A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [201]
As theoretic lay leader of the Christian community, the Emperor was an elected sovereign currently drawn from the Luxemburg rulers of Bohemia. Charles IV’s family ties with France, the preferred home of his father, John the Blind, were close. He had been brought up at the French court from the age of seven, had married a sister of Philip VI, and his own sister Bonne had married Philip’s son Jean II. Though slightly hunchbacked and sallow of skin, he had been handsome in his prime, with long black hair and beard and lustrous black eyes. Now 61, he had outlived three wives, wedded a fourth, and married off seven or eight of his offspring into an intricate network of Hungarian, Bavarian, and Hapsburg dynasties. Seemingly affable and meek, he was quick and firm in decision, but restless and never still. He was given to whittling willow branches as he listened apparently abstracted to petitioners and advisers, and then made to each a reply “full of wisdom.” He spoke and wrote Czech as well as French, Italian, German, and Latin, all equally proficiently. In being cerebral and shrewd, he was like his nephew Charles V, both being the opposite of irrational, intemperate fathers.
Charles IV was astute enough to recognize that the Empire of his title was not that of Charlemagne. His central concern was the Kingdom of Bohemia, whose territorial enlargement and cultural enrichment he pursued with effect that earned him the title “Father of His Country.” He himself represented the nationalist tendencies that were making his imperial title obsolete.
While the Emperor’s welcome was being prepared, Coucy entered the war with England, not in his home territory of Picardy but in Languedoc against the Gascons, under the leadership of the Duc d’Anjou, Governor of Languedoc. Like Lancaster also a king’s brother, Anjou was driven by ambition for a crown of his own. In joining him, Coucy forged the connection that within a few years was to draw him into Anjou’s fateful pursuit of the crown of Naples.
After two months of siege and skirmish in Gascony, Coucy returned to Paris to serve as an escort to the Emperor. The welcoming party that was to greet him at Cambrai on the Hainault border included, besides Coucy, the King’s two chief advisers, Rivière and Mercier, and many nobles, knights, and squires, making in all a party of 300 resplendent horsemen. On December 22, they rode forward a league from the city to meet the advancing guests. Two hundred of Cambrai’s leading townsmen and clergy, headed by the Bishop, rode with them through ranks of archers and commoners stationed at the gates. The Emperor in a furred winter cloak of gray on a gray horse, together with his eldest son, Wenceslas, King of the Romans, was escorted into the city, where he dismounted with some difficulty, being afflicted by gout, and accompanied the Bishop to prayers in the church.
His primary purpose in coming, he told the French lords afterward at dinner, was to visit King Charles and his Queen and their children whom he wished to see “more than any other creatures in the world.” When he had accomplished this and presented his son to them, he would die with a quiet mind whenever God wished to take him. The Emperor was in fact in the last year of his life, and perhaps anticipating death, as people did in a time of few remedies or cures, he may have undertaken the uncomfortable journey more from a desire to revisit the Paris of his youth than for political advantage.
At each town in his progress through Picardy and the Ile de France, delegations met him in ceremonial welcome and presented gifts of meat, fish, bread, wines, and wagonloads of hay and oats, paid for by the King. On each occasion the Emperor was careful to state that he was a guest in a city of the King of France, while his hosts took pains that no bells should be rung