A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [262]
In May before leaving, he founded, as he had before the Swiss campaign, a perpetual daily mass for himself and his successors, this time at the Abbey of St. Médard near Soissons, assuring him double coverage. Toward the cost of his expedition, the crown supplied 78,000 francs, of which 8,000 were to be repaid by the Pope. Another 4,000 was given to Coucy in compensation for the non-payment of aids promised him in the preceding year. He assembled an army estimated at 1,500 lances, amounting with foot soldiers and archers to a total of about 9,000 men. Miles de Dormans, the former Chancellor, who had been eager to go for the past year, joined with 200 lances. The bulk of the force was evidently made up by mercenaries, partly recruited in Avignon, where Coucy went first for consultations with Clement.
In July he crossed the Alps by way of Mont Cenis bearing powers to conclude the marriage by proxy of Anjou’s son and Bernabò’s daughter. A message from Bernabò invited him to enter Milan with 200 of his highest-ranking companions, which Coucy, whether from pomp or caution, enlarged to 600. Welcomed “with much joy” by Bernabò outside the gates, they entered the city together, “but such was the great number of men that they broke the bridge.” This seems to have been Coucy’s only faux-pas and did not detract from opulent ceremonies and a daily parade of gifts during a visit that lasted two weeks.
Two weeks was not too long to chart a course through the labyrinthine rivalries of Italy. The interrelationships of Venice, Genoa, Milan, Piedmont, Florence, and assorted despots and communes of northern Italy were constantly shifting. As soon as one power joined another against a third for that season’s advantage, all alliances and feuds changed partners as if in a trecento square dance. Venice feuded with Genoa, Milan played off one against the other and feuded with Florence and the several principalities of Piedmont, Florence feuded with its neighbors, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca, and formed various leagues against Milan; papal politics kept the whole mass quivering.
Coucy’s first hazard lay underfoot in the mutual jealousy between Bernabò and his melancholy nephew Gian Galeazzo, who now ruled in Pavia since the death of his father in 1378. Subtle, secretive, and deceptively mild, Gian Galeazzo cultivated a public repute for timidity and a hidden will as strong and unprincipled as Bernabò’s. In later years when he was better known, Francesco Carrara of Padua said of him, “I know Gian Galeazzo. Neither honor nor pity nor sworn faith ever yet inclined him to do a disinterested deed. If he ever seeks what is good, it is because his interest requires it, for he is without moral sense. Goodness, like hate or anger, is for him a matter of calculation.” As an opponent, Carrara’s opinion was naturally inimical but not necessarily invalid; the character it ascribed to Gian Galeazzo anticipated by more than a century Machiavelli’s Prince.
Gian Galeazzo resented and feared Bernabò’s intrusion on his own prior relationship with the French royal family. “Bernabò is making fresh alliances with France,” warned his mother. “If he becomes related, he will seize upon your sovereignty.” With his one remaining child against Bernabò’s well-filled stable, Gian Galeazzo could not match his uncle in alliances. If he could not match him, he could remove him, a cold alternative that from this moment—as was later recognized—began to take shape in his mind.
Meanwhile, he quietly paid his share of the subsidy for Anjou and prepared to welcome Coucy to Pavia. It was ten years since their encounter at Montichiari which had so confirmed Gian Galeazzo’s distaste for battle that he had never again taken the field. But Coucy