A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [268]
Pierre de Craon returned to France after Anjou’s death, disposing of obvious riches. While many of his recent companions, remnants of Anjou’s army, begged their way on foot out of Italy, he appeared at court with a magnificent retinue, exciting indignation. “Ha! False traitor,” cried the Duc de Berry on seeing him enter the Council, “wicked and disloyal, you deserve death! It is you who caused my brother’s death. Seize him, and let justice be done!” No one dared carry out the command in fear of Craon’s Burgundy connection. Craon continued to ornament the court of Charles VI and to escape for a long time a relentless lawsuit by the Duchesse d’Anjou and her son, although ultimately he was ordered to pay back 100,000 francs.
Ironically, after escaping harm in Italy, Coucy suffered a fall from his horse in Avignon with serious injury to his leg. Possibly a compound fracture, it was severe enough to keep him confined to bed for nearly four months. As Anjou’s viceroy, he took responsibility for the ragged veterans returning from Bari, distributing funds and mediating disputes. On the arrival of Anjou’s widow to establish her son’s claims in Provence, he visited her several times (presumably in a litter), advised her in the matter of Pierre de Craon, and “comforted her as best he could.” During these visits he may well have met and talked with the author of one of the great commentaries of the 14th century.
Honoré Bonet, Benedictine Prior of Salon in Provence, was attached in some capacity to the Anjou household and living in Avignon during the years 1382–86 while writing his observations on the kind of experience in which Coucy was an actor. The Tree of Battles was an examination of the laws and customs of war and, inevitably, of its moral and social effects. His purpose in writing the book, Bonet stated, was to find an answer to the “great commotions and very fierce misdeeds” of his own time. His conclusion was blunt. Stated in the form of a question—“Whether this world can by nature be without conflict and at peace?”—his answer was, “No, it can by no means be so.”
“I make a Tree of Mourning at the beginning of my book,” he wrote, on which could be seen three things: the “tribulation such as never was before” of the schism; the “great dissension” among Christian princes and kings; and the “great grief and discord” among communities. Bonet examined many practical and moral questions—whether, if a man is captured while under safe-conduct, the guarantor is bound to ransom him at his own cost; whether a man should prefer death to flight from battle; what were a knight’s rights to wages, including sick pay and pay while on leave; what were the rules of spoil. Through every discussion his governing idea was that war should not harm those who do not make war, while every example of his own time showed that it did. He is “heart-stricken to see and hear of the misery inflicted on poor laborers … through whom, under God, the Pope and all the kings and lords in the world have their meat and all their drink and clothing.” In answer to the question whether it is permissible to take prisoner the “merchants, tillers of the soil, and shepherds” of the enemy, his answer was no: “All husbandmen and plowmen with their oxen when they are carrying on their business” and any ass, mule, or horse harnessed to a plow should have immunity “by reason of the work they do.” The reason was fundamental: security of the laborer and his beasts benefits all because they work for all.
Bonet reflected the growing dismay at the “great grief and discord” caused by daily violation of this principle. Monks like himself and poets like Deschamps deplored openly the conduct of war not because they were necessarily more sensitive than other men but because they were articulate and accustomed