A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [269]
* The name Sicily remained attached to the Kingdom of Naples, causing confusion which should be resolutely ignored.
* In 1388 Giovanni de Mussi of Piacenza stated that a household of nine with two horses required a minimum income of 300 florins a year. In 1415 a wealthy Italian citizen spent 574 florins on his marriage celebration. A well-paid artisan at about this time earned approximately eighteen florins a year.
Chapter 20
A Second Norman Conquest
While Coucy was still in Avignon, his diplomatic talents were assigned the delicate task of informing Pope Clement of the proposed marital alliance of the King of France to a house on the other side of the schism. The prospective bride was Elizabeth of Bavaria—or Isabeau, as she became known by the French equivalent of her name—a member of the Wittelsbach dynasty and a granddaughter to Bernabò Visconti. Bavaria, like all the German states, had remained in obedience to Urban, to the bitter disappointment of Charles V. A German marriage was nevertheless important to give weight against England, especially since Richard II was negotiating to marry Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the late Emperor.
Bavaria was the most powerful and flourishing of the German states, and the Wittelsbachs the wealthiest of the three families—the others being the Hapsburgs and the Luxemburgs—which at different times occupied the imperial throne. A Wittelsbach alliance was so desirable that Bernabò Visconti married no fewer than four of his children to scions of that house. Taddea, the second of these, bringing a dowry of 100,000 gold ducats, married Duke Stephen III of Bavaria, who, though he ruled jointly with two brothers, possessed every quality of the autocrat to excess. Reckless, prodigal, ostentatious, amorous, restless without a tournament or a war, he was well suited to a Visconti daughter, and when she died after twelve years of marriage, her sister Maddalena, with another dowry of 100,000 ducats, took her place. Isabeau, product of the first union, was in 1385 a pretty, plump fifteen-year-old German maiden destined for a lurid career.
Her marriage to Charles VI was first broached when her uncle, Duke Frederick, came to share in the pleasures of French chivalry at the siege of Bourbourg. He learned that a condition of betrothal to the King of France was that the prospective bride be examined in the nude by ladies of the court to determine if she were properly formed for bearing children. Conveyed to his excitable brother, the proposal was indignantly rejected. What if she should be sent back? Duke Stephen demanded, and instantly tossed aside the offered crown. The alliance, however, was tactfully pursued by his uncle, Albert of Bavaria, ruler of Hainault-Holland, and by the Duke of Burgundy on the occasion of the famed double wedding of their sons and daughters. Stephen’s consent was obtained by arranging that Isabeau should be sent to France on pretext of a pilgrimage, although Stephen warned his brother, who was to escort her, that if he brought her back, “You will have no more bitter enemy than I.”
Rumors of the planned marriage, on reaching Milan, provoked the most sensational coup of the age—the ousting of Bernabò by his supposedly quiet and retiring nephew Gian Galeazzo. Bernabò’s marriage policy had for some time been cutting into Gian Galeazzo’s sovereignty, owing to Bernabò’s habit of giving away, as dowries, Visconti territories or their revenues to which the nephew had equal title—and without consulting him. The prospect of Bernabò’s granddaughter on the throne of France, and a renewed prospect of Bernabò’s daughter Lucia on