A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [285]
Led by Coucy, a vanguard of 1,000 lances began the march, followed by the King and main body with “12,000” baggage carts, not counting pack animals. While en route, Coucy was suddenly detached for a mission to Avignon of unrecorded purpose but probably concerned with the plan that continued to obsess the French of conquering Rome for Clement. He returned—“to the great joy of the whole army”—within about a month, which, considering a journey of almost 500 miles each way, was energetic traveling.
Little combat and no glory were found at Guelders. The campaign bogged down in negotiations. Tents were wet after a summer of heavy rains, provisions rotted in the humidity, food was scarce despite a rich country. The return after honor had been satisfied by a negotiated apology from the Duke of Guelders, was wretched under more heavy rains. Roads were mud, horses stumbled over slippery logs and rocks, men were drowned in fording flooded rivers, and wagons of booty floated away. Knights, squires, and grand seigneurs came home without pride or profit, many of them sick or exhausted and blaming the Duke of Burgundy whose ambitions in Brabant they correctly held responsible. Coucy seems to have incurred no blame as he had incurred none in the insurrection of Paris. Since the start of the reign, the government of the uncles had dragged the country into ruinous expense for a series of grandiose projects ending in futility. At Guelders their credit ran out.
Awareness of bad government speaks through the omens and incidents inserted in the record by a censorious chronicler like the Monk of St. Denis. While the army for Guelders was being assembled, he reports, a hermit journeyed all the way from Provence to tell the King and his uncles that he had been instructed by an angel to warn them to treat their subjects more gently and lessen the burden of taxes and subsidies. The nobles at court scorned the hermit for his poverty and were deaf to his counsel, and though the young King treated him kindly and was disposed to listen, the uncles sent him away and levied the triple tax.
Deschamps’ satire grew more caustic after the Guelders campaign, in which he had personally participated and fallen ill like others of an “intestinal flux.” The military do not find their best friend in a war correspondent suffering from dysentery. Through many ballads, Deschamps’ theme is unfavorable comparison with knights of the past. They had gained hardiness through long apprenticeship and training, ridden long journeys, practiced wrestling and throwing the stone, scaling forts, and combat with shield and sword. Now the younger men scorn training and call those who wish to instruct them cowards. They spend their youth eating and drinking, spending and borrowing, “polishing themselves white as ivory … each one a paladin.” They sleep late between white sheets, call for wine on waking, eat partridges and fat capons, comb their hair to perfection, know nothing about the management of estates, and care for nothing but making money. They are arrogant, irreligious, weakened by gluttony and debauchery, and unfit for the profession of arms, “the heaviest in the world.”
Denouncing them on the one hand for softness and indolence, Deschamps castigates them on the other for recklessness, improvidence, and bad judgment. In his Lay de Vaillance, they keep no order, no night watch or scouts or advance guard, give no protection to foragers, allow carts and provisions to be captured. “When bread lacked for a day or it rained in the morning, they cried, ‘The army will starve!’ ” and “when they let provisions spoil on the ground, they wanted to turn back.” They start out in winter, attack recklessly and in the wrong season, never ask the advice of the older men until after danger