A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [302]
In company with the King and court, Coucy returned to Paris via Dijon, where the Duke of Burgundy was prepared to “dissemble”—as he did everything—in a very grand manner, with a view to restoring himself to favor. An entire book has been written about the festivities, liveries, banquets, tournaments, gifts, and costs of this occasion, but amidst the accumulating troubles of the 14th century these extravaganzas recur so regularly that astonishment fades.
Incidental to displaying political status, such festivities must have supplied economic stimulus. For the King’s visit to Burgundy, tailors, embroiderers, goldsmiths, armorers, and all trades and crafts received orders for goods and services. The Duke alone ordered 320 new lances to present to competitors. All the towns of Burgundy which the King would visit en route received funds for cleaning and decorating and even repaving streets and squares. Dijon itself, with its forest of spires and bell towers and chimneys fitted with iron grills to keep storks from nesting, its narrow twisting streets and taverns of ill repute, had to begin by clearing away animal ordure. Dogs, cats, pigs, and sheep wandered freely through its dark wooden arcades, the pigs especially contributing to the filth and smells. Voracious feeders, quarrelsome and “unsociable,” they were the subject of constant complaints for biting and, in one case, eating a child, for which the guilty animal was executed by hanging. Regulations prohibiting the keeping of pigs in the city and the disposal of their ordure in the river had little effect.
Because there was no hall large enough to accommodate all the guests, a gigantic tent requiring 30,100 ells of cloth was ordered to cover the palace courtyard. Thriftily, after the event, the cloth was cut up and sold in lots. The amount of fabric consumed for blue satin draperies to be hung in all the ducal rooms, for 300 gowns of silk and damask for attending ladies, and as many doublets of parti-colored velvet and satin for the knights, must have emptied Flanders. How many needlewomen were employed to embroider the draperies with the Duke’s “Il me tarde” entwined with his wife’s initials against a background of azure doves perched in a forest of orange and lemon trees? How many carpenters and laborers found work razing walls, cutting down trees, flattening the ground, and constructing covered grandstands for three days of tournaments in February weather? When the host alone had thirty war-horses on hand for the events, the total number would have required an army of grooms and stable hands. Jongleurs, actors of miracle plays, acrobats, and animal trainers flocked to the town to entertain the people while the nobles jousted.
Coucy, even at fifty, was a—or possibly the—prize-winner of the tournament, receiving a pearl-and-sapphire clasp from the Duchess in reward. In the farewell exchange of gifts (and careful account was kept of the price tag of each), Burgundy upstaged the King by giving him a more expensive present than the King gave to the Duchess. The ceremonies concluded with singing and dancing by the ladies and damsels, “for love of the King, the Duc de Touraine [Orléans], the Duc de Bourbon and the Sire de Coucy.”
Soon after Charles’s return to Paris, his promise to think of nothing but reuniting the Church was put aside in favor of Genoa’s alluring enterprise against the Kingdom of Barbary. Here was a ready-made adventure with no need of the serious political maneuvering required in the papal cause. Crusade, even if it had little to do with the cross, gave prestige to the participants, not to mention the privilogium crucis allowing a moratorium on their debts and immunity from lawsuit. While “the fire of valor enflamed all hearts,” certain cautions were observed: the Council limited the number of knights who could leave the country to 1,500, and none could go without the King