A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [340]
The second French embassy heard the news on their way to Avignon. On their arrival, the new Pope assured them of his intent to pursue every means of ending the schism and repeated his statement that he would abdicate if so advised as easily as taking off his hat, which he lifted from his head in illustration. His assurances in reply to the King mounted like a ladder to Heaven. He had accepted election only to end the “damnable schism,” and would rather spend the rest of his life in “desert or cloister” than prolong it; if the King sent well-informed persons with definite proposals, he would accept them without hesitation and “execute them without fail”; he was “disposed, determined and resolved” to work for union and would accept the counsel of the King and his uncles “so that they rather than another prince may acquire the eternal glory that shall be the reward of so meritorious an effort.”
De Luna may have been sincere but once he was on the papal throne, the duty to abdicate was fast replaced by the sense of right that supreme office breeds. The schism, like the war, was a trap not easy to get out of.
All this time Coucy had been in north Italy conducting, on behalf of Louis d’Orléans, a financial, political, and military campaign for the sovereignty of Genoa. The offer had come out of the city’s chronic anarchy: the Grimaldi, Doria, Spinola, and other noble families, having been exiled and lacking cohesion, wanted a sovereign to restore them and deliver the city from bourgeois rule. Power swung from one bourgeois group to another, each of which installed a Doge until he was overthrown and exiled by opponents. No fewer than five Doges held office in 1393, giving way in 1394 to the return of Adorno, the Doge of the Tunisian campaign. Doges, parties, and exiled nobles exerted their various weights in the fluctuating balance of power between Florence and Milan.
As Lieutenant and Procurator General “in trans-alpine parts” for the Duc d’Orléans, Coucy established himself at Asti, which belonged to Louis as part of Valentina’s dowry. He commanded some 400 lances and 230 archers recruited from among the best in France, and engaged an almost equal number of Gascon and Italian mercenaries. But without greatly superior numbers he could not expect to subdue Genoese territories by military conquest alone, if the local rulers were disposed to defend them. As in Normandy many years before, his strategy was to take castles and towns by negotiation backed by a show of force and assault only when required.
The nobles who had made the original proposal came to offer him their castles, but, being “prudent and subtle” and having experience of Lombards and Genoese, Coucy did not trust too much in their promises and took care not to put himself in their power, even to the point of holding conferences in open fields rather than inside castle premises. Collaboration with the Genoese in Tunisia must have left an unpleasant impression.
Guided by Gian Galeazzo, who arranged contacts and lent money and soldiers, Coucy pushed his way through the Italian maze, recruiting and paying mercenary companies, negotiating the terms and price for submission of castles and territories, treating with Pisa and Lucca for their non-interference, sending out envoys to other parts of Italy to gather adhesions for the future Kingdom of Adria. The paper work was substantial, and through its survival in the archives a 14th century politico-military campaign can be seen at work. Recruiting was piecemeal: Guedon de Foissac comes with 2 knights, 19 squires, and 10 archers, Aimé de Miribel