A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [341]
The territory of Savona, which had revolted against the Doge, is the crux of the advance, requiring delicate negotiations. When Gascon mercenaries are about to subject one of its vassal towns to “fire and blood” in revenge for the killing of three of their horses, they have to be hastily bought off at a cost of 96 écus, not too much to avoid hostilities which would make the cost of conquest greater. The approaches to Savona are opened by deals with surrounding lords for permission to pass through the valleys they command. Finally, Savona with its towns and castles is secured by “secret treaties” and payment of 6,990 gold florins.
Each castle whose allegiance is obtained is required to fly the Orléans flag and each lord is reimbursed by monthly installments on an agreed sum “until such time as the Duc d’Orléans is made master of Genoa.” Forty members of the Spinola family receive collectively 1,400 florins a month for their allegiance and agreement to billet Coucy’s forces in their towns and fortresses. Records of each transaction in the precise and architectural handwriting of the time make it plain that when knighthood was in flower, one of its primary interests was money.
The notaries who drew up these agreements and the ambassadors who confirmed them had to be paid, as well as couriers to and from Paris. Wages to men-at-arms and retainers to captains of companies were recorded, likewise twenty florins to Antonio de Cove, cannoneer, to fetch a grosse bombarde from a certain lord for the siege of a castle; eighteen florins to an envoy sent by Coucy to Pavia to borrow 400 florins from Gian Galeazzo; a silver goblet and ewer to Gian Galeazzo’s secretary.
Not surprisingly, Coucy was constantly running out of ready cash, but the banking and credit network of the time kept him in operation. It enabled him to borrow 12,000 florins from one Boroumeus de Boroumeis, merchant of Milan, to be repaid by Orléans to the brothers Jacques and Franchequin Jouen, merchant-grocers of Paris. At another time Coucy pawned jewels and plate to pay his men-at-arms until 40,000 livres were brought by Orléans’ chamberlain from Paris.
In November, after receiving plenipotentiary powers from the King of France and the Duc d’Orléans, Coucy concluded a treaty with Savona covering a mass of rights, guarantees, and obligations almost as complex as the Treaty of Brétigny. With this in hand, he moved to Pavia to arrange the definitive terms of Gian Galeazzo’s share in the present venture and in the future Voie de Fait.
Twenty-one years had passed since Coucy and Gian Galeazzo had fought on opposite sides in the Battle of Montichiari. Did they reminisce over old times and remind each other how each had barely escaped with his life? Or were their relations purely formal? Did they compare notes on their respective monastic foundations, Coucy’s for the Célestins at Soissons, Gian Galeazzo’s for the Carthusians at Pavia, and did the Italian Prince say, as he had elsewhere, that he intended to build one “which will have no like in the world”? He did not live to see his boast fulfilled in the famous Certosa of Pavia.
He would doubtless have conducted Coucy through his archive of state papers and certainly through his library, whose collection had been started for his father by Petrarch. It contained the poet’s copy of Vergil as well as his own and Boccaccio’s works and Dante’s Commedia. Steadily expanded by Gian Galeazzo’s purchases to more than 900 volumes, it rivaled the library of Charles V at the Louvre and was open to bibliophiles and scholars whom the lord of Pavia liked to attract to his court. Its glories were the illuminated manuscripts he commissioned. Regardless