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By Root 1339 0

While Bonet and others had often in the past condemned the warrior for robbery and cruelty toward peasants, they were now ready to condemn chivalry’s fundamental assumption that military capacity resided in none but the mounted knight. The chronicler of the Quatre Valois, writing at about this time, pointed out that the common soldier had been decisive in certain combats “and for this, poor men should not be held without honor nor in vile esteem.” He cited a battle of the King of Cyprus against the Saracens in 1367, in which the day was saved by action of the sailors who remained to guard the ships, and this was by the will of Christ, who did not wish Christian chivalry to perish at the hands of the infidels, and moreover “wished to give an example to nobles.… For our Lord Jesus Christ wants no grandiloquence or vanity. He wishes victory to be gained by the common people so that the great should not take vainglory.”

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex. As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even for the sake of success.

The Turkish victory had no immediate effect in Europe because Bajazet had to turn east against the rise of a fierce enemy in Asia. The rapid conquests of Tamerlane at the head of a revived Mongol-Turkic horde were comparable, in Gibbon’s large words, “to the primitive convulsions of nature which agitated and altered the surface of the globe.” Overrunning Anatolia, leaving a trail of ruined cities and pyramids of skulls, Tamerlane met and defeated the Ottoman army at Angora (Ankara) in 1402 and captured the Sultan alive. Kept in a wagon fitted with iron bars, Bajazet was dragged along on the Mongol path of conquest until he died of misery and shame—as if history had deliberately arranged a symmetrical retribution.

Absorbed in its own factions and schisms, Europe failed to seize the occasion to break the Ottoman hold on the Balkans. Except for a brave but minor expedition led by Boucicaut—the last trickle of the crusades—Constantinople could obtain no more help from the West; Sigismund was embroiled with the Germans and Bohemia; France and England were each torn by domestic conflict. Bajazet’s son held his own against Tamerlane, the Mongol eruption subsided, Bajazet’s grandson advanced again in Europe, and in 1453 his great-grandson Mohammed II conquered Constantinople.

At Coucy, rival ambitions swirled around the great barony with its castles of grandeur, its 150 towns and villages, its famous forests, its “many fine ponds, many good vassals,… much great nobility and inestimable revenues.” Marie de Bar, Coucy’s eldest daughter, and the Dame de Coucy, his widow, entered into a prolonged contest over the inheritance, Marie claiming the whole and the Dame de Coucy claiming half. Neither ceding, they lived in hostility, each in a separate castle of the domain with her captains and entourage of relatives, each pursuing lawsuits. At the same time the Célestins of Ste. Trinité brought a lawsuit against the widow, claiming that she had failed to carry out Coucy’s last bequests to their monastery.

Meanwhile, Queen Isabeau, still concerned primarily with her parental family, was trying to promote a marriage between her father, Stephen of Bavaria, then in Paris as ambassador of the Empire, and the Dame de Coucy. This raised the prospect of the strategic domain passing into foreign hands, for it was feared that Marie might be pressured into allowing the house of Bavaria to take possession by purchase or otherwise. To frustrate this design, Louis d’Orléans pressured Marie (by “threats and menaces,” according to one source) into selling the barony to him, disregarding the widow’s claims on the ground that the barony was indivisible. Whether his motive was primarily the interests of France or his personal aggrandizement vis-à-vis the Duke of Burgundy is an open question. In any event, he acquired one of the greatest properties of northern