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In the same year as Castillon, madness overtook Henry VI, precipitating the same contest for control of the Englich crown that had so damaged France. Unemployed soldiers and archers returning to England took service with the baronial factions, adding their violence and weapons to the civil Wars of the Roses that now took the place of the war in France. In the same fateful year of 1453 the formidable defenses of Constantinople fell before the siege guns of Mahomet II. The Turks brought a siege train of seventy pieces of artillery headed by a super-bombard hooped with iron, drawn by sixty oxen and capable of launching cannonballs weighing 800 pounds. The fall of Byzantium has supplied a conventional date for the close of the Middle Ages, but an event more pregnant with change took place at the same time.

In 1453–54 the first document printed from movable type was produced by Gutenberg at Mainz, followed in 1456 by the first printed book, the Vulgate Bible. “The Gothic sun,” as Victor Hugo put it with fitting grandiloquence, “set behind the gigantic printing press of Mainz.” The new means of disseminating knowledge and exchange of ideas spread with unmedieval rapidity. Printing presses appeared in Rome, Milan, Florence, and Naples within the next decade, and in Paris, Lyon, Bruges, and Valencia in the 1470s. The first music was printed in 1473. William Caxton set up his printing press at Westminster in 1476 and published that still unsurpassed work of English prose, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, in 1484.

With the Tudors on the English throne, a formal settlement between England and France was eventually concluded by the Treaty of Etaples in 1492, a year more significant for other reasons. The energies of Europe that had once found vent in the crusades were now to find it in voyages, discoveries, and settlements in the New World.

The Coucy lineage, after the death of Enguerrand VII, hung by the single thread of Marie’s son Robert de Bar. Philippa died without issue. Isabel, offspring of Coucy’s second marriage, died in 1411, followed or predeceased within six months by her only child, an infant daughter. Perceval, the Bastard of Coucy, left a will in 1437 leaving his seigneurie to the husband of Robert de Bar’s daughter, from which it may be presumed that the only son of Enguerrand VII died without issue. Yet the single thread was to lead to a King. Robert de Bar’s daughter Jeanne married Louis de Luxemburg, Constable of France, and in her turn bore a daughter who married a Bourbon of the branch descended from St. Louis. The grandson of this marriage, Antoine de Bourbon, married Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, and the son of their marriage, with his white plume of Navarre and his famous concession—“Paris is worth a mass”—reached the throne as Henri IV. Courageous, quick-witted, amorous, reasonable, he was the most popular of all French Kings and—perhaps owing to a few genes from Enguerrand VII—a rational man.

The great barony of Coucy, after being united with the royal domain under Louis XII, son of Charles d’Orléans, remained the property of the Orléans branch of the royal house. During the minority of Louis XIV—whose brother Philippe d’Orléans carried the title Sire de Coucy—the formidable castle, originally built to overawe kings, became a focus of the Fronde, the league of nobles opposed to Cardinal Mazarin, the Regent. To destroy a base of his enemies, Mazarin in 1652 blew up parts of the castle, rendering it uninhabitable, though his means were inadequate to bring down the titanic donjon. An earthquake in 1692 shattered more of the castle and left a jagged crack from top to bottom of the donjon, but it still stood, guardian over the empty halls below. One hundred years later the barony’s last seigneur was the Duc d’Orléans, called Philippe Egalité, who, as a member of the National Convention, voted for the death of Louis XVI and was himself a victim of the guillotine a year later. His property, including Coucy,