Enguerrand VII de Coucy
French nobleman
1342 CE to 1393 CE
Enguerrand VII de Coucy, KG (1340 – 18 February 1397, in captivity at Bursa), also known as Ingelram de Coucy, is a fourteenth-century French nobleman, the last Sieur de Coucy, and the son-in-law of King Edward III of England and Philippa of Hainault.
Following his marriage to Edward's daughter Isabella of England (1332–1382), Coucy also holds the English title of 1st Earl of Bedford, among other English estates granted to the couple by Edward III.
World
The Atlantic Lands
View →Related Events
Showing 4 events out of 4 total
Lord Enguerrand VII de Coucy, the thirty-five-year-old son-in-law of King Edward III of England and Philippa of Hainault, and a nephew of the Duke of Austria, claims (as the right of his mother, Katharina von Habsburg) the Swiss territory of Aargau held by his Habsburg cousin Duke Leopold III of Austria.
Having obtained both permission and gold from the French crown to gather a ten thousand-man army of French and English mercenaries, joined, at de Coucy’s invitation, by knights, he engages a number of Free Companies, including one led by Owain Lawgoch, to seize the Aargau.
Advancing across France to Alsace, the mercenary army ravages areas while marching south to Basel, crosses the Jura Mountains, and in November 1375 enters the lower Aargau, which forms part of a great tableland to the north of the Alps and the east of the Jura.
The mercenaries wear heavy cloaks with pointed hoods, called “Güglers” in Swiss-German, and become known by this name (as does the associated conflict).
Duke Leopold, installed comfortably at Breisach to the north, refuses to engage de Coucy’s invaders and instead orders a systematic destruction of Aargau.
This leaves no villages, people, booty, or food for the invaders, but also earns Leopold the intense enmity of his Swiss subjects.
Various citizens’ armies of the small Swiss Confederation, experienced resisters of Austrian aggression, oppose the invading Güglers, who mistakenly divide into thirds to contend with the defenders.
The Bernese march in support of the Swiss to overwhelm the Güglers at Fraubrunnen on December 26, 1375.
Two Irish pilgrims who visited Albania on their way to Jerusalem in 1322 had reported that Durrës was “inhabited by Latins, Greeks, perfidious Jews and barbaric Albanians”.
At the death of Serbian King (Tsar) Dušan in 1355, the city had passed into the hands of the Albanian family of Thopias.
After peace was made in 1366 a company of mercenaries, mostly from Navarre and Gascony, had been organized into a coherent company of soldiers under Louis, the brother of Charles II of Navarre, who is Count of Beaumont-le-Roger in his own right and Duke of Durazzo in right of his wife, Joanna.
Louis intends to assert his claim over Albania and to fight for his claim to the principality.
Charles of France has likewise aided him with fifty thousand ducats.
The Navarrese ranks had begun to swell in 1372 through the recruiting techniques of Enguerrand de Coucy, who had been hired to form a force of five hundred lances and five hundred cavalry archers, mostly from Gascony.
Though these soldiers had been recruited for service in Albania, they had at first been first organized in Naples.
Many men from Navarre had begun enlisting in 1375 and 1376 mand have traveled directly to Albania to join their countrymen.
The enrollment lists for these years have been preserved in Pamplona and reveal the important presence of many engineers.
The total number of men that had left Tortosa between February 1375 and June 1376 is in the thousands.
They are paid thirty gold Aragonese florins a month.
Louis and the Navarrese in midsummer 1376, capture Durazzo (the remnant of the kingdom), which had been in the hands of Karl Topia, thus reestablishing the regnum Albaniae.
His death this same year leaves the Navarrese unemployed.
The Swiss force Coucy’s invaders to battle their way westward across the Jura on their return to France in the spring of 1376.