A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 3Guizot, François
History
A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 3
Guizot, François
France -- History
“on condition that he should pay to the king a hundred thousand crowns by
way of restitution, three hundred thousand by way of fine, and should be
kept in prison until the whole claim was satisfied;” and the decree ended
as follows: “We have declared and do declare all the goods of the said
Jacques Coeur confiscated to us, and we have banished and do banish this
Jacques Coeur forever from this realm, reserving thereanent our own good
pleasure.”
After having spent nearly three years more in prison, transported from
dungeon to dungeon, Jacques Coeur, thanks to the faithful and zealous
affection of a few friends, managed to escape from Beaucaire, to embark
at Nice and to reach Rome, where Pope Nicholas V. welcomed him with
tokens of lively interest. Nicholas died shortly afterwards, just when
he was preparing an expedition against the Turks. His successor,
Calixtus III., carried out his design, and equipped a fleet of sixteen
galleys. This fleet required a commander of energy, resolution, and
celebrity. Jacques Coeur had lived and fought with Dunois, Xaintrailles,
La Hire, and the most valiant French captains; he was known and popular
in Italy and the Levant; and the pope appointed him captain-general of
the expedition. Charles VII.’s moneyman, ruined, convicted, and banished
from France, sailed away at the head of the pope’s squadron and of some
Catalan pirates to carry help against the Turks to Rhodes, Chios, Lesbos,
Lemnos, and the whole Grecian archipelago. On arriving at Chios, in
November, 1456, he fell ill there, and perceiving his end approaching,
he wrote to his king “to commend to him his children, and to beg that,
considering the great wealth and honors he had in his time enjoyed in the
king’s service, it might be the king’s good pleasure to give something to
his children, in order that they, even those of them who were secular,
might be able to live honestly, without coming to want.” He died at
Chits on the 25th of November, 1456, and, according to the historian John
d’Auton, who had probably lived in the society of Jacques Coeur’s
children, “he remained interred in the church of the Cordeliers in that
island, at the centre of the choir.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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