Monument to a bright medieval life

In the late Middle Ages, the hilltop castle of Coucy-le-Chateau, about an hour north of Paris, was as famous as Chartres Cathedral for its mighty round tower.

But times change, wars are fought, castles are leveled, kingdoms come and go. It took Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century,” published in 1978, to put Coucy back on the map, as a symbol of a troubled era not wholly unlike our own.

Pilgrims, book in hand, have been visiting Coucy-le-Chateau since the publication of Tuchman’s saga of medieval Europe in its death throes. Retreating Germans destroyed the castle in World War I, but Tuchman devotees are undeterred. Sometimes ruins speak more eloquently than restorations.

“A Distant Mirror” describes Europe’s tumultuous 1300s through the eyes of a great man whom readers come to know: Enguerrand VII, master of Coucy-le-Chateau, a friend and counselor to kings, a diplomat, a warrior, the last of a dynasty that took for its motto: “Not king nor prince, duke nor count am I; I am the lord of Coucy.”

Last month, I went to Coucy-le-Chateau by train from Paris, disembarking at Soissons. As the train approached the station, I saw the tower of St. Gervais and St. Protais, which, together with Notre Dames in Noyon, Amiens and Laon, attracts students of Gothic architecture to Picardy, a region strategically poised between Paris and the Low Countries. Nearby, the almost-twin towers of the abbey of St. Jean des Vignes, one of the richest monasteries in France during the Middle Ages, rises above the townscape.

Compared with Provence and the Loire, Picardy is hardly a major tourist destination. This region of farms and orchards is known for its midsummer harvest of cherries, strawberries and raspberries, testifying to the role agriculture has played in keeping the countryside beautiful.

In a car rented at the station, I drove about 10 miles west of Soissons to the hamlet of Vic-sur-Aisne on the placid river that gives the area its name; the Aisne Valley is part of the domain of the Sire de Coucy. The village has an impressive castle keep, dating to the 1100s, and the Lion d’Or, a restaurant established around 1580, where I ate a delicious salad with three kinds of grilled fish.

But it was hard to imagine what it would have looked like in Enguerrand VII’s time, when the plague swept across Europe in successive waves, killing as many as 25 million people. Together with the Hundred Years’ War between England and France (from about 1337 to 1453) and constant marauding by supposedly valiant knights seeking income and activity during lulls in the conflict, the plague left countless villages empty and fields untilled all across France.

One of Enguerrand VII’s forebears, Thomas of Marle, Sire de Coucy from 1116 to 1130, was a notorious thief, excommunicated from the church, and called “the wickedest man of his generation” by the abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Nogent a few miles southwest of Coucy-le-Chateau.

On my way to the castle, I meandered along one-lane roads, seeking the abbey, where Enguerrand VII’s bones were buried, carried home from the prison in Turkey where he died in 1397 after the defeat of Christian crusaders at the Battle of Nicopolis in what is now Bulgaria.

All that remains at Nogent is a stone gate of unknown vintage in the middle of a wheatfield and a magnificent view of Coucy-le-Chateau on its hilltop.

A modern town grew up on the northern side of the ruins after World War I, leaving the high village quiet, with little more than a tourist information office, an 11th or 12th century church and a small hotel-restaurant, the Belle Vue, surrounded by mostly intact walls, 30 feet thick in places, interspersed with gates and towers.

On Friday and Saturday nights in July, the ruins are the setting for Coucy a la Merveille, a medieval pageant featuring 350 volunteer actors in costume and complete with jousting, mock tribunals and banquets.

Because the Belle Vue was full, I checked into a bed-and-breakfast nearby owned by Michele Lefevre-Tranchart, who was, from 1982 to 1995, mayor of the commune in which the ruins lie and is the unofficial village historian.

Her house, partly built into the ramparts, has three cheerful guestrooms and a staircase lined with prints and photos of Coucy through the ages. At breakfast, she told me that only 60 or so families returned to the high village after World War I, when it was decided to leave the castle in ruins instead of restoring it.

In the late afternoon, I toured the castle, where little more than a pile of rubble remains of the 180-foot tower, built in the early 13th century. Several corner towers and their subterranean vaults can be entered, as well as the shell of the lofty great hall.

I stood there in the bright summer sun, thinking of Enguerrand. The Sire de Coucy valiantly fought for his king as far afield as Switzerland and Italy, though he seems to have preferred negotiation and to have recognized that the power of the knighthood, mired in pride, greed and sloth, was waning.

Toward the end of “A Distant Mirror,” Tuchman compared Enguerrand to George Washington for his “steadiness, sagacity and competence,” a flickering of light in malevolent times -- no matter that his only monuments are a book and a ruined castle.

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Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at latimes.com/susanspano.

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Coucy-le-Chateau

Bed-and-breakfast: Michele Lefevre-Tranchart’s is at 3 Rue Traversiere, Coucy-le-Chateau, 011-33-3-23-52-76-64. About $50 for a double with a private bath.

Information: Tourist office of Coucy-le-Chateau, 8 Rue des Vivants; 011-33-3-23-52-44-55.