Enguerrand III., called the Great, Lord of Montmirail, Oisy, Crèvecour, la Ferté-Ancoul, la Ferté-Gaucher, Vicomte de Meaux, and Châtelan of Cambrai. He was the founder of the present castle, and at the same time walled in the considerable town that had risen under the protection of his ancestors. As he was a child at his accession, his mother administered the signory, and conceded a charter of liberties to the town in 1197, which he confirmed when of age. In 1200, more majorum, he attacked the property of the Church of Reims. In 1210, he joined the Count of Vermandois in the first crusade against the Albigenses, and again in 1219 and 1226; then assisting at the siege of Toulouse and the taking of Avignon. He distinguished himself also at the battle of Bovines.
Enguerrand, though not wanting in territorial power, exercised an influence far beyond that due to wealth or breadth of possessions, and which was in great measure personal. He appears to have submitted with an ill grace to the government of Queen Blanche during the minority of St. Louis, and is said to have even contemplated regal power. However this may be, the consciousness of his influence, no doubt, led him to erect the Castle of Coucy, it is thought, between 1225–1230; and it maybe that in so doing he proposed to himself to cast into the shade the grand tower of the Louvre, the work, a few years before, of Philip Augustus. He is also said to have rebuilt his other castles of St. Gobain, Assis, Marle, Folembrai, and St. Aubyn, and the Hôtel Coucy at Paris.
In 1244, he was in the confidence of St. Louis, and attended a conference of nobles at Chinon, where he supported the plan of a descent upon England; but while assembling his vassals for this purpose he was flung from his horse and killed by his own sword. Of his children by Marie de Montmirail, Raoul II., who fell in the crusade of 1250, and Enguerrand IV., became successively Sieurs de Coucy; but both died childless, and with the last closed the male line of these great barons. Alix, half-sister to the last lords, married Arnoul, Count de Guines. Enguerrand the Great had also a daughter, Mary, who in 1239 became the second wife of Alexander II. of Scotland, and the mother of Alexander III. Mary was a very remarkable person, and exercised the duties of guardian to her son in difficult times in a very efficient manner, devising and executing a vigorous policy of her own.
Arnold Comte de Guines sold Guines to Philip le Hardi in 1282. Alix de Coucy, his wife, was daughter of Enguerrand III. by Marie Dame d’Oisy, his third wife. They had Enguerrand V. de Guines, Sire de Coucy, &c., who lived at the court of his cousin-german, Alexander III., in Scotland, where he married, before 1285, Christine de Baliol. He died 1321.
William, his son and heir, married Isabel, daughter of Guy de Chatillon, Comte de St. Pol. He died 1335, and was succeeded by Enguerrand VI., who married Catherine, daughter of Leopold, Duke of Austria. This baron took part in the defence of his province against Edward III., and fell at the battle of Crécy, in 1346, leaving his son an infant.
Enguerrand VII., better known in England as Ingelram de Coucy, was one of the greatest and most powerful barons of his race and age, and, in a warlike age, celebrated as a military leader. He commenced his public life by a war of extermination against the insurgent Jacquerie. He was then one of the hostages in England for King John, and there married Isabel, daughter of Edward III., became a Knight of the Garter (39th on the list), and in 1366 was created Earl of Bedford. The effect, perhaps the price, of these honours was his neutrality in the war between France and England. He claimed the duchy of Austria, and raised 60,000 condottieri to support his rights, but in this he was unsuccessful.
After the death of Edward III. he returned the insignia of the Garter to his successor, and took part with France. Upon Du Guesclin’s death, he was offered, and declined, the sword of Constable of France, but became governor of Picardy. His advice to the king was to anticipate the English attacks.
His second wife was a daughter of the Duke of Lorraine. In 1382, he composed, by fair words, the insurrection of the Maillotins, at Paris. In Picardy he was scarcely less lenient. Doutard, one of their leaders, he sentenced to death, but at the gallow’s foot he was pardoned, by the custom of Picardy, because a woman from the crowd consented to marry him,—a singular legal juxtaposition of hanging and matrimony. Enguerrand took part in the campaign of Charles VI. against Ghent, in which Van Artevelde was killed; and in the following year, after putting down an insurrection at Paris, he joined the war in Flanders, where he won the high approbation of Froissart.
He then went to Italy, and fought at the battle of Arezzo, for which he received the charge of Grand Butler of France. Shortly afterwards, he was prominent in the military and naval preparations for a descent upon England, and seems to have commanded a division of the fleet, and to have been driven upon the coast of Scotland.
In 1390 he took part in the African expedition, landing at Carthage. The closing act of his life was the unsuccessful crusade against Sultan Bajazet, upon his invasion of Hungary, and the battle of Nicopolis in 1396, when Enguerrand was defeated and made prisoner, and so died in 1397, aged 57, the last male of the second line of the Sires of Coucy.