Jacques Cœur was born a merchant’s son in Bourges around 1395 and climbed out of the commoner class by marrying Macée de Léodepart in 1418, whose father had ties to the Duke of Berry. By 1432 he was trading in Damascus for silk, carpets and the gall nuts used to make ink, bringing goods back through Narbonne and Montpellier and making himself useful to the Knights of Rhodes and to Venice. In 1436 Charles VII made him Master of the Mint, and he wrote every major French coinage ordinance from 1435 to 1451, recalling debased coins and standardizing weights. His agents brokered a 1445 treaty between the Sultan of Egypt and the Knights of Rhodes, and in 1448 he helped Pope Nicholas V end a papal schism, earning a papal license to trade with non-Christian lands.
He funded Charles VII’s reconquest of Normandy and rode beside the king into Rouen in 1449, while lending heavily to the nobility. After the king’s mistress Agnès Sorel died in 1450, Jeanne de Vendôme, one of his debtors, accused him of poisoning her. Charles had him arrested in 1451 and kept part of the seized wealth; when the murder charge collapsed, judges who owed him money or held his estates convicted him on other counts. In 1453 he was sentenced to public penance, exile and confiscation. A nephew and two former managers broke him out in 1455 and smuggled him to Rome, where the papacy gave him command of a 16-ship fleet to relieve Rhodes. He died on Chios in 1456, and his heirs fought for his estates until 1489.
- His palace in Bourges carried the motto: to a valiant heart, nothing is impossible.
- His business ran on some 300 managers, yet historian Jacques Heers found his Mediterranean fleet never exceeded four galleys.
- New charges claimed he sent French gold to Muslims, minted underweight coins and seized men as galley oarsmen.
- He spent nearly two years moving between five prison fortresses before the verdict.
- François Villon cited him in a poem, and Mikhail Bulgakov put him at the ball in The Master and Margarita.
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