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.”

We have felt bound to represent with some detail the active and energetic life, prosperous for a long while and afterwards so grievous and hazardous up to its very last day, of this great French merchant at the close of the middle ages, who was the first to extend afar in Europe, Africa, and Asia the commercial relations of France, and, after the example of the great Italian merchants, to make an attempt to combine politics with commerce, and to promote at one and the same time the material interests of his country and the influence of his government.  There can be no doubt but that Jacques Coeur was unscrupulous and frequently visionary as a man of business; but, at the same time, he was inventive, able, and bold, and, whilst pushing his own fortunes to the utmost, he contributed a great deal to develop, in the ways of peace, the commercial, industrial, diplomatic, and artistic enterprise of France.  In his relations towards his king, Jacques Coeur was to Charles VII. a servant often over-adventurous, slippery, and compromising, but often also useful, full of resource, efficient, and devoted in the hour of difficulty.  Charles VII. was to Jacques Coeur a selfish and ungrateful patron, who contemptuously deserted the man whose brains he had sucked, and ruined him pitilessly after having himself contributed to enrich him unscrupulously.