Hugues de Bertoncourt
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 Hugues de Bertoncourt | ||||||||
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 Or, a musimon's head erased and on a chief gules three rake heads Or 
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Introduction
My name is Hugues de Bertoncourt, and I was born on a cold spring morning of 1337 in the far northeast of France, an hour's slow ride from the city of Rethel. Named in honor of a distant ancestor, my life began just as the clouds of the Hundred Years' War darkened our lands. The 1340s brought turmoil and division, as Flemish towns allied with the English while our Count remained loyal to the French crown. By 1349, the shadow of the Black Death reached our region, forever altering our lives and fortunes.
At the age of 15, I was married to a widow, a fourth cousin in Ghent, where I was sent to live with her family. Our union was short-lived, as a recurrent round of the Plague swept through the city. Both my wife and I fell ill; while I miraculously survived, she tragically did not. Her death left me with a profound sense of loss and a deeper understanding of the fragility of life.
As a result of my marriage, I was left with valuable trade connections in both Ghent and Bruges, along with family lands in Bertoncourt and a townhouse in the city of Rethel. These assets allowed me to immerse myself in the world of vulgar commerce, where I have spent my years engaged in trade. I deal primarily in English wool and Flemish fabric, exchanging them for French flax and woad dye.
In my later 40s, during a trade mission to Marseilles, I met the son of an Italian merchant who had come to the city trading Savonese glass, pottery, Italian silks, and whatever they could liberate from the Genoese. Through this connection, I was introduced to and later married a Savonese widow named Caterina da Savona, a woman from a modestly wealthy merchant family. Together, we have built a comfortable and prosperous life, blending our mercantile expertise and fostering strong ties between our respective homelands.