A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, “no epoch was more naturally mad.”

he was not immune from the occupational disease of rulers: overestimation of their capacity to control events.

What knights lacked in the fading 14th century was innovation. Holding to traditional forms, they gave little thought or professional study to tactics. When everyone of noble estate was a fighter by function, professionalism was not greater but less. Chivalry was not aware of its decadence, or if it was, clung ever more passionately to outward forms and brilliant rites to convince itself that the fiction was still the reality. Outside observers, however, had grown increasingly critical as the fiction grew increasingly implausible. It was now fifty years since the start of the war with England, and fifty years of damaging war could not fail to diminish the prestige of a warrior class that could neither win nor make peace but only pile further injury and misery upon the people.

Of all the rules of war written by Assyrians, Jews, Romans, Greeks, and all Christians, this French chivalry does not keep one tenth, yet thinks there is no chivalry in the world of valor equal to theirs.”

The ancient Romans, as Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University, remarked sarcastically some years later, “did not drag after them three or four pack horses and wagons laden with robes, jewels, carpets, boots and hose and double tents. They did not carry with them iron or brass stoves to make little pies.”

The preferable route lay through Brabant, but the towns and nobles of that duchy warned that they would never allow passage of a French army because it would cause more damage to their lands “than if the enemy were in the country.”