A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

If our last decade or two of collapsing assumptions has been a period of unusual discomfort, it is reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before.

“History never repeats itself,” said Voltaire; “man always does.”

Simply summarized by the Swiss historian, J. C. L. S. de Sismondi, the 14th century was “a bad time for humanity.”

This has led me to formulate Tuchman’s Law, as follows: “The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold” (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages. The claim of the Church to spiritual leadership could never be made wholly credible to all its communicants when it was founded in material wealth. The more riches the Church amassed, the more visible and disturbing became the flaw; nor could it ever be resolved, but continued to renew doubt and dissent in every century.

Through disappearance by failure to produce a male heir or by sinking over the edge into the lower classes, and through inflow of the ennobled, the personnel of the nobility was in flux, even though the status was fixed as an order of society.

A knight on the way down might pass an enterprising peasant on his way up. Having bought or inherited his freedom, a rent-paying peasant who prospered would add fields and tenants of his own, gradually leave manual labor to servants, acquire a fief from lord or Church, learn the practice of arms, marry the daughter of a needy squire, and slowly assimilate upward until he appeared in the records as domicellus, or squire, himself.

A Christian duty of particular merit was the donation of dowries to enable poor girls to marry, as in the case of a Gascon seigneur of the 14th century who left 100 livres to “those whom I deflowered, if they can be found.”

People lived close to the inexplicable. The flickering lights of marsh gas could only be fairies or goblins; fireflies were the souls of unbaptized dead infants.

For all the explanations, the earth and its phenomena were full of mysteries: What happens to fire when it goes out? Why are there different colors of skin among men? Why do the sun’s rays darken a man’s skin but bleach white linen? How can the earth, which is weighty, be suspended in air? How do souls make their way to the next world? Where lies the soul? What causes madness?

More than a code of manners in war and love, chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life. That it was about four parts in five illusion made it no less governing for all that. It developed at the same time as the great crusades of the 12th century as a code intended to fuse the religious and martial spirits and somehow bring the fighting man into accord with Christian theory.

Since a knight’s usual activities were as much at odds with Christian theory as a merchant’s, a moral gloss was needed that would allow the Church to tolerate the warriors in good conscience and the warriors to pursue their own values in spiritual comfort. With the help of Benedictine thinkers, a code evolved that put the knight’s sword arm in the service, theoretically, of justice, right, piety, the Church, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed.

As its justification, courtly love was considered to ennoble a man, to improve him in every way. It would make him concerned to show an example of goodness, to do his utmost to preserve honor, never letting dishonor touch himself or the lady he loved. On a lower scale, it would lead him to keep his teeth and nails clean, his clothes rich and well groomed, his conversation witty and amusing, his manners courteous to all, curbing arrogance and coarseness, never brawling in a lady’s presence.

In any epoch the difference between a rabble and an army is training, which was not bestowed on foot soldiers called up by the arrière-ban. Despised as ineffective, they were ineffective because they were despised.

So lethal was the disease that cases were known of persons going to bed well and dying before they woke, of doctors catching the illness at a bedside and dying before the patient.

Agnolo di Tura, a chronicler of Siena, recorded the fear of contagion that froze every other instinct. “Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another,” he wrote, “for this plague seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And no one could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship.… And I, Angolo di Tura, called the Fat, buried my five children with my own hands, and so did many others likewise.”

Exaggeration and literary pessimism were common in the 14th century, but the Pope’s physician, Guy de Chauliac, was a sober, careful observer who reported the same phenomenon: “A father did not visit his son, nor the son his father. Charity was dead.”

In another place villagers were seen dancing to drums and trumpets, and on being asked the reason, answered that, seeing their neighbors die day by day while their village remained immune, they believed they could keep the plague from entering “by the jollity that is in us. That is why we dance.”

That the infection came from contact with the sick or with their houses, clothes, or corpses was quickly observed but not comprehended.

God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut.

Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.

An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914–18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust.

In creating a climate for pessimism, the Black Death was the equivalent of the First World War, although it took fifty years for the psychological effects to develop. These were the fifty-odd years of the youth and adult life of Enguerrand de Coucy.

What proportion of the peasantry was well off and what poor is judged by what they bequeathed, and since the poorest had nothing to leave, they remain mute. For no other class is that famous goal of the historian, wie es wirklich war (how it really was), so elusive.

As the rampage spread against all landowners’ estates, the Jacques, when asked why they did these things, replied “that they knew not but they saw others do it and they thought they would thus destroy all the nobles and gentry in the world and there would be none any more.”

When many clerics who could teach French were eliminated by the Black Death, children in the grammar schools began learning their lessons in English—with both profit and loss, in the opinion of John of Trevisa. They learned grammar more quickly than before, he wrote, but, lacking French, they were at a disadvantage when they “scholle passe the se and travayle in strange londes.”

For all its dominance, there never was a time when the Church was not resisted somewhere by dissent.

The clear voice of common sense spoke through the King’s adviser in philosophy, Nicolas Oresme, who despised both astrology and sorcery. A man of scientific spirit though a bishop, he was a mathematician and astronomer and translator of the Politics and Ethics of Aristotle. One of his books began with the sentence, “The earth is round like a ball,” and he postulated a theory of the earth’s rotation.

In a culminating heresy, he transferred salvation from the agency of the Church to the individual: “For each man that shall be damned shall be damned by his own guilt, and each man that is saved shall be saved by his own merit.” Unperceived, here was the start of the modern world.

As the masters became richer, the workers sank to the level of day labor, with little prospect of advancement.

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.

The nobles’ fashionable clothes and habits of luxury, their private bedrooms where they shut themselves up till noon, their soft beds and perfumed baths and comforts on campaign were cited as evidence that knighthood had gone soft. 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.”

Although marriage was a sacrament, divorce was frequent and, given the right strings to pull, easily obtained. In Piers Plowman all lawyers are said to “make and unmake matrimony for money,” and preachers complained that a man might get rid of his wife by giving the judge a fur cloak. In theory, divorce did not exist, yet marriage litigation filled the courts of the Middle Ages.

In the decline of Rome, too, there must have been pockets of wealth and delight and serene days where trouble never penetrated.

Said by his partisans to be good-looking and well-mannered, he appears more generally as a “wild boar” who went on rampages at night with bad companions, burst into burghers’ houses to rape their wives, shut up his own wife in a whorehouse, roasted a cook who served him a burned meal. According to these versions, he was sired by a cobbler, was born ugly and deformed (causing the death of his mother in giving him birth), soiled the baptismal water at his christening, and stained the altar by sweating profusely at his coronation at the age of two—all omens, although probably ex post facto, of an unholy reign.

His reign saw the notorious pogrom of 1389 when a priest leading a procession through the Jewish quarter of Prague on Easter Sunday was stoned by a Jewish child, causing the townspeople to turn out for the slaughter of 3,000 of the Jewish community. When the survivors sought justice from the King, Wenceslas declared that the Jews deserved their punishment, and fined the survivors, not the perpetrators.

How hard it was to end a war.