More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 6 - September 30, 2023
The Comte d’Auxerre in the Battle of Poitiers was variously rendered by English chroniclers as Aunser, Aussure, Soussiere, Usur, Waucerre, and by the Grandes Chroniques of France as Sancerre, a different fellow altogether.
At the opening of the 14th century Picardy supported about 250,000 households or a population of more than a million, making it the only province of France, other than Toulouse in the south, to have been more populous in medieval times than in modern.
Everybody scolded Avignon and everybody came there.
By a supreme paradox, the Order that Francis founded on rejection of property attracted the support and donations of the wealthy because its purity seemed to offer assurance of holiness.
They leave an impression of a Church so pervaded by venality and hypocrisy as to seem ripe for dissolution, but an institution so in command of the culture and so rooted in the structure of society does not readily dissolve.
The Church gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.
Of all the characteristics in which the medieval age differs from the modern, none is so striking as the comparative absence of interest in children.
If children survived to age seven, their recognized life began, more or less as miniature adults. Childhood was already over. The childishness noticeable in medieval behavior, with its marked inability to restrain any kind of impulse, may have been simply due to the fact that so large a proportion of active society was actually very young in years. About half the population, it has been estimated, was under twenty-one, and about one third under fourteen.
Tournaments proliferated as the noble’s primary occupation dwindled. Under the extended rule of monarchy, he had less need to protect his own fief, while a class of professional ministers was gradually taking his place around the crown. The less he had to do, the more energy he spent in tournaments artificially re-enacting his role.
Without losing its appetite for war, the inchoate state had not yet devised a regular method to pay for it.
Fields went uncultivated, spring seed unsown. Second growth with nature’s awful energy crept back over cleared land, dikes crumbled, salt water re-invaded and soured the lowlands. With so few hands remaining to restore the work of centuries, people felt, in Walsingham’s words, that “the world could never again regain its former prosperity.”
Draconian means were adopted by the despot of Milan, Archbishop Giovanni Visconti, head of the most uninhibited ruling family of the 14th century. He ordered that the first three houses in which the plague was discovered were to be walled up with their occupants inside, enclosing the well, the sick, and the dead in a common tomb.
Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered.
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.
As the war dragged on, the habituating of armed men to cruelty and destruction as accepted practice poisoned the 14th century.
When capitalism became feasible through the techniques of banking and credit, it became respectable. The theory of a non-acquisitive society faded, and accumulation of surplus wealth lost its odium—indeed, became enviable.
Black Monday brought to a head all the faults of the six months’ campaign—the vulnerability of the English army, the foiling of decisive battle, the incapacity to take a major walled town or capital city, the vaguely perceived knowledge, of which Lancaster had a glimmer, that France could not be conquered by pillage, nor by siege, town by town, fortress by fortress. In the long run, this was what would condemn the war to drag on for a hundred years—the fact that, short of a fluke like the capture of a king at Poitiers, medieval armies had no means of achieving a decisive result, much less
...more
He should dress handsomely and fashionably and wear fresh new shoes, taking care that they fit so well that “common folk will discuss how you got them on and where you entered them.”
At tournaments, to the scandal of the people, there often came groups of questionable ladies, “the most costly and lovely but not the best of the kingdom,” dressed “in divers and wonderful male attire as if they were part of the tournay.” Wearing divided and parti-colored tunics, short capes, and daggers in pouches, riding fine coursers and palfreys, they exhibited a “scurrilous wantonness” that “neither feared God nor blushed at the scorn of the crowd.”
In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
In one 14th century illuminated manuscript, Pride was a knight on a lion, Envy a monk on a dog, Sloth a peasant on a donkey, Avarice a merchant on a badger, Gluttony a youth on a wolf, Ire a woman on a boar, and Luxury (instead of the standard Lechery) a woman on a goat.
The amount the rich could squander on occasions like these in a period of repeated disasters appears inexplicable, not so much with regard to motive as with regard to means. Where, in the midst of ruin and decline and lowered revenues from depopulated estates and towns, did all the money come from to endow the luxury?
Medieval technology could raise marvels of architecture 200 feet in the air, it could conceive the mechanics of a loom capable of weaving patterned cloth, and of a gearshaft capable of harnessing the insubstantial air to turn a heavy millstone, but it failed to conceive the fore-and-aft rig and swinging boom capable of adapting sails to the direction of the wind. By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped.
Expressing himself as “madly desirous” to see the famous treasure and relics of St. Denis, the Emperor was shown the preserved body of the saint, who, having been martyred by decapitation on the hill of Montmartre (hence its name), had walked with his head in his hands to the site where he laid the head down and founded the abbey.
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.”
Concentration of wealth was moving upward in the 14th century and enlarging the proportion of the poor, while the catastrophes of the century reduced large numbers to misery and want. The poor had remained manageable as long as their minimum subsistence could be maintained by charity, but the situation changed when urban populations were swelled by the flotsam of war and plague and infused by a new aggressiveness in the plague’s wake.
This stroke of fiscal suicide reflected momentary panic rather than serious intention. Aside from Charles V, most rulers governed by impulse in the 14th century.
The poor provided the explosive force, but became the agents of the merchant class, whose interests were not theirs.
The wave of insurrection passed, leaving little change in the condition of the working class. Inertia in the scales of history weighs more heavily than change. Four hundred years were to elapse before the descendants of the Maillotins seized the Bastille.
If he had led a rapid and spartan advance with all energies and resources applied to the objective, the outcome could well have been different. But the “if” asks for a modern attitude in a medieval age.
Papal dispensations of consanguinity were obtained in duplicate, one from each Pope because the marriages spanned the schism.
Hall of the Nine Worthies, the heroes of history most admired in the Middle Ages. They were three ancients—Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar; three Biblical Jews—Joshua, King David, and Judas Maccabeus; three Christians—King Arthur, Charlemagne, and the crusader Godfrey of Bouillon. An adjoining hall 30 by 60 feet, was dedicated to the feminine worthies, Hippolyta, Semiramis, Penthisilea, and other legendary queens.
In either direction no successful invasion of a hostile beachhead was ever carried out between 1066 and 1944.
Gathered together, the facts of decay convey too solid an impression. In real life every age is a checkerboard of light and dark.
In the decline of Rome, too, there must have been pockets of wealth and delight and serene days where trouble never penetrated.
Wenceslas’ difficulties were not merely personal or temperamental. They were an epitome of his century. He too was lost in the dark wood of his time.
Work, Groote believed, “was wonderfully necessary to mankind in restoring the mind to purity,” although not so commerce: “Labor is holy, but business is dangerous.”
On the downward slope of the Middle Ages man had lost confidence in his capacity to construct a good society.
