A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Until recently, historians tended to dislike and to skirt the century because it could not be made to fit into a pattern of human progress. After the experiences of the terrible 20th century, we have greater fellow-feeling for a distraught age whose rules were breaking down under the pressure of adverse and violent events. We recognize with a painful twinge the marks of “a period of anguish when there is no sense of an assured future.”

People of the Middle Ages existed under mental, moral, and physical circumstances so different from our own as to constitute almost a foreign civilization. As a result, qualities of conduct that we recognize as familiar amid these alien surroundings are revealed as permanent in human nature.

As William Langland wrote, When the kindness of Constantine gave Holy Church endowments In lands and leases, lordships and servants, The Romans heard an angel cry on high above them, “This day dos ecclesiae has drunk venom And all who have Peter’s power are poisoned forever.”