A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Promoted by popular preachers, a mythology of blood grew in a mirror image of the Christian ritual of drinking the blood of the Saviour. Jews were believed to kidnap and torture Christian children, whose blood they drank for a variety of sinister purposes ranging from sadism and sorcery to the need, as unnatural beings, for Christian blood to give them a human appearance.

Again Pope Clement attempted to check the hysteria in a Bull of September 1348 in which he said that Christians who imputed the pestilence to the Jews had been “seduced by that liar, the Devil,” and that the charge of well-poisoning and ensuing massacres were a “horrible thing.” He pointed out that “by a mysterious decree of God” the plague was afflicting all peoples, including Jews; that it raged in places where no Jews lived, and that elsewhere they were victims like everyone else; therefore the charge that they caused it was “without plausibility.” He urged the clergy to take Jews under their protection as he himself offered to do in Avignon, but his voice was hardly heard against local animus.

The movement that began as an attempt through self-inflicted pain to save the world from destruction, caught the infection of power hunger and aimed at taking over the Church.

Homeless ghosts, the Jews filtered back from eastern Europe, where the expelled had gone. Two Jews reappeared in Erfurt as visitors in 1354 and, joined by others, started a resettlement three years later. By 1365 the community numbered 86 taxable hearths and an additional number of poor households below the tax-paying level. Here and elsewhere they returned to live in weakened and fearful communities on worse terms and in greater segregation than before. Well-poisoning and its massacres had fixed the malevolent image of the Jew into a stereotype.

The period of the Jews’ medieval flourishing was over. The walls of the ghetto, though not yet physical, had risen.

Unlike the dice transformed into prayer beads, people did not improve, although it had been expected, according to Matteo Villani, that the experience of God’s wrath would have left them “better men, humble, virtuous and Catholic.” Instead, “They forgot the past as though it had never been and gave themselves up to a more disordered and shameful life than they had led before.”

Clement VI, though hardly a spiritual man, was sufficiently shaken by the plague to burst out against his prelates in a tirade of anger and shame when they petitioned him in 1351 to abolish the mendicant orders. And if he did, the Pope replied, “What can you preach to the people? If on humility, you yourselves are the proudest of the world, puffed up, pompous and sumptuous in luxuries. If on poverty, you are so covetous that all the benefices in the world are not enough for you. If on chastity—but we will be silent on this, for God knoweth what each man does and how many of you satisfy your lusts.”

“When those who have the title of shepherd play the part of wolves,” said Lothar of Saxony, “heresy grows in the garden of the Church.”

The crown grasped for money by every means and favored the least scrupulous, which was debasing the coinage.

Since the petty coins of daily use were those affected, the system reduced the real wages and purchasing power of the common people while bankers, merchants, and nobles, whose movable wealth was in large gold coins or gold and silver vessels and plate, were less affected.

The Crucifixion with its nails, spears, thorns, whips, and more dripping blood was inescapable. Blood and cruelty were ubiquitous in Christian art, indeed essential to it, for Christ became Redeemer, and the saints sanctified, only through suffering violence at the hands of their fellow man.

Jean’s major military action was to burn or carry off provisions of the countryside so as to deprive the English of supply, at the cost of the local populace. Left to face a hungry winter robbed of their hard-earned harvests, the people experienced their own warrior class not as protectors but ravagers.

Unrepentant at the end, he declared himself justified “in carving his way with a sword through a false and miserable world.”

“Thence-forward infinite harm, misfortune and danger befell the French people for lack of good government and adequate defense.”

The nobles were to blame also, as Jean de Venette saw it, for discord among the Estates General which caused the Estates to abandon the task they had begun. “From that time on all went ill with the kingdom, and the state was undone.… The country and whole land of France began to put on confusion and mourning like a garment because it had no defender or guardian.”

Virtues die, vices triumph, honesty perishes, pity is stifled, avarice pervades, confusion overwhelms, order vanishes.

Their corpses were dragged to the courtyard of the palace and left there for all to see while Marcel hurried to the Place de Grève, where he addressed the crowd from a window of the city hall, asking their endorsement of his deed. It had been done, he said, for the good of the kingdom and the removal of “false, wicked, and traitorous” knights. With one voice the mob shouted its approval and its adherence to the Provost “through life and death.” Marcel promptly returned to the palace to present the Dauphin with that ever-justifying formula: the deed had been done “by the will of the people.” The prince, he said, must show himself at one with the people by ratifying the act and pardoning everyone concerned. “Grieving and dumbfounded,” the Dauphin could read the warning of the sprawled bodies on the pavement. He prayed to the Provost that the people of Paris might be his good friends as he was theirs, and accepted from Marcel two lengths of red-and-blue cloth to make hoods for himself and his officers.