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.

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.”

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place.

Man himself was the formulator of the impossible Christian ideal and tried to uphold it, if not live by it, for more than a millennium. Therefore it must represent a need, something more fundamental than Gibbon’s 18th century enlightenment allowed for, or his elegant ironies could dispose of. While I recognize its presence, it requires a more religious bent than mine to identify with it.

The basic principle was that the King should “live of his own” under ordinary circumstances, but since his own revenues might not suffice for defense of the realm or other governmental purposes, his subjects could be taxed to enable him, as Thomas Aquinas neatly phrased it, “to provide for the common good from the common goods.”

Everybody scolded Avignon and everybody came there.

Ockham opened a dangerous door to direct intuitive knowledge of the physical world. He was in a sense a spokesman for intellectual freedom, and the Pope recognized the implications by his ban. In reply to the excommunication, Ockham promptly charged John XXII with seventy errors and seven heresies.

A scholar of Oxford kept a seven-year record of the weather through the years 1337–44 and noted that the sound of bells heard more clearly or at a greater distance than usual was a sign of increased humidity and a prediction of rain.

He had no great qualities apart from or ahead of his time, but shone in those qualities his time admired in a king:

Wealth generated by the weaving industry enriched the magnates of the bourgeoisie, who enjoyed a luxury that had astonished Queen Jeanne, wife of Philip the Fair, when she visited Bruges. “I thought I would be the only queen here,” she said, “but I find six hundred others.”

Emotional response, dulled by horrors, underwent a kind of atrophy epitomized by the chronicler who wrote, “And in these days was burying without sorrowe and wedding without friendschippe.”

The calamity chilled the hearts of men, wrote Boccaccio in his famous account of the plague in Florence that serves as introduction to the Decameron.

The sense of a vanishing future created a kind of dementia of despair.

Reaching out to us in the future, Petrarch cried, “Oh happy posterity who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.”

In Florence Giovanni Villani, the great historian of his time, died at 68 in the midst of an unfinished sentence: “… e dure questo pistolenza fino a … (in the midst of this pestilence there came to an end …).”

Under the concept of “noble” architecture, the 15th and later centuries preferred to ignore human elimination. Coucy probably had better sanitation than Versailles.

If the lay view of medieval woman was a scold and a shrew, it may be because scolding was her only recourse against subjection to man, a condition codified, like everything else, by Thomas Aquinas.

That women reacted shrewishly in the age of Aquinas was hardly surprising.

At the University of Bologna in the 1360s the faculty included Novella d’Andrea, a woman so renowned for her beauty that she lectured behind a veil lest her students be distracted. Nothing is said, however, of her professional capacity.

Clouded by the metaphysics of transubstantiation, it was little understood by the ordinary layman, except for the magical powers believed to reside in the consecrated wafer. Placed on cabbage leaves in the garden, it kept off chewing insects, and placed in a beehive to control a swarm, it induced the pious bees, in one case, to build around it a complete chapel of wax with windows, arches, bell tower, and an altar on which the bees placed the sacred fragment.

the favorite comic relief was the on-stage donkey for Balaam’s ass or for the Virgin to ride on the Flight into Egypt or for the Three Kings in lieu of camels. The “hin-han” brayed by the actor inside the donkey’s skin and the turds dropped from a lifted tail evoked howls of delight even when the donkey bore Jesus into Jerusalem.

Schadenfreude was not peculiar to the Middle Ages, but it was a dark variety indeed, induced by plague and successive calamities,

A man ahead of his time, Oresme suggested that the source of demons and specters could be the disease of melancholy.

Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane.

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.

Even riddled by the schism, the Church was still in control. The cracking of old and famous structures is slow and internal, while the façade holds.

Concentration of wealth was moving upward in the 14th century and enlarging the proportion of the poor,

Moral authority can be no stronger than its acknowledgment. When officials were venal—as even the poor could see they were in the bribing of tax commissioners—and warriors a curse and the Church oppressive, the push for change gained strength.

If all men had a common origin in Adam and Eve, how should some be held in hereditary servitude? If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?

The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

Though he never lost his indignation at social injustice, Deschamps looked with a satiric eye on the human species, which though endowed with reason, prefers folly.

The Duc de Berry, who had just married his twelve-year-old bride, felicitates himself on having “escaped love” and recommends talking Fidelity and practicing Falsity.

“Labor is holy, but business is dangerous.”

The cult of death was to reach its height in the 15th century, but its source was in the 14th.

Already the stereotype of the crafty Frenchman and bluff Englishman was operating.

“Do you think,” he cried, in the eternal voice of protest, “that people will suffer forever your bad government? Who do you think can endure, among so many other abuses, your mercenary appointments, your multiple sale of benefices, your elevation of men without honesty or virtue to the most eminent positions?”

An attack of gout suffered by Bajazet, which supposedly prevented him from advancing, evoked from Gibbon the proposition that “An acrimonious humor falling on a single fibre of one man may prevent or suspend the misery of nations.”