A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

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

From the top of the donjon an observer could see the whole region as far as the forest of Compiègne thirty miles away, making Coucy proof against surprise. In design and execution the fortress was the most nearly perfect military structure of medieval Europe, and in size the most audacious.

Only the Church offered an organizing principle, which was the reason for its success, for society cannot bear anarchy.

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.

The private wars were the curse of Europe which the crusades, it has been thought, were subconsciously invented to relieve by providing a vent for aggression.

He left 20 sous (equal to one livre) a year in perpetuity to the leprosarium of Coucy-la-Ville so that its inmates “will pray for us each year in the Chapel for our sins.” Twenty sous at this time was equal to a day’s pay of one knight or four archers, or the hire of a cart and two horses for twenty days, or, theoretically, the pay of a hired peasant for two years, so it may be presumed to have underwritten a reasonable number of prayers, though perhaps not adequate for the soul of Enguerrand IV.

Money could buy any kind of dispensation: to legitimize children, of which the majority were those of priests and prelates;* to divide a corpse for the favorite custom of burial in two or more places; to permit nuns to keep two maids; to permit a converted Jew to visit his unconverted parents; to marry within the prohibited degree of consanguinity (with a sliding scale of fees for the second, third, and fourth degrees); to trade with the infidel Moslem (with a fee required for each ship on a scale according to cargo); to receive stolen goods up to a specific value. The collection and accounting of all these sums, largely handled through Italian bankers, made the physical counting of cash a common sight in the papal palace.

Nothing so vexed medieval thinking, nothing so baffled and eluded settlement, nothing was so great a tangle of irreconcilables as the theory of usury. Society needed moneylending while Christian doctrine forbade it.

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.

The diseased sailors showed strange black swellings about the size of an egg or an apple in the armpits and groin. The swellings oozed blood and pus and were followed by spreading boils and black blotches on the skin from internal bleeding. The sick suffered severe pain and died quickly within five days of the first symptoms. As the disease spread, other symptoms of continuous fever and spitting of blood appeared instead of the swellings or buboes. These victims coughed and sweated heavily and died even more quickly, within three days or less, sometimes in 24 hours. In both types everything that issued from the body—breath, sweat, blood from the buboes and lungs, bloody urine, and blood-blackened excrement—smelled foul. Depression and despair accompanied the physical symptoms, and before the end “death is seen seated on the face.”

Although the mortality rate was erratic, ranging from one fifth in some places to nine tenths or almost total elimination in others, the overall estimate of modern demographers has settled—for the area extending from India to Iceland—around the same figure expressed in Froissart’s casual words: “a third of the world died.” His estimate, the common one at the time, was not an inspired guess but a borrowing of St. John’s figure for mortality from plague in Revelation, the favorite guide to human affairs of the Middle Ages.

With arms collected in advance they killed 200 of the mob, an act which only served to bring down upon them a furious onslaught by the townspeople in revenge for the death of Christians. The Jews fought until overpowered; then retreating to their homes, they too set their own fires. Six thousand were said to have perished at Mainz on August 24, 1349. Of 3,000 Jews at Erfurt, none was reported to have survived.

Invited to Rome by the revolutionary Cola di Rienzi, who wanted his wealth, Monreale overconfidently entered alone, was seized, tried as a public robber, and executed. He went to the block magnificently dressed in brown velvet embroidered in gold and had his own surgeon direct the ax of the executioner. Unrepentant at the end, he declared himself justified “in carving his way with a sword through a false and miserable world.”

The friar has censure left over for the common people, “whose belly is their God and who are the slaves of their women,” and for the clergy, who receive the worst scolding of all. They are sunk in luxury, gluttony, pomp, ambition, anger, discord, envy, greed, litigation, usury, and sacks of silver and gold. Virtues die, vices triumph, honesty perishes, pity is stifled, avarice pervades, confusion overwhelms, order vanishes. Was this merely the traditional monastic tirade upon the world, or a deeper pessimism that begins to darken the second half of the century?

The deaths of the young in the Second Pest halted repopulation, haunting the age with a sense of decline. In the urge to procreate, women in England, according to Polychronicon, “took any kind of husbands, strangers, the feeble and imbeciles alike, and without shame mated with inferiors.”

Who can say what made Jean return? Perhaps it was no medieval reason, but the human tragedy of a man who, knowing himself inadequate for the task he was born to, sought the enforced passivity of prison.

A knight, asked by the Queen if he has fathered any children, is forced to admit he has not, and indeed he “did not have the look of a man who could please his mistress when he held her naked in his arms. For his beard was … little more than the kind of fuzz that ladies have in certain places.” The Queen tells him she does not doubt his word, “for it is easy to judge from the state of the hay whether the pitchfork is any good.” In his turn, the knight asks, “Lady, answer me without deceit. Is there hair between your legs?” When she replies, “None at all,” he comments, “Indeed I do believe you, for grass does not grow on a well-beaten path.”