A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

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.

An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914–18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust.

It may be that the untender medieval infancy produced adults who valued others no more than they had been valued in their own formative years.

Luxury and immorality, pride and dissension, superior Turkish training, discipline, and tactics all contributed to the fatal outcome. Nevertheless, what basically defeated the crusaders was the chivalric insistence on personal prowess—which

Why, in a society dominated by the cult of the warrior, was extravagant display more important than the equipment of victory? Why was absolutely nothing learned from an experience as recent as Mahdia? All the grandiose projects of the last decade—invasion of England, Guelders, Tunisia, the Voie de Fait—were either castles in the air or exercises in futility. Why, after a less than glorious fifty years since Crécy, was the attitude of the French crusaders so steeped in arrogance and overconfidence? Why were they unable to take into account the fact of opponents who did not fight for the same values and who obeyed different rules? It can only be answered that a dominant idea is slow to change and that, regardless of everything, the French still believed themselves supreme in war.

The worst of the harsh conditions was deprivation of wine, the Europeans’ daily drink throughout their lives.

According to an anonymous poem of the mid-14th century, life’s span was 72 years, consisting of twelve ages corresponding to the months of the year. At 18, the youth begins to tremble like March with the approach of spring; at 24, he becomes amorous as the blossoming of April, and nobility and virtue enter his soul along with love; at 36, he is at the summer solstice, his blood as hot as the sun of June; at 42, he has acquired experience; at 48, he should think of harvesting; at 54, he is in the September of life when goods should be stored up; age 60, the October of life, is the onset of old age; 66 is dark November when all green withers and dies and a man should think on death, for his heirs are waiting for him to go if he is poor and waiting more eagerly if he is rich; 72 is December, when life is as mournful as winter and there is nothing left to do but die.

The Battle of Agincourt has inspired books and studies and aficionados, but it was not decisive in the sense of Crécy, which, by leading to the capture of Calais, transformed Edward III’s semi-serious adventure into a hundred years’ war, nor in the sense of Poitiers, which determined the loss of confidence in the noble as knight. Agincourt merely confirmed both these results, especially the second, for not even Nicopolis was so painful a demonstration that valor in combat is not the equivalent of competence in war. The battle was lost by the incompetence of French chivalry, and won more by the action of the English common soldiers than of the mounted knights.

The phenomenon of Jeanne d’Arc—the voices from God who told her she must expel the English and have the Dauphin crowned King, the quality that dominated those who would normally have despised her, the strength that raised the siege of Orléans and carried the Dauphin to Reims—belongs to no category. Perhaps it can only be explained as the answer called forth by an exigent historic need. The moment required her and she rose. Her strength came from the fact that in her were combined for the first time the old religious faith and the new force of patriotism. God spoke to her through the voices of St. Catherine, St. Michael, and St. Margaret, but what He commanded was not chastity nor humility nor the life of the spirit but political action to rescue her country from foreign tyrants.