A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

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

Tuchman’s Law, as follows: “The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold” (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

Its insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is one that the modern world does not share, no matter how devout some present-day Christians may be. The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages.

When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.

Not citizen to state but vassal to lord was the bond that underlay political structure. The state was still struggling to be born.

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 clergy were to pray for all men, the knight to fight for them, and the commoner to work that all might eat.

The object of the noble’s function, in theory, was not fighting for fighting’s sake, but defense of the two other estates and the maintenance of justice and order. He was supposed to protect the people from oppression, to combat tyranny, and to cultivate virtue—that is, the higher qualities of humanity of which the mud-stained ignorant peasant was considered incapable by his contemporaries in Christianity, if not by its founder.

The tide was receding from the universality of the Church that had been the medieval dream.

The Christian ideal was ascetic: the denial of sensual man. The result was that, under the sway of the Church, life became a continual struggle against the senses and a continual engagement in sin, accounting for the persistent need for absolution.

no factor caused more trouble than the persistent lag between the growth of the state and the means of state financing.

The childishness noticeable in medieval behavior, with its marked inability to restrain any kind of impulse, may have been simply due to the fact that so large a proportion of active society was actually very young in years. About half the population, it has been estimated, was under twenty-one, and about one third under fourteen.

Progress, moral or material, in man or society, was not expected during this life on earth, of which the conditions were fixed. The individual might through his own efforts increase in virtue, but betterment of the whole would have to await the Second Coming and the beginning of a new age.

Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

Beneath it all was the daily condition of medieval life, in which hardly an act or thought, sexual, mercantile, or military, did not contravene the dictates of the Church. Mere failure to fast or attend mass was sin. The result was an underground lake of guilt in the soul that the plague now tapped.

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.

Whether employed or living by adventure, they made pillage pay the cost. Life by the sword became subordinate to its means; the means became the end; the climate of the 14th century succumbed to the brute triumph of the lawless.

The elasticity of the human mind allowed honor to be unaffected by partnership with mercenaries and brigands.

Such as thou art, so once was I, As I am now, so shalt thou be.

kingship depended on the King’s will. The sovereign was not above the law; rather, his duty was to maintain the law, for God denied Paradise to tyrants. Sanction derived in theory from the consent of the governed, for kings and princes, as a great theologian, Jean Gerson, was to remind Charles’s successor, “were created in the beginning by the common consent of all.”

As Charles knew well, the cult of monarchy was the basis of the people’s consent. He deliberately fed the cult while at the same time he was the first to show that rulership could be exercised “from the chamber” independent of personal leadership in battle.

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.

The cracking of old and famous structures is slow and internal, while the façade holds.

“Therefore the innocent must die of hunger with whom these great wolves daily fill their maw,” wrote Deschamps. “This grain, this corn, what is it but the blood and bones of the poor folk who have plowed the land? Wherefore their spirit crieth on God for vengeance. Woe to the lords, the councillors and all who steer us thus, and woe to all who are of their party, for no man careth now but to fill his bags.”

Inertia in the scales of history weighs more heavily than change.

“I know Gian Galeazzo. Neither honor nor pity nor sworn faith ever yet inclined him to do a disinterested deed. If he ever seeks what is good, it is because his interest requires it, for he is without moral sense. Goodness, like hate or anger, is for him a matter of calculation.”

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.

Chivalry was not aware of its decadence, or if it was, clung ever more passionately to outward forms and brilliant rites to convince itself that the fiction was still the reality.

Government by favorite leans toward the arbitrary exercise of power,

but if autocrats always acted wisely they would not furnish history with moral lessons.

In the midst of events there is no perspective.

What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few? Circuses and ceremonies are meant to encourage the acceptance; they either succeed or, by costing too much, accomplish the opposite.

To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states. States function only in terms of what those in control perceive as power or personal ambition, and both of these wear blinkers.

Christianity held a tragic power indeed if the need for salvation could lead a man to recant his own creation.

They were caught in that common irony of human endeavor when one self-interest cancels out another.

Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate,

prudence cannot make a strong case against the mystique of valor.

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 Gothic sun,” as Victor Hugo put it with fitting grandiloquence, “set behind the gigantic printing press of Mainz.”