A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

the Black Death of 1348–50,

they were the hoofprints of more than the four horsemen of St. John’s vision, which had now become seven—plague, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government, insurrection, and schism in the Church.

Until recently, historians tended to dislike and to skirt the century because it could not be made to fit into a pattern of human progress.

expect contradictions, not uniformity.

With all this wealth, empty spaces nevertheless exist where the problem is not contradictory information but no information.

History is made by the documents that survive, and these lean heavily on crisis and calamity, crime and misbehavior, because such things are the subject matter of the documentary process—of lawsuits, treaties, moralists’ denunciations, literary satire, papal Bulls.

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.

What compounds the problem is that medieval society, while professing belief in renunciation of the life of the senses, did not renounce it in practice, and no part of it less so than the Church itself.

Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.

In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder. When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.

Violent, destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man retains his vision of order and resumes his search.

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 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.

habit of violence that flourished because of a lack of any organ of effective restraint.

inadvertent by-product of the nobles’ passionate pursuit of war.

“Of the good towns, merchants and working men,” wrote a noble at the court of the last Duke of Burgundy, “no long description is necessary, for, among other things, this estate is not capable of great attributes because it is of servile degree.”

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.

in practice the rules were as changeable and diffuse as clouds in a windy sky.

unlimited simony—that is, the selling of offices.

everything the Church had or was, from cardinal’s hat to pilgrim’s relic, was for sale.

Money could buy any kind of dispensation: to legitimize children, of which the majority were those of priests and prelates;

“I am living in the Babylon of the West,” wrote Petrarch in the 1340s, where prelates feast at “licentious banquets” and ride on snow-white horses “decked in gold, fed on gold, soon to be shod in gold if the Lord does not check this slavish luxury.”

Everybody scolded Avignon and everybody came there.

When commissioned to raise money for a crusade, according to Matteo Villani, they would take from the poor, in lieu of money, “linen and woolen stuffs or furnishings, grain and fodder … deceiving the people. That was the way they gave the Cross.” What they were peddling was salvation, taking advantage of the people’s need and credulity to sell its counterfeit.

The regular clergy detested the pardoner for undoing the work of penance, for endangering souls insofar as his goods were spurious, and for invading clerical territory, taking collections on feast days or performing burial and other services for a fee that should have gone to the parish priest. Yet the system permitted him to function because it shared in the profits.

In real life their sinfulness was not funny but threatening, for when a friar failed so far in holiness how could he save souls? This sense of betrayal explains why the friars were so often the object of active hostility, sometimes even of physical assault, because, as a chronicle of 1327 stated simply, “they did not behave as friars ought.”

The friars were an element of daily life, scorned yet venerated and feared because they might, after all, have the key to salvation.

In Hell men were naked, nameless, and forgotten.

The Church, not the government, sponsored the care of society’s helpless—the indigent and sick, orphan and cripple, the leper, the blind, the idiot—by indoctrinating the laity in the belief that alms bought them merit and a foothold in Heaven. Based on this principle, the impulse of Christian charity was self-serving but effective. Nobles gave alms daily at the castle gate to all comers, in coin and in leftover food from the hall. Donations from all sources poured into the hospitals, favorite recipients of Christian charity. Merchants bought themselves peace of mind for the non-Christian business of making profit by allocating a regular percentage to charity. This was entered in the ledger under the name of God as the poor’s representative. A Christian duty of particular merit was the donation of dowries to enable poor girls to marry, as in the case of a Gascon seigneur of the 14th century who left 100 livres to “those whom I deflowered, if they can be found.”

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.

As restraint of initiative, this was the direct opposite of capitalist enterprise. It was the denial of economic man, and consequently even more routinely violated than the denial of sensual man.