A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Reconnoitering terrain in advance was not part of medieval warfare because it was not part of tournaments. The clash was everything.

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

a grand banquet hall measuring 50 by 200 feet, called the Salle des Preux or Hall of the Nine Worthies, the heroes of history most admired in the Middle Ages. They were three ancients—Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar; three Biblical Jews—Joshua, King David, and Judas Maccabeus; three Christians—King Arthur, Charlemagne, and the crusader Godfrey of Bouillon.

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

he was linked to her husband in that intense partisanship which automatically accompanied kinship through marriage

in the Middle Ages.

What knights lacked in the fading 14th century was innovation. Holding to traditional forms, they gave little thought or professional study to tactics.

When everyone of noble estate was a

fighter by function, professionalism was not g...

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. Outside observers, however, had grown increasingly critical as the fiction grew increasingly implausible. It was now fifty years since the start of the war with England, and fifty years of damaging war could not fail to diminish the prestige of ...

Instead of troubadours glorifying the ideal knight and ideal love in romantic epics, moralists now deplored in satire and allegory and didactic treatise what the knight had become—predator and aggressor rather than champion of justice.

The military do not find their best friend in a war correspondent suffering from dysentery.

In theory, divorce did not exist, yet marriage litigation filled the courts of the Middle Ages.

Regardless of theory, divorce was a fact of life, a permanent

element in the great disharmony between medieval the...

The marks of a century of woe—lowered population, dwindling commerce, deserted villages, ruined abbeys—were

were everywhere in France, and cause enough for the climate of pessimism. Certain communes in Normandy were reduced to two or three hearths; in the diocese of Bayeux several towns had been abandoned since 1370, likewise several parishes of Brittany. The commerce of Châlons on the Marne was reduced from 30,000 pieces of cloth a year to 800. In the region of Paris, according to an ordinance of 1388, “many notable and ancient highways, bridges, lanes, and roads” had been left to decay—gutted by streams, overgrown by hedges, brambles, and trees, and some, having become impassable, abandoned altogether. The same examples could be multiplied for the south.

Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.

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?

the favorite popular belief that the King was invested with royalty in order to maintain justice

in favor of the small against the great.

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.

Ignoring the obvious, and the disparity between goal and means, the French pursued their aim with the blind persistence that amounts to frivolity.

Courtly love was an accustomed game, not a motivating ideal to which men desperately clung and for which, like the knights

who held the lists of St. Ingelbert, they staked their lives.

Social antagonism found vent against the Jews, who so

regularly

in history b...

microcosm of the world’s l...

In Spain their role had been more prominent and prosperous than elsewhere. Pedro the Cruel had employed them extensively as advisors and agents, besides keeping a Jewish mistress, and his preference was made a theme of Enrique’s accusations until Enriqu...

Popular hatred was...

by agitators who rai...

of the Jews’ increasing influence and demanded cancellation of debts owed to Christ-killers. Given a religious motive...

A fanatic Archdeacon, Ferran Martínez, preached a version of Hitler’s final solution. In 1391 murder, seizure of property, and forcible conversion of the Jews began, and this taste of violence soon turned into general insur...

in four days of terror in Barcelona. Protection of the Jews was denounced by the populace as treason to Christendom. Gradually, the rulers regained the upper hand, but aggression against the Jews had been too overt and physically damaging to be repaired. They were rendered vulnera...

Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated. In this anxiety, Chaucer toward the end of his life, in his envoy to the Parson’s Tale, was moved to “revoke” his life’s work—The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Book of the Duchess, and all the poems that were not pious—and to beg Christ to forgive him for writing these “worldly vanities … so that I may be one of those at the day

of

doom that shall be saved.” Christianity held a tragic power indeed if the need for salvation could lead a ...

One more enterprise, the fourth since the Scottish fiasco, had ended in vain, not for lack of will or courage or fighting capacity, but from the headlong undertaking of a militarily impractical

task. The strength of walls against men, the problems of siege to the besieger, the risks of overseas supply were as well known to knights as the inside of their helmets. They could have known the conditions of North Africa from the rout of St. Louis’ two crusades, regardless of the time elapsed; 120 years ago was but yesterday insofar as change was expected. Military carelessness had some excuse, however. In a period of

poor communication, advance intelligence was usually lacking. Mahdia’s fortified strength could well have been unsuspected. Ignorance of the foe was a condition of the time; contempt for this foe, a condition of its mentality. Froissart claimed that knights said to him afterward, “If the Sire de Coucy had been in comman...

structure played a part in the outcome, what principally vitiated the siege of Barbary was lack of a vital interest. When that was present, when the stakes were serious, as in the recovery of France under Charles V, a strategy compatible with its object was imposed, recklessness and improvidence disallowed. For the Fr...

knights to war was desire to do deeds of valor augmented by zeal for the faith, not the gaining of a political end by force of arms. They were concerned with the action, not the goal—wh...

In the great age of Aquinas, scholasticism had undertaken to answer all questions of faith by reason and logic, but reason had proved incapable of explaining God and the universe, and the effort faded, leaving only a hard shell of argument by logic, practiced, as Petrarch said in disgust, by “hoary-headed children.” When they begin to “spew forth syllogisms,” he advised taking flight. Gerson, like others of

his

troubled time, craved something more meaningful for the soul and found the alternative in mystic faith ...

The

unfair advantage of the written word triumphs in the end.