A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Wenceslas’ difficulties were not merely personal or temperamental. They were an epitome of his century. He too was lost in the dark wood of his time. Like Jean II of France, he was born to a task of government too heavy for him in an age when too much was going wrong. Like government, the Church in his country was failing in its task and giving rise to the strongest movement for reform in Europe.

Indifference, however, like a vacuum in nature, is not a

natural condition of human affairs.

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, the most widely read religious book in Catholicism after the Bible.

Certain ways of behavior vary little across the centuries.

For men of affairs no less than poets, the insecurity of the time allowed little confidence in the future.

pessimistic view of man’s fate was the duty of the clergy in order to prove the need of salvation. It was by no means new to the 14th century.

Mankind was at one of history’s ebbs. At mid-century the Black Death had raised the question of God’s hostility to man, and events since then had offered little reassurance. To contemporaries the miseria of the time reflected sin, and, indeed, sin in the form of greed and inhumanity abounded.

On the downward slope of the Middle Ages man had lost confidence in his capacity to construct a good society.

Times of anxiety nourish belief in conspiracies of evil, which in the 14th century were seen as the work of persons or groups with access to diabolical aid. Hence the rising specter of the witch. By the 1390s witchcraft had been officially recognized by the Inquisition as equivalent

to heresy.

Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.

chivalry’s love “for one of the great ladies of the world—Vainglory.”

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 crusaders of 1396 started out with a strategic purpose in the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, but their minds were on something else. The young men of Boucicaut’s generation, born since the Black Death and Poitiers and the nadir of French fortunes, harked back to pursuit of those strange bewitchments, honor and glory. They thought only of being in the vanguard, to the exclusion of reconnaissance, tacti...

Enguerrand did not innovate nor rise above his time; he went with it, served it better than most, and died of its values. It was reduced by his going.

Considering all the bereaved families of Burgundy whose sons did not return, the receptions probably represented not so much popular enthusiasm as organized joy, in which the 14th century excelled.

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than

sex. As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even for the sake of success.

If the sixty years seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague, and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness, and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labor for the fields, of cleared land reverting to waste; and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of

guilt and sin and the hostility of God.

People felt subject to events beyond their control, swept, like flotsam at sea, hither and yon in a universe without reason or purpose. They lived through a period which suffered and struggled without visible advance. They longed for a remedy, for a revival of faith, for stability and order that never came.

Yet change, as always, was taking place. Wyclif and the protestant movement were the natural consequence of default by the Church. Monarchy, centralized government, the national state gained in strength, whether for good or bad. Seaborne enterprise, liberated by the compass, was reaching toward the voyages

of discovery that were to burst the confines of Europe and find the New World. Literature from Dante to Chaucer was expressing itself in national languages, ready for the great leap forward in print. In the year that Enguerrand de Coucy died, Johan Gutenberg was born, although that in itself marked no turn of the tide. The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.

IN THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS, the forces set in motion during the 14th century played themselves out, some of them in exaggerated form like human failings in old age. After a heavy recurrence in the last year of the old century, the Black Death disappeared, but war and brigandage were renewed, the cult of death grew more extreme, the struggle to end the schism and reform the abuses of the Church more desperate. Depopulation reached its lowest point in a society already weakened

both physically and morally.

Even if Prince Henry’s initial motive was for the greater glory of the Order of Christ, of which he was General, his work and its impulse were modern. He took his place on the bridge between medieval and modern, where the humanists and scientists were crowding.

The population of Europe had sunk to its lowest point by about 1440 and was not to rise for another thirty years.

The great bourgeois financier Jacques Coeur supplied a footing of money and credit, and siege artillery perfected by skilled gunners outside the ranks of chivalry broke the English hold on castles and towns with an efficacy unknown in the 14th century.

Town after town opened its gates to the

King’s forces, the more readily because Charles VII accomplished at last the fundamental military reform that had defeated his grandfather Charles V. In 1444–45 he succeeded in establishing a standing army, incorporating and at the same time eli...

Among signs of change at mid-century, none was more important than this innovation of the standing army. What it signified was a principle of order where all before—plague, war, and schism—had been agents of disorder.

Recovery was aided by England’s fading will for conquest.

towns surrendered as soon as the artillery train appeared.

The longest war was over, though perhaps few were aware of it. After so many truces and renewals, who could have realized that the end had come?

Without ceremony or cease-fire, treaty or settlement, the adventure and agony of five generations faded away. National identities were formed by its passage.

The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity. The brotherhood of chivalry was severed, just as the internationalism of the universities, under th...

Between England and France the war left a legacy of mutual antagonism ...

necessity required alliance on the...

In the same year as Castillon, madness overtook Henry VI, precipitating the same contest for control of the English crown that had so damaged France. Unemployed soldiers and archers returning to England took service with the baronial factions, adding their violence and weapons to...

In the same fateful year of 1453 the formidable defenses of Constantinople fell before the siege guns of Mahomet II. The Turks brought a siege train of seventy pieces of artillery headed by a super-bombard hoope...

cannonballs weighing 800 pounds. The fall of Byzantium has supplied a conventional date for the close of the Middle Ages, but an event more pregnant...

In 1453–54 the first document printed from movable type was produced by Gutenberg at Mainz, followed in 1456 by the first printed book, the Vulgate Bible. “The Gothic sun,” as Victor Hugo put it with fitting grandilo...

Printing presses appeared in Rome, Milan, Florence, and Naples wi...

The energies of Europe that had once found vent in the crusades were now to find it in voyages, discoveries, and settlements in the New World.

Henri IV. Courageous, quick-witted, amorous, reasonable, he was the most popular of all French Kings and—perhaps owing to a few genes from Enguerrand VII—a rational man.