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Search - A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

A Distant Mirror The Calamitous 14th Century
Author: Barbara Tuchman

The 14th century gives us back two contradictory images: on the one hand a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry and exquisitely illuminated Books of Hours; on the other, a time of ferocity and spiritual agony -- a world plunged into chaos. These are the years when the Black Death struck in the great plague of 1348-50,... more » killing more than a third of the entire population between India and Iceland, and returned four times during the rest of the century. . . when freebooting companies of brigands terrorized Europe with impunity. . . when a "hundred years' war" seemed to have no beginning and no end, and, defying the belligerents' own efforts to end it, acquired a life of its own, "an epic of brutality and bravery checkered by disgrace" . . . when chivalry, the ideal that had formed and nurtured the nobility, was crumbling under the impact of new weapons, new tactics, and knightly follies. . . when a wae of peasant and proletarian revolts swept through Europe, evoking panic from and fierce repression by the ruling class. . . when papal schism rent the Christian world -- with Pope and anti-Pope excommunicating each others' followers, who could be sure of salvation? The Church was pulled this way and that, "like a prostitute found at the scene of a debach," depriving man of his one great spiritual comfort in a capricious and malevolent world.

Yet this was also the time of Chaucer and Petrarch, Froissart and Wyclif; courtly romance; ribald tales; the Sorbonne and Oxford; tournaments and pageants; a richness and gusto in extreme counterpoint to the cults of death, the flagellants, the rot and despair. . .

Ms. Tuchman anatomizes the century, revealing to us both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived: what childhood was like; what marriage was like; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Here are guilty passions; loyalties and treacheries; political assassinations; sea battles and sieges; fear of the end of the world; corruption in high places and a yearning for reform; lust and sadism on the stage. Here are proud cardinals, beggars, bailiffs, feminists, Jews, scholars of the university, grocers, bankers, clerks, sorcerers, mercenaries, saints and mystics, lawyers and tax-collectors, and, dominating it all, the knight in his valor and "furious follies," a "terrible worm in an iron cocoon."

As the spine of her narrative, the author has chosen the history of one man -- Enguerrant de Coucy VII, "the most skilled and experienced of all the knights of France." We see Coucy orphaned by his father's death at Crecy and his mother's in the Black Death; inheriting the most awesome fortress in Europe; engaged in the war against England from the age of fifteen; a leader at eighteen of the suppression of the Jacquerie; a loyal subject of the King of France while simultaneously a son-in-law of France's enemy, the King of England. Warrior, envoy, councillor, and mediator, he twice refused the Constableship, the highest -- and most lucrative -- military office in France. We follow him through princely feuds and private wars, religious foundations, peace parleys, and secret missions, to the culminating fiasco of knighthood, the last crusade of medieval Christendom. Launched against the Turks who had penetrated Europe, it was the final mad hubris of a fabled elite in which not even Coucy's sense and experience could save the day, or, finally, his own life.

With Coucy's death and the death of the century began the dying of a world, a world that has been made utterly real and important to us through the genius of a writer who commands to the highest degree the power both to synthesize and dramatize. In this, her largest and most meaningful achievement, Barbara Tuchman lays before us one of the most tormented eras in human history -- and the door to our own time.

ISBN-13: 9780307291608
ISBN-10: 030729160X
Publication Date: 1978
Pages: 654
Rating:

Currently 3.5/5 Stars.

3.5 stars, based on 2 ratings

Publisher: Knopf
Book Type: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 3
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

History >> Europe
History >> World >> Medieval

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