A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

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The image used in the site header is a fragment from Benozzo Gozzoli's fresco Procession of the Magi.

Earlier recurrences had affected chiefly children who had not acquired immunity, but in the fourth round a new adult generation fell under the swift contagion. The desperation of kings for more money to fight their wars and the extent of political manoeuvring and corruption suggest that they could match anything we witness in the modern world. He is like Sean Patrick Flanery in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, showing up and playing a role in a remarkable number of landmark 14th Century events. From the moment I started in on this hefty 600-pager, I was enthralled by the voice of the consummate stylist guiding me along. Much faster to reload than the French crossbow, the longbow proved a decisive advantage, particularly as deployed by the far more organized and disciplined English army.Look, if you are going to have trouble with the idea of people putting their lips to pus filled sores, then you are going to find this part of the book challenging. However, in my opinion, that “casual attitude towards life” has a more straightforward explanation and that is the simple fact that death itself was so common and present everything, contributing to the development of a fatalistic attitude in people. In that vein, even though there were “priests” who were incompetent and corrupt, willing to sell pardons and absolutions at a moment’s notice, the veneration towards anything religious persisted: “ friars were an element of daily life, scorned, yet venerated and feared because they might, after all, hold the key to salvation” [1978: 39].

Now there were two Popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon, with the Christian world split in its support of the two. McCaddon's] reading, with impeccable French and English accents, immerses the reader in the lengthy narrative, mixing politics with the personal. Drawing heavily on Froissart's Chronicles, Tuchman recounts the histories of the Hundred Years' War, the Black Plague, the Papal Schism, pillaging mercenaries, anti-Semitism, popular revolts including the Jacquerie in France, the liberation of Switzerland, the Battle of the Golden Spurs, and various peasant uprisings. While A Distant Mirror didn't turn me into an expert in making barley bread or choosing the right kind of alligator for your castle moat, it was nevertheless an utterly fascinating read.I am going to try to keep this review short, maybe a reaction to having just completed Tuchman's extensive opus. And if it also contains rich and erudite disquisitions and is narrated in a language as clear and flowing as water from a spring, then the volume must be given a preferential place in one’s library.

The Black Death, the Schism of the Church, clothing, foods, mysticism, chivalry and how motherhood was perceived – it’s all here and it is all interesting, but there is too much to grasp given the abundance of details. and each was to produce unsurpassed works of art: The Apocalypse series of tapestries for Anjou; the Tres Riches Heures and Belles Heures illuminated for Berry; and the statues of the Well of Moses and the Mourners for Burgundy. Though I’m a bit wary that Tuchman is not a historian… I love books about Medieval times by Jacques le Goff, I’d argue that to date there was no better historian of Middle Ages than him – and Annales school of history, i. In the chapter entitled 'The Worms of the Earth Against the Lions' I was just about to cheer wholeheartedly for the weavers of Ghent until I read of the way they in turn oppressed the lower class fullers; and my sympathy was with commoners of Anjou demanding tax relief until "In a frenzy of triumph and unspent wrath, the people rushed to rob and assault the Jews, the one section of society upon whom the poor could safely vent their aggression.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. I didn’t know very much about the 14th Century before I read this – although I did know enough to know that it was one of those ‘cusp’ centuries – where things that had stayed pretty much the same for a very long time were about to come up against innovations that would make their continuing virtually impossible. And indeed the reflection of humanity you see in this "distant mirror" is almost unrecognizable, but all the more fascinating for that. Men and women hawked and hunted and carried a favorite falcon, hooded, on the wrist wherever they went, indoors or out--to church, to the assizes, to meals.

Barbara Tuchman achieved prominence as a historian with The Zimmerman Telegram and international fame with the Pulitzer-Prize winning The Guns of August. Edward claimed to be the rightful French King but his real goal was to add mainland provinces to his domain. The Battle of Poitiers” depicted in “Chroniques“ by the 14th century medieval author Jean Froissart.The Prince of Wales took Jean back to England along with other captured nobles and the enormous booty he had seized. Christians lost faith in the Church as priests too hid in fear or charged exorbitant fees to perform last rites. The status of nobility was in “flux”, and the modern state, as we know it, did not yet exist: there was “the vassal-to-lord relationship and not citizen-to-state” [1978: 5]. Kings, nobles, popes and prelates accumulated fantastic wealth at the expense of everyone else for whom it was the worst of times. So while the Edwardian Era War and the Caroline War are depicted in complete detail as well as related battles with the Bretons, battles in Italy, in Spain, in Belgium and finally in Bulgaria (contemporary country names used), only a quick summary of the Lancastrian War is given.