Our medieval soul

Review of A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman

As the source of so many of our touchstone images and ideas, the Medieval Age marked us more deeply than just about any other - dungeons, cold, early death, blind faith, religious fanaticism, capricious tyranny, and the knightly order of honor (and repression). Tuchman questions these stereotypes and myths by holding them to intelligent scrutiny.

Tuchman chose 14th century, when the feudal order was beginning to break down after nearly 500 years of relative stability as a politico-economic system. It was a tumultuous in terms of conquest and war, on the cusp of a second dark ages – the fabulous expansion of the Gothic era was ending in plague, famine, war, and the beginnings of populist revolt. Tuchman chose an aristocrat, Enguerrand de Coucy, as the vehicle for this story. She also follows the great writers of the time, including Chaucer and Petrarch.

Coucy was the embodiment of the late chivalric ideal: rich, prudent, decidedly less cruel than his forebears, a brilliant military strategist and a fine diplomat. Rather than rush rashly into military engagement as his contemporaries tended to do for glory, he analyzed the situation and chose his moment. He led an exemplary life of service, though died in shame as a prisoner in the hands of the Turks and without an heir. It was an incredible life, though we get to know little of his character and personal thoughts due to gaps in the documentary record.

The age that Tuchman portrays was one in which everything that could have gone wrong, did. The plague killed up to 50% of the European population in several waves, which loosed the peasants from the land as labor costs rose with higher demand. A terrible war (of "100 years") began in France, devastating large portions of it by very unknightly pillage and simple havoc. The Catholic church suffered its first schism, which divided societies and destroyed its image of unity – in the first great political-military disasters that get far, far worse in the Reformation. Finally, the Turks were approaching and took Constantinople in a series of victories that frightened the West with a new style of warfare. No wonder people felt the apocalypse was approaching.

Most interestingly, the feudal system was under such stress that to contemporaries it appeared on the verge of collapse. Not only were knights proving incapable of facing up to growing popular rebellions with several shocking military defeats (e.g., William Tell in Switzerland), but their technology of warfare was in decline – longbows (by British yeoman) were introduced, as were far more maneuverable lighter arms and professional standing armies (the massive mobile forces of the Turks). With the end of their monopoly of force, the entire political system of knights from the landed aristocracy with limited loyalty to a central kingly authority was clearly on the way out – huge mercenary and even nationalist armies were on the horizon. War was no longer an affair restrained by rule and knightly custom, where the captured could expect to be held for ransom comfortably and perhaps for years, but was evolving into far more brutal confrontations with high combat fatality rates and even mass executions.

Tuchman explains these developments as a popular historian who understands the need for brief explanation, in contrast to many academics, with clarity, in dense paragraph after paragraph. For example, I never had understood the chain of reasoning that went behind certain theological disputes, such as the "transubstantiation" of the body of Christ in the wine and wafer of mass. If it wasn't true godhead, she explains, then the authority of the church (leading directly to the pope) would be undermined. Thus, it was defended with extreme violence. Finally, Tuchman portrays the period as a nexus, a watershed in which one order is giving way to another. Her descriptions are poetic and vivid.