A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

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In the blossoming of secular music as an art in the 14th century, as many as thirty-six different instruments had come into use. One must take in score after score of kings, nobles, popes, prelates and others and their complex relationships as well as Middle Ages political geography.

We learn about the Plague, the Hundred Years War, and the decline in the power of the Church as it cannibalizes itself in an orgy of unmitigated greed and perniciousness. In 1303 King Philip IV of France in conjunction with the anti-papist Italian army captured Pope Boniface VIII, who not surprisingly, soon was dead.The most interesting bits of this book were when she gives a glimpse into the odd lives of people and how they viewed their world. Tuchman’s book then tells of the rise of papal Avignon, and details the schism in the second half of the century.

I hadn’t studied the 14th century at all before reading Tuchman, but that was part of the charm the book: it was look into a world that was so thoroughly bizarre that I couldn’t not interested by it.I think it helped her that she was not talking about the whole of the Middle Ages but just a century, and focused in particular on the life of Enguerrand VII de Coucy. Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was an American self-trained historian and author and double Pulitzer Prize winner. A Distant Mirror opens to us a journey not only into the Middle Ages, into that distant land full of fragmented power, magic and superstition, but also into the medieval mind and mentality of people living at that time. A similar story took place in England where Richard II, only 13 in 1380, was likewise guided by the recently departed Edward III’s relatives.

For the aborted 1348 French invasion of England, the French packed a vast prefab camp with numbered panels. The result is that this is probably one of the most engaging history non fiction books I have ever read. This needn’t be a problem, however, as even with no other sources on the period you can think about and evaluate Tuchman’s main arguments and overall narrative just with the information in the book. From changes in climate to political changes, all will have far-reaching consequences for the European world.One French nobleman, the Sire de Coucy who plays a central role in the book, tried to rein them in, hanging culprits daily, but against “men habituated to lawless force punishment failed to bring the violence under control. This made her narrative often read like an exciting story or myth set at this specified time, rather than this broad historic narrative of the Middle Ages.