Welcome to Hard Times

By John Skow

A DISTANT MIRROR: THE CALAMITOUS 14TH CENTURY by Barbara W. Tuchman; Knopf; 677 pages; $15.95

This is a book of marvels, a gawker's book. It is also a thoughtful, finely illuminated book of historical narrative, but what it relates is so bizarre that judicious appreciation is not a likely first reaction. The reader is a village child at a crossroads fair: a bear dances, an acrobat does a backflip without spilling his wine glass and the child's mouth hangs open.

Here are some other sideshows from 14th century Europe, as presented by Author Barbara Tuchman:

The citizens of Mons buy a condemned criminal from a neighboring town to have the pleasure of seeing him quartered. "In the trousseau of the unfortunate Blanche de Bourbon, who unwisely married Pedro the Cruel, 11,794 squirrel skins" are used, most of them imported from Scandinavia. Charles V of France, known as "the wise," owns a flask of Virgin's milk and the top of John the Baptist's head. He dines on roasted peacock. He commissions a learned councillor, Nicolas Oresme, to explain the theory of stable currency in simple language. It is believed widely, though Pope Clement VI tries to subdue the hysteria, that the bubonic plague that struck Europe in 1347 has been caused by poison put into wells by Jews. The fashion of wearing shoes with pointed, curled toes, sometimes held up by threads fixed to the knees, is considered sinful and is forbidden by law, though the law is ignored.

This Europe was surely a distant mirror. But reflecting what? Should we see the anxieties of our own times in the writhing torments of the period? Or is the view merely that of troubled humanity? To her credit, and despite the book's somewhat insistent subtitle, this Pulitzer-prizewinning popular historian (The Guns of August, Stilwell and the American Experience in China) hints at few parallels. Her business is to give a human face and as much coherence as the traffic will bear to one of those swales of history when old energies had run out and new momentum had not yet caught hold.

There is no question that the 14th century was vexed by extraordinary problems, though Tuchman reminds us that "havoc in a given period does not cover all the people all the time." Plague was the most dramatic calamity; it swept across Europe again and again during the second half of the century, and it was chiefly responsible for a drop in population that is thought to have reached 40% to 50%. Not all survivors were worse off because of the plague; laborers could demand fewer restrictions and higher wages, and in some places the diminished number of mouths may have made food relatively more plentiful. But the pestilence seemed the vengeance of God, and its effect on the spirit of the century was both frenzy and depression.

Human institutions were poorly equipped to cope with the plague, or with man-made anguish like the Hundred Years' War. It lasted from 1337 well into the 15th century, mainly because knights in armor could lay waste to a countryside, but, lacking siege cannon, could not usually capture a strongly defended walled town. There was a more fundamental reason for perpetual war, however. As Tuchman says of the English, "Essentially, Gloucester and the barons of his party were opposed to peace because they felt war to be their occupation." Fighting was supposed to be conducted according to the chivalric code, but actually it was a business, entered into for the purposes of seizing loot, capturing prisoners to ransom, securing bribes in return for mercy shown, and, it would seem, as an excuse to extract additional taxes. Yet the levying mechanism of the emerging nation-state was still not refined. In Paris, for example, heralds on horseback would announce yet another impost, then gallop for their lives. Violent revolts by commoners troubled both France and England.

As Tuchman sees it, the noblemen of the time, including most of the rulers, were petulant adolescents. The French, who lost to England at Crecy in 1346, and at Poitiers ten years later, did so because they refused obstinately to understand that archers, who were not noble, could be effective soldiers. They still had not learned their lesson by the time of Agincourt, in 1415.

The author traces the tumult of the period by following the career of a great feudal lord, Enguerrand de Coucy VII, the seigneur of some 150 towns and villages in Picardy. He was born in 1340, and he died in captivity in 1397, having been made a prisoner by the Turks. Coucy was the best of his kind, an able diplomat, a shrewd military leader and a man of good luck. His campaigns took him to England (where he married King Edward's daughter), Tunisia, Italy, Switzerland and Hungary. He died at century's end, appropriately for Tuchman. His only drawback as a subject is that almost nothing personal is known about him. As Tuchman notes with exasperation, the only contemporary sketch of Coucy shows him facing away from the artist.

Through no fault of the author, Coucy as a result sounds a bit like a modern corporation president as seen by a tame biographer on the company payroll. On balance, however, her choice of Coucy is a good one. Her choice of the 14th century is brilliant, and her portrait of the period is exciting, artful and solidly based in scholarship. -- John Skow

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