A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century – Barbara Tuchman, 1978 ★½

All Pain, No Gain

War, plague, poverty, religious doubt, the rich being totally evil and getting away with it… If you think this century has it bad, just imagine all that in the 1300s. Barbara Tuchman takes us through the ordeal of life in Europe just before the Renaissance; the result is pretty painful.

Also messy, confusing, and not at all fun to read. In fact, this is Tuchman at her toughest and most pedantic, a book lacking a thesis or character to latch onto.

Tuchman offers snark instead, lots of it: “If the fiction of chivalry molded outward behavior to some extent, it did not, any more than other models that man has made for himself, transform human nature.”

Tuchman’s titular concept is that the 14^th century could be seen as a reflection of her own, the 20^th, which had protracted wars, rampant disease, soul-crushing poverty, angry underclasses, and a wide array of other ills attributable in some way to the same root cause: Human folly.

You get what she means, pretty early on. But that doesn’t stop her from banging on the same points over again:

For belligerent purposes, the 14^th century, like the 20^th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use…

Fixed as they were in the pattern of female nature conceived for them by men, it was no accident that women often appeared among the hysterical mystics…

In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

Not that this ever discourages Tuchman, who visits upon the reader horrors unremitting.

The Battle of Nájera, one of many English victories connected to the Hundred Years' War covered in A Distant Mirror. Tuchman notes while the war dragged on for 114 years, much of that time saw periods of truce between France and England. Nájera was a proxy battle in the conflict, fought in Spain. Image from https://history.info/did-you-know/years-war-end/

At the center of A Distant Mirror is French nobleman Enguerrand VII de Coucy, or Lord Coucy for short. Here for me lies a chief flaw in the book, as Coucy, even in Tuchman’s starry-eyed narrative, never seems to merit the attention she bestows upon him.

Tuchman, a canny veteran writer of these things, needed a hook to tie together a sprawling narrative of this far-removed time, and Coucy has the advantage of figuring in several important battles and intrigues. But as Tuchman readily acknowledges, not much is known of Coucy. That vagueness leaves a hole at Distant Mirror’s center.

Tuchman brings up Coucy a few times as a rational exception to a mad age, even to the point of taking exception to criticism against him by Jean Froissart, the main chronicler of the time and Tuchman’s acknowledged chief source throughout this book.

A Distant Mirror opens with a sumptuous account of this castle, owned by Lord Coucy, which dominated the Picardy region of France. Tuchman notes it was blown up by the Germans in 1917, apparently out of spite. Above, an 1820 watercolor from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enguerrand_VII_de_Coucy.

Characteristic of her approach are passages like this one:

Coucy’s rank, prowess, and territorial importance would have warranted military command in any case, but other qualities were making him indispensable to the crown. Intelligence, tact, skills of rhetoric, and a noticeable level-headedness were coming to be more useful than the traditional mindless impetuosity of the knight in the iron cocoon.

Alas, Coucy’s presence at French military disasters like the sieges of Mahdia and Nicopolis aren’t exactly points in his favor; they were defeats brought on by bad leadership Coucy either directed or failed to counter. I was not impressed by the guy.

Tuchman is on better ground when relating the Black Death, which hit hardest in the early part of the 14^th century and wound up cutting Europe’s population in half. So distending was the experience that Tuchman suggests it shook faith in God to the point where “the end of an age of submission came in sight.” Which certainly puts a sunny construction on things, valid as it may sound.

Black Death victims with buboes, pus-filled swellings that indicated Bubonic Plague infection. Tuchman records a Welsh lament: "Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit!" Image from https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/The-Black-Death/

Tuchman describes an English country scene: When the last survivors, too few to carry on, moved away, a deserted village sank back into the wilderness and disappeared from the map altogether, leaving only a grass-covered ghostly outline to show where mortals once had lived.

There are many descriptive jewels like this; Tuchman’s sources, like Froissart, Petrarch, and the Monk of St. Denis, were nothing if not pungently quotable. But is she letting the legend become the history?

She mentions the rape of the Countess of Salisbury by England’s King Edward III as a likely event, though this was not widely accepted by historians then or now (for a tamer version of what happened, see the Shakespeare-attributed play Edward III). The wildest tales of debauchery and brutality are retailed throughout A Distant Mirror, not without demur, but with the weight of first mention.

Another version of the Edward III-Countess of Salisbury affair is that her garter merely slipped off during a dance and the gallant king picked it up, telling all to make of that what they would. The likewise suspect event is captured in this painting by Albert Chevallier Tayler, from http://www.artnet.com/artists/albert-chevallier-tayler.

In recounting the homicidal exploits of one noble, Tuchman shrugs off their implausibility: “But even if exaggerated, the stories about Wenceslas are too much of a kind not to represent some body of truth.” Her historiographic approach apparently boils down to where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

In describing Coucy, she suggests a portrait given by Chaucer in the Prologue of The Canterbury Tales captures Coucy in some way, even if we have no authentic word portrait to draw a comparison. The two men travelled in the same high circles and might have met somewhere, and Chaucer would have been impressed. She’s Tuchman, just go with it.

She even makes factual errors, like when detailing French plans to invade England by France across the English Channel: “In either direction no successful invasion of a hostile beachhead was ever carried out between 1066 and 1944.” Not true; the French invaded in 1216, taking a large piece of England before being beaten back.

Petrarch, a 14th-century Italian scholar, is one of Tuchman's chief sources in A Distant Mirror. "Oh happy posterity who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable," she quotes him saying of his time. Image from http://mssenglishandcommunications.weebly.com/english-12/notes-on-visions-by-francesco-petrarch

Ultimately, my chief reason for not liking the book were none of the above points but rather its relentlessly smug and downbeat tone. I get it, it was the Middle Ages. Things were rotten. But Tuchman’s high-handedness in writing about the knights and villeins with their superstitions, charge-first military tactics and materialist vanities felt wrong on both a moral and an aesthetic level. Make me care about these people a bit; don’t look down on them like ants.

Her frustration with these idiots is everywhere: “Habit has an especially tenacious grip when, as in the Middle Ages, the pace of change is slow.”

Tuchman was pushing back against the romantic view of the time, of castles and fair maidens, and it’s a fair corrective, to a point. But 600 pages is a lot to go through the various failings of mad kings, venial priests, and vicious mercenaries without giving some light to explain why the times held such beguiling allure for later generations.

John Wycliffe gestures before a crowd in a 19th century painting. Wycliffe, an 14th-century English priest, set the stage for Protestantism with what Tuchman calls "the radical proposition that the priesthood should be disestablished as the necessary mediator between man and God." Image from  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollardy 

The popular medieval historian back in the 1970s when this came out might still have been Thomas B. Costain, of whom it was said it was hard knowing when he was employing fact or fiction. Like Tuchman, he could be dark and lurid, sometimes even fanciful. But his work carried a real charge for the period lacking here.

Tuchman doesn’t write without nuance: At one point she notes it was commonly accepted that the world was round; also, while life expectancy was short in the aggregate, people often did live into their 70s if they made it through war, disease, and the like.

Most people were free, too; nobles were not progressive so much as preferred incomes derived from tenant farmers than from serfs. Tuchman notes: “Though limited serfdom existed, the rights and duties of serfs were fixed by custom and legal memory, and the work of medieval society, unlike that of the ancient world, was done by its own members.”

You get a good person, too, now and then. French King Charles V assumes the crown looking sickly and weak, but shows himself principled and smart on the throne. After France endures several terrible losses to the English in the Hundred Years’ War, like at Crécy and Poitiers, Charles guides his forces away from combat and lets the English pillage the country. The result buys the French time and gives them a sense of purpose with which to repair their shattered state.

English forces at Crécy in 1346 deployed bowmen and sharpened stakes against French cavalry. "So long as one side in this contest made use of this advantage while the other side did not, the fortunes of war were to remain unbalanced," Tuchman writes. Image from https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2015/12/26/battle-of-crecy-august-26-1346/  

Charles, Tuchman concludes, was “successful but aberrant.” More common were knights so blind to all but their own glory that they ignored the role of archers until their mounts were dropped by arrow fire; or insisted on riding at the front despite the fact a smart enemy usually held their own best forces in reserve, waiting for the climax.

The book also is weighed down by long lists detailing clothes, castle accoutrements, retainers, food served at dinners, and other things that read like data dumps from the research process. Tuchman’s ability as a fluid synthesizer of historical material doesn’t endear her to historians, but it usually makes her very readable. Here that synthesis is missing. The result not only feels like a brick, but reads like one, too.

I just think Coucy was the wrong person to build such a big history around, and that Tuchman was too deep in her project before she came to the same conclusion. A book that spotlights the Hundred Years’ War or the Papal Schism of 1378 – which broke Western Catholicism in two for over fifty years – is not going to bore people, but merging them together with the Plague and a host of other disasters will tax the finesse of even the most polished yarnspinner.

Tuchman contents herself working the margins of the 14^th century, calling out the stupidity even as she warns us against judging them by our standards. She may be warning us about fairy tales, but what we get instead becomes the longest way of saying “once upon a time.”