Worst of times
David Benson
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century Barbara W. Tuchman (Macmillan £9.95)
A university teacher of medieval literature I once knew claimed that her students were especially attracted to the Middle Ages because it was an era of peace and stability. She — and anyone who thinks the same — Should read Barbara Tuchman's latest book.
The title announces her basic arguments. 'Mirror' suggests the many striking resemblances between that period and our own: almost continual warfare, both civil and international, widespread political instability and popular uprisings, a crisis of confidence in almost all institutions, especially the Church, and a rise of individualism combined with a general decline in authority. 'Distant' points to equally remarkable differences, such as an unabashed love of combat and of public display by the rich and a lack of organization in any large-scale effort so fundamental that even the limited order achieved by the English at Crecy was enough to achieve a totally unexpected victory. The subtitle reveals the author's ultimate conclusion: the 14th century was one of the worst of times.
This large (over 600 pages) but always carefully organized book concentrates on England and France during the last half of the century (when the Hundred Years' War was beginning its bloody course), but also examines other parts of Europe, especially Italy, and even includes episodes about the Turks and Barbary pirates. The material is nicely focused, but not limited, by the previously ignored figure of Enguerrand de Coucy VII of Picardy.
Among many surprises: we learn that Europe at the begining of the 14th century suffered a minor Ice Age, that the chastity belt is largely a Renaissance myth, and that French plans to invade England were so advanced by 1386 that a portable wooden town measuring nine miles in circumference was constructed to be towed across the channel on 72 ships. Aside from her curiosity, Mrs Tuchman's greatest virtue is her strong narrative skill. She is especially good with the set-pieces: Crecy, Poitiers, the Black Death, and schism in the Church. She notes that she has unfashionably relied on contemporary chroniclers like Froissart because 'their form is narrative and so is . mine'. The similarities go even further. Both she and the late medieval chroniclers are concerned with the exciting surface of events, with specific characters and acts instead of general trends. It makes for lively if not especially profound history. But a substantial difference between the two is that while the medieval chronicler was usually able to discover some ideal and nobility in the powerful men of his day, our author has no heroes. Coucy himself is admired for his level-headedness and practicality (though he never really comes alive as a character), but the selfishness, greed and violence of almost every other figure, even the glorious Black Prince, is revealed by Mrs Tuchman's uncondescending if modern standards of decent human behaviour.
This cast of villains is the real centre of the book. Consider Charles II, King of Navarre, whose ceaseless plotting and malevolence for its own sake won him the title of Charles the Bad; or Sir John Hawkwood, an English mercenary on the Continent, who appears in a fresco in the cathedral of Florence and inspired the saying that 'an Italianized Englishman is a devil incarnate'; or the terrible Bernabe Visconti, the lustful and cruel ruler of Milan, who fathered some 36 children and on his accession published a 40-day programme of torture, though perhaps only as a warning to the citizens who were required to kneel whenever he drove through the streets: the sinners of Dante's Inferno may be less exaggerated characatiftes than is often thought.
One could argue with some things in the book. Ockham is slighted and his thought distorted, the term 'working class' is used loosely and anachronistically, religious feeling (for which the author admits she has not much sympathy) is sometimes too glibly dismissed as sexual repression, and the words of great poets, especially Chaucer and Langland, are used without regard for the possibilities of irony. More seriouslY, the author ignores the delight medieval writers and artists so often express in their world, despite all its horrors and failures. Even the picture of the fourth horseman with his legion of corpses on the cover of the book astonishes us with its obvious pleasure in physical motion and landscape. This is an exciting and even bracing book to read; partly because, as the Middle Ages knew, everyone finds comfort in the disasters of others, but even more because the author has destroyed the Middle Ages of sentimental myth and supplied something even better—a picture of a world inhabited by real if not always nice people.
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