A Distant Mirror is subtitled “The Calamitous 14th Century,” and it tries to be a history of that century, but I think it fails in three very crucial ways. And all three of these issues are things Tuchman confesses to in her Foreword.
First, right out of the gate, A Distant Mirror is not the book she wanted it to be.
The genesis of this book was a desire to find out what were the effects on society of the most lethal disaster of recorded history -- that is to say, of the Black Death of 1348-50, which killed an estimated one third of the population living between India and Iceland. Given the possibilities of our own time [Tuchman is writing in 1978], the reason for my interest is obvious. The answer proved elusive because the 14th century suffered so many “strange and great perils and adversities” (in the words of a contemporary) that its disorders cannot be traced to any one cause; they were the hoofprints of more than the four horsemen of St. John’s vision, which had now become seven -- plague, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government, insurrection, and schism in the Church. All but plague itself arose from conditions that existed prior to the Black Death and continued after the period of the plague was over.
Although my initial question has escaped an answer, the interest of the period itself -- a violent, tormented, bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant -- was compelling and, as it seemed to me, consoling in a period of similar disarray. If our last decade or two of collapsing assumptions has been a period of unusual discomfort, it is reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before.
So, in other words, Tuchman wants me to know that what I’m about to read is a story she learned along way as she vainly pursued a much more interesting story. Great. Buckle in for something long and rambly.
Which, to Tuchman’s credit, she tries to head off at the pass by focusing the story around a single protagonist -- someone who, through his eyes, we can try to make better sense of all the disarray she’s about to describe.
To narrow the focus to a manageable area, I have chosen a particular person’s life as the vehicle of my narrative. Apart from human interest, this has the advantage of enforced obedience to reality. I am required to follow the circumstances and the sequence of an actual medieval life, lead where they will, and they lead, I think, to a truer version of the period than if I had imposed my own plan.
But there is a problem -- the second problem in our list. We don’t make the acquaintance of Tuchman’s chosen protagonist -- Enguerrand de Coucy VII -- until Chapter 7, and even then, he never really strikes me as more than a single star in a vast constellation of other French and English knights, noblemen, popes, and kings. The cast of characters is a little like that in Game of Thrones, where everyone goes by the same four or five last names. Now, which Coucy is this guy again?
And the third difficulty is that the characters are extremely difficult for modern readers to relate to, since they, and the age they live in, are so different from us and the one we live in. Here, Tuchman herself makes this point.
Difficulty of empathy, of genuinely entering into the mental and emotional values of the Middle Ages, is the final obstacle. The main barrier is, I believe, the Christian religion as it then was: the matrix and law of medieval life, omnipresent, indeed compulsory. Its insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is one that the modern world does not share, no matter how devout some present-day Christians may be. The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages.
So what are we left with? A second-hand tale, cobbled together from pieces that never cohered as intended, framed around an elusive protagonist who, when he does manifest, acts is ways difficult for us to understand or sympathize with. How’s that sound? It’s what you’ll get if you decide to pick up A Distant Mirror.
The Lure of Earthly Things
All that said, there are some interesting tidbits that can be drawn out of the text. As more fully described in The March of Folly, there is the catastrophic excesses of the medieval Catholic Church which, of course, leads to the Protestant Reformation.
The conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages. The claim of the Church to spiritual leadership could never be made wholly credible to all its communicants when it was founded in material wealth. The more riches the Church amassed, the more visible and disturbing became the flaw; nor could it ever be resolved, but continued to renew doubt and dissent in every century.
One formative lesson for me came in the reading of a biography of Theodore Roosevelt who, like many “conservatives” of his day, grew concerned about the increasing wealth disparity of his age, fearing that it would lead to revolution and anarchy.
Oppression of the peasant by the landowner troubled the conscience of the time and evoked warnings. “Ye nobles are like ravening wolves,” wrote Jacques de Vitry, a 13th century author of sermons and moral tales. “Therefore shall ye howl in hell … who despoil your subjects and live on the blood and sweat of the poor.” Whatever the peasant amasses in a year, “the knight, the noble devours in an hour.” He imposes illicit taxes and heavy exactions. De Vitry warned the great not to scorn the humble or inspire their hate for “if they can aid us, they can also do us harm. You know that many serfs have killed their masters or have burned their houses.”
This juxtaposition, I think, is why Tuchman chose her title. In this and many other ways, the 14th century appears like a distant mirror to the early 20th -- and perhaps even today.
The ubiquitous and oppressive Christianity of the age led to a lot of strange circumstances. Here’s a brief footnote that surprised me, but perhaps shouldn’t have.
[Jews] maintained a place in society because as moneylenders they performed a role essential to the kings’ continuous need of money. Excluded by the guilds from crafts and trades, they had been pushed into petty commerce and moneylending although theoretically barred from dealing with Christians. Theory, however, bends to convenience, and Jews provided Christians with a way around their self-imposed ban on using money to make money.
Since they were damned anyway, they were permitted to lend at interest rates of 20 percent and more, of which the royal treasury took the major share. The increment to the crown was in fact a form of indirect taxation; as its instruments, the Jews absorbed an added measure of popular hate. They lived entirely dependent upon the king’s protection, subject to confiscations and expulsions and the hazards of royal favor. Nobles and prelates followed the royal example, entrusting money to the Jews for lending and taking most of the profits, while deflecting popular resentment upon the agent. To the common man the Jews were not only Christ-killers but capricious, merciless monsters, symbols of the new force of money that was changing old ways and dissolving old ties.
Yes, you read all of that right. Christians -- including Christian kings -- banned by their religion from usury, worked in close partnership with Jews to finance their exploits, all the while damning the Jews for their moneylending practices and for their legendary hostility to Christ and his followers. If one holds that distant mirror up to our modern society, one might cite the way some U.S. administrations financed political wars in foreign countries through the production and selling of illegal drugs, only to wage their own rhetorical war against the scourge that those drugs brought to their society.
A Strange Personification of Death
But the most fascinating parts of Tuchman’s narrative have to be those that deal with the cultural effect that the Black Death had on the people of Europe.
A strange personification of Death emerged from the plague years on the painted walls of the Camposanto in Pisa. The figure is not the conventional skeleton, but a black-cloaked old woman with streaming hair and wild eyes, carrying a broad-bladed murderous scythe. Her feet end in claws instead of toes. Depicting the Triumph of Death, the fresco was painted in or about 1350 by Francesco Traini as part of a series that included his scenes of the Last Judgement and the Tortures of Hell. The same subject, painted at the same time by Traini’s master, Andrea Orcagna, in the church of Santa Croce in Florence, has since been lost except for a fragment. Together the frescoes marked the start of a pervasive presence of Death in art, not yet the cult it was to become by the end of the century, but its beginning.
This is significant.
Usually Death was personified as a skeleton with hourglass and scythe, in a white shroud or bare-boned, grinning at the irony of man’s fate reflected in his image: that all men, from beggar to emperor, from harlot to queen, from ragged clerk to Pope, must come to this. No matter what their poverty or power in life, all is vanity, equalized by death. The temporal is nothing; what matters is the after-life of the soul.
This is the view that dominated the age, and it was reflected as such in the art that came before the plague. But now, in the Traini fresco and in many other works to come, the brutal facts of this allegory will become stamped with a crusted and gruesome reality.
In Traini’s fresco, Death swoops through the air toward a group of carefree, young, and beautiful noblemen and ladies who, like models for Boccaccio’s storytellers, converse and flirt and entertain each other with books and music in a fragrant grove of orange trees. A scroll warns that “no shield of wisdom or riches, nobility or prowess” can protect them from the blows of the Approaching One. “They have taken more pleasure in the world than in things of God.” In a heap of corpses nearby lie crowned rulers, a Pope in tiara, a knight, tumbled together with the bodies of the poor, while angels and devils in the sky contend for the miniature naked figures that represent their souls. A wretched group of lepers, cripples, and beggars (duplicated in the surviving fragment of Orcagna), one with nose eaten away, others legless or blind or holding out a cloth-covered stump instead of a hand, implore Death for deliverance. Above on a mountain, hermits leading a religious contemplative life await death peaceably.
Below in a scene of extraordinary verve a hunting party of princes and elegant ladies on horseback comes with sudden horror upon three open coffins containing corpses in different stages of decomposition, one still clothed, one half-rotted, one a skeleton. Vipers crawl over their bones. The scene illustrates “The Three Living and Three Dead,” a 13th century legend which tells of a meeting between three young nobles and three decomposing corpses who tell them, “What you are, we were. What we are, you will be.” In Traini’s fresco, a horse catching the stench of death stiffens in fright with outstretched neck and flaring nostrils; his rider clutches a handkerchief to his nose. The hunting dogs recoil, growling in repulsion. In their silks and curls and fashionable hats, the party of vital handsome men and women stare appalled at what they will become.
Death, no longer the abstract equalizer held at bay for decades of distraction and comfort, now flies among us, striking us down with all the ambivalence long foretold.
Violence Official As Well As Individual
Tuchman makes the point that the ubiquity of death from plague changed the art of the day, but it is a lot less clear whether it had other effects on the surrounding culture. One would like to attribute the horrific violence of the time with the increasing uncertainty of life, but in more ways than not, it seems like violence predated the scourge of the Black Death.
In England coroners’ rolls showed manslaughter far ahead of accident as cause of death, and more often than not the offender escaped punishment by obtaining benefit of clergy through bribes or the right connections. If life was filled with bodily harm, literature reflected it. One of La Tour Landry’s cautionary tales for his daughters tells of a lady who ran off with a monk and, upon being found in bed with him by her brothers, they “took a knife and cut away the monk’s stones and threw them in the lady’s face and made her eat them and afterwards tied both monk and lady in a sack with heavy rocks and cast them into a river and drowned them.” Another tale is of a husband who fetched his wife back from her parents’ house, where she had fled after a marital quarrel. While lodged overnight in a town on the way home, the lady was attacked by a “great number of young people wild and infect with lechery” who “ravished her villainously,” causing her to die of shame and sorrow. The husband cut her body into twelve pieces, each of which he sent with a letter to certain of her friends that they might be made ashamed of her running away from her husband and also be moved to take vengeance on her ravishers. The friends at once assembled with all their retainers and descended upon the town where the rape had occurred and slew all its inhabitants.
I’m a little surprised that Tuchman didn’t reference the Bible story in Judges 19 on which this latter tale is obviously based, but I guess that’s not relevant to the larger point she is trying to make: that the literature reflected the violence of the time. And frankly, if she only cited stories such as this, I’m not sure I would’ve believed that the 14th century was any more violent than our own (I mean, have you ever seen a Marvel movie?). But she goes on to make the case that the violence of the time was something far beyond just popular entertainment.
Violence was official as well as individual. Torture was authorized by the Church and regularly used to uncover heresy by the Inquisition. The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people’s bodies. In everyday life passersby saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls. In every church they saw pictures of saints undergoing varieties of atrocious martyrdom -- by arrows, spears, fire, cut-off breasts -- usually dripping blood. The Crucifixion with its nails, spears, thorns, whips, and more dripping blood was inescapable. Blood and cruelty were ubiquitous in Christian art, indeed essential to it, for Christ became Redeemer, and the saints sanctified, only through suffering violence at the hands of their fellow man.
In village games, players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws. Trumpets enhanced the excitement. Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs to the laughter of spectators as he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless. Accustomed in their own lives to physical hardship and injury, medieval men and women were not necessarily repelled by the spectacle of pain, but rather enjoyed it. The citizens of Mons bought a condemned criminal from a neighboring town so that they should have the pleasure of seeing him quartered. It may be that the untender medieval infancy produced adults who valued others no more than they had been valued in their own formative years.
This is something else entirely. Less a distant mirror, and more a looking glass into a strange and brutal Wonderland.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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