A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

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Labor shortage and stronger peasant/artisan position was the strongest broad effect. Inflation/wages spiral. The church got generally richer through legacies and Clement VI 1350 jubilee, where you could get absolutions for money. But it grew much more hated. I guess the seeds of the reformation were planted here.

England and France were not always fighting. So what was an unemployed knight to do? “Left unemployed by the truce the [mercenary] companies reverted to plundering the people they lately liberated."The 14th century really couldn’t come to terms with the necessity of interest [on debt], and the result was antisemitism as a sort of economic doctrine. Christian usury prohibitions grounded in economic illiteracy made periodic slaughter of Jews necessary to balance the budget? I love Tuchman’s irony, sympathy, empathy, enthusiasm, and attention to detail for her subject. She brings history to life and makes us care about the people involved in it, from the abused peasants to the arrogant nobility, all of whom are caught up in disasters both natural (like earthquake and plague) and artificial (like war and class division). One of the wonderful things about Tuchman’s book is how strange it makes 14th century worldview and life seem and yet at the same time how uncannily it holds them up to mirror our own era and culture. In the words of Voltaire quoted by Tuchman: “History never repeats itself; man always does.” The official explanation was an astrological one from the professors of the University of Paris. They were widely translated, leading to growth in national languages as a positive effect. Kinda like internet today I guess. Both bubonic and pneumonic plagues were present together so the miasma theory was not entirely wrong even though they thought it was stinky air and malign astrology that caused air transmission. They also believed in sight transmission. Must have been total FUD. It's a clever device, and an effective retelling of Froissart's chronicles in the light of what we now know. It turns what starts out seeming dry into something thrilling and absorbing. I dearly wish, now, there was a volume from Tuchman to take us into the of the renaissance and the reformation.

Kinda interesting. The knights had their Arthurian legends, the peasants their Robin Hood and William Tells. Never noticed the Europe-wide pattern. Although marriage was a sacrament, divorce was frequent and, given the right strings to pull, easily obtained...”lawyers are said to 'make and unmake matrimony to money' and a man might get rid of his wife by giving the judge a fur coat....marriage litigation filled the courts of the Middle Ages.” Here stops my explanation. It is time now for the quote. This passage is better than an the Index to offer a glimpse to that Distant Mirror that Tuchman has approached to us for our close examination.

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Then there is Wendy, another friend here, whose opinion I also respect, value and seek out and who has introduced me to many excellent books. She told me she had read this one three times – now, if that isn’t high praise it is hard to know what is. One big difference: they had no idea how it spread. Didn’t even suspect fleas and rats apparently. Though rats were associated with pestilence generally (the Pied Piper story is from 1284 it seems). That’s our one big advantage. Perhaps the main one. In the evening minstrels played with lutes and harps, reed pipes, bagpipes, trumpets, kettle drums, and cymbals. “ Poetry, story-telling and drama were all wildly popular. Literature, written for the first time in the vernacular by masters from Dante to Chaucer, flowered; all was ready for the great leap to print in the next century. Tuchman offers theory that since neglect was the standard of childcare till age 7 or so, everyone grew up severely messed up. Sounds about right. A world where having a serial killer psyche is the norm, and being nice is a form of mental illness. Mad king Charles VI on throne for decades. Makes Trump look actually stable if not a genius. Evilunclocracy in England and France. Rise of occult and magic. Torture and extraction of confessions to devil worship a routine way to cancel people. OG cancel culture. We are at 1393.