A Distant Mirror was a very good book, although I think it was strongest in its analysis and in its descriptions of broader social life and issues, and weakest when it got into high politics. The high politics were just largely uninteresting. There were too many characters too shallowly developed. Even the Sire de Coucy, whose life the book follows, doesn't feel fully fleshed out. I think it is a hard balance and I'm not sure I really got what Tuchman was doing. That said, this book was extremely good in its discussions of chivalry, the Black Plague, and the broader social forces of the 14th century. I really liked it and couldn't put it down at the end (after some more boring parts in the middle). I go into a couple of topics below, but I took fewer notes after getting about halfway through the book before picking up a little more again at the end. So this is kind of an eh blog.
The Black Plague
The chapter discussing the Black Plague, which arrived in Europe in 1347, reads like a story of apocalypse. Tuchman writes of Brother John Clyn, who was the last monk left living in Friars Manor in Kilkenny Ireland. He wrote in his journal of the experience and said, "I leave my parchment to continue this work, if perchance any man survive and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and carry on the work which I have begun." And it is interesting to read about the Plague after having experienced Coronavirus. One similarity is found where Tuchman writes that "Its loathsomeness and deadliness did not herd people together in mutual distress, but only prompted their desire to escape each other." Yet there were also those who selflessly worked to save or give comfort to others; the nuns of Hotel Dieu in Paris were known to have no fear of death in caring for the sick, and new nuns constantly replaced those who died. The deaths were so numerous that in some towns, such as Tournai, the local government had to strictly regulate the sounding of bells for funeral services, since they would ring all day otherwise. The countrysides changed completely Peasants died on roads, and survivors could not tend livestock and the land as they had before. Wolves came down where the shepherds were gone, but when they discovered livestock bodies corrupted by plague, they turned away.
For the entirety of the Plague, people were unaware of its cause or how it spread. They never suspected fleas, the true cause, since the fleas had always been there. When King Philip VI of France asked the medical faculty of the University of Paris to discover the cause, they determined that the Plague came from a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. Hmm. But for most people, the only explanation was that it was punishment from God. Sometimes, people blamed Jews, and lynchings began in the spring of 1348, when Jews in Carcassonne and Narbonne were dragged from their houses and thrown into bonfires. In Germany, Jews were "slaughtered with a thoroughness that seemed to seek a final solution," writes Tuchman, and the Jews of Mains resorted to locking themselves inside and burning their own houses to kill themselves rather than be killed by their enemies. Towns banned Jews, and then, because Jews had been filling important roles, brought them back, but with major legal disabilities. This would lead to the rise of the ghetto in Europe.
The Hundred Years' War
The Hundred Years' War was really a combination of several smaller wars that overlapped and sometimes had years-long gaps between them. It began in 1337. When Charles IV of France died in 1328, he left no son to succeed him, extinguishing the male line of the Capet dynasty, which had enjoyed over three centuries of father-to-son inheritance. With that, the crown of France would pass to his nearest male relative, which would be his nephew, Edward III, the son of his sister. But it was debatable whether the right to rule could be transmitted through a woman, who could not herself possess the right to rule. So Philip, Charles IV's cousin and the Count of Valois, inherited the French throne. But the French and English monarchies remained totally intertwined since 1066, when Frenchmen conquered England and through the Plantagenet dynasty, which left the English in control of a huge amount of lands in modern-day France, which the French kings coveted. Moreover, the English kings were French. They descended from France and spoke French, and they wouldn't speak English at court until well into the Hundred Years' War.
In the reign of King Edward III, the last of the French lands that remained in English hands were in Gascony, in southwestern France, and there was a strange situation in which the kings of France and England were co-equals, but that King Edward paid homage to King Philip VI of France as his liege with regard those lands in France. The war began over that territorial dispute, and would not be resolved for a century.
The character of the war is more extensive than intensive. Most of it is not fought in pitched battles, but in large scale raids, in which one army seeks to provoke another to attack it. The best way to do this was to engage in a terror campaign against the populace, burning and looting until the liege lord was forced to act, potentially compromising his force. One of the rare pitched battles occurred at Poitiers in 1356, fought between King Jean II of France (who had been king since 1350 after succeeding his father Philip VI) and Edward the Black Prince, son of English King Edward III. The two were first cousins once removed. About 15,000 French attacked 6,000 Anglo-Gascons, and the English won the battle, in large part thanks to the longbow. The English longbow had a range of 300 yards, and could deliver 10 to 12 arrows per minute, compared to a crossbow's two. The longbow's arrow was three feet long and was expected not to miss its target within 200 yards. In 1337, King Edward III banned all sport except archery and cancelled the debts of workmen who manufactured bows and arrows. It was extremely useful at Poitiers, where is completely disrupted French charges. The English triumph was complete, as they not only repulsed French forces, but captured King Jean, one of his sons, and many other French nobles who would pay good ransoms.
With Jean II captured, his son Charles (later Charles V) became regent as an 18-year-old, and was initially responsible for increasing taxes to pay the ransoms of his father and brother. He tried devaluing the coinage, but that created huge popular resistance and strikes throughout Paris. He managed to get some taxes passed that would be carried out by the Estates, but as he left for London to retrieve his father, King Jean II sent word that he repudiated the taxes. The situation of the French captives in London was not so bad. They were treated well, and after a triumphal march with them through the streets of London, King Edward III gave the French captives the royal treatment, not subjecting them to such indignities that they would even want to leave. He did, however, post guards to make sure they didn't. King Jean received visitors from France and enjoyed the pleasures of court life. He was given gifts and money from across France to pay for his comforts in London. King Edward III didn't seem to want Jean's title, and was mainly focused on getting as good a price for it as possible. So lots of the offers looked like Edward III forgoing the title of "King of France" in exchange for being confirmed in his smaller titles within France and being exempt from French taxes.
Meanwhile, in France, the Dauphin Charles was struggling to maintain control. From one side, he dealt with Etienne Marcel, Provost of the merchants of Paris who led the Third Estate of the city in attempting to reform and control the French monarchy; from the other, he dealt with Charles of Navarre, a nobleman with a strong claim to the Kingdom of France who had moved to Paris, an implicit threat. Charles of Navarre had even lectured an assembly of Parisians about how his claim to France was even better than King Edward's. The Dauphin began gathering troops around himself, preparing for a confrontation. Marcel and Charles of Navarre became aligned, and on February 22, 1358, Marcel led a force of Parisians into the royal palace and killed two of the Dauphin's marshals, as good as an attack on the Dauphin himself, although Marcel made a show of defending him. The result was that Marcel would go on to lose favor with the nobility. For the short term, the Dauphin was intimidated into accepting rule by the Council of the Estates, but in the long term, it hardened his will.
In May 1358, the Dauphin-Regent attempted to undercut Marcel by blockading Paris, which required the nobles of the country's waterways to fortify and provision their castles. This led to the seizing the foods of their peasants for this purpose, provoking an uprising, as these peasants had already been through years of war and plague. In this portion of the book, Tuchman goes into an excellent portrayal of peasant life that I won't get into here except to say that it is incredibly well-written and informative as well as interesting and moving. Many of the peasants lived on a rent-paying basis with their lords, paying them with a certain number of days' work in the lord's fields. They also were made to pay a hearth tax and a clerical tithe and recent new taxes for the ransoms of their captured lords. Peasants also owed fees for everything they used. They had to pay the lord to grind their grain in his mill, to press apples in his cider press, and to settle disputes in his court. Oppressed even further, they revolted in May of 1358 in northern France.
They were led by Guillaume Cale, a wealthy peasant. The Jacquerie adopted French national symbols as their own, and proclaimed themselves loyal to the crown, just not the petty tyrants who formed their local nobility. They flew banners with the fleur-de-lys and used the national battle cry of "Montjoie!" But when Cale went out to treat with Charles of Navarre, sent to crush him, he made a crucial mistake: he thought Charles would treat him according to the laws of war, but those only applied to nobility. Instead, Charles captured Cale, tortured him, and beheaded him. His army, headless, was destroyed. The rest of the summer went poorly for the peasants of northern France. Tuchman writes, "Like every insurrection of the century, it was smashed, as soon as the rulers recovered their nerve, by weight of steel, and the advantages of the man on horseback, and the psychological inferiority of the insurgents." By June 24, 1358, 20,000 "Jacques" had been killed and the countryside was a wasteland.
A peace treaty with England was not reached until March 1359, when the truce was about to expire and King Jean traded half his kingdom for his own release. The Treaty of London surrendered all of western France from Calais to the Pyrenees and granted England a massive ransom of 4 million gold ecus in fixed installments, guaranteed by the presence in London of forty French highborn hostages. The French back in France rejected the treaty, and King Edward invaded again, besieging Reims from October 1359 to May 1360. Finally, a more lasting peace was achieved in May when the Treaty of Bretigny was signed, naming the ransom for King Jean at 3 million ecus, confirming the transfer of titles in western France to Edward amounting to a third of France, and also confirming that Edward would renounce his claim to the crown of France. Jean had spent four years in London and was replaced by his son Louis as a hostage. But Louis made an escape. And strangely enough, King Jean's sense of honor compelled him to surrender himself as a hostage to make up for his son's dishonor. So he returned to London in 1363, and died there of an unknown malady some months later in 1364. He might have liked it better to be imprisoned but comfortable than to be free and stressed as the King of France.
I know this isn't very far in the war, but I'm stopping. There is too much too write about and I got lost a bunch in all the names of people. It was interesting though to learn about the Anglo-French divorce and how the Hundred Years' War specifically precipitated the separation of the two peoples (and their creation). There was one last chance for France and England to unite after Henry V won at Agincourt and married the French king, Charles VI's daughter. France was reduced to almost nothing. Tuchman calls it an Anglo-Burgundian condominium. But then both Henry V and Charles VI die within months of each other, leaving the nine-month-old Henry VI as King of England and disputed King of France. His French uncle was able to seize the throne of France from him, and at that point France unexpectedly was able to recover, and Joan of Arc led the French to victory at Orleans, eventually winning the war despite her being burned at the stake. In some ways, it was impossible by the latter portion of the war that the two kingdoms could ever be united. Through war they distinguished themselves. They could have only been held together under the Angevins at a time when a Kingdom was just the property of a man, but by the 1400s, a nascent nationalism was developing. Tuchman points out that the British and the French would remain rivals for another half millennium, when they were forced to align together to defeat Germany in World War One.
The Avignon Papacy
I didn't take enough notes on this, but I'll just say it was really interesting that this book covered the time period where the Popes left Rome and there was a "Western Schism." Interesting thing to learn more about. It resulted in Rome sinking into poverty, and combined with the Black Death, brought Rome's population from 50,000 to 20,000.
Chivalry
Tuchman's book also goes into significant detail about chivalry, gender, and society in the High Middle Ages. One incredible example is the Combat of the Thirty in 1351. During conflict in Brittany (over who is the rightful ruler big surprise) that was a sort of proxy war between the French and English, Robert de Beaumanoir, on the French side, challenged his opponent, Bramborough, to single combat. Others clamored to join, and it was agreed that they would fight with fifteen on each side. After arranging terms, they chose a site, heard mass, and exchanged courtesies. They fought until four on the French side and two on the English side were killed, and then declared a recess. Then they fought again until the French side won, and every man on the English side was wounded (if they survived) and nine were killed. The survivors were ransomed, and were feted as heroes of the time wherever they went. The combat was celebrated in poetry, painting, and tapestry, as well as a memorial stone erected on the site.
But the chivalrous were also getting the raw end of the deal in some ways. A major change of the High Middle Ages was that landed nobility were finding themselves accompanied by a bourgeoisie that was often richer than they were. The three estates of France were the clergy, the landed nobility, and the bourgeoisie. But while the landed nobility were generally not taxed, as they were meant to provide men to their king, not money, as the bourgeoisie did. In one satire of the time, Renart le Contrefait, said of the urban bourgeoisie, "They live in a noble manner, wear lordly garments, have falcons and sparrow hawks, fine palfreys and fine chargers. When the vassals must go to join the host, the bourgeois rest in their beds; when the vassals go to be massacred in battle the bourgeois picnic by the river."
The great irony of chivalry is that it valorizes battle, yet only as a form and not actually how to win it. These brave, aristocratic knights spent their whole lives fighting in jousts and tournaments and lived for battle. But then when battles came, they were so obsessed with gaining glory that they would rush out ahead of each other and be killed, losing huge battles all over the place to peasants who just held pikes in front of them and kept a line. The culmination of this was at Nicopolis in 1396. A crusading army sought to rid Europe of the Ottoman Turks, but instead confirmed their presence for centuries more in an embarrassing defeat caused by French knights overzealousness in charging forward, breaking up their own lines. Tuchman writes that "The crusaders of 1396 started out with a strategic purpose in the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, but their minds were on something else... They thought only of being in the vanguard, to the exclusion of reconnaissance, tactical plan, and common sense, and for tat their heads were to roll in blood-soaked sand at the Sultan's feet."
But war and power are all about ups and downs. Despite the Sultan Bayezid's massive victory in the west in 1396, just six years later he was defeated by Tamerlane, the Turco-Mongol conqueror of the east, and paraded until his death in a wagon fitted with iron bars. But then the scales swung again for the Ottomans--by 1453 they would march into Constantinople, the year traditionally associated with the end of the Medieval era. Interestingly, Tuchman points out that 1453 is the year of the end of the Hundred Years' War, the Fall of Constantinople, and the first printed document on the Gutenberg printing press. People must have had no idea how momentous the changes were that came in that year.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Death in a tournament (like jousting) was considered a sin by suicide by the Church, which hated the tournaments.
- People in Picardy built tunnels that they hid in with their livestock during the Norman invasions. They enlarged them and used them during the Hundred Years' War as well.
- The name Jacques comes from the term jacque, the padded long shirt that peasants wore as protective armor in war.
- In England, supposedly if a married couple traveled to Dunmow in Essex and could honestly say that they hadn't fought or regretted their marriage in their first year (and would do it over again if given the chance), they would be given a side of bacon.
- King Charles the Wise's library amounted to 1,000 volumes in 1373, which was considered absolutely huge, but I can store that many books on two or three of my five year-old kindles today.
- Something interesting that is a theme in the book is that the peasants always believe that their local nobility are bad, but that the King is good. I remember hearing something similar about 19th century Russia. I also feel like there's a similar dynamic in the United States were people rely on the federal government to protect them from local elites.
- At one point in the Hundred Years' War, the French planned to make a landing with an entire prefabricated castle town with numbered pieces that they could put together in Sussex.
- While religion was very different in the 14th century than today, one interesting similarity is that priests were complaining about churches being empty and mass sparsely attended. We think of medieval people as so much more religious than us, but it seems that because religion was all-consuming, actual belief was proportionately low.
- Monarchy is bad: in one year, Charles VI had six major seizures, each worse than the last, which sometimes left him cowering in a corner or howling like a wolf.
