Book Review

A Distant Mirror:

The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

     Barbara Tuchman made a name for herself by writing popular history, that is, she wrote works of historical non-fiction that were meant to be accessible to your average reader and not to a specialist. Things have certainly changed from the time she was writing to the present. Her historical book about the Middle Ages, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14^th Century, might be a bit much for today’s average reader at almost 600 pages. With the shortening attention spans and aversion to any kind of intellectualism that is all-pervasive in the age of social media, this one might be appealing to the few scholars left around today who still care about things like history. That is too bad because Barbara Tuchman put a lot of effort into this volume.

Rather than writing a bird’s eye view of a past era, Tuchman puts the reader on the ground as if the past is happening all around the audience. It involves real historical figures that come across as real people rather than abstractions defined solely by their actions. The castles, villages, and landscapes are precisely described too, at least in the beginning. France and England serve as the epicenter of the narrative, while the action, mostly warfare, spills out into the surrounding kingdoms. The central actor in all this is Enguerrand VII de Coucy, uniquely qualified for this role because he served as a noble under two French kings and married an English princess who was also partially of Italian ancestry. That last point is important because the Medieval age saw the 100 Years War which was fought between France and England. Few people these days fully understand how deeply connected these two countries have been throughout history. I’m sure even fewer people know that French was once the dominant language of England.

Tuchman does well at explaining the labyrinthine complex of alliances, intermarriages, land possessions, and rivalries that characterized the political climate of this time. In addition to this mess of battle and peacekeeping diplomacy, there was also a curious conflict going on in the Catholic church. White popes and anti-popes fought with each other over who should rightfully lead the Christian church, a conflict between the papacies in Avignon and Rome raged on as well. Theology actually fell by the wayside at times as the inner politics of the Catholic church and economic greed took precedence over religion. Meanwhile, heretical sects filled the power vacuum and the church started the Inquisition to torture and punish those who strayed away.

The spiritual shortcoming of the time is important in this book because Tuchman uses the conflict between the secular and the sacred as a theoretical framework for analyzing the 14^th century. While the high-minded ideals of Aquinas and Augustine were circulating among the intelligentsia, average citizens were paying less and less attention to the church. The knight’s code of chivalry and courtly love were also meant to be standards for righteous conduct but ended up being justifications for debauchery instead. As the Crusades began to go out of style, the orders of knights being sent to the so-called Holy Lands began resembling the outlaw bikers of our own day, more prone to getting drunk and committing crimes than performing acts of heroism. Tuchman exemplifies how the 14^th century was a time of spiritual crisis when religious people failed to follow the impossibly high standards the moralists and philosophers of their day laid out for them. Does this sound a bit like America in the past few decades? The “distant mirror” part of the title is applicable for more reason than one.

Aside from all this, there were other nasty things happening too. Witch hunts, peasant uprisings, pogroms against the Jews, enforced poverty through taxation, and the Black Plague were just some of what we learn about here. Tuchman makes some interesting comments about the military too. One is that wars were mostly fought for economic reasons, kind of like they are now, and a historical analysis of Medieval warfare is a subject that is underrepresented in academia or so she believes. Another is that military technology at that time advanced far in excess of ethical and moral progress, a permanent gap and deficit in the human psyche that could end up being our downfall in the end. In any case, we aren’t much different now since our military capacity to kill masses of people with minimal effort has outpaced our need to understand the value of preserving human life and our planet a million-fold.

Tuchman’s prose is deliberate and detailed, something that is both a blessing and a curse. While most of the book explains the doings of Enguerrand VII, mostly in relation to politics, there is also a lot of writing about warfare, most of which can be stiff, labored, and quite dull. She seems to be more interested in other subject matters and this shows in her approach. The most fascinating parts of the book are those about the side issues mentioned previously. Some of her occasional sidetracks are more interesting than the central themes. The politics of the Catholic church and the nobility are sometimes interesting, sometimes not.

A Distant Mirror will probably appeal more to readers who came of age in the 20^th century. Although a lot of it is interesting, it is long and moves at a slow pace that only patient readers will comprehend, and patient people with healthy attention spans are a dying breed. That is unfortunate because Barbara Tuchman shows how the seeds of modernity and our own times were sown. The roots of democracy, Marxism, capitalism, modern literacy and education, science, technology, and concepts of individual liberty are all here. The distant mirror of the title is there to reflect how human nature hasn’t changed in 700 years even though the outward form of society has. But a phenomenologist might question whether those roots were really there in the Middle Ages since they could be projections of the author’s mind. I propose that you put your phone away for a very long time and study what expert historians and philosophers have to say on the matter. Do yourself a favor. You’ve got nothing to lose.

Tuchman, Barbara W. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14^th Century. Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 1978.