A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century PDF Book

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Author : Barbara W. Tuchman
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A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August

*Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal

The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.”

Praise for A Distant Mirror

“Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books

“A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary

Book ID Asin: 0345349571
Book Title: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Book Author: Barbara W. Tuchman
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Book Format Name: Kindle
Book Format Price: $14.99
Book Format Name: Audiobook
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Book Format Name: Hardcover
Book Format Price: $31.79
Book Format Name: Paperback
Book Format Price: $11.99
Book Format Name: AudioCD
Book Format Price: $30.47
Book Price: $11.99
Book Category: Books, History, Europe and unknown
Book Rating: 1,595 ratings

Book Product Detail

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Publishing Group; 1st Ballantine Books Edition (July 12, 1987)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 784 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0345349571
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0345349576
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.41 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.54 x 1.89 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #28,759 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #19 in French History (Books)
- #20 in Historical Study Reference (Books)
- #26 in England History

Customer Reviews:
1,595 ratings

Amazon.com Review

In this sweeping historical narrative, Barbara Tuchman writes of the cataclysmic 14th century, when the energies of medieval Europe were devoted to fighting internecine wars and warding off the plague. Some medieval thinkers viewed these disasters as divine punishment for mortal wrongs; others, more practically, viewed them as opportunities to accumulate wealth and power. One of the latter, whose life informs much of Tuchman's book, was the French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy, who enjoyed the opulence and elegance of the courtly tradition while ruthlessly exploiting the peasants under his thrall. Tuchman looks into such events as the Hundred Years War, the collapse of the medieval church, and the rise of various heresies, pogroms, and other events that caused medieval Europeans to wonder what they had done to deserve such horrors.

Review

“Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books

“A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary

From the Publisher

Anyone who has read THE GUNS OF AUGUST or STILWELL AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN CHINA, knows that Barbara Tuchman was one of the most gifted American writers of this century. Her subject was history, but her profiles of great men and great events are drawn with such power that reading Tuchman becomes a riveting experience

In A DISTANT MIRROR, Barbara Tuchman illuminates the Dark Ages. Her description of medieval daily life, the role of the church, the influence of the Great Plagues, and the social and political conventions that make this period of history so engrossing, are carefully woven into an integrated narrative that sweeps the reader along.

I am a particular devotee of medieval and pre Renaissance music, so Barbara Tuchman's brilliant analysis of this period has special meaning for me - and I hope for many others.

George Davidson, Director of Production, The Ballantine Publishing Group

From the Inside Flap

"Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . A great book, in a great historical tradition." Commentary

The 14th century gives us back two contradictory images: a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, and a dark time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world plunged into a chaos of war, fear and the Plague. Barbara Tuchman anatomizes the century, revealing both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived.

From the Back Cover

"Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . A great book, in a great historical tradition." Commentary
The 14th century gives us back two contradictory images: a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, and a dark time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world plunged into a chaos of war, fear and the Plague. Barbara Tuchman anatomizes the century, revealing both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived.

About the Author

Barbara W. Tuchman (1912–1989) achieved prominence as a historian with The Zimmermann Telegram and international fame with The Guns of August—a huge bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her other works include Bible and Sword, The Proud Tower, Stilwell and the American Experience in China (for which Tuchman was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize), Notes from China, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly, and The First Salute.

Chapter 1

“I Am the Sire de Coucy”: The Dynasty

Formidable and grand on a hilltop in Picardy, the five-towered castle of Coucy dominated the approach to Paris from the north, but whether as guardian or as challenger of the monarchy in the capital was an open question. Thrusting up from the castle’s center, a gigantic cylinder rose to twice the height of the four corner towers. This was the donjon or central citadel, the largest in Europe, the mightiest of its kind ever built in the Middle Ages or thereafter. Ninety feet in diameter, 180 feet high, capable of housing a thousand men in a siege, it dwarfed and protected the castle at its base, the clustered roofs of the town, the bell tower of the church, and the thirty turrets of the massive wall enclosing the whole complex on the hill. Travelers coming from any direction could see this colossus of baronial power from miles away and, on approaching it, feel the awe of the traveler in infidel lands at first sight of the pyramids.

Seized by grandeur, the builders had carried out the scale of the donjon in interior features of more than mortal size: risers of steps were fifteen to sixteen inches, window seats three and a half feet from the ground, as if for use by a race of titans. Stone lintels measuring two cubic yards were no less heroic. For more than four hundred years the dynasty reflected by these arrangements had exhibited the same quality of excess. Ambitious, dangerous, not infrequently ferocious, the Coucys had planted themselves on a promontory of land which was formed by nature for command. Their hilltop controlled passage through the valley of the Ailette to the greater valley of the Oise. From here they had challenged kings, despoiled the Church, departed for and died on crusades, been condemned and excommunicated for crimes, progressively enlarged their domain, married royalty, and nurtured a pride that took for its battle cry, “Coucy à la merveille!” Holding one of the four great baronies of France, they scorned territorial titles and adopted their motto of simple arrogance,

Roi ne suis,

Ne prince ne duc ne comte aussi;

Je suis le sire de Coucy.

(Not king nor prince,

Duke nor count am I;

I am the lord of Coucy.)

Begun in 1223, the castle was a product of the same architectural explosion that raised the great cathedrals whose impulse, too, sprang from northern France. Four of the greatest were under construction, at the same time as the castle—at Laon, Reims, Amiens, and Beauvais, within fifty miles of Coucy. While it took anywhere from 50 to 150 years to finish building a cathedral, the vast works of Coucy with donjon, towers, ramparts, and subterranean network were completed, under the single compelling will of Enguerrand de Coucy III, in the astonishing space of seven years.

The castle compound enclosed a space of more than two acres. Its four corner towers, each 90 feet high and 65 in diameter, and its three outer sides were built flush with the edge of the hill, forming the ramparts. The only entrance to the compound was a fortified gate on the inner side next to the donjon, protected by guard towers, moat, and portcullis. The gate opened onto the place d’armes, a walled space of about six acres, containing stables and other service buildings, tiltyard, and pasture for the knights’ horses. Beyond this, where the hill widened out like the tail of a fish, lay the town of perhaps a hundred houses and a square-towered church. Three fortified gates in the outer wall encircling the hilltop commanded access to the outside world. On the south side facing Soissons, the hill fell away in a steep, easily defensible slope; on the north facing Laon, where the hill merged with the plateau, a great moat made an added barrier.

Within walls eighteen to thirty feet thick, a spiral staircase connected the three stories of the donjon. An open hole or “eye” in the roof, repeated in the vaulted ceiling of each level, added a little extra light and air to the gloom, and enabled arms and provisions to be hoisted from floor to floor without the necessity of climbing the stairs. By the same means, orders could be given vocally to the entire garrison at one time. As many as 1,200 to 1,500 men-at-arms could assemble to hear what was said from the middle level. The donjon had kitchens, said an awed contemporary, “worthy of Nero,” and a rainwater fishpond on the roof. It had a well, bread ovens, cellars, storerooms, huge fireplaces with chimneys on each floor, and latrines. Vaulted underground passageways led to every part of the castle, to the open court, and to secret exits outside the ramparts, through which a besieged garrison could be provisioned. From the top of the donjon an observer could see the whole region as far as the forest of Compiègne thirty miles away, making Coucy proof against surprise. In design and execution the fortress was the most nearly perfect military structure of medieval Europe, and in size the most audacious.

One governing concept shaped a castle: not residence, but defense. As fortress, it was an emblem of medieval life as dominating as the cross. In the Romance of the Rose, that vast compendium of everything but romance, the castle enclosing the Rose is the central structure, which must be besieged and penetrated to reach the goal of sexual desire. In real life, all its arrangements testified to the fact of violence, the expectation of attack, which had carved the history of the Middle Ages. The castle’s predecessor, the Roman villa, had been unfortified, depending on Roman law and the Roman legions for its ramparts. After the Empire’s collapse, the medieval society that emerged was a set of disjointed and clashing parts subject to no central or effective secular authority. Only the Church offered an organizing principle, which was the reason for its success, for society cannot bear anarchy.

Out of the turbulence, central secular authority began slowly to cohere in the monarchy, but as soon as the new power became effective it came into conflict with the Church on the one hand and the barons on the other. Simultaneously the bourgeois of the towns were developing their own order and selling their support to barons, bishops, or kings in return for charters of liberties as free “communes.” By providing the freedom for the development of commerce, the charters marked the rise of the urban Third Estate. Political balance among the competing groups was unstable because the king had no permanent armed force at his command. He had to rely on the feudal obligation of his vassals to perform limited military service, later supplemented by paid service. Rule was still personal, deriving from the fief of land and oath of homage. Not citizen to state but vassal to lord was the bond that underlay political structure. The state was still struggling to be born.

By virtue of its location in the center of Picardy, the domain of Coucy, as the crown acknowledged, was “one of the keys of the kingdom.” Reaching almost to Flanders in the north and to the Channel and borders of Normandy on the west, Picardy was the main avenue of northern France. Its rivers led both southward to the Seine and westward to the Channel. Its fertile soil made it the primary agricultural region of France, with pasture and fields of grain, clumps of forest, and a comfortable sprinkling of villages. Clearing, the first act of civilization, had started with the Romans. At the opening of the 14th century Picardy supported about 250,000 households or a population of more than a million, making it the only province of France, other than Toulouse in the south, to have been more populous in medieval times than in modern. Its temper was vigorous and independent, its towns the earliest to win charters as communes.

In the shadowed region between legend and history, the domain of Coucy was originally a fief of the Church supposedly bestowed on St. Remi, first Bishop of Reims, by Clovis, first Christian King of the Franks, in about the year 500. After his conversion to Christianity by St. Remi, King Clovis gave the territory of Coucy to the new bishopric of Reims, grounding the Church in the things of Caesar, as the Emperor Constantine had traditionally grounded the Church of Rome. By Constantine’s gift, Christianity was both officially established and fatally compromised. As William Langland wrote,

When the kindness of Constantine gave Holy Church endowments

In lands and leases, lordships and servants,

The Romans heard an angel cry on high above them,

“This day dos ecclesiae has drunk venom

And all who have Peter’s power are poisoned forever.”

That 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.

In the earliest Latin documents, Coucy was called Codiciacum or Codiacum, supposedly derived from Codex, codicis, meaning a tree trunk stripped of its branches such as those the Gauls used to build their palisades. For four centuries through the Dark Ages the place remained in shadow. In 910–20 Hervé, Archbishop of Reims, built the first primitive castle and chapel on the hill, surrounded by a wall as defense against Norsemen invading the valley of the Oise. Settlers from the village below, taking refuge within the Bishop’s walls, founded the upper town, which came to be known as Coucy-le-Château, as distinguished from Coucy-la-Ville below. In those fierce times the territory was a constant bone of conflict among barons, archbishops, and kings, all equally bellicose. Defense against invaders—Moors in the south, Norsemen in the north—had bred a class of hard-bitten warriors who fought among themselves as willingly and savagely as against outsiders. In 975 Oderic, Archbishop of Reims, ceded the fief to a personage called the Comte d’Eudes, who became the first lord of Coucy. Nothing is known of this individual except his name, but once established on the hilltop, he produced in his descendants a strain of extraordinary strength and fury.

The dynasty’s first recorded act of significance, religious rather than bellicose, was the founding by Aubry de Coucy in 1059 of the Benedictine Abbey of Nogent at the foot of the hill. Such a gesture, on a larger scale than the usual donation for perpetual prayers, was meant both to display the importance of the donor and to buy merit to assure his salvation. Whether or not the initial endowment was meager, as the monastery’s rancorous Abbot Guibert complained in the next century, the abbey flourished and, supported by a flow of funds from successive Coucys, outlived them all.

Aubry’s successor, Enguerrand I, was a man of many scandals, obsessed by lust for women, according to Abbot Guibert (himself a victim of repressed sexuality, as revealed in his Confessions). Seized by a passion for Sybil, wife of a lord of Lorraine, Enguerrand succeeded, with the aid of a compliant Bishop of Laon who was his first cousin, in divorcing his first wife, Adèle de Marie, on charges of adultery. Afterward he married Sybil with the sanction of the Church while her husband was absent at war and while the lady herself was pregnant as the result of still a third liaison. She was said to be of dissolute morals.

Out of this vicious family situation came that “raging wolf” (in the words of another famous abbot, Suger of St. Denis), the most notorious and savage of the Coucys, Thomas de Marie, son of the repudiated Adèle. Bitterly hating the father who had cast his paternity in doubt, Thomas grew up to take part in the ceaseless war originally launched against Enguerrand I by the discarded husband of Sybil. These private wars were fought by the knights with furious gusto and a single strategy, which consisted in trying to ruin the enemy by killing or maiming as many of his peasants and destroying as many crops, vineyards, tools, barns, and other possessions as possible, thereby reducing his sources of revenue. As a result, the chief victim of the belligerents was their respective peasantry. Abbot Guibert claimed that in the “mad war” of Enguerrand against the Lorrainer, captured men had their eyes put out and feet cut off with results that could still be seen in the district in his time. The private wars were the curse of Europe which the crusades, it has been thought, were subconsciously invented to relieve by providing a vent for aggression.

When the great summons of 1095 came to take the cross and save the Holy Sepulcher on the First Crusade, both Enguerrand I and his son Thomas joined the march, carrying their feud to Jerusalem and back with mutual hate undiminished. From an exploit during the crusade the Coucy coat-of-arms derived, although whether the protagonist was Enguerrand or Thomas is disputed. One or the other with five companions, on being surprised by a party of Moslems when out of armor, took off his scarlet cloak trimmed with vair (squirrel fur), tore it into six pieces to make banners for recognition, and thus equipped, so the story goes, fell upon the Moslems and annihilated them. In commemoration a shield was adopted bearing the device of six horizontal bands, pointed, of red on white, or in heraldic terms, “Barry of six, vair and gules” (gules meaning red).

As his mother’s heir to the territories of Marie and La Fère, Thomas added them to the Coucy domain to which he succeeded in 1116. Untamed, he pursued a career of enmity and brigandage, directed in varying combinations against Church, town, and King, “the Devil aiding him,” according to Abbot Suger. He seized manors from convents, tortured prisoners (reportedly hanging men up by their testicles until these tore off from the weight of the body), personally cut the throats of thirty rebellious bourgeois, transformed his castles into “a nest of dragons and a cave of thieves,” and was excommunicated by the Church, which ungirdled him—in absentia—of the knightly belt and ordered the anathema to be read against him every Sunday in every parish in Picardy. King Louis VI assembled a force for war upon Thomas and succeeded in divesting him of stolen lands and castles. In the end, Thomas was not proof against that hope of salvation and fear of hell which brought the Church so many rich legacies through the centuries. He left a generous bequest to the Abbey of Nogent, founded another abbey at Prémontré nearby, and died in bed in 1130. He had been married three times. Abbot Guibert thought him “the wickedest man of his generation.”

Book Review

Name: RJ
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Chivalry does not vanquish planning. And Chivalrous men do not make an ideal of man.
Date: Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 20, 2022
Review: I loved this. To recreate the past with such disparate clues, and to do so in a way that presents what was wrong then with men in Italy, England, and France, to show that it is the same that is wrong today with men everywhere--perhaps all captured in the idea that male adhesion to Chivalry is both misogynic and guaranteed economic loss--makes a lot of sense. The book then provides lyrical, stunning descriptions of the why of anti-Semitism, primogeniture, betrayal, and well all the themes that make up the human experience. A real stunner of a story all woven together through a semi-biography of one incredibly successful bicultural noble guy--Engerard, sire de Coucy. A must read.

Name: Sotto voce
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Re-visit 35 years later
Date: Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 2, 2018
Review: I recall 30-some years ago the first time I saw the great cathedral in Richmond, Britain and wondering how could it be that this enormous structure be so remote from people? Like the Salisbury Plain … how could the 12th century version of Lincoln have possibly mustered the labor and wealth to build this structure taller than the great pyramid? It was the tallest building in the world for 238 years. After a few minutes of thinking, I remembered Barbara Tuchman's “Distant Mirror”. Lincoln, like the whole regions of modern Brittany and Picardy have never recovered from the 14th century.

I someway stumbled on the Kindle enabled edition. I don’t know how. The original print edition would have been mightily enhanced with an internet. When it was first published, “A Distant Mirror” was a Dewey Decimal System exploration in extrimis. There were simply too many side alleys to be explored

I read the book as soon as it was published around 1982. The ‘distant mirror’ that the early ‘80’s reader related to was the memory of the 70’s becoming the '80's … hot and cold war, economic “malaise”, pandemic swine flu, upward economic stagnation and class struggle, 16% usurious mortgage rates, gas lines week end and out, a predicted ice age, etc, etc. … it was bad, really bad.

How bad could it get? Tuchman had perfect timing and an intuitive narrative to 'parallels' from the 14th century that frankly no one had much knowledge of at the time. In my 25-30 year-old mind, Tuchman captured my rapt attention. The book remains in the top 10 historicals for me for the reason that there are no other similar historicals following the life of one extraordinary, little known Enguerrand de Coucy. The first reading has stayed with me for many years. I would have rated it a 6-star at the time. The re-read goes to show that my memory was not as crisp as I once imagined.

This Kindle enhanced re-read revealed one thing I don't recall noticing at the time. The elephant in the room is Tuchman's 20th century moral/social critique to the 14th century. Her opinion was not necessary for the narrative to be excellent. How could I have missed that Tuchman was a non-historian and elitist of old Morgenthau wealth? I don't know. I'm more discriminating in historical authors these days before committing to a 600-page read.

99.5% of the narrative is still amazing. .5% is naïve and materially questionable and it jerks you back when you see it. Modern historical deep dives simply don't follow the Tuchman pattern today for a reason. Who are we to judge a nearly 600 year-old generational period when half of the people you know died of the plague then half again died 20 years later? Most of your family today would have never survived birth then. Without the Capetian and Valois propaganda and fake 'chivalry' source Froissart, Tuchman's sourcing is narrow.

I can’t believe I’m critical. This was an historical monument to my fascination in deep diving history. Tuchman’s decidedly sharp positions and determinations have not survived the test of our greater historical knowledge today.

The Kindle read is phenomenal. What was a full-on Dewey Decimal System labor has become instant access to sources, places, names and opens lines into other dimensions and 14th century dynamics. I may have spent more time venturing into references than the book.

Finally, I so wanted to re-visit the sense of my first read. Perhaps I was bound for some disappointment. The 14th century, the 13th century … whatever century was nothing comparable to the present any more than the present is akin to the future. History frankly is not what repeats. The base nature of our species constructs and behavior are unsuppressed and this is what is repeated.

In the current context of socio-historical writing, 4 stars. I would doubt the book would be the huge success if it was a new History release.

Name: S and T Gorrow
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Second purchase
Date: Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 24, 2022
Review: I have the original hard cover I purchased years ago. One of the best books for time between the dark ages and the high Middle Ages. Like it so much I bought the Kindle edition.

Name: Patrick King
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: The best medieval history book
Date: Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 26, 2019
Review: One of the best history books I’ve ever read. Tuchman starts off, great historian that she was, pointing out how conflicting and exaggerating medieval sources can be, and even introduces “Tuchmans Law” (pronounced tuck-men) which basically states that bad news is repeated and spread so much that it multiplies the seeming presence of bad things in life to the point you would think nothing good ever happens (just like watching the evening news). A Distant Mirror is actually a biography of a nobleman named Enguerrand de Coucy VII (pronounced On-geh-hon-de-koo-see). She briefly covers his ancestors as some of them absolutely butchered peasants and barons in their domain while some built the great castle of Coucy in Picardy, France. She spends the first several chapters setting the stage for Enguerrand’s life. The “little ice age” that kicked off the century with some mass starvation. Chivalry and romance, with the knights who were mostly hypocrites and brigands, and women who had minimal say in life. War, how it was all about “the fight” and “the glory”, not even about good strategy. Youth, and how children were basically just treated like little adults, meaning they didn’t have an idea of “childhood” like we have today where it’s a very special time of life, separate and distinct, and deserving special attention. Again, she points out contradictions from her research (“children are neglected and children are loved”). And of course, she covers a long and excellent chapter on the Black Death (which was originally her main goal for the book, but being the good historian that she was, she figured out it was more than the plague that ruined the 1300’s and so expanded the scope of her research)! Here are the Flagellants, whipping themselves through the streets, announcing Gods judgment through “the pestilence,” only to quickly blame the Jews for poisoning the wells and turning whole towns against them! Here are people hanging out next to the “privies” thinking they’ll avoid the plague that way. Tuchman is so accurate, she even points out that the statistic about 1/3 of the population dying from plague didn’t come from anyone actually counting the dead, it came from the book of Revelation! It was a way of life for intellectuals and scholars back then to use scripture and ancient literature to interpret events (doctors read Galen instead of just actually looking at what was wrong with their patients). And just when I thought I couldn’t get more enthralled, we actually begin the life of Enguerrand de Coucy VII. We are with him when he’s captured at the battle of Poitiers. With him when he’s taken hostage and shipped to England (likely in the same group with Geoffrey Chaucer!), when he marries the kings daughter, when he goes on a crusade...won’t spoil anything for you. There is the peasants revolt or “Jacquerie uprising.” There is John Wycliffe becoming buddies with, of all people, John of Gaunt (Duke of Lancaster) because they both want the state to be over the church, not the church over the state as it then was. Here is King Charles the VI of France being followed through the forest of Mans by a strange, ragged man saying, “Ride no further, noble King! Turn back! You are betrayed!” which leads him to have a psychotic snap upon exiting the forest, killing some of his own knights. And that’s just the beginning of his woes. Anyways...if you haven’t already read A Distant Mirror, I hope you will soon!

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