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4.06 AVERAGE
4.06 AVERAGE
informative
slow-paced
Imagine a time when corruption had soaked into every crevice of society...church and state were either aligned in machinations to control the populace and enrich themselves to unseemly heights or locked in public feuds and power struggles over this same popular influence. Imagine a time when discourse was often coarse and vulgar and professional moralists wrung their hands in exasperation and outrage. Imagine a time when youth reigned supreme and people between the ages of 15 and 30 had a disproportionate influence on the course of human events. Imagine a time when aggression and invasion were practically unending; where the King (who was the State) used empire building to gain status and treasure for himself and his small circle of wealthy nobles and billed the masses in taxes and blood.
In other words, imagine a time not unlike our own anxious and pessimistic century. And then consider that it has all happened before.
I purchased a used copy of Barbara Tuchman's panoramic history of the 14th century about 15 years ago and have finally gotten around to reading it cover-to-cover. It was a fantastic voyage to the depths of the Middle Ages. I am so glad that I saved this book for a time when I could read it slowly and with attention. A Distant Mirror is dense reading. The book is drenched in facts and detail. Yet Tuchman's lively writing style makes it an intriguing page-turner for anyone who has an interest in medieval history -- and may possibly win a few open minded readers who were not even aware they were interested before beginning Tuchman's book.
Tuchman traces the events of the 14th century, beginning with the incomprehensible ravages of the Black Death, through the life of a notable French nobleman named Engeurrand de Coucy. Coucy's lifespan covered the majority of this miserable century and his life was documented with more detail than many of his time. Coucy was involved with most of the major battles of his day, he was in the circle of the kings of France as well as having connections with the English royal family. His stronghold of Coucy was a strategic fortress and an amazing example of the finest of medieval architecture. (Much less primitive than one would expect.) Coucy was a man of his time...but a finer example of a medieval man. He appeared to be more rational, judicious and practical than the stereotypic knight errant. His story is, in itself, an epic adventure. The backdrop of 14th century Europe adds amazing drama to his biography.
The forces of plague, war, brigandage and religious crisis due to the unprecedented papal schism are the major dark themes of the age. So much death, destruction, abuse, chaos and woe were packed into the century that society seemingly spiralled out of control.
Entire books have been devoted to the subject of the plague (such as John Kelly's The Great Mortality.) Such is the scope of misery and misdeed in the 1300s that this unprecedented catastrophe, which wiped out as much as 50% of the population of Europe, is merely one on a laundry list of horror presented in A Distant Mirror.
War and the love of war consumes the bulk of any discussion of medieval public affairs. The modern reader pictures knights wielding mace and lance. In truth the military and engineering feats of this era were surprisingly sophisticated. The French army, for instance, prepared a portable wooden town to be transported across the channel to England and set up in less than 3 hours as a base of operations. This 'town' was to have a circumference of 9 miles and an area of 1000 acres surrounded by a 20 ft wall.
Military strategy, on the other hand was simplistic and wedded to the highly impractical concepts of 'chivalry'. Brute force combined with an overblown attitude of glorious battle were the rule. In Tuchman's words: "For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use."
The ruling/warring class was no longer keeping up the Arthurian facade by the latter part of the 14th century and the general population was beginning to turn on the concept. "Chivalry was not aware of its decadence, or if it was, clung ever more passionately to outward forms and brilliant rites to convince itself that the fiction was still the reality. Outside observers, however, had grown increasingly critical as the fiction grew increasingly implausible. It was now fifty years since the start of the war with England, and fifty years of damaging war could not fail to diminish the prestige of a warrior class that could neither win nor make peace but only pile further injury and misery upon the people."
Coucy was respected and well regarded by his fellow noble class as well as members of the lower classes. In this regard, he was a stand-out personality. If Coucy had been less the exception and more of the rule, perhaps the flowering of Europe 100 years in the future would have accelerated. However, rampant corruption, debauchery, casual violence and cruelty were still in full sway throughout the 1300s. The effects were more than a few sage leaders could combat: "Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot." (This jumped out of the page as counsel for our own era.)
The other cornerstone of medieval society...the Catholic Church...was, at the same time, undergoing cataclysmic upheaval in the form of the papal schism with a French imposed upstart papacy in Avignon battling the established Roman pope. Cynicism and despair were running high and reformers such as Jan Hus, Wyclif and Gerson each had an era of influence with the general population -- foreshadowing the rise of Martin Luther and the protestant movement.
Public morality was suffering: "The young...rarely went to church except on feast days and then only to see the painted faces and decollete gowns of the ladies and the spectacle of their headdresses 'immense towers with horns hung with pearls.' People kept vigils in church not with prayer but with lascivious songs and dances, while the priests shot dice as they watched. Gerson deplored the same laxity: men left church in the midst of services to have a drink and 'when they hear the bell announcing consecration, they rush back into the church like bulls.' Card-playing, swearing, and blasphemy, he wrote, occurred during the most sacred festivals, and obscene pictures were hawked in church, corrupting the young. Pilgrimages were the occasion for debauchery, adultery, and profane pleasures."
Since A Distant Mirror presents the 14th century through a French prism, I will reach for the French language to underscore a major theme in the book: "la plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose". It is not difficult to see the threads of human folly and greed and capacity for base behavior running in a direct line across the chasm of 700 + years.
"Mankind was at one of history's ebbs." writes Tuchman. "At mid-century the Black Death had raised the question of God's hostility to man, and events since then had offered little reassurance. To contemporaries the miseria of the time reflected sin, and, indeed, sin in the form of greed and inhumanity abounded. On the downward slope of the Middle Ages man had lost confidence in his capacity to construct a good society."
Yet throughout this litany of despair and miscreant behavior, the occasional burst of light will emerge from the miasma of the century. The life of Coucy, for example, punctuates events with examples of a man who, by and large, treated his family and associates fairly, led by example, counselled wisely, provided loyalty and courage in his affairs and seemed to be a man of relative enlightenment. Coucy's role is to remind the reader that all eras have their villains and heroes, their high cultural points as well as their lowest common denominator excesses, their sages and visionaries who can see farther down the road of history than the average soul.
My review is lengthy because, there is so much to say about the nearly 600 pages of this fascinating look backward and eye opening look at our own times. Although Tuchman wrote this book in 1979, no doubt mired in pessimism over the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, the stagnant economy and the general social ennui of that period...the entree into the 21st century has only given rise to larger global problems and yet more uncertainty and anxiety in the populace. Perhaps reading A Distant Mirror will provide some balance and a longer view of how societies can (and do) bounce back from seemingly insurmountable odds.
As bad as the New Depression, the Climate Crisis, the rise of global terrorism and the ravages of reality television may be...it could always be dirtier and more painful. A Distant Mirror is not your grandma's Society For Creative Anachronism. It presents an era of mad kings, drunken emperors, lusty priests, scheming queens and brutal brigands...stripped of their romantic trappings and presented as highly modernist characters.
In other words, imagine a time not unlike our own anxious and pessimistic century. And then consider that it has all happened before.
I purchased a used copy of Barbara Tuchman's panoramic history of the 14th century about 15 years ago and have finally gotten around to reading it cover-to-cover. It was a fantastic voyage to the depths of the Middle Ages. I am so glad that I saved this book for a time when I could read it slowly and with attention. A Distant Mirror is dense reading. The book is drenched in facts and detail. Yet Tuchman's lively writing style makes it an intriguing page-turner for anyone who has an interest in medieval history -- and may possibly win a few open minded readers who were not even aware they were interested before beginning Tuchman's book.
Tuchman traces the events of the 14th century, beginning with the incomprehensible ravages of the Black Death, through the life of a notable French nobleman named Engeurrand de Coucy. Coucy's lifespan covered the majority of this miserable century and his life was documented with more detail than many of his time. Coucy was involved with most of the major battles of his day, he was in the circle of the kings of France as well as having connections with the English royal family. His stronghold of Coucy was a strategic fortress and an amazing example of the finest of medieval architecture. (Much less primitive than one would expect.) Coucy was a man of his time...but a finer example of a medieval man. He appeared to be more rational, judicious and practical than the stereotypic knight errant. His story is, in itself, an epic adventure. The backdrop of 14th century Europe adds amazing drama to his biography.
The forces of plague, war, brigandage and religious crisis due to the unprecedented papal schism are the major dark themes of the age. So much death, destruction, abuse, chaos and woe were packed into the century that society seemingly spiralled out of control.
Entire books have been devoted to the subject of the plague (such as John Kelly's The Great Mortality.) Such is the scope of misery and misdeed in the 1300s that this unprecedented catastrophe, which wiped out as much as 50% of the population of Europe, is merely one on a laundry list of horror presented in A Distant Mirror.
War and the love of war consumes the bulk of any discussion of medieval public affairs. The modern reader pictures knights wielding mace and lance. In truth the military and engineering feats of this era were surprisingly sophisticated. The French army, for instance, prepared a portable wooden town to be transported across the channel to England and set up in less than 3 hours as a base of operations. This 'town' was to have a circumference of 9 miles and an area of 1000 acres surrounded by a 20 ft wall.
Military strategy, on the other hand was simplistic and wedded to the highly impractical concepts of 'chivalry'. Brute force combined with an overblown attitude of glorious battle were the rule. In Tuchman's words: "For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use."
The ruling/warring class was no longer keeping up the Arthurian facade by the latter part of the 14th century and the general population was beginning to turn on the concept. "Chivalry was not aware of its decadence, or if it was, clung ever more passionately to outward forms and brilliant rites to convince itself that the fiction was still the reality. Outside observers, however, had grown increasingly critical as the fiction grew increasingly implausible. It was now fifty years since the start of the war with England, and fifty years of damaging war could not fail to diminish the prestige of a warrior class that could neither win nor make peace but only pile further injury and misery upon the people."
Coucy was respected and well regarded by his fellow noble class as well as members of the lower classes. In this regard, he was a stand-out personality. If Coucy had been less the exception and more of the rule, perhaps the flowering of Europe 100 years in the future would have accelerated. However, rampant corruption, debauchery, casual violence and cruelty were still in full sway throughout the 1300s. The effects were more than a few sage leaders could combat: "Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot." (This jumped out of the page as counsel for our own era.)
The other cornerstone of medieval society...the Catholic Church...was, at the same time, undergoing cataclysmic upheaval in the form of the papal schism with a French imposed upstart papacy in Avignon battling the established Roman pope. Cynicism and despair were running high and reformers such as Jan Hus, Wyclif and Gerson each had an era of influence with the general population -- foreshadowing the rise of Martin Luther and the protestant movement.
Public morality was suffering: "The young...rarely went to church except on feast days and then only to see the painted faces and decollete gowns of the ladies and the spectacle of their headdresses 'immense towers with horns hung with pearls.' People kept vigils in church not with prayer but with lascivious songs and dances, while the priests shot dice as they watched. Gerson deplored the same laxity: men left church in the midst of services to have a drink and 'when they hear the bell announcing consecration, they rush back into the church like bulls.' Card-playing, swearing, and blasphemy, he wrote, occurred during the most sacred festivals, and obscene pictures were hawked in church, corrupting the young. Pilgrimages were the occasion for debauchery, adultery, and profane pleasures."
Since A Distant Mirror presents the 14th century through a French prism, I will reach for the French language to underscore a major theme in the book: "la plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose". It is not difficult to see the threads of human folly and greed and capacity for base behavior running in a direct line across the chasm of 700 + years.
"Mankind was at one of history's ebbs." writes Tuchman. "At mid-century the Black Death had raised the question of God's hostility to man, and events since then had offered little reassurance. To contemporaries the miseria of the time reflected sin, and, indeed, sin in the form of greed and inhumanity abounded. On the downward slope of the Middle Ages man had lost confidence in his capacity to construct a good society."
Yet throughout this litany of despair and miscreant behavior, the occasional burst of light will emerge from the miasma of the century. The life of Coucy, for example, punctuates events with examples of a man who, by and large, treated his family and associates fairly, led by example, counselled wisely, provided loyalty and courage in his affairs and seemed to be a man of relative enlightenment. Coucy's role is to remind the reader that all eras have their villains and heroes, their high cultural points as well as their lowest common denominator excesses, their sages and visionaries who can see farther down the road of history than the average soul.
My review is lengthy because, there is so much to say about the nearly 600 pages of this fascinating look backward and eye opening look at our own times. Although Tuchman wrote this book in 1979, no doubt mired in pessimism over the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, the stagnant economy and the general social ennui of that period...the entree into the 21st century has only given rise to larger global problems and yet more uncertainty and anxiety in the populace. Perhaps reading A Distant Mirror will provide some balance and a longer view of how societies can (and do) bounce back from seemingly insurmountable odds.
As bad as the New Depression, the Climate Crisis, the rise of global terrorism and the ravages of reality television may be...it could always be dirtier and more painful. A Distant Mirror is not your grandma's Society For Creative Anachronism. It presents an era of mad kings, drunken emperors, lusty priests, scheming queens and brutal brigands...stripped of their romantic trappings and presented as highly modernist characters.
Huge book; short review.
Voluminous, informed ... but kinda boring: how was all that made so ... boring? Good passages, but overall just too much work. Look at how many other reviewers gave up on "A Distant Mirror" (I finished)
Structurally, the problem is that no real superstructure was presented, just a long disconnected series of follies, deaths & betrothments. One hundred years war, the plague shouldn't be boring, but successfully, they were.
5 stars for content
2 stars for interest, reader captivation
3 stars for me.
Voluminous, informed ... but kinda boring: how was all that made so ... boring? Good passages, but overall just too much work. Look at how many other reviewers gave up on "A Distant Mirror" (I finished)
Structurally, the problem is that no real superstructure was presented, just a long disconnected series of follies, deaths & betrothments. One hundred years war, the plague shouldn't be boring, but successfully, they were.
5 stars for content
2 stars for interest, reader captivation
3 stars for me.
Wow, that was some dense reading! Overall a very engaging book, although it sometimes gets bogged down in the minutiae of various topics.
Another great book from Barbara Tuchman, comparing the similarities between the 14th and 20th centuries. Truly fascinating. The fun fact that sticks in my head was that a 14th century army, moving at top speed, could only cover 9 miles in a day. On bad days, it was more like one mile. No wonder wars lasted so long...
Normally, I have always enjoyed Barbara Tuchman's books, but this one, while very interesting, I felt I had to struggle a bit.
A Distant Mirror made me think a bit about the distinction between textbook and nonfiction, because this stack of solid research surely blurred the distinction. I have a lot of empathy for her task here- tackling something in a scholarly way, but also retaining the human interest factor can be a difficult balance to hit. Well written nonfiction tops the list of some of my favorite books of the past few years, though ([b:The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History|17910054|The Sixth Extinction An Unnatural History|Elizabeth Kolbert|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1372677697s/17910054.jpg|25095506], [b:Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster|1898|Into Thin Air A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster|Jon Krakauer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1463384482s/1898.jpg|1816662], [b:Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies|1842|Guns, Germs, and Steel The Fates of Human Societies|Jared Diamond|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1453215833s/1842.jpg|2138852], [b:The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon|3398625|The Lost City of Z A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon|David Grann|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320487318s/3398625.jpg|3438638], pretty much all of DFW's essays, just to name a few off the old dome).
Hesitatingly I have to admit this history doesn't quite make it to that list for me. It creates an amazingly textured portrait of life in the 14th century, but gets way too bogged down in details to be the page turner that the others I mentioned were for me. That being said, it is definitely a worthwhile read. She has 2 main framing techniques to keep this from being more than an info dump: 1) the comparison of the chaos of the century (black plague, 2 popes, 100 years war, crusades, etc) to the similar history shaking events of the 20th, and 2) tracing the life of a typical leading noble through said chaos. I thought her first point was interesting, although I'm not sure if I agree with it, given how fast progress was happening in the 20th century and how static the 14th seems in comparison (maybe that includes an optimistic appraisal of what we learned from the world wars in the 20th century, but whatever, I'm an optimist). The second was an excellent way to cut through the figures and dates and add a little human interest.
I think it is worth a little digression to say that this book was written in the 1970s, and you can tell. History in its most basic form is something static- a straightforward retelling of historical events that everyone agreed happened. In reality, though, nothing is so black and white. The way we understand the already limited and distorted accountings of the past shifts based on the temporal and historical lens that we ourselves are looking out of. I would be interested to see what current historical scholars think of her summary of medieval attitudes. For example, she concludes based on lack of artistic and prose representations of motherhood, among other evidence, that children were hardly mothered or looked upon fondly until they reach the age of 7, when survival started to seem more likely. She then extrapolates this universally stunted childhood as a possible explanation for the emotionally stunted behaviors of many people in adulthood and the universal acceptance of bloody violence as a cultural norm. Could this really be true? Parental affection is such a basic biological imperative that I find it hard to believe that most mothers and fathers could ignore their children until what passed for adulthood in this age of high mortality.
Nonetheless, these sorts of cultural suppositions are the most interesting part by far of the book. I only care about the battles insofar as it reveals what the people of the time felt strongly about. The Hundred Year's War was basically a clusterf**k of incompetent nobles trying to prove their manhood by prancing around like massive metal turtles, strategy and training be damned. The cult of knighthood was foundering fast, and this makes for fascinating reading on the fallibility of human pride. I liked that the Swiss and the Turks made some guest appearances here and were like hey guys, while you were drinking wine and chasing women we were actually making military maneuvers, here are your bums because we just handed them to you. And Joan of Arc, that story told in the context of the times almost made me believe in miracles because how the hell did that happen.
And speaking of Joan of Arc, I think too that this century-ish really saw the growth of nationalism as a thing, a theme that is really interesting to explore, as its roots continue through today. Sometimes it's easy to forget that Italy and France and even England to an extent were really more of a group of warring tribes in the same region that only occasionally even identified as the same group, a phenomenon that honestly continues to today. If you go to Liguria vs even Milan, just one region over in Italy, the food, culture, and dialect to this day remain totally different. Italy, France, Switzerland- these are all just modern concepts that do not correspond to the reality of how people see or saw themselves. After reading this, my theory is that the concept of nation emerged to replace the crumbling of existing institutions that society organized itself around, from the papacy (hopelessly submerged in the politics of the schism) to the entire three estate system (useless nobles in their metal cocoons strike again).
I thought this was gonna be a short review (cool themes, too much detail), but I guess I laid out a bit of a thesis. I do understand a lot better the roots of the countries that I am now spending a whole lot of time in from reading this, and enjoyed it. Just took forever and a half to trudge through.
Hesitatingly I have to admit this history doesn't quite make it to that list for me. It creates an amazingly textured portrait of life in the 14th century, but gets way too bogged down in details to be the page turner that the others I mentioned were for me. That being said, it is definitely a worthwhile read. She has 2 main framing techniques to keep this from being more than an info dump: 1) the comparison of the chaos of the century (black plague, 2 popes, 100 years war, crusades, etc) to the similar history shaking events of the 20th, and 2) tracing the life of a typical leading noble through said chaos. I thought her first point was interesting, although I'm not sure if I agree with it, given how fast progress was happening in the 20th century and how static the 14th seems in comparison (maybe that includes an optimistic appraisal of what we learned from the world wars in the 20th century, but whatever, I'm an optimist). The second was an excellent way to cut through the figures and dates and add a little human interest.
I think it is worth a little digression to say that this book was written in the 1970s, and you can tell. History in its most basic form is something static- a straightforward retelling of historical events that everyone agreed happened. In reality, though, nothing is so black and white. The way we understand the already limited and distorted accountings of the past shifts based on the temporal and historical lens that we ourselves are looking out of. I would be interested to see what current historical scholars think of her summary of medieval attitudes. For example, she concludes based on lack of artistic and prose representations of motherhood, among other evidence, that children were hardly mothered or looked upon fondly until they reach the age of 7, when survival started to seem more likely. She then extrapolates this universally stunted childhood as a possible explanation for the emotionally stunted behaviors of many people in adulthood and the universal acceptance of bloody violence as a cultural norm. Could this really be true? Parental affection is such a basic biological imperative that I find it hard to believe that most mothers and fathers could ignore their children until what passed for adulthood in this age of high mortality.
Nonetheless, these sorts of cultural suppositions are the most interesting part by far of the book. I only care about the battles insofar as it reveals what the people of the time felt strongly about. The Hundred Year's War was basically a clusterf**k of incompetent nobles trying to prove their manhood by prancing around like massive metal turtles, strategy and training be damned. The cult of knighthood was foundering fast, and this makes for fascinating reading on the fallibility of human pride. I liked that the Swiss and the Turks made some guest appearances here and were like hey guys, while you were drinking wine and chasing women we were actually making military maneuvers, here are your bums because we just handed them to you. And Joan of Arc, that story told in the context of the times almost made me believe in miracles because how the hell did that happen.
And speaking of Joan of Arc, I think too that this century-ish really saw the growth of nationalism as a thing, a theme that is really interesting to explore, as its roots continue through today. Sometimes it's easy to forget that Italy and France and even England to an extent were really more of a group of warring tribes in the same region that only occasionally even identified as the same group, a phenomenon that honestly continues to today. If you go to Liguria vs even Milan, just one region over in Italy, the food, culture, and dialect to this day remain totally different. Italy, France, Switzerland- these are all just modern concepts that do not correspond to the reality of how people see or saw themselves. After reading this, my theory is that the concept of nation emerged to replace the crumbling of existing institutions that society organized itself around, from the papacy (hopelessly submerged in the politics of the schism) to the entire three estate system (useless nobles in their metal cocoons strike again).
I thought this was gonna be a short review (cool themes, too much detail), but I guess I laid out a bit of a thesis. I do understand a lot better the roots of the countries that I am now spending a whole lot of time in from reading this, and enjoyed it. Just took forever and a half to trudge through.
A Distant Mirror, by Barbara Tuchman, is more than a history of the 14th Century. It's an examination of a time and place with the benefit of hindsight, told through picking out the thread of one man's life. This is an endlessly fascinating work about medieval Europe. What lasts through the ages? Clearly contemporaries are no judge. Perhaps it's the strength of the human spirit? Highly recommended.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
adventurous
informative
slow-paced
One of my favorite history books.