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VIVID PORTRAIT OF A VIOLENT CENTURY
A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman (Macmillan)
Reviewed by Harvey Tyson
"While clouds of smoke by day and the glow of flames by night mark burning towns, the sky over the neighbouring vicinity is clear; where the screams of tortured prisoners are heard in one place, bankers count their coins and peasants plough behind placid oxen somewhere else. Havoc in a given period does not cover all the people all the time, and though its effect is cumulative, the decline it drags behind takes time before it is recognised.”
The quote above is a sample of the style and careful objectivity of a history-writer in search of similarities between the Dark Ages and our lives today.
Her study - a carefully chronicled history of 60 years of 14th century life in France and Britain - is a work of monumental research.
Barbara Tuchman turned to medieval Europe to find out how the Black Death, "the most lethal disaster in recorded history" affected mankind. The great plague wiped out one third of all people living between India and Iceland. It did so in two summers, leaving castles and whole towns empty; fields uncultivated: and people of all levels and cultures in a state of shock, their institutions and their values shattered.
"Given the possibilities of our own times, the reason for my interest is obvious," says the author, without bothering to allude to nuclear warfare.
The title refers to a mirror image of the 20th Century which some see in the chaos of the 14th Century. The presumptions of this approach are at first irritating, for in reading history it is too easy to be tendentious in these comparisons. Indeed it seems egocentric for researchers today to see themselves and their own problems in the personalities and problems of the past.
Question
But Barbara Tuchman is too good a researcher to fall into the trap and, like a good reporter, does not allow her preconceptions to colour the facts.
She writes: "Although my initial question has escaped an answer, the interest of the period itself – a violent, tormented bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age - was compelling. If our last decade or two of collapsing assumptions has been a period of unusual discomfort, it is reassuring to know that 'the human' species has lived through worse before."
And emerged with renewed vigour, she might have added.
She does not, anywhere beyond the foreword, force comparisons. Instead she treats us to a wide but easily assimilable, flow of information. That age 'of chivalrous knights, fair damsels, witchcraft and and derring-do may appear too vague, too romantic, too inadequately chronicled for proper study. Yet the opposite is true. It was the age of great writers such as Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer; of painstaking professIonal chroniclers such as Froissart; an age 'of documentation of minutiae by church scribes and feudal clerks. '
Disaster
The author describes the library of Charles the Wise, which was said ta contain a thousand volumes - including those "best sellers" the Roman de la Rose and Sir John Mandville's "Travels." Her a own book deals with the life and times of Enguererand .deCoucy VII, known in his day as "'the most ... skilful of all the knights of France, a champion nobleman whose connections and loyalties spanned England and France in the heat of the Hundred Years War. He seems the perfect focus for such a history, but again the author does not strain for effect. Her book remains true to historical research, and rests on a bibliooraphy of no fewer than 300 works, with 600 authorities listed in the chapter reference notes.
At the end of it; what are her conclusions about the results on society of a disaster as calamitous as the, Black Death? There are no short answers, but she appears to agree with Petrarch who wrote to Boccaccio in 1366: "The earth is perhaps depopulated ... but was never more populated with vice and the creatures of vice."
Values
The presence of Death, wiping out men in 24 hours and their whole families in days, brouoht not piety, but piracy. Not love, but lust. Chivalry was a myth; the Knighthood did not protect even fair damsels. And the Church, growing more and more avaricious as it reaped in the empty lands and abandoned properties, did not guide the way to God.
Barbara Tuchman looks carefully at all aspects - and all the contradictions - of the period: the cults of religious mania and hippie-dom that swept Europe; the strikes by peasant labour; the hijacking (of transport wagons, hostages, whole villages and castles); the move for women's liberation and the constant questioning - or abandonment - of traditional values. While she focuses on the black death, and poverty and pillage, she does not overlook the fact that even in times of chaos there is also luxury. Here is a sample of the author's, style, and her objective approach to her subject:
Insensitive
"At (the Sire de) Coucy 's level, men and women hawked and hunted and carried a favourite falcon, hooded, on the wrist wherever they went, indoors or out, to church, to the assizes, to meals. On occasion huge pastries were served from which live birds were released to be caught by hawks -unleashed in the banquet hall. At the turret of the castle where the lord's flag flew, a 'watchman was stationed with a horn to be blown at the approach of strangers . . . In the evening minstrels pIayed with lutes and harps. . If no concert or performance was scheduled (the plays had elaborate sets, complete with waterfalls, thunder and horsemen) then the company entertained each other with song and conversation, tales of the day's hunting, ‘graceful questions' on the conventions of love, and verbal games,"
Such were the social habits of the civilised and the sophisticated. As today, however, they either enjoyed or were insensitive to cruelty.
Theirs was a violent century, indeed a mirror of our own. But has there ever been a century without violence, and cruelty and war?
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