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A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

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by Barbara W. Tuchman


  The sumptuary laws proved unenforceable; the prerogative of adornment, like the drinking of liquor in a later century, defied prohibition. When Florentine city officials pursued women in the streets to examine their gowns, and entered houses to search their wardrobes, their findings were often spectacular: cloth of white marbled silk embroidered with vine leaves and red grapes, a coat with white and red roses on a pale yellow ground, another coat of “blue cloth with white lilies and white and red stars and compasses and white and yellow stripes across it, lined with red striped cloth,” which almost seemed as if the owner were trying to see how far defiance could go.

  To the grands seigneurs of multiple fiefs and castles, identity was no problem. In their gold-embossed surcoats and velvet mantles lined in ermine, their slashed and parti-colored tunics embroidered with family crest or verses or a lady-love’s initials, their hanging scalloped sleeves with colored linings, their long pointed shoes of red leather from Cordova, their rings and chamois gloves and belts hung with bells and trinkets, their infinity of hats—puffed tam-o’shanters and furred caps, hoods and brims, chaplets of flowers, coiled turbans, coverings of every shape, puffed, pleated, scalloped, or curled into a long tailed pocket called a liripipe—they were beyond imitation.

  When the 14th century opened, France was supreme. Her superiority in chivalry, learning, and Christian devotion was taken for granted, and as traditional champion of the Church, her monarch was accorded the formula of “Most Christian King.” The people of his realm considered themselves the chosen objects of divine favor through whom God expressed his will on earth. The classic French account of the First Crusade was entitled Gesta Dei per Francos (God’s Deeds Done by the French). Divine favor was confirmed in 1297 when, a bare quarter-century after his death, France’s twice-crusading King, Louis IX, was canonized as a saint.

  “The fame of French knights,” acknowledged Giraldus Cambrensis in the 12th century, “dominates the world.” France was the land of “well-conducted chivalry” where uncouth German nobles came to learn good manners and taste at the courts of French princes, and knights and sovereigns from all over Europe assembled at the royal court to enjoy jousts and festivals and amorous gallantries. Residence there, according to blind King John of Bohemia, who preferred the French court to his own, offered “the most chivalrous sojourn in the world.” The French, as described by the renowned Spanish knight Don Pero Niño, “are generous and great givers of presents.” They know how to treat strangers honorably, they praise fair deeds, they are courteous and gracious in speech and “very gay, giving themselves up to pleasure and seeking it. They are very amorous, women as well as men, and proud of it.”

  As a result of Norman conquests and the crusades, French was spoken as a second mother tongue by the noble estate in England, Flanders, and the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. It was used as the language of business by Flemish magnates, by law courts in the remnants of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, by scholars and poets of other lands. Marco Polo dictated his Travels in French, St. Francis sang French songs, foreign troubadours modeled their tales of adventure on the French chansons de geste. When a Venetian scholar translated a Latin chronicle of his city into French rather than Italian, he explained his choice on the ground that “the French language is current throughout the world and more delightful to hear and read than any other.”

  The architecture of Gothic cathedrals was called the “French style”; a French architect was invited to design London Bridge; Venice imported dolls from France dressed in the latest mode in order to keep up with French fashions; exquisitely carved French ivories, easily transportable, penetrated to the limits of the Christian world. Above all, the University of Paris elevated the name of the French capital, surpassing all others in the fame of its masters and the prestige of its studies in theology and philosophy, though these were already petrifying in the rigid doctrines of Scholasticism. Its faculty at the opening of the 14th century numbered over 500, its students, attracted from all countries, were too numerous to count. It was a magnet for the greatest minds: Thomas Aquinas of Italy taught there in the 13th century, as did his own teacher Albertus Magnus of Germany, his philosophical opponent Duns Scotus of Scotland, and in the next century, the two great political thinkers, Marsilius of Padua and the English Franciscan William of Ockham. By virtue of the university, Paris was the “Athens of Europe”; the Goddess of Wisdom, it was said, after leaving Greece and then Rome, had made it her home.

  The University’s charter of privileges, dating from 1200, was its greatest pride. Exempted from civil control, the University was equally haughty in regard to ecclesiastical authority, and always in conflict with Bishop and Pope. “You Paris masters at your desks seem to think the world should be ruled by your reasonings,” stormed the papal legate Benedict Caetani, soon to be Pope Boniface VIII. “It is to us,” he reminded them, “that the world is entrusted, not to you.” Unconvinced, the University considered itself as authoritative in theology as the Pope, although conceding to Christ’s Vicar equal status with itself as “the two lights of the world.”

  In this favored land of the Western world, the Coucy inheritance in 1335 was as rich as it was ancient. Watered by the Ailette, the Coucys’ land was called the vallée d’or (golden valley) because of its resources in timber, vineyards, grain crops, and a profusion of fish in the streams. The magnificent forest of St. Gobain covered more than 7,000 acres of primeval oak and beech, ash and birch, willow, alder and quivering aspen, wild cherry and pine. The home of deer, wolves, wild boar, heron, and every other bird, it was a paradise for the hunt. From taxes and land rents and feudal dues of various kinds increasingly converted to money, from tolls on bridges and fees for use of the lord’s flour mill, wine press, and bread ovens, the annual revenue of an estate the size of Coucy would have been in the range of 5,000 to 6,000 livres.

  Everything that had formed the fief since the tree trunks at Codiciacum was symbolized in the great lion platform of stone in front of the castle gate where vassals came to present rents and homage. The platform rested on three lions, couchant, one devouring a child, one a dog, and in between them, a third, quiescent. On top was a fourth lion seated in all the majesty the sculptor could evoke. Three times a year—at Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas—the Abbot of Nogent or his agent came to pay homage for the land originally granted to the monks by Aubry de Coucy. The rituals of the ceremony were as elaborate and abstruse as any in the royal crowning at Reims.

  Mounted on a bay horse (or, according to some accounts, a palomino) with clipped tail and ears and a plow-horse’s harness, the abbot’s representative carried a whip, a seed bag of wheat, and a basket filled with 120 rissoles. These were crescent-shaped pastries made of rye flour, stuffed with minced veal cooked in oil. A dog followed, also with clipped ears and tail, and with a rissole tied around his neck. The agent circled a stone cross at the entrance to the court three times, cracking his whip on each tour, dismounted and knelt at the lion platform, and, if each detail of equipment and performance was exactly right so far, was allowed to proceed. He then mounted the platform, kissed the lion, and deposited the rissoles plus twelve loaves of bread and three portions of wine as his homage. The Sire de Coucy took a third of the offerings, distributed the rest among the assembled bailiffs and town magistrates, and stamped the document of homage with a seal representing a mitered abbot with the feet of a goat.

  Pagan, barbarian, feudal, Christian, accumulated out of the shrouded past, here was medieval society—and the many-layered elements of Western man.

  Chapter 2

  Born to Woe: The Century

  When the last of the Coucys was born, his country was supreme but his century was already in trouble. A physical chill settled on the 14th century at its very start, initiating the miseries to come. The Baltic Sea froze over twice, in 1303 and 1306–07; years followed of unseasonable cold, storms and rains, and a rise in the level of the Caspian Sea. Contemporaries could not know it was the onset of what has since been
recognized as the Little Ice Age, caused by an advance of polar and alpine glaciers and lasting until about 1700. Nor were they yet aware that, owing to the climatic change, communication with Greenland was gradually being lost, that the Norse settlements there were being extinguished, that cultivation of grain was disappearing from Iceland and being severely reduced in Scandinavia. But they could feel the colder weather, and mark with fear its result: a shorter growing season.

  This meant disaster, for population increase in the last century had already reached a delicate balance with agricultural techniques. Given the tools and methods of the time, the clearing of productive land had already been pushed to its limits. Without adequate irrigation and fertilizers, crop yield could not be raised nor poor soils be made productive. Commerce was not equipped to transport grain in bulk from surplus-producing areas except by water. Inland towns and cities lived on local resources, and when these dwindled, the inhabitants starved.

  In 1315, after rains so incessant that they were compared to the Biblical flood, crops failed all over Europe, and famine, the dark horseman of the Apocalypse, became familiar to all. The previous rise in population had already exceeded agricultural production, leaving people undernourished and more vulnerable to hunger and disease. Reports spread of people eating their own children, of the poor in Poland feeding on hanged bodies taken down from the gibbet. A contagion of dysentery prevailed in the same years. Local famines recurred intermittently after the great sweep of 1315–16.

  Acts of man no less than change in the climate marked the 14th century as born to woe. In the first twenty years, four ominous events followed one after another: the assault on the Pope by the King of France; the removal of the Papacy to Avignon; the suppression of the Templars; and the rising of the Pastoureaux. The most fateful was an assault on Boniface VIII by agents of Philip IV, King of France, surnamed the Fair. The issue was temporal versus papal authority arising from Philip’s levy of taxes on clerical income without consent of the Pope. Boniface in response issued the defiant Bull Clericos Laicos in 1296 forbidding the clergy to pay any form of tax whatsoever to any lay ruler. He recognized in the growing tendency of prelates to hesitate between allegiance to their king and obedience to the Pope a threat to the papal claim to universal rule as Vicar of Christ. Despite formidable hostilities brought to bear on him by Philip the Fair, Boniface asserted in a second Bull, Unam Sanctam, in 1302, the most absolute statement of papal supremacy ever made: “It is necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff.”

  Philip thereupon called for a council to judge the Pope on charges of heresy, blasphemy, murder, sodomy, simony and sorcery (including consorting with a familiar spirit or pet demon), and failure to fast on fast days. At the same time Boniface drew up a Bull to excommunicate the King, prompting Philip to resort to physical force. On September 7, 1303, agents of the King, aided by anti-papist Italian armed forces, seized the 86-year-old Pope in his summer retreat at Anagni near Rome with the intention of forestalling the excommunication and bringing him by force before a council. After three days’ turmoil, Boniface was freed by the citizens of Anagni, but the shock of the outrage was mortal and within a month he was dead.

  The assault on the Pope did not rally support for the cause of the victim and the fact that it did not was a measure of change. The tide was receding from the universality of the Church that had been the medieval dream. The all-embracing claim of Boniface VIII was obsolete before he made it. The indirect consequence of the “Crime of Anagni” was the removal of the papacy to Avignon, and in that “Babylonian Exile” demoralization began.

  The move occurred when, under the influence of Philip the Fair, a French Pope was elected as Clement V. He did not go to Rome to take up his See, mainly because he feared Italian reprisals for the French treatment of Boniface, although the Italians said it was because he kept a French mistress, the beautiful Countess of Périgord, daughter of the Count of Foix. In 1309 he settled in Avignon in Provence near the mouth of the Rhône. This was within the French sphere, though technically not in France since Provence was a fief of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily.

  Thereafter under six French popes in succession, Avignon became a virtual temporal state of sumptuous pomp, of great cultural attraction, and of unlimited simony—that is, the selling of offices. Diminished by its removal from the Holy See of Rome and by being generally regarded as a tool of France, the papacy sought to make up prestige and power in temporal terms. It concentrated on finance and the organization and centralization of every process of papal government that could bring in revenue. Besides its regular revenue from tithes and annates on ecclesiastical income and from dues from papal fiefs, every office, every nomination, every appointment or preferment, every dispensation of the rules, every judgment of the Rota or adjudication of a claim, every pardon, indulgence, and absolution, everything the Church had or was, from cardinal’s hat to pilgrim’s relic, was for sale. In addition, the papacy took a cut of all voluntary gifts and bequests and offerings on the altar. It received Peter’s Pence from England and other kingdoms. It sold extra indulgences in jubilee years and took a special tax for crusades which continued to be proclaimed but rarely left home. The once great impulse had faded, and fervor for holy war had become largely verbal.

  Benefices, of which there were 700 bishops’ sees and hundreds of thousands of lower offices, were the most lucrative source of papal income. Increasingly, the popes reserved more and more benefices to their power of appointment, destroying the elective principle. Since the appointees were often strangers to the diocese, or some cardinal’s favorite, the practice aroused resentment within the clergy. If an episcopal election was still held, the papacy charged a fee for confirming it. To obtain a conferred benefice, a bishop or abbot greased the palms of the Curia for his nomination, paid anywhere from a third to the whole of his first year’s revenue as the fee for his appointment, and knew that when he died his personal property would revert to the Pope and any outstanding dues would have to be paid by his successor.

  Excommunication and anathema, the most extreme measures the Church could command, supposedly reserved for heresy and horrible crimes—“for by these penalties a man is separated from the faithful and turned over to Satan”—were now used to wring money from recalcitrant payers. In one case a bishop was denied Christian burial until his heirs agreed to be responsible for his debts, to the scandal of the diocese, which saw its bishop lying unshriven and cut off from hope of salvation. Abuse of the spiritual power for such purposes brought excommunication into contempt and lowered respect for clerical leaders.

  Money could buy any kind of dispensation: to legitimize children, of which the majority were those of priests and prelates;* to divide a corpse for the favorite custom of burial in two or more places; to permit nuns to keep two maids; to permit a converted Jew to visit his unconverted parents; to marry within the prohibited degree of consanguinity (with a sliding scale of fees for the second, third, and fourth degrees); to trade with the infidel Moslem (with a fee required for each ship on a scale according to cargo); to receive stolen goods up to a specific value. The collection and accounting of all these sums, largely handled through Italian bankers, made the physical counting of cash a common sight in the papal palace. Whenever he entered there, reportedAlvar Pelayo, a Spanish official of the Curia, “I found brokers and clergy engaged in reckoning the money which lay in heaps before them.”

  The dispensation with most serious results was the one permitting appointment to a benefice of a candidate below the canonical age of 25 or one who had never been consecrated or never taken the required examination for literacy. Appointment of unfit or absentee clergy became an abuse in itself. In Bohemia on one occasion in the early 14th century, a boy of seven was appointed to a parish worth an annual income of 25 gulden; another was raised through three offices of the hierarchy, paying at each stage for a dispensation for non-residence and postponed consecration. Younger sons of noble families w
ere repeatedly appointed to archbishoprics at 18, 20, or 22. Tenures were short because each preferment brought in another payment.

  Priests who could not read or who, from ignorance, stumbled stupidly through the ritual of the Eucharist were another scandal. A Bishop of Durham in 1318 could not understand or pronounce Latin and after struggling helplessly with the word Metropolitanus at his own consecration, muttered in the vernacular, “Let us take that word as read.” Later when ordaining candidates for holy orders, he met the word aenigmate (through a glass darkly) and this time swore in honest outrage, “By St. Louis, that was no courteous man who wrote this word!” The unfit clergy spread dismay, for these were the men supposed to have the souls of the laity in their charge and be the intermediaries between man and God. Writing of “incapable and ignorant men” who could buy any office they wanted from the Curia, the chronicler Henry of Hereford went to the heart of the dismay when he wrote, “Look … at the dangerous situation of those in their charge, and tremble!”

  When Church practices were calculated at a money value, their religious content seeped away. Theoretically, pardon for sin could only be won through penitence, but the penance of a pilgrimage to Rome or Jerusalem had little meaning when the culprit could estimate the cost of the journey and buy an indulgence for an equivalent sum.

  The popes—successors, as Petrarch pointed out, of “the poor fishermen of Galilee”—were now “loaded with gold and clad in purple.” John XXII, a Pope with the touch of Midas who ruled from 1316 to 1334, bought for his own use forty pieces of gold cloth from Damascus for 1,276 gold florins and spent even more on furs, including an ermine-trimmed pillow. The clothing of his retinue cost 7,000 to 8,000 florins a year.

 

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