A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Given the hardships and the length of time consumed, people journeyed over long distances to an astonishing degree—from Paris to Florence, from Flanders to Hungary, London to Prague, Bohemia to Castile, crossing seas, alps, and rivers, walking to China like Marco Polo or three times to Jerusalem like the Wife of Bath.

  What was the mental furniture of Enguerrand’s class, the upper level of lay society? Long before Columbus, they knew the world was a globe, a knowledge proceeding from familiarity with the movement of the stars, which could be made comprehensible only in terms of a spherical earth. In a vivid image, it was said by the cleric Gautier de Metz in his Image du Monde, the most widely read encyclopedia of the time, that a man could go around the world as a fly makes the tour of an apple. So far was the earth from the stars, according to him, that if a stone were dropped from there it would take more than 100 years to reach our globe, while a man traveling 25 leagues a day without stopping would take 7,157½ years to reach the stars.

  Visually, people pictured the universe held in God’s arms with man at its center. It was understood that the moon was the nearest planet, with no light of its own; that an eclipse was the passage of the moon between the earth and the sun; that rain was moisture drawn by the sun from the earth which condensed into clouds and fell back as rain; that the shorter the time between thunder and lightning, the nearer the source.

  Faraway lands, however—India, Persia, and beyond—were seen through a gauze of fabulous fairy tales revealing an occasional nugget of reality: forests so high they touch the clouds, horned pygmies who move in herds and grow old in seven years, brahmins who kill themselves on funeral pyres, men with dogs’ heads and six toes, “cyclopeans” with only one eye and one foot who move as fast as the wind, the “monoceros” which can be caught only when it sleeps in the lap of a virgin, Amazons whose tears are of silver, panthers who practice the caesarean operation with their own claws, trees whose leaves supply wool, snakes 300 feet long, snakes with precious stones for eyes, snakes who so love music that for prudence they stop up one ear with their tail.

  The Garden of Eden too had an earthly existence which often appeared on maps, located far to the east, where it was believed cut off from the rest of the world by a great mountain or ocean barrier or fiery wall. In the earthly Paradise grow every kind of tree and flowers of surpassing colors and a thousand scents which never fade and have healing qualities. Birds’ songs harmonize with the rustling of forest leaves and the rippling of streams flowing over jeweled rocks or over sands brighter than silver. A palace with columns of crystal and jasper sheds marvelous light. No wind or rain, heat or cold mars Paradise; no sickness, decay, death, or sorrow enters there. The mountain peak on which it is situated is so high it touches the sphere of the moon—but here the scientific mind intervened: that would be impossible, pronounced the 14th century author of Polychronicon, because it would cause an eclipse.

  For all the explanations, the earth and its phenomena were full of mysteries: What happens to fire when it goes out? Why are there different colors of skin among men? Why do the sun’s rays darken a man’s skin but bleach white linen? How can the earth, which is weighty, be suspended in air? How do souls make their way to the next world? Where lies the soul? What causes madness? Medieval people felt surrounded by puzzles, yet because God was there they were willing to acknowledge that causes are hidden, that man cannot know why all things are as they are; “they are as God pleases.”

  That did not silence the one unending question: Why does God allow evil, illness, and poverty? Why did He not make man incapable of sin? Why did He not assure him of Paradise? The answer, never wholly satisfying, was that God owed the Devil his scope. According to St. Augustine, the fount of authority, all men were under the Devil’s power by virtue of original sin; hence the necessity of the Church and salvation.

  Questions of human behavior found answers in the book of Sidrach, supposedly a descendant of Noah to whom God gave the gift of universal knowledge, eventually compiled into a book by several masters of Toledo. What language does a deaf-mute hear in his heart? Answer: that of Adam, namely Hebrew. Which is worst: murder, robbery, or assault? None of these; sodomy is the worst. Will wars ever end? Never, until the earth becomes Paradise. The origin of war, according to its 14th century codifier Honoré Bonet, lay in Lucifer’s war against God, “hence it is no great marvel if in this world there arise wars and battles since these existed first in heaven.”

  Education, so far as it would have reached Enguerrand, was based on the seven “liberal arts”: Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because “without numbers there is nothing”; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music. Medicine, though not one of the liberal arts, was analogous to Music because its object was the harmony of the human body.

  History was finite and contained within comprehensible limits. It began with the Creation and was scheduled to end in a not indefinitely remote future with the Second Coming, which was the hope of afflicted mankind, followed by the Day of Judgment. Within that span, man was not subject to social or moral progress because his goal was the next world, not betterment in this. In this world he was assigned to ceaseless struggle against himself in which he might attain individual progress and even victory, but collective betterment would only come in the final union with God.

  The average layman acquired knowledge mainly by ear, through public sermons, mystery plays, and the recital of narrative poems, ballads, and tales, but during Enguerrand’s lifetime, reading by educated nobles and upper bourgeois increased with the increased availability of manuscripts. Books of universal knowledge, mostly dating from the 13th century and written in (or translated from the Latin into) French and other vernaculars for the use of the layman, were literary staples familiar in every country over several centuries. A 14th century man drew also on the Bible, romances, bestiaries, satires, books of astronomy, geography, universal history, church history, rhetoric, law, medicine, alchemy, falconry, hunting, fighting, music, and any number of special subjects. Allegory was the guiding concept. Every incident in the Old Testament was considered to pre-figure in allegory what was to come in the New. Everything in nature concealed an allegorical meaning relating to some aspect of Christian doctrine. Allegorical figures—Greed, Reason, Courtesy, Love, False-Seeming, Do-Well, Fair Welcome, Evil Rumor—peopled the tales and political treatises.

  Epics of great heroes, of Brutus and King Arthur, of the “strong stryfe” of Greece and Troy, of Alexander and Julius Caesar, of how Charlemagne and Roland fought the Saracens and how Tristan and Iseult loved and sinned, were the favorites of noble households, though not to the exclusion of coarser stuff. The fabliaux or tales of common life, bawdy and scatological, were told in noble halls as well as taverns. The Ménagier of Paris, a wealthy bourgeois contemporary of Enguerrand VII, who at the age of sixty in 1392 wrote a book of domestic and moral instruction for his young wife, had read or possessed the Bible, The Golden Legend, St. Jerome’s Lives of the Fathers, the works of St. Augustine, St. Gregory, Livy, Cicero, the Roman de la Rose, Petrarch’s Tale of Griselda, and other less familiar titles. The Chevalier Geoffroy de La Tour Landry, a slightly older contemporary of Enguerrand, who in 1371 wrote a book of cautionary tales for his daughters, was as well acquainted with Sarah, Bathsheba, and Delilah as with Helen of Troy, Hippolyta, and Dido. If the Ménagier was too respectable to read Ovid, the Roman poet was well known to others. Aristotle was the basis of political philosophy, Ptolemy of “natural” philosophy, Hippocrates and Galen of medicine.

  Contemporary writers rapidly found an audience. In Dante’s lifetime his verse was chanted by blacksmiths and mule-drivers; fifty years later in 1373 the growth of reading caused the Signoria of Florence, at the petition of citizens, to offer a year’s course of public lectures on Dante’
s work for which the sum of 100 gold florins was raised to pay the lecturer, who was to speak every day except holy days. The person appointed was Boccaccio, who had written the first biography of Dante and copied out the entire Divine Comedy himself as a gift for Petrarch.

  In an Italian biographical dictionary at the end of the century, the longest articles were given to Julius Caesar and Hannibal, two pages to Dante, one page each to Archimedes, Aristotle, King Arthur, and Attila the Hun, two and a half columns to Petrarch, one column to Boccaccio, shorter mentions to Cimabue and Giotto, and three lines to Marco Polo.

  For Enguerrand at age seven, the usual pattern was abruptly interrupted when his father was killed in the war against the English at about the time of the fatal Battle of Crécy in 1346, but whether in that or another engagement is uncertain.

  When a fief owing an important number of fighting men to the King was left in the hands of a widow or minor heir, the question of control became crucial, the more so now when the kingdom was already at war. As governors of the barony of Coucy during Enguerrand’s minority, the King appointed the chief of his Council, Jean de Nesles, Sire d’Offémont, a member of the old nobility, and another of the royal inner circle, Matthieu de Roye, Sire d’Aunoy, Master of the Crossbowmen of France, an office exercising command over all archers and infantry. Both were seigneurs of Picardy with lands not far from Coucy. Enguerrand’s uncle, Jean de Coucy, Sire d’Havraincourt, was named his guardian and tutor or adviser. His mother, Catherine of Austria, left in a situation vulnerable to predatory ambitions, quickly concluded an agreement with the numerous brothers and sisters of her late husband who during his lifetime had held the property in common. They were confirmed in possession of various castles and manors, and Enguerrand VII, who had no brothers or sisters, was confirmed as successor to the major portion of the domain, including the territories of Coucy, Marie, La Fère, Boissy-en-Brie, Oisy-en-Cambrésis, and their towns and dependencies.

  In 1348 or ’49 Enguerrand’s mother remarried, presumably by her own or her own family’s choice, a fellow Austrian or German named Conrad de Magdebourg (also called Hardeck). Catherine bore no children of this marriage; within a year she and her husband were dead, victims of the great holocaust that was about to overtake Europe and leave Enguerrand an orphan.

  During her lifetime Catherine was said to have taken great care of her son’s education, wishing him to distinguish himself in “the arts, letters and sciences pertaining to his rank” and frequently reminding him of the “virtue and high reputation of his ancestors.” Coming from a 16th century account of Enguerrand de Coucy, this statement may have been the kind of tribute routinely paid at that time to noble personages: equally well it could have had some basis in fact. Like other medieval childhoods, however, Enguerrand’s is a blank. Nothing is known of him until his sudden emergence onto the pages of history in 1358 at the age of eighteen.

  Of chivalry, the culture that nurtured him, much is known. More than a code of manners in war and love, chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life. That it was about four parts in five illusion made it no less governing for all that. It developed at the same time as the great crusades of the 12th century as a code intended to fuse the religious and martial spirits and somehow bring the fighting man into accord with Christian theory. Since a knight’s usual activities were as much at odds with Christian theory as a merchant’s, a moral gloss was needed that would allow the Church to tolerate the warriors in good conscience and the warriors to pursue their own values in spiritual comfort. With the help of Benedictine thinkers, a code evolved that put the knight’s sword arm in the service, theoretically, of justice, right, piety, the Church, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed. Knighthood was received in the name of the Trinity after a ceremony of purification, confession, communion. A saint’s relic was usually embedded in the hilt of the knight’s sword so that upon clasping it as he took his oath, he caused the vow to be registered in Heaven. Chivalry’s famous celebrator Ramon Lull, a contemporary of St. Louis, could now state as his thesis that “God and chivalry are in concord.”

  But, like business enterprise, chivalry could not be contained by the Church, and bursting through the pious veils, it developed its own principles. Prowess, that combination of courage, strength, and skill that made a chevalier preux, was the prime essential. Honor and loyalty, together with courtesy—meaning the kind of behavior that has since come to be called “chivalrous”—were the ideals, and so-called courtly love the presiding genius. Designed to make the knight more polite and to lift the tone of society, courtly love required its disciple to be in a chronically amorous condition, on the theory that he would thus be rendered more courteous, gay, and gallant, and society in consequence more joyous. Largesse was the necessary accompaniment. An open-handed generosity in gifts and hospitality was the mark of a gentleman and had its practical value in attracting other knights to fight under the banner and bounty of the grand seigneur. Over-celebrated by troubadours and chroniclers who depended on its flow, largesse led to reckless extravagance and careless bankruptcies.

  Prowess was not mere talk, for the function of physical violence required real stamina. To fight on horseback or foot wearing 55 pounds of plate armor, to crash in collision with an opponent at full gallop while holding horizontal an eighteen-foot lance half the length of an average telephone pole, to give and receive blows with sword or battle-ax that could cleave a skull or slice off a limb at a stroke, to spend half of life in the saddle through all weathers and for days at a time, was not a weakling’s work. Hardship and fear were part of it. “Knights who are at the wars … are forever swallowing their fear,” wrote the companion and biographer of Don Pero Niño, the “Unconquered Knight” of the late 14th century. “They expose themselves to every peril; they give up their bodies to the adventure of life in death. Moldy bread or biscuit, meat cooked or uncooked; today enough to eat and tomorrow nothing, little or no wine, water from a pond or a butt, bad quarters, the shelter of a tent or branches, a bad bed, poor sleep with their armor still on their backs, burdened with iron, the enemy an arrow-shot off. ‘Ware! Who goes there? To arms! To arms!’ With the first drowsiness, an alarm; at dawn, the trumpet. ‘To horse! To horse! Muster! Muster!’ As lookouts, as sentinels, keeping watch by day and by night, fighting without cover, as foragers, as scouts, guard after guard, duty after duty. ‘Here they come! Here! They are so many—No, not as many as that—This way—that—Come this side—Press them there—News! News! They come back hurt, they have prisoners—no, they bring none back. Let us go! Let us go! Give no ground! On!’ Such is their calling.”

  Horrid wounds were part of the calling. In one combat Don Pero Niño was struck by an arrow that “knit together his gorget and his neck,” but he fought on against the enemy on the. bridge. “Several lance stumps were still in his shield and it was that which hindered him most.” A bolt from a crossbow “pierced his nostrils most painfully whereat he was dazed, but his daze lasted but a little time.” He pressed forward, receiving many sword blows on head and shoulders which “sometimes hit the bolt embedded in his nose making him suffer great pain.” When weariness on both sides brought the battle to an end, Pero Nino’s shield “was tattered and all in pieces; his sword blade was toothed like a saw and dyed with blood … his armor was broken in several places by lance-heads of which some had entered the flesh and drawn blood, although the coat was of great strength.” Prowess was not easily bought.

  Loyalty, meaning the pledged word, was chivalry’s fulcrum. The extreme emphasis given to it derived from the time when a pledge between lord and vassal was the only form of government. A knight who broke his oath was charged with “treason” for betraying the order of knighthood. The concept of loyalty did not preclude treachery or the most egregious trickery as long as no knightly oath was broken. When a party of armed knights gained entrance to a walled town by declaring themselves allies and then proceeded to slaughter the defenders, chivalry was evidently not violated,
no oath having been made to the burghers.

  Chivalry was regarded as a universal order of all Christian knights, a trans-national class moved by a single ideal, much as Marxism later regarded all workers of the world. It was a military guild in which all knights were theoretically brothers, although Froissart excepted the Germans and Spaniards, who, he said, were too uncultivated to understand chivalry.

  In the performance of his function, the knight must be prepared, as John of Salisbury wrote, “to shed your blood for your brethren”—he meant brethren in the universal sense—“and, if needs must, to lay down your life.” Many were thus prepared, though perhaps more from sheer love of battle than concern for a cause. Blind King John of Bohemia met death in that way. He loved fighting for its own sake, not caring whether the conflict was important. He missed hardly a quarrel in Europe and entered tournaments in between, allegedly receiving in one of them the wound that blinded him. His subjects, on the other hand, said the cause was Divine punishment—not because he dug up the old synagogue of Prague, which he did, but because, on finding money concealed beneath the pavement, he was moved by greed and the advice of German knights to dig up the tomb of St. Adelbert in the Prague cathedral and was stricken blind by the desecrated saint.

  As an ally of Philip VI, at the head of 500 knights, the sightless King fought the English through Picardy, always rash and in the avant-garde. At Crécy he asked his knights to lead him deeper into the battle so that he might strike further blows with his sword. Twelve of them tied their horses’ reins together and, with the King at their head, advanced into the thick of the fight, “so far as never to return.” His body was found next day among his knights, all slain with their horses still tied together.