A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Pursuit for the strategic purpose of destroying the enemy’s armed forces did not belong in the medieval lexicon of war. Evidently somewhat stunned by his own victory, Edward made no effort to pursue. Absorbed in the riches of conquest, the English spent the day after the battle in counting and identifying the dead, giving honorable burial to the noblest, and reckoning the ransoms of prisoners. Afterward, despite his claim to be King of France, Edward appeared to lose interest in Philip, who had taken refuge in Amiens. Keeping to the coast, the English marched north to assault Calais, the port opposite Dover where the Channel is narrowest. Here, blocked by a tenacious defense, they bogged down in a siege that was to last a year.

  The defeat of French chivalry and of the supposedly most powerful sovereign in Europe started a train of reactions that were to grow more serious with time. Although it did not bring down the French monarchy nor bring it to terms, it did cause a crisis of confidence in the royal government, and a general resentment when the King once more had to resort to extraordinary taxation. From this date, too, began an erosion of belief in the nobles’ performance of their function.

  Philip had neither the instinct for rule possessed by Philip the Fair and St. Louis, nor councillors capable of reforming the military and financial customs to meet the new dangers that had come upon them. The provincial estates whose consent was required for new taxes were reluctant, like most representative bodies, to recognize crisis until it was underfoot. Given an inadequate and obsolete system, the King had to devise substitutes like the sales tax—called maltôte because it was so hated—or the equally unpopular salt tax; or else he fell back on devaluing the coinage. In disruption of prices, rents, debts, and credit, the effect of this subterfuge for taxation was regularly disastrous. “And in the year 1343 Philip of Valois made 15 deniers worth three,” wrote one chronicler in sufficient comment.

  Each time they were summoned to vote aids, the Estates voiced their loud discontent with fiscal abuses. Each time they made their grudging subsidies contingent on stated reforms, in the belief that better management by more honest men would enable the King once again to live of his own.

  After Crécy and the loss of Calais, a new Estates General was summoned in 1347 to meet the King’s desperate need of money for defense. Armed forces and a fleet had to be reconstructed against the danger of renewed invasion. Sharpened by the shame of steady defeats, the Estates’ displeasure with the royal government was outspoken. “You should know,” they told the King, “how and by what counsel you have conducted your wars and how you, by bad counsel, have lost all and gained nothing.” If he had had good counsel, they said, no prince in the world “should have been able to do ill to you and your subjects.” They reminded him how he had gone to Crécy and Calais “in great company, at great cost and great expense [14th century speakers and writers had an affinity for double statements] and how you were treated shamefully and sent back scurvily and made to grant all manner of truces even while the enemy were in your kingdom.… And by such counsel have you been dishonored.” After this scolding, the Estates, acknowledging the need for defenses, promised subsidies, but on rather indefinite terms.

  While besieging Calais, Edward still hoped to cement an alliance with Flanders by his daughter’s marriage to the young Count Louis de Male. The death at Crécy of the boy’s father, Count Louis de Nevers, removed the main obstacle. But fifteen-year-old Louis, “who had been ever nourished among the noble men of France,” would not agree and “ever he said he would not wed her whose father had slain his, though he might have half the whole realm of England.” When the Flemings saw that their lord was “too much French and evil counseled,” they put him in “courteous prison” until he should agree to accept their counsel, which greatly annoyed him, so that after several months in prison he gave the required promise. Released, he was allowed to go hawking by the river, but kept under such close surveillance lest he should steal away “that he could not piss without their knowledge.” Under this treatment he finally agreed to wed.

  Early in March 1347 the King and Queen of England with their daughter Isabelle came up from Calais to Flanders. The betrothal took place in great ceremony, the marriage contract was drawn, the wedding day fixed for the first week in April, and lavish gifts were prepared by the royal parents. Louis continued to go hawking daily by the river, making pretense that the marriage pleased him greatly, so that the Flemings relaxed their watch. But they misjudged their lord’s outward countenance, “for his inward courage was all French.”

  In the same week that the marriage was to take place, he rode forth as usual with his falconer. Casting his hawk after a heron with the call “Hoie! Hoie!” he followed the flight until at some distance off he “dashed his spurs to his horse and galloped forth,” not stopping until he was over the border in France, where he joined King Philip and told him how with “great subtlety” he had escaped the English marriage. The King was overjoyed and speedily arranged Louis’ marriage with Margaret of Brabant, daughter of the Duke of Brabant, Flanders’ neighbor on the east, who was closely allied to France. The insult to the English crown was sharp, and doubtless sharper to the fifteen-year-old bride. Her feelings could not have been soothed by a song written in her name and, according to Jean de Venette, sung everywhere in France with the refrain, “J’ay failli à celui à qui je estoie donnée par amour” (I have lost him whose love I was given to be). Four years later she revenged herself on a different bridegroom by jilting him in her turn almost at the church door. Either because these aborted betrothals gave her a taste for independence, or because she had a character notoriously willful, Isabelle of England was still unmarried when she met Enguerrand de Coucy VII thirteen years later.

  The capture of Calais a few months after the Flemish marital fiasco was the single great result of the campaign. Philip had assembled a relief force and started toward the city, but, hampered by lack of money and the losses after Crécy, turned away without fighting. Waiting for the relief that never came and cut off from food, the citizens of Calais held out until, reduced to eating rats and mice and even excrement, they were starved into surrender. Recently wounded, their captain, Jean de Vienne, bare-headed and holding his sword reversed in token of submission, rode through the gate to hand over the keys of the city to the English. Walking behind him barefoot in their shirts were the six richest burghers with halters around their necks to signify the victor’s right to hang them at will. In that somber scene, watched by the hollow-eyed, desolate survivors, a French cause was born: to retrieve Calais.

  Exasperated by the prolonged resistance which had dragged him, against the medieval habit, through a winter’s siege, Edward was in a furious mood and would have hung the six burghers but for Queen Philippa’s moving plea for mercy. The drawn-out effort from August 1346 to August 1347 had soured his troops and exhausted his resources. Provisions, horses, arms, and reinforcements had to be brought from England, where the requisitioning of grain and cattle caused hardship, and the necessary mobilizing of ships wrecked commerce, reducing revenues from the wool-export tax. It has been estimated that some 32,000 combatants, plus the crews of ships and all the service troops needed for the siege, making a total of 60,000 to 80,000 men, were employed in the course of the Crécy-Calais campaign. The drain having reached its limits, Edward could not advance from his victory. The new foothold in France led nowhere but to acceptance of a truce running until April 1351.

  If belligerents could make sober judgments during the course of a war, which they rarely can, the first ten years of the Anglo-French contest would have shown the English how inconclusive were their triumphs: to win a smashing naval victory, a smashing field victory, and a permanent foothold on the coast was still far from conquering France or its crown. But the taste of plunder, the gorgeous stuffs and rich ransoms flowing to England, and the glory and renown of Crécy cried by the heralds in public places had excited English blood. On their side, the French would now never stop short of the goal that the poet Eustache
Deschamps was to make his refrain forty years later: “No peace until they give back Calais.” Crécy and Calais ensured that the war would go on—but not yet, for Europe in 1347 stood on the edge of the most lethal catastrophe in recorded history.

  Chapter 5

  “This Is the End of the World”: The Black Death

  In October 1347, two months after the fall of Calais, Genoese trading ships put into the harbor of Messina in Sicily with dead and dying men at the oars. The ships had come from the Black Sea port of Caffa (now Feodosiya) in the Crimea, where the Genoese maintained a trading post. The diseased sailors showed strange black swellings about the size of an egg or an apple in the armpits and groin. The swellings oozed blood and pus and were followed by spreading boils and black blotches on the skin from internal bleeding. The sick suffered severe pain and died quickly within five days of the first symptoms. As the disease spread, other symptoms of continuous fever and spitting of blood appeared instead of the swellings or buboes. These victims coughed and sweated heavily and died even more quickly, within three days or less, sometimes in 24 hours. In both types everything that issued from the body—breath, sweat, blood from the buboes and lungs, bloody urine, and blood-blackened excrement—smelled foul. Depression and despair accompanied the physical symptoms, and before the end “death is seen seated on the face.”

  The disease was bubonic plague, present in two forms: one that infected the bloodstream, causing the buboes and internal bleeding, and was spread by contact; and a second, more virulent pneumonic type that infected the lungs and was spread by respiratory infection. The presence of both at once cause the high mortality and speed of contagion. So lethal was the disease that cases were known of persons going to bed well and dying before they woke, of doctors catching the illness at a bedside and dying before the patient. So rapidly did it spread from one to another that to a French physician, Simon de Covino, it seemed as if one sick person “could infect the whole world.” The malignity of the pestilence appeared more terrible because its victims knew no prevention and no remedy.

  The physical suffering of the disease and its aspect of evil mystery were expressed in a strange Welsh lament which saw “death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance. Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit! It is seething, terrible … a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry … a painful angry knob … Great is its seething like a burning cinder … a grievous thing of ashy color.” Its eruption is ugly like the “seeds of black peas, broken fragments of brittle sea-coal … the early ornaments of black death, cinders of the peelings of the cockle weed, a mixed multitude, a black plague like halfpence, like berries.…”

  Rumors of a terrible plague supposedly arising in China and spreading through Tartary (Central Asia) to India and Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and all of Asia Minor had reached Europe in 1346. They told of a death toll so devastating that all of India was said to be depopulated, whole territories covered by dead bodies, other areas with no one left alive. As added up by Pope Clement VI at Avignon, the total of reported dead reached 23,840,000. In the absence of a concept of contagion, no serious alarm was felt in Europe until the trading ships brought their black burden of pestilence into Messina while other infected ships from the Levant carried it to Genoa and Venice.

  By January 1348 it penetrated France via Marseille, and North Africa via Tunis. Shipborne along coasts and navigable rivers, it spread westward from Marseille through the ports of Languedoc to Spain and northward up the Rhône to Avignon, where it arrived in March. It reached Narbonne, Montpellier, Carcassonne, and Toulouse between February and May, and at the same time in Italy spread to Rome and Florence and their hinterlands. Between June and August it reached Bordeaux, Lyon, and Paris, spread to Burgundy and Normandy, and crossed the Channel from Normandy into southern England. From Italy during the same summer it crossed the Alps into Switzerland and reached eastward to Hungary.

  In a given area the plague accomplished its kill within four to six months and then faded, except in the larger cities, where, rooting into the close-quartered population, it abated during the winter, only to reappear in spring and rage for another six months.

  In 1349 it resumed in Paris, spread to Picardy, Flanders, and the Low Countries, and from England to Scotland and Ireland as well as to Norway, where a ghost ship with a cargo of wool and a dead crew drifted offshore until it ran aground near Bergen. From there the plague passed into Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, Iceland, and as far as Greenland. Leaving a strange pocket of immunity in Bohemia, and Russia unattacked until 1351, it had passed from most of Europe by mid-1350. Although the mortality rate was erratic, ranging from one fifth in some places to nine tenths or almost total elimination in others, the overall estimate of modern demographers has settled—for the area extending from India to Iceland—around the same figure expressed in Froissart’s casual words: “a third of the world died.” His estimate, the common one at the time, was not an inspired guess but a borrowing of St. John’s figure for mortality from plague in Revelation, the favorite guide to human affairs of the Middle Ages.

  A third of Europe would have meant about 20 million deaths. No one knows in truth how many died. Contemporary reports were an awed impression, not an accurate count. In crowded Avignon, it was said, 400 died daily; 7,000 houses emptied by death were shut up; a single graveyard received 11,000 corpses in six weeks; half the city’s inhabitants reportedly died, including 9 cardinals or one third of the total, and 70 lesser prelates. Watching the endlessly passing death carts, chroniclers let normal exaggeration take wings and put the Avignon death toll at 62,000 and even at 120,000, although the city’s total population was probably less than 50,000.

  When graveyards filled up, bodies at Avignon were thrown into the Rhône until mass burial pits were dug for dumping the corpses. In London in such pits corpses piled up in layers until they overflowed. Everywhere reports speak of the sick dying too fast for the living to bury. Corpses were dragged out of homes and left in front of doorways. Morning light revealed new piles of bodies. In Florence the dead were gathered up by the Compagnia della Misericordia—founded in 1244 to care for the sick—whose members wore red robes and hoods masking the face except for the eyes. When their efforts failed, the dead lay putrid in the streets for days at a time. When no coffins were to be had, the bodies were laid on boards, two or three at once, to be carried to graveyards or common pits. Families dumped their own relatives into the pits, or buried them so hastily and thinly “that dogs dragged them forth and devoured their bodies.”

  Amid accumulating death and fear of contagion, people died without last rites and were buried without prayers, a prospect that terrified the last hours of the stricken. A bishop in England gave permission to laymen to make confession to each other as was done by the Apostles, “or if no man is present then even to a woman,” and if no priest could be found to administer extreme unction, “then faith must suffice.” Clement VI found it necessary to grant remissions of sin to all who died of the plague because so many were unattended by priests. “And no bells tolled,” wrote a chronicler of Siena, “and nobody wept no matter what his loss because almost everyone expected death.… And people said and believed, ‘This is the end of the world.’ ”

  In Paris, where the plague lasted through 1349, the reported death rate was 800 a day, in Pisa 500, in Vienna 500 to 600. The total dead in Paris numbered 50,000 or half the population. Florence, weakened by the famine of 1347, lost three to four fifths of its citizens, Venice two thirds, Hamburg and Bremen, though smaller in size, about the same proportion. Cities, as centers of transportation, were more likely to be affected than villages, although once a village was infected, its death rate was equally high. At Givry, a prosperous village in Burgundy of 1,200 to 1,500 people, the parish register records 615 deaths in the space of fourteen weeks, compared to an average of thirty deaths a year in the previous decade. In three villages of Cambridges
hire, manorial records show a death rate of 47 percent, 57 percent, and in one case 70 percent. When the last survivors, too few to carry on, moved away, a deserted village sank back into the wilderness and disappeared from the map altogether, leaving only a grass-covered ghostly outline to show where mortals once had lived.

  In enclosed places such as monasteries and prisons, the infection of one person usually meant that of all, as happened in the Franciscan convents of Carcassonne and Marseille, where every inmate without exception died. Of the 140 Dominicans at Montpellier only seven survived. Petrarch’s brother Gherardo, member of a Carthusian monastery, buried the prior and 34 fellow monks one by one, sometimes three a day, until he was left alone with his dog and fled to look for a place that would take him in. Watching every comrade die, men in such places could not but wonder whether the strange peril that filled the air had not been sent to exterminate the human race. In Kilkenny, Ireland, Brother John Clyn of the Friars Minor, another monk left alone among dead men, kept a record of what had happened lest “things which should be remembered perish with time and vanish from the memory of those who come after us.” Sensing “the whole world, as it were, placed within the grasp of the Evil One,” and waiting for death to visit him too, he wrote, “I leave parchment to continue this work, if perchance any man survive and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and carry on the work which I have begun.” Brother John, as noted by another hand, died of the pestilence, but he foiled oblivion.

  The largest cities of Europe, with populations of about 100,000, were Paris and Florence, Venice and Genoa. At the next level, with more than 50,000, were Ghent and Bruges in Flanders, Milan, Bologna, Rome, Naples, and Palermo, and Cologne. London hovered below 50,000, the only city in England except York with more than 10,000. At the level of 20,000 to 50,000 were Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, Marseille, and Lyon in France, Barcelona, Seville, and Toledo in Spain, Siena, Pisa, and other secondary cities in Italy, and the Hanseatic trading cities of the Empire. The plague raged through them all, killing anywhere from one third to two thirds of their inhabitants. Italy, with a total population of 10 to 11 million, probably suffered the heaviest toll. Following the Florentine bankruptcies, the crop failures and workers’ riots of 1346–47, the revolt of Cola di Rienzi that plunged Rome into anarchy, the plague came as the peak of successive calamities. As if the world were indeed in the grasp of the Evil One, its first appearance on the European mainland in January 1348 coincided with a fearsome earthquake that carved a path of wreckage from Naples up to Venice. Houses collapsed, church towers toppled, villages were crushed, and the destruction reached as far as Germany and Greece. Emotional response, dulled by horrors, underwent a kind of atrophy epitomized by the chronicler who wrote, “And in these days was burying without sorrowe and wedding without friendschippe.”