A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Admirers of Meung sprang to his defense in open letters to Christine and Gerson. The defenders, Jean de Montreuil, Gontier and Pierre Col, were clerics and scholars in the secretarial service of the crown. Together with like-minded academics, they were among those who had chosen another path than Gerson in reaction to the dusty answers of the scholastics. With their faith in human reason and recognition of natural instincts they were acknowledging the lay spirit. In that sense they were humanists, although not concerned with the classical researches of the humanist movement in Florence. What they admired in Meung was his free-ranging thought and bold attack on standard formulas. Among certain learned and enlightened men, Jean de Montreuil asserted, appreciation of the Roman de la Rose was such that they would rather do without their shirts than this book. “The more I study the gravity of the mysteries and the mystery of the gravity of this profound and famous work, the more I am astonished at your disapproval.”

  While fervent, this was not very specific. Pierre Col was more courageous, defending the sensuality that so offended Gerson. He asserted that the Song of Solomon celebrated love for the daughter of Pharaoh, not for the Church; that the female vulva represented by the Rose was held to be sacred, according to the Gospel of St. Luke; and that Gerson himself would one day fall in love, as had happened to other theologians.

  The debate expanded. Christine replied with Le Dit de la Rose and Gerson with a magisterial essay, Tractatus Contra Romantium de Rosa in which allegorical figures carry their complaints against Jean de Meung before the “sacred court of Christianity” and he is appropriately condemned. Although Gerson had the last word in the controversy, he could not destroy the attraction of the book. It continued to be widely read into the 16th century, surviving even a pious attempt to “moralize” its images, in which the Rose was transformed into an allegory for Jesus.

  While Gerson remained within the establishment, the search for faith was drawing others outside in movements away from institutional religion. People were seeking in lay communion a substitute for rituals grown routine and corrupt. Faith was all the more needed when the way seemed lost in a dark wood of alarms and confusions.

  The damage done by the schism had deepened. Both the popes were absorbed in extravagant display for the sake of prestige and the search for more and more money to support it. Pope Boniface in Rome took cuts from usury and sold benefices to the point of scandal, sometimes re-selling the same office to a higher bidder and dating the second appointment previous to the first. He sold the right to hold as many as ten or twelve benefices at a time. Clement VII extracted “voluntary” loans and subsidies and piled up ecclesiastical taxes until his bishops in 1392 refused to pay, and pinned their protest to the doors of the papal palace in Avignon. As a dependent of France, he made over tithes on the French clergy to the crown, and in the many disputes arising from this, he took the crown’s part against the clergy. No measures filled his need; he had to borrow from usurers and pawn the sacred treasures. At his death, it was said, the papal tiara itself was on pawn.

  Within the Empire the effect of the schism was not greatly divisive because conditions were already so chaotic that they could not have been made much worse. Charles IV had taken the precaution before he died of having his eldest son, Wenceslas, crowned King of Bohemia and nominated Emperor ahead of time, but concord and unity did not come with the title. This was not surprising since Charles had apportioned rule of the imperial territories among Wenceslas’ two brothers, an uncle and a cousin. Their interests were often at odds, the rival houses of Wittelsbach and Hapsburg were hostile, the twenty-odd principalities were insubordinate, the towns, fighting to maintain their privileges, formed leagues against the nobles. Revenues adequate for the exercise of central government could not be collected out of conditions of anarchy, and the authority of the Emperor was too superficial to control the situation.

  Wenceslas IV was eighteen when he acceded to the throne in 1378 shortly after accompanying his father on the memorable visit to Paris. Although trained in government by his father, well educated and literate in Latin, French, German, and Czech, he lacked the character to dominate his circumstances. Despite his initial efforts to work out a balance of forces, the incessant warring of groups and classes, of towns versus princes, lesser nobles against the greater, Germans against Czechs, leagues against leagues, created a network of dissension that defied sovereignty—and destroyed the sovereign.

  A tragic, ruined figure, Wenceslas emerges from the chronicles a kind of Caliban, half clownish, half vicious, a composite of half-truths and legends reflecting the animosities of his various sets of enemies. Because his reign was the source of the Hussite revolt against the Church and of the rising Czech nationalism hostile to the Germans, Wenceslas suffered posthumously from both clerical and German chroniclers. The unfair advantage of the written word triumphs in the end. But even if exaggerated, the stories about Wenceslas are too much of a kind not to represent some body of truth.

  Said by his partisans to be good-looking and well-mannered, he appears more generally as a “wild boar” who went on rampages at night with bad companions, burst into burghers’ houses to rape their wives, shut up his own wife in a whorehouse, roasted a cook who served him a burned meal. According to these versions, he was sired by a cobbler, was born ugly and deformed (causing the death of his mother in giving him birth), soiled the baptismal water at his christening, and stained the altar by sweating profusely at his coronation at the age of two—all omens, although probably ex post facto, of an unholy reign. He was happy only when hunting, spending months at a time in the woods and at hunting lodges to the neglect of government, preferring the company of grooms and hunting companions whom he ennobled, to the anger of the barons. His early efforts to uphold justice and achieve order left him frustrated, he only made enemies by favoring one faction over another, his errors of judgment compounded a sense of inadequacy, he became incapable of pursuing a policy with any consistency, fled from his problems, and found refuge from incapacity in hunting and heavy drinking.

  While it was common in Germany for a man in any rank of society to drink himself under the table, Wenceslas became a confirmed alcoholic. He grew increasingly irritable and black-tempered and indolent as a sovereign, stayed in Prague to the neglect of the rest of the Empire, and succumbed to fits of savagery in which he was thought sometimes to have “lost command of his reason.” As if reflecting his master, one of the hounds that followed him everywhere was said to have attacked and killed his first wife, Joanna of Bavaria—although according to other sources she died of the plague and left a sorrowing husband too distressed—or possibly too drunk—to attend the funeral. Evidently not as repellent as he was later made out to be, he married a second Bavarian princess, reputedly very beautiful, who was said to have held him in great affection. Not so the Church, whose priests he pilloried, together with their concubines. His reign saw the notorious pogrom of 1389 when a priest leading a procession through the Jewish quarter of Prague on Easter Sunday was stoned by a Jewish child, causing the townspeople to turn out for the slaughter of 3,000 of the Jewish community. When the survivors sought justice from the King, Wenceslas declared that the Jews deserved their punishment, and fined the survivors, not the perpetrators.

  His most famous conflict came with the Church and ended in the canonizing of his victim. Its cause lay in the usual struggle of temporal versus ecclesiastical authority. Enmity reached a peak in 1393 when the Archbishop of Prague ordered his Vicar-General, John of Pomuk, to confirm the election of an abbot chosen by the monks over the candidate preferred by the King. Wenceslas in a fury threw the Archbishop, the Vicar-General, and two other prelates into prison; then, after releasing the Archbishop, tortured the others to extract a confession of the hierarchy’s hostile designs. Maddened by their silence, the King himself reportedly seized a torch to apply to the victims’ feet. Frightened by what he had done, he then offered to spare their lives in return for their promise on oath not to tell of th
eir torture. When John of Pomuk proved too broken and suffering to sign the oath, Wenceslas, in a compulsion to destroy the evidence, had him bound hand and foot and thrown from a bridge into the Moldau to drown. John of Pomuk was subsequently canonized as a martyr and made the patron saint of all bridges.

  The King’s troubles mounted through the 1390s. He was drunk a great part of the time but not so incapacitated as to fail to aggrandize his Bohemian possessions at the expense of the great nobles. In consequence, he succeeded in uniting them in antagonism for long enough to enable them finally to depose him as Emperor in 1400, although he remained King of Bohemia.

  Wenceslas’ difficulties were not merely personal or temperamental. They were an epitome of his century. He too was lost in the dark wood of his time. Like Jean II of France, he was born to a task of government too heavy for him in an age when too much was going wrong. Like government, the Church in his country was failing in its task and giving rise to the strongest movement for reform in Europe. Taking its doctrine from Wyclif and named for Jan Hus, who was to be burned as a heretic in 1415, the Hussite rising opened the way to the Reformation a hundred years later. It also finished off Wenceslas by inducing an apoplectic fit of which he died in 1419.

  In France the feverish atmosphere showed itself in 1389 when an impassioned controversy over the immaculate conception of the Virgin caused Dominican monks to be accused, like the Jews in the plague, of poisoning the rivers if not the wells. It happened that a Dominican, Jean de Montson, had propagated the view that the Virgin was conceived in original sin. He was condemned by the University of Paris, which upheld the opposite, Franciscan, view of her immaculate conception. When Montson appealed to Pope Clement, d’Ailly and Gerson went to Avignon to demand official approval of their opinion. Clement was in a dilemma. Montson’s view was that of previous orthodoxy approved by Thomas Aquinas. If Clement denounced it, his own orthodoxy would be challenged by his rival in Rome. If he upheld it, he would be contradicting the University and arousing popular wrath in France. In the heat of this situation, angry threats pursued the Dominicans. Afraid for his life, Montson went over to Rome, leaving Clement free to declare for Immaculate Conception.

  While devotion to the Virgin could still arouse such feeling, disbelief and irreverence were common at the end of the century, if the complaints of clerics and preachers reflect the true case. Scolding the laity was the cleric’s normal occupation, but now the volume was rising. Many folk “believe in naught higher than the roof of their house,” lamented the future saint Bernardino of Siena. His fellow monk Walsingham reported that certain barons of England believe “that there is no God, and deny the sacrament of the altar and resurrection after death, and consider that as is the death of a beast of burden, so is the end of man himself.” Alongside evidence of failing faith may be put the unfailing succession of wills and bequests to shrines, chapels, convents, hermits, and sums for prayers and for pilgrimages by proxy. Few who professed disbelief during life took chances when they neared the end.

  The too frequent use of excommunication for failure to take communion or keep feast days, so deplored by Gerson and other reformers, was a measure of the falling off of religious observance. Churches were empty and mass meagerly attended, wrote Nicolas de Clamanges in his great tract De Ruina et Reparatione Ecclesiae (The Ruin and Reform of the Church). The young, according to him, rarely went to church except on feast days and then only to see the painted faces and décolleté 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.

  Irreverence in many cases was the by-product of a religion so much a part of daily life that it was treated with over-familiarity, but the chorus of reproof at the end of the century indicated a growing element of disgust. “Men slept in indifference and closed their eyes to the scandal,” mourned the Monk of St. Denis. “It was a waste of time to talk of ways to reform the Church.”

  Indifference, however, like a vacuum in nature, is not a natural condition of human affairs. A new devotional movement arose at this time in the small trading towns of northern Holland, between desolate marshland and moor near the mouth of the Rhine—as if only in a remote corner of strife-torn Europe could fresh piety find a place to sprout. Because the members lived communally, they came to be known by their neighbors as the Brethren of the Common Life, although they referred to themselves simply as “the devout.” Their purpose was to find direct union with God, and through preaching and good works create a devout lay society. They were not extremists like the earlier Brethren of the Free Spirit but simply, as they said, “religious men trying to live in the world”—meaning the lay world as distinct from the cloistered.

  Gerard Groote, founder of the movement, was the son of a prosperous cloth merchant of Deventer in Holland. Born in the same year as Coucy, he spent a dissolute youth while studying law and theology at the University of Paris, where he dabbled in magic and medicine and made love to women “in every green woods and upon every mountain.” Finding the scholars’ disputations “useless and full of discord,” he left the University to join the secular clergy, and after a career as a worldly pastor in Utrecht and Cologne, experienced a conversion. Giving away his property in Deventer to charity, he went forth to preach a gospel of dedication to God springing from an “inner kernel of devotion,” rather than from baptism and the sacraments.

  His zeal, gift of rhetoric, and an impressive personality attracted listeners in crowds that often overflowed the churches. People came to listen from miles away. Wearing an old gray cloak and patched garments, and trundling with him a barrel of books from which to confute critics after a sermon, Groote urged love of neighbors as well as of God, elimination of vice, and obedience to Christ’s commandments. Lamenting the corruption and predicting the impending collapse of the Church, he preached to the clergy in Latin and to the laity in the vernacular. A disciple took down his words and another went ahead to post announcement of a coming sermon on the church doors of the next town. Enthusiasts met in groups to adopt his principles and gradually joined to practice them, living together in houses segregated by sex.

  Association was voluntary, without the binding vow essential in the regular Orders, committing members to life apart from the world. Under the rules of Groote’s Devotia Moderna, members were to live in poverty and chastity but, instead of begging like the friars, were to earn their living by teaching children and by two occupations not controlled by the guilds, copying manuscripts and cooking. Work, Groote believed, “was wonderfully necessary to mankind in restoring the mind to purity,” although not so commerce: “Labor is holy, but business is dangerous.” By the time he died of an illness in 1384, his followers’ houses in Holland and the Rhineland numbered well over a hundred, with those for women being three times as many as those for men.

  The communities’ emphasis on individual devotion and their very existence without a vow or an official rule were in themselves a criticism of the authorized Orders. Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels. Before he died, Groote was prohibited from preaching by the Bishop of Utrecht. When other churchmen afterward attempted to suppress the movement, his followers made vigorous and successful defense of their principles. At the Council of Constance in 1415, Gerson, though he disliked their doctrines, defended them against charges of heresy. Their communities survived because a climate of sympathy existed in their favor, and not only among the laity. Two years after Groote’s death, the B
rethren established their first formal monastery in association with the Augustinian Order, though still without vows. Although the movement remained small and limited, it was soon to produce in The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, the most widely read religious book in Catholicism after the Bible.

  In 1380, in the small town of Kempen, south of Deventer, a peasant’s son was born to an evidently literate mother who kept a dame’s school for the younger children of the town. At twelve, Thomas of Kempen—or a Kempis, as he came to be called—entered a school of the Common Life at Deventer, lived and studied with its disciples, and then joined an associated Augustinian monastery, where he remained for the rest of his 91 years. Loving books and quiet corners, he compiled the sayings and sermons of Groote and his disciples into a prolonged rhapsody on the theme that the world is delusion and the Kingdom of God is within; that the inner spiritual life is preparation for life everlasting. What he was saying over and over, through endless variations and admonitions, was that the life of the senses is without value, that the riches, pleasures, and powers of the world—the things most men want and rarely obtain—are no good to them anyway, but are only an obstacle on the way to eternal life; that the way to salvation lies in the abnegation of earthly desires and in the continual struggle against sin in order to make room for love of God; that man is born “with an inclination to evil,” which he must conquer to be saved; that good lies in doing, not knowing—“I would rather feel compunction than know how to define it”; that only the humble in spirit are at peace—“it is much safer to be in subjection than in authority”; that to desire anything is to be “straightway disquieted”; that man is but a pilgrim in life, the world is an exile, home is with God.