A Distant Mirror

Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.

If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.

What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few?

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex. As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even for the sake of success.

Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, “no epoch was more naturally mad.”

Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.

Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.

Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.

When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.

The emphasis on sorcery reflected accusations by the authorities more than it did actual practice. Being threatened, the Church responded by virulent persecution.

In the midst of events there is no perspective.

Nothing is more certain than death and nothing uncertain but its hour.

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?

Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.

As the era of the sword was ending, that of firearms began, in time to allow no lapse in man’s belligerent capacity.

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.

To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states.

His (Deschamps’) complaint of court life was the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was composed of hypocrisy, flattery, lying, paying and betraying; it was where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind, and dumb.

Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

When reproached for spending too much time with books and clerks, Charles answered, “As long as knowledge is honored in this country, so long will it prosper.”

Against men habituated to lawless force, violent punishment failed to bring the violence under control.

That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.

Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.

Left to face a hungry winter robbed of their hard-earned harvests, the people experienced their own warrior class not as protectors but ravagers.

Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.

What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact.

The system was aided by the Church, whose natural interests allied it more to the great than to the meek.