Image of the latest edition from the Penguin Random House website, penguinrandomhouse.com.
I read an older edition of the book: Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Ballentine Books, 1978).
Cover illustration: “The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse” from the Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duc de Berry, Courtesy of Musée Condé, Chantilly. [The Duc de Berry lived during the thirteenth century.]
Was the Fourteenth Century in Europe the Worst Time and Place to be Alive?
I spent July of 2026 reading A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman (Ballentine Books, New York, 1978), a decades-old study in small but well-written print of the fourteenth century. My prior knowledge of the Middle Ages began with a teenage read of Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott and the movie with Anthony Andrews, followed by a lot of novels and movies. It was time to learn the real history after decades of romanticized entertainment, and I was hoping a story idea for a medieval fiction book would spring to life from the pages. Tuchman’s account paints a grim picture, however, and the fourteenth century was terrible time to be alive for an ordinary man, and certainly not a romantic time.
Medieval knights were not particularly romantic or heroic, but rather mercenary. Bands of knights were for hire, switching sides when given a better offer. Logistics didn’t exist, so knights and soldiers in the many skirmished of the Hundred Years’ War supplied themselves by ransacking villages in their path. Local damsels were at risk from the knights, rather than objects of rescue as depicted in many a movie. True heroics in the century come from tales of Austrian peasants defending their villages from invading knights by climbing the mountainsides and raining stones on the knights and their horses as they rode into the mountain passes. Once such tale, whether true or legend, was the inspiration for the William Tell Overture (Tuchman, p. 274).
The confusing conflict between England and France known as the Hundred Years’ War tangled most of Europe in a scramble for lands and coin. Rather than killing each other in battle, nobles captured each other for ransom. Unable to pay King Edward’s ransom, even the King of France spent years in captivity in England.
The Papacy was itself a financial institution, a kind of ethereal bank, ensconced in a massive palace in Avignon rather than in Rome. France installed a second pope in Rome later in the century, the head of a band mercenary soldiers crowned as Pope Clement to oppose Pope Urban in Avignon. Bishoprics were available for purchases, as well as indulgences to secure one’s position in the afterlife.
The Papacy had its own military as well, gaining control and lands as well as funding the crusades. Tuchman’s gives a thorough analysis of the complete absence of any separation between church and state in this century, including a sound line of reasoning for the rise of John Wyclif in England.
The skirmishes to capture each other’s territories left the nobles of Europe with empty land and storehouses: the plague killed off most of the peasants to work their lands. Three waves of the Black Death wiped out as many as half of the peasants of Europe in the fourteenth century. Exact numbers are anyone’s guess. Nobles could hide on their country estates, but common peasants couldn’t escape the scourge. Tuchman’s often profound reasoning resonates in statements like “. . .the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man” (Tuchman, p. 123).
After a single read, A Distant Mirror still needs another read or two. The century of conflict still doesn’t make sense, with kings and knights seemingly switching sides on a whim, wherever the promise of wealth shone brighter. I had heard that the fourteenth century was the worst century to be alive, and after reading Tuchman’s account of political, religious, and financial chaos, I agree.