A Distant Mirror: Plague, War, and Church in 14th-Century Europe

Introduction: Tuchman's Calamitous Century

The rather poetic title A Distant Mirror, given by the historian Barbara Tuchman to her landmark work about the 14th century, belies the horrors she chronicles: terrors of disease, war, and religious intolerance that were rife in the chaotically governed Europe of that era. The subtitle of the book is "The Calamitous 14th Century," and calamitous for almost all of its citizens it was indeed. The century was marked by the plague, internal as well as external wars, and the suffocating control of the Church over European political affairs. The misery of disease and the constant turmoil of war kept the already divided population in a perpetual state of crisis. Because of disease and the dangers of war, people lived in constant fear and turned to the Church for solace — and when the Church proved either ineffectual or meddling, local and often more violent manifestations of religious fervor emerged, tearing communities across Europe even further asunder.

Tuchman's thesis is that, because there was no unifying system of governance, the population was especially prone to warfare and strife between fiefdoms, and the Church had ample room to act as the only unifying authority — even when its counsel proved dangerous, as during the era of the bubonic plague. Her central theme is that, rather than an age in which knights were bold and maidens were modest, the 14th century was wrecked by governmental chaos much like the 20th century in which she wrote her book. The three horrors she identifies were all interrelated: the inability to find a common governing authority, the division of Europe into fiefdoms where knights owed loyalty to their lords and to the Church rather than to the state, the fear of neighboring fiefdoms seizing control, the ideological dominance of the Church over secular life, and the way the plague created further stress upon the population's nerves and economy.

The Bubonic Plague and Social Fragmentation

The plague was horrible to witness even in a purely physical sense: "The disease [that kept Europe in a constant state of fear] was [the] bubonic plague, present in two forms: one that infected the bloodstream, causing the buboes and internal bleeding, and was spread by contact . . . The second by respiratory fashion" (67). Regardless of whether the lungs or the blood were affected, the progression of the disease was swift. Most victims died within three days or fewer, sometimes in less than 24 hours — Tuchman records that some sufferers went to bed well and were dead of the plague by the next morning (67). Socially, communities became even more internally divided: when the plague arrived in a town, individuals were quick to ostracize the infected, and sometimes entire households were barred up when a single member fell ill.

This paranoia was justified to some degree, as patients would sometimes infect and kill the very physicians who had come to their bedsides to treat them. "Out of 24 physicians in Venice, 20 were said to have lost their lives in the plague, although, according to another account, some were believed to have fled or to have shut themselves up in their houses" (67). When contemporaries described the plague as a scourge that "cuts off the young," they meant that the illness was severing the youth of Europe from life and robbing the continent of a future generation left physically intact (67).

By the end of the century, the population of Europe, especially its youngest and most vulnerable members, had been reduced by 50% (119). Revenue from taxes declined, as did commerce and general economic as well as personal prosperity. Religious fanaticism and questioning increased at a grass-roots level, while support for the institutional Church declined, as did support for the local lords who had provided the tenuous structure of governance that had sustained Europe up to that time. One unintended consequence of the epidemic was that the political power of the peasantry increased, since landowners could no longer impose taxes at their previous rates — a grim, paradoxical benefit of the devastation.

Religion, Fanaticism, and the Failure of the Church

Frightened, individuals turned to religion, heightening the fervor that already marked European life. A crisis of faith was created for the mainstream Church. "Then faith must suffice," said Pope Clement VI when told of the seemingly unstoppable plague. He found it necessary to grant remissions of sin to all who died of the plague because so many were dying unattended by priests — making an institution that had stood so ideologically intransigent on doctrinal matters seem suddenly ineffectual (70).

The Church was also forced to halt religious processions, which had been a primary source of its power of public display, because such gatherings were spreading infection as people mingled in common spaces (79). Without answers from the Church, people grew more frightened, since no one suspected rats or the fleas on rats — the actual source of contagion. Bleeding, purging with laxatives, and other remedies prescribed by doctors also proved useless (81). The only available clue lay in the evidence of human-to-human contact, and in the concept of spiritual pollution promoted by fanatical folk religion, often not endorsed by the Church itself. "The result was an underground lake of guilt in the soul that the plague now tapped. That the mortality was accepted as God's punishment may explain in part the vacuum of comment that followed" (80).

To ward off the plague, individuals scourged themselves to no avail. "Self-flagellation was intended to express remorse and expiate the sins of all" (89). The persecution of the Jewish population of Europe intensified. "In Cologne the Town Council repeated the Pope's argument that Jews were dying of the plague like everyone else," yet a group of militant flagellants insisted on attacking Jews for well-poisoning, a common antisemitic charge leveled against Jewish communities in Christian lands (90). Without answers, and divided among themselves in already fragmented fiefdoms, people searched for explanations from religion and from their governing lords and found none.

Conclusion: Interconnected Horrors and Their Legacy

During this period, war critically hampered the development of effective, larger governing states in Europe, and government existed merely as personal, military ties to lords. The Church's ideological influence was often contrary to the political, economic, and public health needs of the population, and even when that influence waned, more radical forms of religion stepped in to fill the void — especially in the context of plague-driven fear. The three horrors Tuchman identifies were not isolated phenomena but mutually reinforcing forces, each one deepening the damage inflicted by the others.

Even if the reader does not share Tuchman's enthusiasm and confidence in the value of centralized, democratic governments and nation-states as cure-alls for social disorder, the book makes for a fascinating and sobering read. It shows how the age when "knights were bold" meant a boldness that was often ungallant, mercenary, and defensive in nature — far removed from the romantic image the Middle Ages has long carried in the popular imagination.

Works Cited

Tuchman, Barbara W. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Ballantine Books, reissue 1987.