A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century [Paperback]

A person could not read a better book about the middle ages and how people lived, fought, traveled, negotiated over issues, and died. I felt like I was actually there and the characters, based on real life people, were so alive and human. Wow, was I fortunate to have the opportunity to read something so well written. I absolutely recommend to anyone who is remotely interested in history.
Mickey Moulder

If you pick this up and think you can't get through all those pages, just trust me that it is more dramatic than any novel you will ever read. The author brings these people to life so vividly and the events are so wildly over the top that you will boggle over the fact that it is all true. The image of the Holy Roman Emperor Wenceslas (no, not that one) and the King of France trying to solve the papal schism in daily meetings while one is consistently drunk and the other drifts in and out of madness sums it all up for me. Tuchman's style is sensitively respectful of the facts while delivering it all with great colour and impact. I take her point that the mistakes that were made were all grounded in the same human factors that dog us throughout all ages. The greed of the 1% was as rampant as today and there were the same riots from the 99% just as fruitlessly. We have the same pointless wars, many of which are caused by the same monstrous egos and all of which enrich a few while the cannon fodder of the masses are sacrificed by the betrayal of their leaders. This book is serious as regards the tragedies while having an eye for the ludicrous and there were plenty of both; indeed I kept thinking of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For Tuchman the hero is de Coucy, but for me it was the French peasantry who paid for the protection of their local knight, but he was as likely to burn their crops and kill their livestock as the invading English in the belief that at least the English wouldn't feed their army on it. Is the saying "You have to destroy a village to save it" a recent one by the Americans? No, the French upper class obviously coined it in the 14th century.

By the beginning of the fifteenth century the delusion of the chivalric ideal sank to its knees under the weight of hypocrisy and the resulting cynicism. Human nature just couldn't live up to it. In the end it was just all about greed and violence. Twas ever thus. I had no idea that the 14th century had been so important simply because it is so distant to us now. This book was time well spent.

I've already read The Guns of August and both that and this book had the same tremendous impact. What stays with me the most with both of these astonishing history books? The sheer drama. How sad that many people think of history as a dry topic. When written about properly, it leaves fiction in the dust.

"A Distant Mirror" is a detailed, well written and mostly engrossing political, cultural, religious and social history of Europe in the fourteenth century. It comes as close as any history of the period to imparting a sense of what life was like, at all levels, in western Europe through plagues, wars, and the vicissitudes of everyday living.

While the book claims to focus on one life in order to tell the history of the period, it works poorly as biography. The story of Enguerrand de Coucy is more of an excuse for delving into the period and is, in itself, more sideshow than main attraction. This is just as well, for the full cast of characters, kings, princes, lords, popes, cardinals, priests, merchants, farmers, and so on are all so fascinating that the story glides along. At times the book does suffer a little from its verbosity. It could have used a little paring down. Nonetheless as a whole it is a remarkable achievement, and well worth it for anyone interested in European or medieval history.