Oldie goldie

I've recently started reading Barbara W. Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century". It's such a fucking vision of a book. Here's an example:

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 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).

"A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century," page 23

Who doesn't love a poison tongue like that? Here's another hit:

The Coucy riches restored Enguerrand IV to royal favor when he lent King Louis 15,000 livres in 1265 to buy what was supposed to be the True Cross. Otherwise he continued a career of outrages into the 14th century and died at the ripe age of 75 in 1311, without issue though not without a bequest. He left 20 sous (equal to one livre) a year in perpetuity to the leprosarium of Coucy-la-Ville so that its inmates “will pray for us each year in the Chapel for our sins.” Twenty sous at this time was equal to a day’s pay of one knight or four archers, or the hire of a cart and two horses for twenty days, or, theoretically, the pay of a hired peasant for two years, so it may be presumed to have underwritten a reasonable number of prayers, though perhaps not adequate for the soul of Enguerrand IV.

"A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century," page 41

The following reminds me of current-day events:

"there have been acts of violence because the poor will not suffer this but know not how to obtain their right except by rising and seizing it themselves"

Philippe de Beaumanoir

Medieval theory intended that the lord or ruler should respond to charges of oppression by investigating and ordering the necessary reform to ensure that taxes fell equally on rich and poor. But this theory corresponded to reality no more than other medieval ideals, and because of this, wrote Philippe de Beaumanoir in 1280–83, “there have been acts of violence because the poor will not suffer this but know not how to obtain their right except by rising and seizing it themselves.” They formed associations, he reported, to refuse to work for “so low a price as formerly but they will raise the price by their own authority” and take “certain pains and punishments” against those who do not join them. This seemed to Beaumanoir a terrible act against the common good, “for the common interest cannot suffer that work should stop.” He advocated that such persons should be arrested and kept long in prison and afterward fined 60 sous each, the traditional fine for rupture of the “public peace.”

"A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century," page 73

That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis. If the Jews were unholy, then killing and looting them was holy work. Lepers too were targets of the Pastoureaux on the theory that they had joined the Jews in a horrible compact to poison the wells, and their persecution was made official by a royal ordinance of 1321.

"A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century," page 77