Ebook: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

"I am the Sire de Coucy": The dynasty -- Born to woe: The century -- Youth and chivalry -- War -- "This is the end of the world": The Black Death -- The Battle of Poitiers -- Decapitated France: The Bourgeois rising and the Jacquerie -- Hostage in England -- Enguerrand and Isabella -- Sons of iniquity -- The gilded shroud -- Double allegiance -- Coucy's war -- England's turmoil -- The emperor in Paris -- The papal schism -- Coucy's rise -- The worms of the earth against the lions -- The lure of Italy -- A second Norman conquest -- The fiction cracks -- The siege of Barbary -- In a dark wood -- Danse macabre -- Lost opportunity -- Nicopolis -- Hung be the heavens with black.;The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. Barbara Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight -- in all his valor and "furious follies," a "terrible worm in an iron cocoon."