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23.24 Effigy of Guillaume de Harsigny (Museum of Laon)

23.25 Danse Macabre (Archives photographiques, Paris)

23.26 Lamentation of the Virgin (BN: Ms. Lat. 9471, fo. 135)

23.27 Massacre of the prisoners at Nicopolis (BN: Ms. Fr. 2646, fo. 255v)

23.28 Posthumous portrait of Coucy (Museum of Soissons)

23.29 Ruins of the donjon of Coucy in 1917 (Association for the Restoration of Coucy and Its Environs)

23.30 Coucy-le-Château today (Photo: S.P.A.D.E.M.)

Foreword

The Period, the Protagonist, the Hazards

The genesis of this book was a desire to find out what were the effects on society of the most lethal disaster of recorded history—that is to say, of the Black Death of 1348–50, which killed an estimated one third of the population living between India and Iceland. Given the possibilities of our own time, the reason for my interest is obvious. The answer proved elusive because the 14th century suffered so many “strange and great perils and adversities” (in the words of a contemporary) that its disorders cannot be traced to any one cause; they were the hoofprints of more than the four horsemen of St. John’s vision, which had now become seven—plague, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government, insurrection, and schism in the Church. All but plague itself arose from conditions that existed prior to the Black Death and continued after the period of plague was over.

Although my initial question has escaped an answer, the interest of the period itself—a violent, tormented, bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant—was compelling and, as it seemed to me, consoling in a period of similar disarray. If our last decade or two of collapsing assumptions has been a period of unusual discomfort, it is reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before.

Curiously, the “phenomenal parallels” have been applied by another historian to earlier years of this century. Comparing the aftermaths of the Black Death and of World War I, James Westfall Thompson found all the same complaints: economic chaos, social unrest, high prices, profiteering, depraved morals, lack of production, industrial indolence, frenetic gaiety, wild expenditure, luxury, debauchery, social and religious hysteria, greed, avarice, maladministration, decay of manners. “History never repeats itself,” said Voltaire; “man always does.” Thucydides, of course, made that principle the justification of his work.

Simply summarized by the Swiss historian, J. C. L. S. de Sismondi, the 14th century was “a bad time for humanity.” Until recently, historians tended to dislike and to skirt the century because it could not be made to fit into a pattern of human progress. After the experiences of the terrible 20th century, we have greater fellow-feeling for a distraught age whose rules were breaking down under the pressure of adverse and violent events. We recognize with a painful twinge the marks of “a period of anguish when there is no sense of an assured future.”

The interval of 600 years permits what is significant in human character to stand out. People of the Middle Ages existed under mental, moral, and physical circumstances so different from our own as to constitute almost a foreign civilization. As a result, qualities of conduct that we recognize as familiar amid these alien surroundings are revealed as permanent in human nature. If one insists upon a lesson from history, it lies here, as discovered by the French medievalist Edouard Perroy when he was writing a book on the Hundred Years’ War while dodging the Gestapo during World War II. “Certain ways of behavior,” he wrote, “certain reactions against fate, throw mutual light upon each other.”

The fifty years that followed the Black Death of 1348–50 are the core of what seems to me a coherent historical period extending approximately from 1300 to 1450 plus a few years. To narrow the focus to a manageable area, I have chosen a particular person’s life as the