A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [329]
On the other hand, it may be that when people were fewer they ate better, and proportionately more money circulated. Contradictory conditions are always present. Evidence of growing business exists alongside that of lowered trade. An Italian merchant who died in 1410 left 100,000 documents of correspondence with agents in Italy, France, Spain, England, and Tunisia. The merchant class had more money at its command than before, and its expenditures encouraged arts, comforts, and technological advance. The 14th century was not arid. The tapestry workshops of Arras, Brussels, and the famous Nicolas Bataille of Paris produced wonders which robbed stained glass of its primacy in decorative art. Mariners’ maps reached new efficiency, allowing sea monsters to disappear from the lower corner in favor of accurate coastlines and navigational aids. Bourgeois money created a new audience for writers and poets and encouraged literature through the buying of books. Several thousand scribes were employed turning out copies to meet the demand of the 25 booksellers and stationarii of Paris. The flamboyant in architecture, with its lavish multitude of attenuated pinnacles, canopied niches, and lacy buttresses, expressed not only a technical exuberance but a denial, even a defiance, of decline. How to reconcile with pessimism the Milan Cathedral, that fantastic mountain of filigree in stone begun in the last quarter of the century?
Psychological effects are clearer than the physical. Never was so much written about the miseria of human life, and the sense of dwindling numbers, even if unmentioned, promoted pessimism about human fate. “What schal befalle hiereafter, God wot,” wrote John Gower in England in 1393,
—for now upon this tyde
men se the world on every syde
In sondry wyse so dyversed
That it welnyh stant all reversed.
For men of affairs no less than poets, the insecurity of the time allowed little confidence in the future. The letters of Francesco Datini, merchant of Prato, show him living in daily dread of war, pestilence, famine, and insurrection, believing neither in the stability of government nor in the honesty of colleagues. “The earth and the sea are full of robbers,” he wrote to one of his partners, “and the great part of mankind is evilly disposed.”
Gerson believed he lived in the senility of the world when society, like some delirious old man, suffered from fantasies and illusions. He, like others, felt the time was at hand for the coming of Anti-Christ and the end of the world—to be followed by a better one. In popular expectation, Apocalypse would bring the return of a great emperor—a second Charlemagne, a third Frederick, an imperial messiah—who, coupled with an angelic pope, would reform the Church, renew society, and save Christendom. Churchmen and moralists in apocalyptic mood stressed more than ever the vanity of worldly things—though without visibly diminishing anyone’s desire for, and pride in, possessions.
A pessimistic view of man’s fate was the duty of the clergy in order to prove the need of salvation. It was by no means new to the 14th century. If Cardinal d’Ailly thought the time of Anti-Christ was at hand, so had Thomas Aquinas a hundred years before. If the corruption of the Church dismayed the devout, it had done so no less in the year 1040 when a monk of Cluny wrote, “For whensoever religion hath failed among the pontiffs … what can we think but that the whole human race, root and branch, is sliding willingly down again into the gulf of primaeval chaos?” If in a waning period Mézières’ favorite dictum was “The things of this fleeting world go ever from bad to worse,” he was matched by Roger Bacon, who had asserted in 1271, at the height of a dynamic period, “More sins reign in these