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A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Don’t let the breadth of the title mislead you: this isn’t a history of the fourteenth century, it’s a history of France from about 1340 to 1400 through the career of a noble man, with occasional jaunts to England and the Italian city states. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – aside from one or two things, noted below – just for clarity.

My favorite parts of this book were the slice-of-life sections: what French peasants ate, what people talked about at court dinners, the lifestyle of British royalty. Tuchman clearly waded through a truly astonishing amount of primary sources, but she also retained consciousness of the gaping holes in the history related to class and literacy and plain old record destruction. But there’s only so much she could do about that, and I admit I did get a little tired of the endless backing and forthing with the politics of war and kingship and more war. It’s what she had to work with, but it wasn’t what I primarily came for.

Not her fault. What is her fault is the dose of explicit and implicit anti-Muslim sentiment we get connected to the crusades. Explicit in some of her turns of phrase, in her allegiance to the western view of defeats as tragic and victories as righteous. And implicit in her claim to be writing a history of the fourteenth century which believes that Muslims are only important to history when they’re killing Christians and getting killed by them.

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