A few weeks ago at my local library, I noticed the The Last Duel by Eric Jager on display as a staff favorite near the entrance. Since I love medieval history and this book is now a major motion picture, my curiosity was doubly piqued. When I read the opening pages, however, I was struck by a particular paragraph in the first chapter, in which Jager offers a rather cynical and gloomy summary of the Middle Ages:
When not united against its common foe, Christendom was often at war with itself. The kings and queens of Europe, a large extended family of brothers and sisters and intermarried cousins, squabbled and fought with one another continually over thrones and territory. The frequent wars among Europe’s feuding monarchs reduced towns and farmland to smoking ruins, killed or starved the people, and left rulers with huge debts that they paid by raising taxes, debasing the coinage, or simply seizing the wealth of convenient victims like Jews.
To be clear, Jager states in the prior paragraph that he is talking specifically about 14th-century Europe, not the full span of medieval history (which is usually recognized as the late 5th to 15th centuries). Nevertheless it is quite common in history books and in popular culture to emphasize the foul conditions of medieval life, with the pitiable commoners living in abject squalor (“Bring out your dead!” as the line goes) and the rich crushing the poor and innocent.
Of course, wars in the Middle Ages did often leave the peasants vulnerable and destitute, as Barbara Tuchman shows repeatedly in A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. France in particular suffered much during the 14th century. The French king was captured by the English, its land was ravaged by civil war and roving marauders, and the Black Death decimated huge swaths of the population.
Yet is it fair to conclude from these events that the medieval era was as dark and violent as Jager’s summary suggests? Barbara Tuchman would likely argue that it was not, despite having written a long history book containing exceptionally dark and violent episodes. In her foreword, she observes that the Middle Ages, like any period in history, were replete with horror and beauty, happiness and tragedy, poverty and prosperity—and that such contradictions are to be expected:
It may be taken as axiomatic that any statement of fact about the Middle Ages may (and probably will) be met by a statement of the opposite or a different version. Women outnumbered men because men were killed off in the wars; men outnumbered women because women died in childbirth. Common people were familiar with the Bible; common people were unfamiliar with the Bible. Nobles were tax exempt; no, they were not tax exempt. French peasants were filthy and foul-smelling and lived on bread and onions; French peasants ate pork, fowl, and game and enjoyed frequent baths in the village bathhouses. The list could be extended indefinitely.
Contradictions, however, are part of life, not merely a matter of conflicting evidence. I would ask the reader to expect contradictions, not uniformity. No aspect of society, no habit, custom, movement, development, is without cross-currents. Starving peasants in hovels live alongside prosperous peasants in featherbeds. Children are neglected and children are loved. Knights talk of honor and turn brigand. Amid depopulation and disaster, extravagance and splendor were never more extreme. No age is tidy or made of whole cloth, and none is a more checkered fabric than the Middle Ages. (p. xix, emphasis mine)
She then articulates two other hazards that greatly influence how we read medieval history. One is the prejudice of historians themselves. The other is what she calls the “disproportionate survival of the bad side”.
Concerning the first hazard, she draws an interesting contrast. The early writers of medieval history once focused on the nobility as the most important subjects of inquiry:
One must also remember that the Middle Ages change color depending on who is looking at them. Historians’ prejudices and points of view—and thus their selection of material—have changed considerably over a period of 600 years. During the three centuries following the 14th, history was virtually a genealogy of nobility, devoted to tracing dynastic lines and family connections and infused by the idea of the noble as a superior person. These works of enormous antiquarian research teem with information of more than dynastic interest, such as Anselm’s item about the Gascon lord who bequeathed a hundred livres for the dowries of poor girls he had deflowered.
However, this focus shifted over time to the commoners, a shift which occurred during the Enlightenment and has since been succeeded by more balanced approaches:
The French Revolution marks the great reversal, following which historians saw the common man as hero, the poor as ipso facto virtuous, nobles and kings as monsters of iniquity. Simeon Luce, in his history of the Jacquerie, is one of these, slanted in his text, yet unique in his research and invaluable for his documents. The giants of the 19th and early 20th centuries who unearthed and published the sources, annotated and edited the chronicles, collected the literary works, read and excerpted masses of sermons, treatises, letters, and other primary material, provided the ground on which we latecomers walk. Their work is now supplemented and balanced by modern medievalists of the post-Marx Block era who have taken a more sociological approach and turned up detailed hard facts about daily life—for example, the number of communion wafers sold in a particular diocese, as an indicator of religious observance.
I am most interested, however, in the second hazard. Similar to how modern journalism is inclined to report on the most dark and dramatic of current events, Tuchman emphasizes that the historical record is fundamentally biased to “crisis and calamity”:
A greater hazard, built into the very nature of recorded history, is overload of the negative: the disproportionate survival of the bad side—of evil, misery, contention, and harm. In history this is exactly the same as in the daily newspaper. The normal does not make news. History is made by the documents that survive, and these lean heavily on crisis and calamity, crime and misbehavior, because such things are the subject matter of the documentary process-of lawsuits, treaties, moralists’ denunciations, literary satire, papal Bulls. No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something. Negative overload can be seen at work in the religious reformer Nicolas de Clamanges, who, in denouncing unfit and worldly prelates in 1401, said that in his anxiety for reform he would not discuss the good clerics because “they do not count beside the perverse men.”
Tuchman suggests that we should treat such calamities and accounts in the same way we should treat the modern news, that is, as sporadic and likely exaggerated rather than as constant and normative. She even creates her own “law” about how easy it is to overstate the degree of horror behind any reported historical event:
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).
I do not think Tuchman’s warnings mean that Eric Jager was misinformed or that he was being deliberately misleading. The point is that Jager has an emphasis, one which is clearly on the violence and power squabbling of the Middle Ages. There is truth in that emphasis, but it is also important to recognize that Jager’s description, and others like it, have their own susceptibilities to exaggeration and must be weighed against the evidence of other historical records. I am eager to read the rest of Jager’s book once I finish a few others on my nightstand; but I’m also interested in considering his account alongside others which acknowledge the complex range of medieval beauty and tragedy. One such account I have become aware of is The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, which apparently offers a more nuanced and sympathetic interpretation of the medieval socio-political landscape. It is undoubtedly prone to the same hazards as Jager’s book is, but again, contradicting takes should be expected—and should lead us to be suspicious of any simple answer to the question of how dark and horrible the Middle Ages were.
Richard Rabil, Jr. 