[Sethomas]

So, I’m re-reading one of my favorite books of all fucking time. It’s called A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. It was written by the late Barbara Tuchman. It’s about the Fourteenh Century, which was by its calamity a mirror, albeit distant, to modernity.

Anyways, I first read this when I was 18 and 19 and I don’t know why all the things that amaze me about it now didn’t amaze me nearly as much back then. Back then, I was reading it not for the author’s intent as an incredible historian looking at the present, but as a kid in the present wanting to learn about the events she so illustriously details.

What sticks out most is this: to say nothing of what the average man was like, she demonstrates with crystalline precision that for any of the names to exist in her book through passing into history, most of them were incredibly brilliant by today’s standards. Especially by today’s standards, even. All of this would include incredible buildup of the fantastic minds of individuals that leads to a description of an amazingly idiotic Duck Soup scenario. This happens several times in each decade she describes.

The mind of the age held a huge amount of cognitive dissonance that I can’t even begin to touch upon. A precise image of chivalry that permeated every work of the time, yet was deliberately ignored in practice and substituted with a convoluted knockoff. The King of France was chosen among a number of essentially equally-legitimate (by their own standards) candidates, thus leading to the Hundred Year War. When he was kidnapped in battle, the people of France rallied together to pay his ridiculously high ransom. In so doing, they decided that the nobility of France were the symbol of everything wrong with France, so the nobility was attacked and slaughtered in many cases to earn the money of the symbol of everything GOOD about France (the king) who was merely one of them.

The central figure around whom the book revolves, Enguerrand de Coucy, used a pearl necklace as a small piece of a dowry. That necklace was appraised in the transaction at, if I remember, 10 000 Livres. By contemporaneous economic theory, if not practice, that would equate literally to about five tons of sterling silver or, more aptly, the value of the common peasant’s lifetime labor. However, we have to assume that this particular peasant manages to live for over five thousand years.

In case you were wondering, the Simpsons joke that the Hundred Years War (which technically was quite a bit longer than 100 years) was originally called “Operation: Speedy Resolution” is not at all far-fetched. At that time, in a way that is incomprehensible in a world inundated with the more famous Simpsons kenning “Cheese-eating surrender-monkeys”, France was the pinnacle of Western culture and its army was probably the greatest in the world. England, on the other hand, was the unshaved armpit of the West where people were literally too embarrassed to admit that they could even speak the land’s eponymous language, which most members of the gentry could not. The English nobility was fluent in French and whatever languages their familial ties to the continent demanded, often Latin as well, but rarely English. The fact that they put up so much of a struggle in a war that they lost despite decades of brutal victories over the French is the only reason why English exists as a language so popular today, as it tied into Chaucer’s decision to eccentrically depict the common man as he might actually talk.

The reason why it lasted more than a few months? The French interpretation of chivalry (see above) forbad them from dismounting along with relying on yeomen mercenaries, which the English did both. As a result, they were slaughtered time and time again by the Welsh longbow. Many knights went into battle understanding this, but in all seriousness they’d rather die with an arrow on horseback than to stop using their horses or, worse, employ lower-class fighters along with their tactics.

Anyways, I can only really set up the fact that brilliant people did remarkably, historically stupid things that led to bizarre political climates. Tuchman calls the entire century out as “lacking sanity” at various points.

Also, the English financed the war by indiscriminate plunder of the French peasantry. When there was no direct fighting going on between the French and English, the French knights observed how effective that was. So, they began to initiate total war, in the most absolute modern sense of the term, upon their own countrymen to pay what they felt would be their salaries when the treasury could not provide it. (!?!!!) They also did this often when the treasury DID provide it.

The Avignon Papacy, in how it related between religion and politics and how the masses from the greatest of politicos to the common peasant interpreted it, is waaaaaay too much for me to talk about either in the role as wannabe historian or wannabe fidei defensor.

A perfect microcosm was when a woman (Catherine of Siena), canonized in relatively short order after her death for her brilliance and purity along with her political influence, implored the worst of the brigand knights (John Hawkwood) to fight in Turkey instead of against the Italian peasantry (yes, he somehow ended up in Italy when the France peasantry got too boring) by means of calling into question his “manliness”, per translation of the Tuscan dialect word she used. This was somewhat funny because Hawkwood had by that time killed hundreds of people by his own hand, many of whom were rather important and well-liked, along with being responsible for the deaths of thousands of others.

Anyways. This is important because of how it speaks not of the medieval mind but of the human spirit. We have not changed at all. How are people in the future going to look at:

The Iraq War?
The aforementioned Armenian Genocide recognition farce I detailed?
The absolute apathy toward the Third World?
The American Party system that mandates that, by one’s tacit approval in voting one way or another, her stances on fiscal policy, social policy, foreign relations, and everything else all have to be defined by a Manichaean manifestation of only two of a huge number (when accounting for varying degrees, priorities, &c.) of possible permutations?
The creation of the Israeli state? (It’s a cultural homeland, taken from legitimate members of a culture that has equal or greater cultural ties to the land, for a culture defined by a religion. Yet, it’s not a theocracy. Yet, anti-Zionism is popularly, often definitionally, associated with Anti-Semitism. Equating Judaism as a religion with Semitic culture is racist because it precludes Jewish atheists and the enormous amount of diasporic converts. ???)

Here’s some lunacy that clicked in today: grocery store psychological marketing. In order to instill a positive association with the store, grocers will put out enormous quantities of exotic and unpopular foods to create the illusion for the shopper that they’re Julia Childs cooking for a dinner attended by the Emperor of China and the pope. As a result of which they’re fully cognizant, they throw away probably hundreds of tons of food annually. Also, while tens of thousands of people die of hunger elsewhere, malnutrition is an actual domestic issue. Also, it takes a shit ton of fertile land to grow those crops destined for the dumpster.

Thoughts?

Contributions?