Quotes from book

A Distant Mirror

“If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?”

“As the era of the sword was ending, that of firearms began, in time to allow no lapse in man’s belligerent capacity.”

“To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states.”

“When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.”

“Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.”

“The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.”

“Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.”

“When reproached for spending too much time with books and clerks, Charles answered, “As long as knowledge is honored in this country, so long will it prosper.””

“Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.”

“The system was aided by the Church, whose natural interests allied it more to the great than to the meek.”

“Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.”

“To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.”

“What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few?”

“Chroniclers habitually matched numbers to the awesomeness of the event.”

“Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.”

“For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.”

“Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, “no epoch was more naturally mad.””

“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 the 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"”