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A distant mirror : the calamitous 14th century / Barbara W. Tuchman
Livre
Edité par Penguin Books - 2017
The fourteenth century was a time of fabled crusades and chivalry, glittering cathedrals and grand castles. It was also a time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world of chaos and the plague. Here, Barbara Tuchman masterfully reveals the two contradictory images of the age, examining the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes and war dominated the lives of serf, noble and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries and guilty passions, Tuchman recreates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, above all, knights. The result is an astonishing reflection of medieval Europe, a historical tour de force
Examines the history of fourteenth century Europe as background to the life of Enguerrand de Coucy VII, one of the most prominent French knights of that time
"I am the Sire de Coucy": the dynasty. Born to woe: the century. Youth and chivalry. War. "This is the end of the world": the black death. The Battle of Poitiers. Decapitated France: the bourgeois rising and the Jacquerie. Hostage in England. Enguerrand and Isabella. Sons of iniquity. The gilded shroud. Double allegiance. Coucy's war. England's turmoil. The emperor in Paris. The papal schism. Coucy's rise. The worms of the earth against the lions. The lure of Italy. A second Norman conquest. The fiction cracks. The siege of Barbary. In a dark wood. Danse macabre. Lost opportunity. Nicopolis. Hung be the heavens with black.