The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: 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 re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight--in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.”
Chapter 1. “I Am the Sire de Coucy”: The Dynasty
Chapter 2. Born to Woe: The Century
Chapter 5. “This Is the End of the World”: The Black Death
Chapter 6. The Battle of Poitiers
Chapter 7. Decapitated France: The Bourgeois Rising and the Jacquerie
Chapter 9. Enguerrand and Isabella
Chapter 15. The Emperor in Paris
Chapter 18. The Worms of the Earth Against the Lions
Chapter 20. A Second Norman Conquest
Chapter 21. The Fiction Cracks
Chapter 22. The Siege of Barbary
Chapter 27. Hung Be the Heavens with Black