A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (Hardback)

Condition

GOOD: The book's spine, cover, and dust jacket are in good condition (may show signs of wear). There are some signs of shelf wear on both the book and the dust jacket, but the pages are free of marks/highlights.

Product Details

Author profile: "Barbara W. Tuchman achieved prominence as a historian withThe Zimmermann Telegram , and international fame withThe Guns of August —a bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. There followed other successes, includingThe Proud Tower ,Stilwell and the American Experience in China (also awarded the Pulitzer Prize),The March of Folly , andThe First Salute ."

There are 5 maps and 40 pages of illustrations with 8 pages in full color.

Description from inside dust jacket: "As the spine of her narrative, the author has chosen the history of one man‐ Enguerrand de Coucy VII, 'the most skilled and experience of all the knights of France.' We see Coucy orphaned by his father's death at Crécy and his mother's in the Black Death; inheriting the most awesome fortress in Europe, engaged in the war against England from the age of fifteen; a leader at eighteen of the suppression of the Jacquerie; a loyal subject of the King of France while simultaneously a son-in-law of France's enemy, the King of England. Warrior, envoy, councillor, and mediator, he twice refused the Constableship, the highest—and most lucrative—military office in France. We follow him through princely feuds and private wars, religious foundations, peace parleys, and secret missions, to the culminating fiasco of knighthood, the last crusade of medieval Christendom. Launched against the Turks who had penetrated Europe, it was the final made hubris of a fabled elite in which not even Coucy's sense and experience could save the day, or finally, his own life."

Not just Coucy's life is profiled in the book. Tuchman covers the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike.

Part One

1. "I Am the Sire de Coucy": The Dynasty
2. Born to Woe: The Century
3. Youth and Chivalry
4. War
5. "This Is the End of the World": The Black Death
6. The Battle of Poitiers
7. Decapitated France: The Bourgeois Rising and the Jacqueirie
8. Hostage in England
9. Enguerrand and Isabella
10. Sons of Iniquity
11. The Gilded Shroud
12. Double Allegiance
13. Coucy's War
14. England's Turmoil
15. The Emperor in Paris
16. The Papal Schism

Part Two

17. Coucy's Rise
18. The Worms of the Earth Against the Lions
19. The Lure of Italy
20. A Second Norman Conquest
21. The Fiction Cracks
22. The Siege of Barbary
23. In a Dark Wood
24. Danse Macabre
25. Lost Opportunity
26. Nicopolis
27. Hung Be the Heavens with Black