He took part in many of the decisive battles. He is a perfect character to follow since he is thus connected to both the French and English nobility, the two warring nations. He is from Picardy, France, and is married to the daughter of the Kind of England. Tuchman has chosen to follow one man of nobility through his lifetime, Enguerrand de Coucy VII(1340-1397). This is a book where the majority of pages are concerned with war and battles. Pages and pages and whole chapters devoted to kings and queens and lords and popes and monks going to battle, getting ready to go to battle, thinking about going to battle, coming back from battle whilst planning the next. Instead of focusing on the effects and after effects of the Black Death, she got caught up in the age old roll call of history. The genesis of this book was a desire to find out what were the effects on society of the most lethal disaster of recorded history – that is to say, of the Black Death of 1348-50, which killed an estimated one third of the population living between India and Iceland.Ī number of times throughout A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman forgot what her initial intentions were regarding this book.
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