This book just goes on and on piling on the shittiness. Dumb mini-crusade against Tunisia. Tedious religious crap, a bad king Wenceslas. I suspect we’re headed for an exhausted whimper of an unhappy ending.
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Even Tuchman’s writing can not redeem this last decade. It just exhausting stupid intrigues among elites. General condition is ghoulish fascination with death. Death cults on the rise. Death masks, obsession with rotting corpses, danse macabre on the rise
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Generally impressed by the sheer amount of 14th century information that seems to be available to historians. This whole reconstruction is very vivid. I’d like to watch a solid TV show based on this book.
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Mad king Charles VI on throne for decades. Makes Trump look actually stable if not a genius. Evilunclocracy in England and France. Rise of occult and magic. Torture and extraction of confessions to devil worship a routine way to cancel people. OG cancel culture. We are at 1393.
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Well, more intrigues in Italy and a misguided crusade later, out man Coucy is dead in Turkish captivity waiting to be ransomed. Kinda sad. He’s the hero of this story even though he never quite comes alive. Tuchman chose him because his life intersected a lot of key events.
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He’s a better example of chivalry and missing the corrupting weaknesses of the class. Sagacious and level-headed. Tuchman suggests he might have been a Washington style leader in a non-monarchical time but I don’t buy it. He comes across as a COO type. Execution, not vision.
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Tuchman’s own tldr of the ~60 years spanned by Coucy’s life: elites had exciting times, commoners had plague, pillage and taxes. Book does a fair job balancing the two, if favoring elite storyline a bit. Fair because there’s more to tell. Elites were mobile and agenty.
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Whew after awhistle-stop tour to the Middle Ages nadir in the 1450s and an epilogue tracing the fate of the Coucy estate into modernity, we’re finally done. Long-ass book but now I am an expert on the long 14th century++.
tldr: lousy ass century. Not recommended for time travel.
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History books are always unsatisfying and don’t end cleanly. The part she rushed through in 1 chapter to stick the landing (1400-1453) is probably worth its own book. Joan of Arc, Agincourt, etc.
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:D I think it sort of pops up every now and then, so it's not really news, since it's an under-control but not eradicated endemic infection

