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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 03a0869 | In the same five years three new colleges were founded at Cambridge--Trinity, Corpus Christi, and Clare--although love of learning, like love in marriage, was not always the motive. Corpus Christi was founded in 1352 because fees for celebrating masses for the dead were so inflated after the plague that two guilds of Cambridge decided to establish a college whose scholars, as clerics, would be required to pray for their deceased members. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 2f53df6 | Charles's old ally Don Enrique, King of Castile, also died before taking sides, and his son, Juan I, though heavily pressed by Charles V to support Clement, preferred to maintain "neutrality," saying that, while faithful to the French alliance, he could not go against the conscience of his subjects. Common people, nobility, clerics, learned men, he wrote, were all Urbanist. "What government, O wise prince," he pointedly inquired of Charles,.. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| e0c96b9 | Smite a villein and he will bless you; bless a villein and he will smite you. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 71af722 | liberality in gifts and expenditure which, since his followers lived off it, was extolled as the most admired attribute of a noble. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 311e9e1 | For each man that shall be damned shall be damned by his own guilt, and each man that is saved shall be saved by his own merit." Unperceived, here was the start of the modern world." | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 6db17b0 | At Coucy's level, men and women hawked and hunted and carried a favorite falcon, hooded, on the wrist wherever they went, indoors or out--to church, to the assizes, to meals. On occasion, huge pastries were served from which live birds were released to be caught by hawks unleashed in the banquet | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 654348e | A regular method was the levy for a crusade, which allowed ecclesiastical income within each country to be taxed by its king, who soon came to regard it as a right. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| dfd3af4 | the Pastoureaux spread the fear of insurrection that freezes the blood of the privileged in any era when the mob appears. Excommunicated by Pope John XXII, they were finally suppressed when he forbade anyone to provision them on pain of death and sanctioned the use of force against them. That was sufficient, and the Pastoureaux ended like every outbreak of the poor sooner or later in the Middle Ages, with corpses hanging from the trees. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 5f0268f | The clergy were to pray for all men, the knight to fight for them, and the commoner to work that all might eat. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 2e4d815 | The physical suffering of the disease and its aspect of evil mystery were expressed in a strange Welsh lament which saw "death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance. Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit! It is seething, terrible ... a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry ... a painful angry knob ... Great is its seething like a burning c.. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 175bd53 | Philip was fascinated by the all-absorbing question of the Beatific Vision: whether the souls of the blessed see the face of God immediately upon entering Heaven or whether they have to wait until the Day of Judgment. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 9379a3e | Only the Church offered an organizing principle, which was the reason for its success, for society cannot bear anarchy. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 4c673e1 | Armed forces were no longer primarily feudal levies serving under a vassal's obligation who went home after forty days; they were recruited bodies who served for pay. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 14e458c | wicked ecclesiastics who show the worst example to the people," and, above all, nobles who empty the purses of the poor by their extravagance, and disdain them for "lowness of blod or foulenesse of body," for deformed shape of body or limb, for dullness of wit and uncunning of craft, and deign not to speak to them, and who are themselves stuffed with pride--of ancestry, fortune, gentility, possessions, power, comeliness, strength, children,.. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| e71c2b0 | When Latimer demanded to know by whom and by what authority he was being indicted, Sir Peter de la Mare supplied the historic answer that the Commons as a body would maintain all their charges in common. At one stroke he created the constitutional means for impeachment and removal of ministers. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| e64a31c | In addition to grand estate, Coucy clearly possessed a personal power of attraction and a faculty for not making enemies. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| d7a2133 | the Pope replied, "What can you preach to the people? If on humility, you yourselves are the proudest of the world, puffed up, pompous and sumptuous in luxuries. If on poverty, you are so covetous that all the benefices in the world are not enough for you. If on chastity--but we will be silent on this, for God knoweth what each man does and how many of you satisfy your lusts." | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 81cf4bf | the irony of man's fate reflected in his image: that all men, from beggar to emperor, from harlot to queen, from ragged clerk to Pope, must come to this. No matter what their poverty or power in life, all is vanity, equalized by death. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| ae60007 | The cry of "Traitor!" was not a local voice only, but a bewildered people's explanation of the inexplicable. It was the eternal cry of conspiracy, of stab in the back." | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 389a7c4 | ecclesiam nulla salus | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| c81fae6 | Owing to the disabilities of the two major sovereigns, one incapacitated by alcohol and the other by insanity, the result was not what it might have been. Renewed madness was already darkening Charles's mind when he arrived and in the brief intervals when he was lucid, Wenceslas was drunk. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| f85cad7 | The castle's predecessor, the Roman villa, had been unfortified, depending on Roman law and the Roman legions for its ramparts. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 62b1ce1 | In theory the Holy Roman Emperor exercised a temporal sway matching the spiritual rule of the Pope over the universal community under God. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| d90e135 | The Empire had no political cohesion, no capital city, no common laws, common finances, or common officials. It was the relic of a dead ideal. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| b0551bf | Peruzzi, secured on expected revenue from the wool tax. When this brought in too little and Edward could not repay, the drain on the Italian companies bankrupted them. The Peruzzi failed in 1343, the Bardi suspended a year later, and their crash brought down a third firm, the Acciaiuioli. Capital vanished, stores and workshops closed, wages and purchases stopped. When, by the malignant chance that seemed to hound the 14th century, economic .. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| c8e1229 | Political balance among the competing groups was unstable because the king had no permanent armed force at his command. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 38009b9 | Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| edb4537 | Rule was still personal, deriving from the fief of land and oath of homage. Not citizen to state but vassal to lord was the bond that underlay political structure. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 0db6db7 | Christine makes it her own in the prologue, where she sits weeping and ashamed, wondering why men "are so unanimous in attributing wickedness to women" and why "we should be worse than men since we were also created by God." | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 4dfc92c | The boy would learn to ride, to fight, and to hawk, the three chief physical elements of noble life, | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 36d8c57 | Doctors were admired, lawyers universally hated and mistrusted. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 58dcbea | NO PEACE TREATY WAS REACHED at Bruges because the English were determined to retain their former possessions in France under their own sovereignty, while Charles V was equally determined to regain the sovereignty of Guienne yielded at Bretigny. His lawyers argued that the yielding of sovereignty had been invalid because it violated the sacred oath of homage, therefore the Black Prince and the King of England had been guilty of rebellion com.. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| b3f5bda | The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 5af13e3 | Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation. | feedback humility | Barbara W. Tuchman | |
| 8bd4339 | No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard and fast and specific decision. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 5be2c0c | It was one of the peculiar malfunctions of technology that shore batteries on the islands were generally of inadequate caliber and range to knock out a ship approaching with hostile intent. One is moved to wonder why, if a 10-pounder gun could be mounted on the rolling deck of a sailing vessel, the same or larger could not be mounted on land? | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 8fa08a5 | the blood libel took possession of the popular mind most rabidly in Germany, where the well-poisoning charge too had originated in the 12th century. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| fed85bd | The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke | openness skepticism stubbornness | Barbara W. Tuchman | |
| 195b550 | Marsilius of Padua, whose Defensor Pacis in 1324 was a forthright assertion of the supremacy of the state. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 0b7c90a | Though surnamed the Wise, he was not immune from the occupational disease of rulers: overestimation of their capacity to control events. No | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 4175688 | Folly is a child of power. | humility thought-life | Barbara W. Tuchman | |
| 63108c4 | 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. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| e92881a | For each man that shall be damned shall be damned by his own guilt, and each man that is saved shall be saved by his own merit." Unperceived, here was the start of the modern world. When" | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 217085a | With his ship faced with the danger of sinking, the Richard's chief gunner screamed to the Serapis, "Quarter! quarter! for God's sake!" Jones hurled a pistol at the man, felling him. But the cry had been heard by Pearson, the Serapis' commander, who called, "Do you ask for quarter?" Through the clash of battle, gunshot and crackle of fire the famous reply came faintly back to him: "I have not yet begun to fight!" Making good his boast, Jone.. | Barbara W. Tuchman |