Amazon.com (ISBN 0345283945, Paperback)

In this sweeping historical narrative, Barbara Tuchman writes of the cataclysmic 14th century, when the energies of medieval Europe were devoted to fighting internecine wars and warding off the plague. Some medieval thinkers viewed these disasters as divine punishment for mortal wrongs; others, more practically, viewed them as opportunities to accumulate wealth and power. One of the latter, whose life informs much of Tuchman's book, was the French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy, who enjoyed the opulence and elegance of the courtly tradition while ruthlessly exploiting the peasants under his thrall. Tuchman looks into such events as the Hundred Years War, the collapse of the medieval church, and the rise of various heresies, pogroms, and other events that caused medieval Europeans to wonder what they had done to deserve such horrors.

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0394400267, Hardcover)

Includes three maps and five sections of plates; one section is in color. A two-time Pulitzer prize winning historian examines 14th century Europe: the crusades, castles, cathedrals, chivalry, the Black Death, the seemingly endless hundred years' war, peasant uprisings, and more. 720 pages, index, notes, bibliography, map endpapers.