Similarly, in the artistic and literary genre known as the Dance of Death, life itself
became a dance with death, as men and women from every class were escorted—
sooner or later—to the grave by ghastly skeletons. Blaming their own sins for the
plague, penitent pilgrims, occasionally bearing whips to flagellate themselves,
crowded the roads. Rumors flew, accusing the Jews of causing the plague by
poisoning the wells. The idea spread from southern France and northern Spain
(where, as we have seen [p. 251], similar charges had already been leveled in the
1320s) to Switzerland, Strasbourg, and throughout Germany. At Strasbourg more
than 900 Jews were burned in 1349, right in their own cemetery.
UPHEAVALS OF WAR
“And westward, look! Under the Martian Gate,” wrote the English poet Geoffrey
Chaucer (c.1340–1400) in The Canterbury Tales, continuing,
Arcita and his hundred knights await,
And now, under a banner of red, march on.
And at the self-same moment Palamon
Enters by Venus’ Gate and takes his place
Under a banner of white, with cheerful face.
You had not found, though you had searched the earth,
Two companies so equal in their worth.^3
Chaucer’s association of war with “cheer” and “valor” was a central conceit of
chivalry, giving a rosy tint to the increasingly “total” wars that engulfed even civilian
populations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the East, the Ottoman Turks
took the Byzantine Empire by storm; in the West, England and France fought a bitter
Hundred Years’ War. Dynastic feuds and princely encroachments marked a
tumultuous period in which the map of Europe was remade.
The Ottoman Empire