I watched most of "BraveHeart" tonight - I hadn't watched it in a few years, and had forgotten just how moving a film it was. It coincides nicely with what I'm reading, "A Distant Mirror", by Barbara Tuchamn. The book chronicles the 14th century through the life of a minor noble, Enguerrand de Coucy. She sets quite a bit of background first, and analogizes a lot of the events to those of August 1914 (not a big surprise, as she had previously written "The Guns of August").

It's fascinating to read about this period - it's so alien to our time. The chapter that covered the black death, for instance - since the people of that era had no notions of micro-organisms, they attributed the deaths to all manner of superstitions. Of course, blaming "the other" came up then as it did later - there were a lot of anti-semitic pogroms. The eye opener (even though I had some vague notions about this) was the population loss - through the 14th century, due to the plague (more than once), wars, brigandage, etc - the population of Europe was nearly 50% lower by 1400 than it had been in 1300. That's a rough estimate, of course - it's not as if anyone was keeping accurate records at that point.

Sobering stuff, that, especially when you read about the 1918 pandemic, and the potential problem of avian flu.