4 ideas
In 1396 a Franco-Burgundian crusade marched against the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid. At Nicopolis on the Danube, the French knights rejected King Sigismund of Hungary's plan to let seasoned infantry absorb the first Turkish line and charged ahead to claim the honor of the vanguard. They were encircled and routed, and thousands of prisoners were executed; Enguerrand de Coucy was captured and died in captivity at Bursa in 1397.
Tuchman's Law holds that being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development five- to tenfold. The record preserves catastrophe and omits ordinary continuity, so people who lived through an era experienced it as less uniformly calamitous than chronicles suggest. Readers of any archive or news feed should discount for this selection effect before judging how bad a period was.
The Black Death of 1347–50 killed roughly a third of Europe's population. Survivors could demand higher wages and move freely, and elites responded with laws freezing pay, such as England's Statute of Labourers, which bred the resentment behind revolts like the 1381 Peasants' Revolt. Clergy had died, fled, or failed to explain or stop the plague, which eroded the Church's authority and prepared the ground for later challenges to it.
The knightly code of honor, largesse and protection of the weak ran alongside a reality of ransom-hunting, pillage of peasants, and unemployed soldiers forming free companies that ravaged France during truces. The ideal did not restrain this behavior. It dignified it and blinded the nobility to tactical and social realities, so the class's self-image steadily diverged from its actual function.