A Distant Mirror — Barbara Tuchman

Tuchman uses the life of Enguerrand de Coucy — a fourteenth-century French nobleman — as a lens through which to examine a century of plague, war, schism, and peasant revolt. The book is a history of catastrophe, but also of how a class of people maintained the fictions of chivalry while the world they were built to govern disintegrated around them. Written in 1978 and still unmatched as narrative medieval history.