The Restoration of Notre Dame

 In April of 2019, the roof beams of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire.  The flame roared through the 900 year old oak beams that supported the lead roof, sending particles of lead throughout the neighborhood and threatening to collapse the whole structure.  As Parisians watched in horror, the nineteenth-century spire that had risen above the crossing crashed down through the church's stone vaulting.

 

At the time there was fear that it might never be restored or might, like Reims cathedral (bombed in World War I) take decades to repair.  President Macron promised it would be rebuilt in time for the 2024 Olympic Games, to be held in Paris.  The restoration efforts didn't quite make the Games, but the cathedral has now reopened, just in time for Christmas 2024.

It helped that the church was not nearly as badly damaged as Reims had been.  Other than at the crossing, where the spire had come down, the stone vaulting (the ceiling you might call it, with all the oak beams and the roof above it) had mostly survived.  The church's interior was damaged by smoke and water but was mostly still there, unlike at Reims, which had been left as a shell after the bombing.

It also helped that a concerted search through Europe's forests (including eastern Europe) was able to find and obtain enough tall oaks to replace the twelfth-century beams.  (Many had been planted two centuries ago with the thought that they would become ships' masts, but steam replaced sail before they were used.)  In spite of some talk in 2019 of redoing the cathedral with an exciting new 21st-century "look," the decision was made to restore the church more or less to how it had been before the fire.  That meant not only using oak beams rather than steel but repairing the stonework (including the vaulting) using medieval techniques.

A major role here was played by craftsmen who had been working on Guédelon Castle.  As I've noted before, this is a project where modern people are attempting to build a medieval castle using medieval techniques and finding it more of a challenge than they anticipated.   But some medieval techniques they've worked out via trial and error, looking at how real medieval castles are put together, others they've found in late medieval handbooks.  At any rate, craftsmen who've developed a good feel for wood and stone played a major role in Notre Dame's reconstruction.

 

Notre Dame reopened in a grand ceremony attended by international dignitaries.  The interior especially looks strikingly different than it did six years ago, being limestone white rather than smoke-stained gray (from centuries both of candle smoke and more recently coal residue from the heating system).  One can see why thirteenth-century visitors to Paris were stunned by the cathedral.

But other aspects have been restored to the nineteenth-century standard,  including a new spire to replace the one erected by Viollet-le-Duc that crashed through the vaulting, and also including the gargoyles and the rather insipid heads of the queens and kings of the Old Testament, depicted on the front.  Some new things have been added, like the sprinkler system (good idea!).  But overall one can now enter the church and imagine oneself back in the thirteenth century.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on churches and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my book, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Available both as an ebook and in paperback.

Barbarians and Romans

 As I discussed back when I started this blog, the idea of Rome falling to hordes of barbarians, like a tsunami sweeping up the beach and inland, used to be a standard part of history.  In recent decades it has been rejected, because it is unsupported by the evidence.  Yes, there were major changes between the fourth and seventh centuries, but a process that takes three centuries is hard to characterize as a "fall."

The only place where Germanic peoples and their culture essentially overran the Romanized Celtic peoples of the Roman Empire was England, where Roman cities disappeared and Christianity moved to the margins.  But even there a great deal of melding between Roman and Anglo-Saxon culture occurred, and British scholars named the following centuries the Dark Ages not because they were evil but because we know so little about them.

And England of course is not the model for all of Europe and the Mediterranean basin, as much as the English would like you to believe it.  In fact on the European Continent in the fourth and fifth centuries a lot of Germanic people were welcomed into the Empire, serving in the Roman armies, settling in various territories.  There was friction of course and the occasional sacking of a city, like Rome itself in 410, but the Empire continued on.

The biggest changes to the Empire were the disasters of the sixth century, several "years without a summer" which broke down trade routes and nearly emptied the cities, as lack of harvests meant no food for the cities to buy, coupled with the first outbreak of the Black Death.  Then in the seventh century the rise of Islam meant that Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, and North Africa became Arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim, rather than Greek and Latin speaking and predominantly Christian, and no longer answered to the Emperor.

But how did Romanized populations react to the Germanic people settling among them in western Europe?  The Romans were not impressed with those they called barbarians, a term they coined because they said those who didn't speak Latin just said "Ba bar ba barg" or the equivalent.  But the Germanic peoples were impressed by Roman culture and, on the Continent, jettisoned their religion and language like a hot potato.  That's why Spanish, Italian, and French are all descended from Latin, in spite of the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, and the Franks.  Even Romanian is a Latin-derived language.  East of the Rhine and in Scandinavia, however, where the Empire had never extended, and in Anglo-Saxon England, Germanic languages persisted (as they still do).

In practice, Romans and Germanic peoples quickly started to intermarry, meaning their descendants had a shared ethnic identity.  Archaeologists who have tried to determine whether a burial represents a Gallo-Roman or a Frank, for example, have been confused by both Roman and Germanic artifacts in the same grave.  Names still had cultural overtones, but parents might name a son Siegfried who they hoped would rise to power as a warleader, while naming a different son Peter who they hoped would end up as a bishop.

The so-called barbarian kings, who established kingdoms within the old Empire with the favor of the Emperor (now in Constantinople), kept much of the old imperial governance structure.  The Empire had been divided into administrative units, each called a pagus, centered on a city.  The pagi became first Christian dioceses (by the fourth or fifth century) and then (by the sixth or seventh century) the counties into which the kingdoms were divided.  Even some of the old Roman taxation system remained, although the collected money went not to Rome or Constantinople but rather to the king.

Interestingly, the Germanic people settled in the old Empire all wanted to assert their own thnic identity.  The Franks were the first to start writing down their old, traditional laws, writing them in Latin, in imitation of Roman law.  These so-called Salic Laws inspired similar written lawcodes from other Germanic peoples, including laws written for the Goths, the Bavarians, the Burgundians, and so on.  This is an indication that even as "German" and "Roman" were in the process of being fused into what would become a (sort of) general medieval culture, the "barbarians" were proud of their heritage and didn't want to forget it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval social and political history, see my book, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other e-tailers, either as an ebook or in print.

Horses

 These days most people do not see a horse on most days.  Riding lessons are for the well-to-do (or for actors appearing costume dramas).  But in the Middle Ages horses were everywhere.

Domestic horses, scientists have now determined, were first found sometime around 2000 BC, in the Steppes east of the Black Sea.  Such domestic animals as sheep, goats, and cattle had been around a lot longer, but until then horses were primarily a food item, hunted by being speared or run off a cliff.  The rock of Solutré in southern Burgundy, seen below, is believed to be one where horses were hunted in this way, as a lot of horse skeletons have been found there.  (Native Americans ran buffalo off cliffs in the same way.)

Domestic horses really change everything.  It is far easier to travel long distances on horseback than on foot.  The nomads of the steppes of Central Asia, who used domestic horses first, found them both a good way to travel and an important aid in herding their other domestic animals.  Cowboys in both North and South America followed in this tradition.

From Central Asia domestic horses spread east to China and west to Europe and the Mediterranean basin and Arabian peninsula.  Around the Mediterranean, horse transport primarily used chariots in antiquity.  Roman roads provided a fairly smooth surface along which horses could trot, pulling a lightweight chariot.  Armies however were primarily made up of foot soldiers, though their leaders rode on horseback.  (I have to wonder if the fact that Romans wore nothing under their togas reduced their enthusiasm for horseback riding.)

One challenge facing horseback riding is the danger of sliding off, if the horse goes too fast or suddenly plunges or rears.  Today that challenge is at least partially resolved by the use of stirrups, that stabilize the rider's perch.  Riders on the steppes seem to have developed the stirrup around the fifth century AD, although it took several hundred more years to reach western Europe.

The stirrup revolutionized warfare and made possible the appearance of knights, medieval fighters on horseback.  Although the majority of fighters in every war were still foot soldiers, one now had cavalry as well, fighters who could wield spear or sword from horseback, thanks to the stirrup.  Knights were primarily aristocratic or, at least in the eleventh century, employed by aristocrats, because horses were expensive.  Not only did they need rich food like oats, but iron horseshoes and iron stirrups were not cheap.

By the thirteenth century, horses were sometimes used in agriculture, although oxen remained the principal draft animal.  Because horses move faster than oxen, one could plow more acreage in the same amount of time, yielding more crops.  Of course this advantage was lessened by the fact that some of those more abundant crops had to be oats to feed the horses, and horses are inherently more skittish than oxen.

The use of horses in agriculture required the development of better horse collars that put the pressure on the chest, not the neck of the horse.  Chariots had harnessed horses in a way that could choke them if anything too heavy was pulled.  Better horse collars, like saddles and stirrups, came out of Central Asia.

Horses reached the Americas with the Spaniards.  Native Americans had either carried their possessions themselves or had had dogs pull sledges (no wheels in the Americas before Columbus).  But the Indians of the plains recognized the value of horses by the seventeenth century and established their own herds, either of horses that had escaped the Spaniards or ones stolen from them.  In South America, horses provided a new form of transportation, as the native llamas and alpacas cannot be ridden except perhaps by a very small child.

(Ironically, horses' ancestors had originally developed in the Americas and crossed the Bering landbridge into Asia, many tens of thousands of years before they were domesticated. But there were no horses around when white men reached the Americas.  The ancestral horses left behind in the Americas had either died out by themselves or were killed off (and doubtless eaten) by indigenous people.)

Horses continued to provide the major form of transportation through the nineteenth century.  New York City had serious problems with heaps of horse manure and the bodies of dead horses, who expired after long and arduous lives of pulling buggies and carts.  Armies as late as World War I employed horses.  Only with the invention and spread of internal combustion vehicles did horses cease to be the major way to travel.  The Amish still use buggies drawn by horses, and horses are still used for herding in parts of the American west, but horses are now primarily used for racing or for leisure activities.  But they still have their uses.  If someone breaks a leg hiking in the backwoods stretches of the Appalachian Trail, horses have to go in and pack the wounded hiker out.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval knights, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Roman Villas

 Roman civilization was city-based.  Outside of Rome itself the cities were small, at most ten thousand people and maybe only a few thousand, but they were still the centers for religion, government, communication, and economic exchange, and these cities persisted into the Middle Ages.  The big Roman provinces were divided into smaller units, called pagi, and each was comprised of a central city and its surrounding countryside.

But how about the countryside beyond the city, the pagus that the city governed?  There were small groupings of people in what we might consider a village, a vicus as it was called, an administrative sub-unit.  But the rural population was scattered thinly, most involved in agriculture.  The countryside was dotted with villas, homes of wealthy Romans who oversaw the big plantation-style agriculture of the time.

 

The term villa could mean either an elegant home or the property attached to it, usually both.  Villas were the country estates of wealthy aristocrats, places they went when they wanted to relax, though they also maintained city dwellings, where the excitement and action took place.  Villas were high-status homes, large, full of atriums, flowering shrubs, mosaics, and bath houses.  They were not a single structure but a collection of structures.  A great many people lived there, under the kindly or not so kindly direction of the head of the household.  Villas also functioned as the centers of the plantation agriculture that marked the Roman Empire.  The slow disappearance of these villas between the third and sixth centuries (it happened at different times in different places) was an indication that the civilization was changing.

A big part of it was the end of plantation-based agriculture.  The Romans had used slaves, not worrying if they were worked to death because new ones were always being captured as the Empire expanded.  But once the Empire stopped conquering new territories and bringing home new slaves, this became a much less viable way to raise crops.  The new Germanic peoples setting in the Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries (Goths around the Mediterranean, Angles and Saxons in Britain, Franks in Gaul) had never used plantation agriculture.  The climate disasters and Black Death of the sixth century, leading to rapid population loss and shrinking of cities (where the produce of the plantations had been bought and sold), meant that people turned to small-scale agriculture.

But what about the villas?  With their economic purpose gone, they became much less viable.  Some of the wealthy Romans instead moved to much smaller, semi-fortified structures on hilltops, feeling the times were much too dangerous for the open villa layout.  But most of the aristocrats who survived moved to the cities with their walls, which were rebuilt around a much smaller population center.

The elegant villa structures themselves fell into disuse.  Because they had been founded in places that were chosen because they were quiet, bucolic, and good for large scale agriculture, rather than at strategically important spots as the cities had been, there was no incentive to maintain them.  Fields once worked by slaves became overgrown with first shrubs, then trees.  

The land attached to villas increasingly became the property of the bishops.  Early medieval bishops in Gaul were mostly from the old aristocracy (and centered in cities), and if they inherited or acquired villas, that land now belonged to the church.  Wealthy families who had moved permanently to the cities considered it an act of piety to give bishops land they no longer wanted, and for which there was no buyer.

In some cases rural monasteries, which really first appeared in Gaul in the seventh century (earlier monasteries had been primarily built in or near the cities), took up the lands and sometimes even the remains of the buildings of the old villas.

 

From the sixth-century population collapse to the first signs of population growth in the late eighth century stretches a little-documented period in which the pattern of rural settlement thoroughly changed.  The cities were still there, but the little rural hamlets of the Empire, the vici, disappeared.  Archaeology suggests that much of the reduced rural population lived in isolated farms.

New villages began appearing in the late eighth century, but they were usually not in the same locations as the old villas, even though the villages (farming communities) were called by the same name in Latin (villa).  The old Gallo-Roman aristocracy had mostly died out, and the new aristocrats established new manor houses for a new form of agricultural organization.  A few old villa structures became repurposed as palaces for the wealthy, but for the most part their mosaics (as seen above) and their pillars were something discovered by accident.

Alexandra Chavarría Arnau discusses the evidence for the decline of late Roman villas in in the volume The Oxford Handbook of the Roman World (ed. Effros and Moreira, 2020).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on the Roman-medieval transition, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Renaissance fruit

 Earlier I posted about medieval fruits and vegetables, the mainstay of the diet for people who had access to a lot less meat than we do in the modern West.  Today I want to discuss a bit more about how we know what their fruit was like.

Surprisingly, we know an awful lot from Renaissance paintings, dating from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.  The artists would put people in the foreground, maybe a wealthy duke who wanted to be memorialized, maybe a Madonna and child, and then fill in the rest with a realistic landscape or household setting.  Often they would include fruit.  For example, Baby Jesus might be depicted holding some cherries, whose red juice was considered symbolic of the blood of the Sacrifice.

(Wait, the kid's not even to his first birthday, and we're already foretelling his painful death?  Yep, that's what's happening.)

A painting by Bellini from the end of the fifteenth century shows a Madonna and child with what appears to be a pear sitting in front of them. Recent scholarship has indicated that it is more likely to be an apple, perhaps symbolizing the Fruit that Adam and Even unwisely ate, causing all sorts of problems, to be contrasted to the salvation Jesus would bring.

 Renaissance painters also sometimes did still lifes, pictures of bowls of fruit and flowers and the like, and helpfully these still lifes often came with labels, as the artist was proud not just of painting an attractive picture but of doing so extremely accurately.  "See, I caught the distinguishing characteristics of this variety of peach or these plums very clearly."

These detailed paintings have been used to identify many kinds of "heritage" fruits, with the purpose of not letting the biodiversity of multiple varieties disappear, as just a few popular types take over the market.  In Italy especially (where a lot of this Renaissance art is found) there is now a concerted effort to find a few small orchards that might still be growing some of the scores of varieties that used to be grown, before the big orchard growers turned to varieties that, with chemical fertilizer and irrigation, could turn out large harvests.

Interestingly, a lot of these small orchards with old varieties are found at monasteries.  The monks and nuns have had orchards since their monasteries were first established, and since the fruit was for their own use, not for the grocery store, they kept on with the varieties they knew best.

Historians can also get a better sense of what medieval fruit looked like.  It was smaller and doubtless a bit scruffier than modern fruit, and often what we would call misshapen.  The apple in the picture above, for example, is a variety dubbed "cow nose apple," still grown in a few places and considered very good, but it doesn't look a lot like a nice round, red McIntosh.

There is an article in the November 2024 Smithsonian magazine about Isabella Dalla Ragione, who is leading the effort in Italy to rediscover and identify many types of heritage fruit, with the purpose of maintaining fruit's ability to adapt to changing climate and conditions.  She found many clues in old manorial records from the Renaissance as well as in Renaissance paintings.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval food and drink, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Good and Bad Plants

 We constantly make distinctions between good and bad plants, especially as they are good or bad for us.  The distinction has a long history.  The book of Genesis in the Bible has God warn Adam, as he's driven out of Paradise, that from now on he's going to have to work growing and harvesting grain, and that bad plants (like thorns and thistles) were going to get into his fields, causing trouble.

We call plants that are growing where we don't want them weeds.  But the distinction between good plants and weeds is a tricky one.  Any plant growing where we don't want it may be labeled a weed, and individual plants may be good or bad in different contexts.  Dandelions, all lawn maintenance firms agree, are a weed that must be eradicated, but they do make one's lawn brightly yellow and cheery after a long winter, plus you can make wine from dandelions (and eat the greens if it's been a long and hungry winter).  For years American cities planted callary pear trees for springtime flowers along the streets, but now they've been declared a noxious weed.  Brush and high grass are generally considered weeds, but they provide cover for songbirds.  Native plants may be considered good and non-native plants (that would cover dandelions) as weeds, but that would dump many of our crop plants into the weed category.

Medieval thinkers understood the difficulty of good and bad as unambiguous labels for plants.  (Interestingly, Latin has no word for "weed," so one could speak of "bad plants" but not "weeds" in the English language sense.)  For example, stinging nettles were definitely bad plants for farmers, who tried to eradicate them, but medieval herbalists used them to make various medicinal concoctions.  Nettles (or at least the ground-up stems) were considered good for colic and for coughs.

The use of medicinal herbs was complicated in the early Middle Ages by lingering fears about paganism, which was usually tied to magic.  So someone grinding up and sprinkling herbs around could either be a wise doctor or a dangerous pagan.  Women especially were looked at with suspicion if they seemed to know too much herbal lore.

The distinction between good and bad plants also had gradations.  It is clear that different kinds of grain were rated more or less highly.  Of the major crop plants, wheat was always described as best, followed by rye, followed by barley, followed by oats, designated as coarse peasant food.  Interestingly, however, dark bread made with at least some rye was eaten by everybody in much of France and Germany, including the elite, and in some places, like Scotland, everybody ate oat bread.

In all of this the assumption was that plants were good if they were good for humans.  Thorns and thistles, against which God warned Adam, were for medieval people the markers of wild places, uninhabited or at best the home of bandits and untamed beasts. Medieval monks sought out wild places to establish monasteries far from worldly distraction, but their first thought was to get rid of all the bad plants and replace them with good crops.

Humans have always had a hard time with wilderness.

Much of the information in this post is treated at greater length by Paolo Squatriti, in the volume The Oxford Handbook of the Roman World (ed. Effros and Moreira, 2020).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval food crops and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Merovingians in the New World

 I've earlier discussed the Merovingian kings of the Franks, considered the first French dynasty, who ruled what is now France from the late fifth century to the middle of the eighth, when they were replaced on the throne by the Carolingians.  Although French students learn about them just as we learn about Columbus and George Washington, it's probably fair to say that not one person in America who is not a medievalist ever heard of them, or of the baptism of Clovis, considered a great turning point in the Christianization of the Germanic peoples.

But this was not always the case!  In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American writers often discussed the Merovingians, as a foil to the new republic just being properly established, or even as a way to understand the French, who had been major allies during the American Revolution and who began their own French Revolution in the same year as the American Constitution was adopted (1789).

Even American school children learned about the Merovingians back then.  British accounts of what they called "universal" history (or, more accurately, western history) began their discussion of post-classical history with the "fall of Rome," with Anglo-Saxons invading Britain and Germanic peoples like the Franks becoming established in the old Roman Empire in Continental Europe.  These British accounts formed the basis of American history books.

(The mind boggles when one realizes how much more a twelve-year-old was expected to read, understand, and remember of historical events, two centuries ago.)

Writers and political theorists, including President John Adams, had much to say about the Merovingians.  Adams himself saw the consecration of Clovis with holy oil, as shown in the ivory carving above (note the dove bringing the ampoule), as an example of what the US had to avoid, in that he didn't want any divine aura hanging around our leaders.  Others however saw the mixing of Roman and Germanic in what is now France as a sign that people of different backgrounds and ethnic origins could work together in this new country.

In trying to understand France, some looked at the French Revolution as the final breaking away from tyrannical kingship, that had been holding the French back since the fifth century.  Others, on the contrary, saw the violence that grew out of the French Revolution as a sign that the French were just inherently violent, as they had been ever since the days of Clovis.  In any event, these writers had a lot to say about the Merovingians.

Merovingian-era documents could even be used to justify slavery.  After all, Roman slavery continued under the Franks until the sixth century, and household slavery for several centuries after that, with plenty of legal justification.  Slave-holders could try to pass off the relatively recent enslavement of Africans to work in the New World as just the continuation of a thousand-year-old practice.

In all of this, one can see that history is not simply events in the past, that stay where you put them.  History is a form of memory, and people are constantly making choices about what to remember and how to interpret past events in light of present concerns.

Gregory I. Halfond has recently published a book on how the Merovingians became a major topic of discussion in the new American republic, Writing about the Merovingians in the Early United States (2023).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

The Chinese Lion of San Marco

 The cathedral of San Marco (Saint Mark's) in Venice, with its surrounding piazza, is decorated with art work taken from many other places.  The famous horses of San Marco, for example, came from Constantinople, when the Fourth Crusade raided this supposed ally of the Christian West at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

Less well known is the lion of Saint Mark—all four evangelists were associated with a symbol, and Saint Mark's was a lion.  This is not just an ordinary lion.  It's a Chinese lion.

A Chinese lion with wings.  So how, you ask, did a Chinese lion end up at the head of the Adriatic in the Middle Ages?

It's huge, made of bronze, thirteen feet long (without the tail) and weighing some three tons.  Venetian records note the lion's presence, atop a pillar of Egyptian granite, no later than 1293.  Recent studies of the isotopes in the bronze suggest that most of it dates to eighth-century China.  During the Tang dynasty, such enormous creatures, often winged, were erected as tomb guardians by the wealthy and powerful.  Such tomb guardians were more commonly ceramic, however, though at the same time small bronze creatures might be erected at Buddhist temples.  Whatever this lion might have stood for originally, the Venetians saw it and coveted it.

So this lion's presence at San Marco indicates that the trade routes that brought spices and silks from the far East to medieval Europe also brought larger and heavier objects.  Something this size would have had to have been cut up for transport and then reassembled on site.  The Venetians must have paid a whole lot to have something like this brought overland some 4500 miles.

But this was the era of Marco Polo, when Italians were very interested in the East.  The whole Italian peninsula thrived on trade that brought goods from very far away to Europe.  As well as objects to sell, the Venetians were eager to obtain goods they could display.

Much of the recent work on the lion of San Marco has been reported by Sarah E. Bond.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval trade, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.

Kindle Unlimited

 As I have discussed earlier on this blog, self-publishing ("indie" publishing) is a complicated process.  The author has to not only write the book, but themselves do (or hire) the editing, the formatting, the procuring of covers, and the actual publishing, to say nothing of keeping track of royalties.  And of course there's then advertising to make sure anyone knows your book exists.  Indie books almost never show up in stores, so no one is going to stumble across it wandering around Fred's Corner Bookstore.

The publishing platforms on which indie authors publish their books have issues of their own to deal with.  (Amazon's KDP has come to dominate the market, but Apple, B&N, and Kobo still have a decent share of e-readers.)  The whole idea is that there are "no gatekeepers," so they aren't going to check for quality of prose or story line or even basic sentence structure, but they don't want plagiarism or raw pornography or words sliding off the page of a paperback.  The platforms want to keep the best authors, those whose books are selling thousands of copies, and figure out how to maximize their own profits (harder when a number of indie books are, shall we say, a bit on the weak side).

Amazon has hit upon "Kindle Unlimited."  Indie authors can decide to enroll their ebooks in the program, in return for a promise to make sure their ebooks are exclusively on Amazon, no other ebook platform.  Voracious readers can then sign up for Kindle Unlimited, pay their $12 a month fee, and read as many ebooks from the program as they want.

These ebooks are officially borrowed, not bought, and the readers can only have ten of them "checked out" at once (and if they stop paying their $12 a month they all disappear from their Kindle).  The authors get paid, not the royalties they'd get from an outright sale, but a fee based on how many pages the KU borrower read.  (How do the bots know?  They know things.)

Romance readers especially, those who may read four or five books a week, love KU.  Why spend $3 or $4 to buy an ebook when for only $12 a month they can read a new book every day - or even more!  Find an author you like, and blast through their entire list.  Readers of other genres of fiction are often the same.

I've recently started an experiment, making my whole "Royal Wizard of Yurt" series available through Kindle Unlimited.  The series (6 novels, 3 novellas, 3 omnibus volumes) has been out for a while, so at this point my faithful fans have pretty much read them all.  So this is an experiment to see if I can get some new fans.  "A Bad Spell in Yurt," the first book in the series, is the gateway drug to all my fiction.

So far the experiment has been working well.  Even though I've done zero promotion, a number of KU members have found and read their way through the whole series.  An additional, unexpected but welcome result has been a number of people who have bought the whole series outright.  Can't tell if these are people who borrowed and read the books, then decided they wanted to have copies to keep forever, or if they're friends, ones who don't have KU memberships, and were told the books were Really Good by their KU friends (fine friends, there).  Either works for me!

So if you're a KU member who's been reading my blog for years but never got around to reading "Bad Spell," give it a try!  Here's the US link (also available in other countries).

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004S2CPM2

The story is about a young wizard, fresh out of wizards' school, who becomes Royal Wizard in the tiny kingdom of Yurt. He has no idea what he's doing, being just glad to have graduated after all that embarrassment with the frogs, but he cheerfully rises to the challenges.  After all, he's not a very good wizard, but Yurt isn't a very big kingdom.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

Women as Regents

 As I have noted previously, medieval aristocratic women had far more authority and ability to make major decisions than is often assumed.  One of the clearest examples of this is the role of powerful women as regents.

A regent is someone who rules, specifically in the name of someone else, awaiting the time when that person becomes an adult or comes back from far away.  If the lord of a castle headed off on Crusade, for example, his wife would normally act as regent until his return.  If the lord died and his children, his heirs or heiresses, were not yet old enough to rule in their own right, their mother would rule until they came of age.

The same was true of counts and dukes, even kings.  Marie de France, a French princess who married the count of Champagne, probably ruled longer than he did.  Adela of Blois, a member of the English royal family, similarly brought up her children and ran the county of Blois during her husband's repeated absences.  Sometimes powerful women ran the county for several generations, arranging the marriages of children and grandchildren.  Mathilda, countess of Nevers in the thirteenth century, guided her daughters. granddaughters, and great-granddaughters into advantageous marriages.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, duchess of Aquitaine, then queen of France, then queen of England during the final two-thirds of the twelfth century, did not keep having retired to a nunnery prevent her from emerging to make major decisions for her children or grandchildren or for that matter for England as a whole.

One of the most powerful regents was Blanche of Castile, queen of France (she was originally from Spain, hence called "of Castile").  Whe her husband Louis VIII died in 1226 after a short reign (you never hear much about Louis VIII, do you), she took over running the kingdom.  She proposed her oldest son as king of England (the English refused the offer), and kept busy for ten years as regent.  During this time, her oldest son, Louis IX, grew to adulthood and married.  Blanche was not at all happy about this, especially since it seemed to be a very happy marriage -- his wife was Marguerite, of the family of counts of Provence.  The story at the time was that Louis and Marguerite had to sneak around behind Blanche's back.  Finally after ten years she allowed him to start acting fully as king and husband.

Most of the women I mention above may barely have met their husbands before their wedding day, and often came from a different part of Europe, even speaking a different language.  But when they became regents they took a deep breath and did what needed to be done.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval women, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

The Murder of Charles the Good

 Charles the Good, count of Flanders, was murdered in 1127.  The details of the plot, the murder, and the consequences are told in several contemporary accounts.  The events reveal much about twelfth-century attitudes and social expectations, starting with the fact that the complicated alliances, betrayals, and plots seen in Game of Throne are mild compared to the real Middle Ages.

To start, Charles was only half Flemish (we would say Belgian, except that Belgium only became a country in the nineteenth century) and half Danish.  Members of great noble and royal families married members of similarly powerful families, meaning that in the twelfth century family ties stretched across all of Europe, even into Russia.

Charles was the son of Cnut, king of Denmark, and of the daughter of Count Robert I of Flanders.  The name Charles was certainly chosen to evoke Charlemagne, emperor three centuries earlier and still alive in epic and story.  The counts of Flanders actually were descended from Charlemagne, as they were very proud to tell anyone who would listen, and in naming his son Charles, King Cnut may have been hoping to gain some imperial cachet for Denmark.  His assassination ended that hope, however.

Although born in Denmark, Charles went with his mother back to Flanders after his father was assassinated.  Noble widows at the time usually left their children with their dead husband's family if they left, but Charles's mother may have feared Cnut's assassins might be coming for her son (she did leave her daughters in Denmark).  He was a toddler at the time, so he probably grew up with few memories of his native country.

His mother settled back in Flanders with her father (Count Robert) and brothers but soon left again, this time to marry the count of Apulia (southern Italy), leaving her son behind this time.  Charles was principally raised by his grandfather, Count Robert, and by his uncle (Robert's successor), also named Robert.  After Robert II's death, his son Baldwin succeeded as count of Flanders, and Charles acted as chief advisor for his cousin.  (Keeping up so far?)

So far everything looks fine, other than nothing matching our idea of a child being raised by a loving two-parent family.  And when Count Baldwin died in 1119, after only a short reign as count, he designated Charles as his successor.  But now the plotting and betrayals begin.  Robert II's widow, Clementia, daughter of the count of Burgundy, wanted a different cousin to succeed, the son of a younger brother of Robert II.  (Thus Burgundy and its alliances enter the picture, and I'm simplifying a lot.)  Everybody went to war with everybody.

But Charles eventually prevailed and settled down to try to be a just count, trying to find food for his subjects during a famine, seeking to pass fair judgments in legal cases.  He also proved himself a generous patron of the church.  When he was murdered, it was not by all his relatives and in-laws, but by his serfs.

In this period, the first quarter of the twelfth century, serfdom was rapidly disappearing in western Europe, as peasants asserted their freedom.  Erembald, who led the conspiracy against Charles, was said by contemporaries to have been born a serf but to be trying to hide his origins, and he decided it was better to kill Charles than to have the count reveal his true status.  This sounds rather implausible, but that contemporaries would say it is an indication of how sensitive an issue servile status was at the time.

Charles was murdered in church, something contemporaries stressed as making an evil deed even worse.  In fact, one chronicler said he was simultaneously praying, singing psalms, and distributing pennies to the poor when he was stabbed.  (Quite the multi-tasker.)  Such a description made Charles's death a virtual martyrdom; someone would have to be killed for one's faith to be an actual martyr, but the chronicler seemed to think this was close enough.

The murder was considered terrible and shocking, sending shock waves throughout Europe.  The Scandinavian royal families had been trying to kill each other off for generations, but further south aristocrats liked to believe they lived in modern, peaceful times, when noble violence was restricted to killing Muslims in the Holy Land (it wasn't).

Charles never became a saint, in spite of being killed in a church and designated "the Good."  Without an heir, he left Flanders in turmoil.  First of course the murderers had to be caught and hung.  Then a successor had to be found.  King Louis VI of France decided he should make the decision as to who succeeded, as Flanders was considered part of the French kingdom.  He settled on William Clito, grandson of William the Conqueror of England, whose wife had been a sister of Robert I of Flanders.  But William Clito had little support, and the county was taken within a year by Thierry of Alsace, whose mother was a sister of Robert II of Flanders.

Can't ignore the role of women in medieval inheritance.

The principal scholar now working on Charles the Good is Jeff Rider of Wesleyan University.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval families, nobles, and inheritance, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

The Hussites

 As I have noted before, the majority culture of Europe's Middle Ages was Christianity, but there was often strong disagreement over what Christianity entailed and which version was the correct version.  We are used to varieties of Christianity in the US, Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, Episcopalians, Baptists, Unitarians, Lutherans, and I'm just scratching the surface.  The difference is that for the most part people have a laissez-faire attitude these days toward other versions of religion, whereas for the most part medieval people found such variety deeply concerning.

(Though I should note that my mother, as a little girl in a nice Methodist household, was told rather triumphantly by her Catholic playmate that her parents weren't really married, that she was a bastard and not really baptized, and that she was going to Hell.)

The Hussites were a group of followers of John Hus in the late Middle Ages, labeled as heretics although, like all heretics, they asserted they were the true Christians and the others the actual heretics.  You can really only tell who was "really" the heretic by who ultimately won.  This isn't as cynical as you'd think.  Medieval Christians figured God would ultimately make sure the real Christians triumphed in the end.  It all made sense.

John Hus (1369-1415) was a theologian in Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic.  He became a professor at the University of Prague, then recently established.  He was perfectly orthodox, that is considered to have correct religious beliefs, though like many theologians arguing over doctrine he periodically got into trouble with his archbishop.  But he started questioning the church's practice of having lay people receive Mass with the wafer only, rather than both wine and wafer.  This had been established in the early Middle Ages out of fear that lay people might either spill or chug-a-lug the wine, neither appropriate for the Blood of Christ.  (Indeed, this continued in Catholicism until the Vatican iI council in the 1960s.)

Hus argued that the Bible showed Jesus urging his disciples at the Last Supper to partake of both bread and wine.  Those who agreed with him were called Utraquists, from the Latin for "both" (utraque).  Though Hus had been a respected theologian, this contrary teaching was considered deeply troubling.  Europe's bishops were at the time trying to resolve the Great Schism, where there were three different men all claiming to be pope (one each in Rome and Avignon, plus a third left over from a failed earlier council), and they called a council at Constance in 1415 to resolve this, and figured they'd start the council with something easier, like deciding what to do with the Utraquists.

Hus was invited to the council to present his arguments.  The emperor Sigismund said he'd guarantee his safety.  If you check Hus's death date, you can tell where this is going.  He was ruled a heretic, the emperor said he couldn't honor the safe-conduct he'd given a heretic, and Hus went to the stake rather than renounce his beliefs.  Even today, you do not tell Sigismund jokes in Bohemia.

(As I've noted before, I'd have made a lousy heretic, as at the first sign of burning at the stake I'd have renounced my "false" beliefs so fast it would make your head spin.  But that's just me.)

Hus's followers, now called Hussites, immediately rebelled against the emperor.  They carried out guerrilla warfare, dragging cannons through the woods to blast imperial soldiers.  At a certain point the organized church, which had in the meantime managed to resolve the schism and settled on having the pope just be one more Renaissance tyrant, basically decided to let the Hussites be heretics if they wanted to endanger their souls so badly, "see if we care."  Utraquists were still around as the Protestant Reformation got underway a century later, further complicating things.  But that story takes us out of the Middle Ages.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval Christianity and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms. Also available in paperback.

The Ill-Born Prince

 I've got a new fantasy novel!  It's called "The Ill-Born Prince" (that's ILL-BORN, not three-times born or anything like that).  It's about a prince who has discovered he's actually not the son of the king but rather of the queen and the Royal Wizard, and he ends up off studying at the wizards' school.  (I was originally thinking of calling it The Bastard Prince but decided that would be too shocking.)

 

For those keeping score at home, it's number 4 in the "Starlight Raven" series.  That series is also known as the "Yurt, the Next Generation" series.  Here's the cover, and here's the link on Amazon.  It's available both as an ebook on all major ebook platforms and as a paperback (it can be ordered from any bookstore as well as bought directly from Amazon).

Like all the books in the Starlight Raven series, it's narrated by Antonia, daughter of the Master of the wizards' school, and the first young woman ever accepted to study there.  The male wizards are still not totally convinced that a woman magic-worker might not be some kind of dangerous witch, so Antonia has plenty of issues to deal with, not least her relationship to Walther, the ill-born prince.

I've tried to write it so people could enjoy the book without having read any of the others in the series, but you may pick up a few continuing sub-plots from earlier if you have.

Here's the beginning to whet your appetite.

PART ONE - Magical Problems

“Every spell in this book has an error in it,” the teacher told us.  “Something is left out, or steps are transposed, or the words in the Hidden Language are wrong.”
Our class of wizardry students looked at each other, startled, then again at the books on our desks.  This was not some ancient grimoire of half-understood magic scribbled down by an imperfectly trained magician whose wits were already going.  These were freshly printed, clean volumes, each copy identical, that we had just been told would be the fundamental text for our final two years at the wizards’ school.
There was a confused murmur while students tried leafing through the book, looking unsuccessfully for any clues.  Then Walther raised his hand and said, “Excuse me, sir, but why were the errors allowed to remain?  Or,” he hesitated a second, pushing a shock of black hair away from his forehead, “were they deliberate?”
The teacher smiled.  He was one of the older teachers; in the last few years a number of new, younger wizards had joined the school faculty, but he was still teaching.  Like all the older wizards, he always seemed to have a soft spot for Walther.
“Excellent question,” he said.  “And yes, it was deliberate.”  He scanned the room.  “Can any of you think why that should be the case?”
After a moment of uneasy silence, Chlodomer put up his hand.  “It’s an exercise for us.  If we can’t find the errors, it shows we aren’t as good at wizardry as we think we are.”
The teacher nodded, lips pursed.  No one on the faculty had ever had a soft spot for Chlodomer.  Even though he was no longer the awkward, easily startled young man he had been when first entering the school six years ago, even though he had become one of the best students in the technical wizardry division, he had never gotten the respect from the teachers he probably deserved.
For that matter, many of the older teachers were still reluctant to respect me either: the first girl the school had ever taken.
“It’s more than an exercise for you, though of course it could be that as well,” the teacher answered Chlodomer.
“This isn’t the way magic is supposed to work,” one of the students objected.  “This isn’t the way anything works.”
“Indeed,” said the teacher crisply.  “Since you have such a good idea of how everything works, this book will present no challenge for you,” which caused the student to slump back in his chair.
I was distracted, looking out the classroom window toward the school courtyard.  There, among the fountains and the rainbows, lay a crimson flying carpet, twitching as though eager to be off.  Two men were busily loading parcels onto it: a swarthy, enormously fat eastern mage, and with him the white-bearded Master of the wizards’ school.
I wished they were not going.
The teacher interrupted my thoughts.  “Miss Antonia, you usually are full of theories.  What do you think?”
I dragged my attention back to the room and tried not to appear irritated at his patronizing tone. “You’re keeping the most powerful spells from us.  Or if not from us, from the senior students, then from the more junior students.  You don’t want anyone using this magic unless and until you decide we’re worthy to have the missing parts of the spell revealed.”
Now the teacher looked surprised, even, I thought, a little guilty.  “Well, there may be something in that.  After all, it could be dangerous for some of the younger students to read and try to master a spell for which they were not ready.”
Another one of the students spoke up.  “What happens if we try the spell just as it’s written?  What is the danger, exactly?”  He and another young man bumped elbows and grinned at each other.  “Does something, well, inappropriate happen?  Does a winged gorgos appear?  Does the whole school collapse?”
“Not at all,” the teacher said reprovingly.  “If you tried one of these spells as written, it would have no effect.  Other than,” he added darkly, “perhaps blowing up in your face.  As would happen if a junior student tried to alter the spells unwisely.  These are errors that need to be considered carefully.”

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

Vultures and buzzards

Europe doesn't have all the kinds of vultures and condors found in the New World, no turkey vultures or black vultures, no California condors or Andean condors.  But medieval people certainly had birds, as I have discussed previously, and that included vultures and buzzards (buzzards and vultures are actually different  kinds of birds, but the names are often used interchangeably).

The European buzzard (pictured above), although now rare, may still be seen in the Pyrenees.  It, like the turkey vulture of the Americas, soars high on air currents looking for dead things to eat.  This is of course a useful function.  Dead animals lying around help nobody.  Different birds and animals have developed a readiness to eat dead things at different stages of decay.

For example, when scientists were trying to live-trap California condors for captive breeding, they would put out a dead goat, then hide in the bushes for four days.  First the ravens would come, then the turkey vultures, then the golden eagles, and finally the condors.  Time to spring the trap!

European buzzards are especially fond of the marrow inside bones.  This is hard to get out when you've only got claws and a beak to work with.  They will thus carry bones high in the air and drop them on a rocky surface, so that they split open, allowing access to the tasty marrow.

The vultures of the Mediterranean, also carrion eaters, were considered a suitable subject for theological speculation, as of course were all aspects of the physical world.  It was widely believed (falsely) that female vultures were able to produce eggs and raise chicks without the intervention of male vultures.  For some early Church Fathers, therefore, the Virgin Birth of Christ was preceded by the virgin birth of vultures, "proving" that such an event was entirely possible and need not be dismissed as imaginary.

Even more so, "Christ as vulture" was, for these theologians, an indication that God had planned out the natural world to give humans a foretaste and understanding of important religious issues.  Just as vultures took care of the dead, Christ came to raise the dead.  It all made sense.  God was thinking of us ahead of time, providing a handy metaphor in the animal kingdom to help us understand the heavenly Kingdom.

Noah Neiber of the University of Iowa is studying vultures as theological beings.

Okay, some early medieval theology is weird.  (Noah knows this.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on animals in medieval thought, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

Fantasy heroines

 The fantasy genre is full of women.  And no, I don't mean men fantasizing about some top-heavy lass pressing her unclad body against theirs.  I mean that the fantasy genre, most commonly a vaguely medieval setting with magic and (usually) wizards and dragons, has lots of active heroines.  This is especially true of YA (young adult) fantasy.

We've come a long way since covers showed sword-wielding maidens dressed in chain mail bikinis.  But some of that ethos is still there.  Fantasy heroines are tough.  Especially the YA ones, where everyone's a teenager.

Even though the setting is sort-of-medieval, fantasy heroines tend to live in a society that is not at all patriarchal.  Women can and do everything the men do, and no one thinks anything of it.  Women in these stories may be knights, bishops, ruling queens, shopkeepers, wizards, mayors, and the like.  Although real medieval women were much more active than scholars once thought, there is no question that medieval men were given precedence, and that the careers of knight and priest were closed to women.

YA heroines are inevitably smart, skilled, sassy, strong, and ready to save the day.  They do not menstruate.  They are not wracked by self-doubt.  They do not carry themselves cautiously around men, trying to avoid any situation that might result in sexual assault.  They do not get all embarrassed around a boy they like, nor do they feel they should agree to the sexual urges of the boy they like.  As role models, they have much to offer teenage girls, as the heroines do not assume there are things they just cannot do, and they do not routinely defer to men.

One of the chief ways in which these heroines differ from medieval women is that they are handy with a sword.  Medieval women did not wield swords (okay, a few may have, and certainly there are examples of women leading knights into battle, most notably Joan of Arc but sword-fighting was just not an option).  Sword-fighting requires both upper-body strength and lots of training.  Even the unusual medieval woman with more upper-body strength than most men would not have been offered the training.  Even in the much more egalitarian modern period, women do not play major league baseball, for the same combination of reasons.

Interestingly, male characters in YA fantasy are much more likely to be wracked by self-doubt than are the female ones.  They wonder if they will have the strength or skill to do what needs to be done, they feel the weight of the expectations put on them, and they are cautious around girls if thoughts of sex enter their minds at all, which it does surprisingly rarely.  And no wonder.  If they tried an unwelcome move on a fantasy heroine, they know for a fact she'd run them through with her sword.

Recently I've realized that my own YA fantasy heroines do not conform to the modern norm.  Antonia, heroine of my "Starlight Raven" series, is certainly smart and capable, but she lives in a patriarchal society, where it is considered shocking that a girl would want to become a wizard.  She has plenty of self-doubts as well as unease around attractive young men.  Sure, she gets to save the day, but without the sassiness or ready confidence of many a fantasy heroine.

Am I being more realistic about what teenage girls are like?  Kind of hard to talk about "realism" in a story that has magic and dragons.  Is she more like what I was like as a teenager?  Probably.  It's interesting that the strongest, sassiest, quickest-with-a-sword fantasy heroines are most freuently written by men.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

More Medieval Spain

As I earlier posted, medieval Spain is much less studied than the rest of medieval Europe.  Part of the issue is the language barrier.  One really has to know both the medieval and the modern versions of Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Arabic, as well as Latin.  But a number of younger scholars, most notably Americans, have started studying this fascinating territory.

 

The Iberian peninsula, although its own separate world, was closely tied to the rest of Europe through the Christian rulers who tried for over six centuries to make it their own.  A lot of these Christian kings were in origin French, especially Burgundian.  In addition, Christian Europe did a great deal of trading with Spain, as its ports along its eastern side could take goods into the Mediterranean, where they could be easily transported.  Spanish horses and leather were considered especially valuable.

But there were distinct differences, such as that for most of the Middle Ages the Christians (and even some of the Muslims) used the Era dating, where the years were always 38 more than "anno Domini," so that while it was 1100 in France it was 1138 in Spain.  No one knows how this started.  There was talk at the time of it having something to do with Julius Caesar.

Today I want to expand on some of what I discussed earlier, concentrating especially on what's called the ta'ifa, a term which might be translated as "city state," a small, powerful principality.  Medieval Spain was full of them.  Indeed, there were at least three periods in medieval Spanish history when ta'ifas multiplied, at the expense of those rulers trying to establish large, centralized territories. Political historians tend to focus on those rulers with the most territory, but most politics then (as now) was local, and the ta'ifas filled the vacuum when the centralizers weakened.

Although one can see medieval Spain's history as permeated with conflicts between Christians and Muslims, it's more complicated, because Muslims also fought Muslims and Christians fought Christians.  Political alliances did not always follow religion.  As well as the various Christians trying to conquer their way south from the Pyrenees, there were Christians who had been there since the heyday of the Roman Empire.  As well as Muslims who recognized the rulership of the local caliphs, there were also powerful lords from North Africa who thought that they ought to be in charge, and the local Muslims did not always agree.  The rulers of the ta'ifas were right in the middle of all this.

(If you look at the map, you can see how close southern Spain is to North Africa, and not only at the Straits of Gibraltar.  Spain was influenced as much by North Africa as by the rest of Europe.)

One of the last of the individual principalities to hold out against the governmental centralization that both Christian and Muslim rulers were trying to impose was headed by the dynasty of  Banu Hud.  They had held power as emirs in the northern part of the Iberian peninsula. but they lost their position in the early twelfth century. Far from giving up, they went on to establish a new center, a ta'ifa, in south-eastern Iberia.

But it was not enough to conquer, or even to make alliances with others who could help them.  They also had to project an air of legitimacy, so that they would be accepted by the people they ruled.  They ruled for over a century, even though there is serious doubt whether this dynasty actually was a series of fathers and sons or a succession of men who attached themselves to the line.

They were able to rule their ta'ifa for as long as they did because they were accepted, and the thirteenth-century members of the dynasty were considered native sons.  This legitimacy was created through a combination of success as warriors (against both Christians and Muslims) and grandiose building projects, minting of coins, establishing laws, wearing clothing copied from the caliphs, and corresponding with the rulers of Baghdad as equals.

A fascinating history of this dynasty has recently been published by Anthony H. Minnema, The Last Ta'ifa:  The Banu Hud and the Struggle for Political Legitimacy in al-Andalus (Cornell University Press, 2024).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

Nicene Creed

 The "Nicene Creed" is trending today, so I thought I'd blog about it, given its importance for medieval Christianity.

The word creed means something that one believes, coming from the Latin "credo," meaning "I believe."  The first words of the Nicene Creed are "I believe," so that makes sense, even though the Creed was originally written in Greek.  The whole creed is a list of things a Christian believes.  Although I've seen some discussions where people on-line are saying, "I don't need a creed! I have the Bible!" they are fundamentally misunderstanding it.  The Nicene Creed is the short version of what you need to believe in order to call yourself a Christian.

The Nicene Creed is named that because it came out of the 325 Council of Nicaea.  By the early fourth century the main wave of persecution of Christians was over, but that just meant that Christians were free to disagree with each other.  There had been a lot of debate and discussion in the first three centuries of Christianity about exactly what were the fundamental tenets of Christianity, especially what was the nature of the Trinity.  All the different people with different views naturally declared that everyone else was a heretic.

For example, was Jesus just a man, divinely-inspired but not divine himself?  Was he in fact God who just put on a facade of looking human in order to fool people?  Had he started as straight human but become divine at some point, either before or after the Crucifixion?  The Gospels had him calling himself both "son of Man" and "son of God" and even saying "I and the Father are one," so that didn't help.  And where did the Holy Spirit fit into this?  If you've got Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, does that mean three Gods?  Since the Christian Bible didn't settle on (more or less) the form it has now for another century or two, and was itself a topic of heated discussion, that wasn't going to help.

The emperor Constantine, who had recently decided to become a Christian, believed this arguing was unseemly.  (He was not baptized yet, but Christian women in his family were persuasive, as was a burning cross he saw in the sky over a battle field, which would certainly have gotten my attention.)  Roman emperors had always been the heads of Roman state paganism, so he found it appropriate to call a council to decide.  The council was presided over by the emperor, but he didn't make the decisions, rather encouraging all the assembled bishops, from all over the Empire, to resolve their differences and vote.

What they came up with is essentially the Nicene Creed of today, though some editing was done at the 381 Council of Constantinople, and the precise wording depends on the translation used.  It defined the Trinity as one God in three persons and Jesus as both wholly divine and wholly human.  There.  No multiple gods, no Jesus as just an ordinary human, no Jesus as a divine being in disguise as a human.  It was a compromise to which the majority of the attending bishops agreed.

Of course it didn't stop those people who left the Council convinced that all those bishops were heretics, or those who heard about the Council and disagreed with what they heard or thought they heard.  Heresies concerning the humanity of Jesus and the nature of the Trinity swirled around the Mediterranean for three more centuries, until the rise of Islam essentially ended them.

But mainstream Christianity had settled on a basic definition, supported by all the bishops of the major cities of the Empire.  It began, "I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth."  So far it could also be a statement of basic Judaism.  But then it immediately adds, "And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten son of God ... co-substantial with the Father."  There's the just-one-substance, more-than-one-person part.

The Creed continues to give a brief summary of Jesus coming to earth to save everyone, being crucified and rising again, ascending to Heaven from which He will come again to judge us all.  Then finally the Creed gets to the Holy Spirit, who always gets overlooked, "And in the Holy Spirit ... who proceeds from the Father."

Somewhere between the sixth and ninth century western (Latin) Christendom added what's known as "filioque" clause to "from the Father."  The term means, "and the son," so the Holy Spirit was said to proceed both from the Father and from the Son.  Greek orthodoxy declared this was a total heresy.  Eastern and Western versions of Christianity have still not resolved this one, twelve hundred years later.

The 381 Council of Constantinople added a final wrap-up to the Nicene Creed, adopted as part of it, saying that one believed in "one holy, catholic, and apostolic church" and in "one baptism for the remission of sins."  Here the stress was on the idea of a universal church, all Christians being one body (the word catholic means universal, though it's been adopted by one version of Latin Christendom as meaning specifically them).  Stress was also put on the church's origins with Jesus's apostles, not just some people somewhere having some ideas.  Christianity (like Judaism) has always emphasized historical continuity.

The wording seems to suggest that you only get one chance to wipe out sins with baptism, so for a while people would wait until they were dying to be baptized, once they were pretty sure they weren't going to sin any more.  Constantine himself was baptized on his death bed.  However, in another century or so infant baptism came in, as wiping away Original Sin, so that infants and children wouldn't go straight to Hell if they died.  This requires bonus actions to wipe away subsequent sins.  Original Sin assumes everyone since Adam and Eve is born already laden with sin, but Nicaea didn't worry about that, and that's a different story.

Today the Nicene Creed is taught to all Catholics and is sort-of part of the doctrine of most western Protestant churches (not the Unitarians obviously).  The Southern Baptists are currently trying to decide about it, worried over the word "catholic," and feeling that the purpose of baptism isn't stated correctly.  (Some have even questioned whether modern Catholics are even really Christians.  I'm not getting into that discussion.)

As a medieval historian, I'm always sort of bemused by how many modern Christians in the West don't realize that you can't jump straight from the first century to the twentieth or twenty-first.  All versions of western Christendom are the products of medieval Christianity, even if there were conscious efforts to reject big parts of it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval Christianity, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.