Thirteenth-Century Churches and Documents

 The thirteenth century is strangely neglected by modern scholars.

How can you say that? cry medievalists. After all, Charles Homer Haskins, who really began medieval studies in the US, called the thirteenth the greatest century. In the church, it was the time when the popes came closest to exercising the absolute power they would have liked to have had at several other times, and the new Franciscan and Dominican orders rapidly spread, transforming ideas of the holy. Kings started keeping good records, and great counts and dukes drew up lists of who owed them homage, making political history much more straightforward. It was a time of the glories of Gothic architecture, as seen with the cathedral of Reims (below). It was when a number of great works of literature were composed (both epics and romances).

 But for monasteries, for cartularies, for the documents one finds in the archives, the period is relatively neglected.  This isn't a result of a shortage of records.  This is a matter of having too much.  The great nineteenth-century efforts to collect, analyze, and put into print the documents of a region, a monastery, a bishopric, all tended to start at the beginning, back probably in the Merovingian era.  They published everything they could find up through the tenth century. For the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they tried to include everything they considered most significant.

Then they got to the thirteenth century.  Lots and lots of documents, a lot of them long and highly repetitive.   Someone at the time would make an agreement with a monastery, and several more documents would be drawn up by various people who agreed and confirmed.  The careful nineteenth-century editors looked at all those documents and shook their heads.

They weren't the first.  Those compiling cartularies in the thirteenth century (that is, books into which original documents were copied for ease of reference and safe-keeping), quickly lost steam.

The scribe who compiled the cartulary of the bishops of Auxerre in the late thirteenth century noted that the bishop's documents had been organized into boxes by topic, the boxes identified as A, B, and so on.  He started with A, carefully copying each document, though there were quite a few of them.  Then he got to box B, and his heart must have sunk.  He copied a few, then said, "And many more on similar topics."  On to box C, where he started abbreviating heavily.

At right about the same time, at the monastery of Montier-en-Der (in Champagne), a scribe chose a few major topics for his cartulary and carefully chose documents to copy for each topic.  He did not abbreviate, he did not start writing fast and sloppily, but he had selected only about 100 documents to incorporate.  He skipped over far more documents than he included.  We know this because those documents still exist, in the same bundles as the ones the scribe chose to include.  It wasn't as if he just skipped trivial documents. He even skipped many documents issued by popes, probably because these long, elaborate charters simply confirmed an agreement that had been reached locally.  Too many documents, the scribe seems to have thought, let's just hit the highlights.

Scholars today, understandably, find it easiest to start their research with printed documents.  All serious medievalists studying society and the church will spend some time in the archives, but again the temptation is strong to stick with the printed record,with just brief excursions into documents that exist only in manuscript.  Those who analyze documents from a wide range of sources, over an extended period of time, which is what one does when studying events in the twelfth century or earlier, find the thirteenth-century plethora of records overwhelming and thus not worth investigating.

 Things have changed by the time one gets to the fourteenth century. There are even more records, especially as the spread of paper, far cheaper than parchment, greatly expanded the number of things considered worth writing down.  But scholars have adapted, focusing on just one manor, for example, or the acts of just one bishop.  They could, if they wished, go back and do the same with the thirteenth century, but they find the fourteenth century too interesting (which it is), between pope-king wars, gunpowder, the spread of eyeglasses, the Black Death, and so much more.

So people doing the sixth-twelfth centuries stay away from the thirteenth century, and those doing fourteenth-fifteenth also stay away from the thirteenth century.  Opportunity for grad students looking for a project!

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

 

Leo IX

I've mentioned Pope Leo IX (1049-1054) before, but he deserves his own blog post.  An active papacy which actually acted as the head of the organized western church began with him.  (Yes, there had been hints of this on and off earlier, like Sylvester I supposedly getting imperial authority in Rome from Constantine, Gregory I sending missionaries to Anglo-Saxon England, or Leo III crowning Charlemagne, but these all failed to have staying power.)

Leo was not born with that name.  Popes had been taking new names upon election for at least five centuries at that point (as popes still do today).  He was originally named Bruno and was from Alsace.  Alsace at that time was under the German king.  (Alsace has switched back and forth between France and Germany multiple times.  People who live there these days are essentially bilingual.  It's part of France now, but if it becomes part of Germany again they're ready.)

Young Bruno came from a powerful family that controlled multiple castles in Alsace, including Dabo and Eguisheim.  At least three places claim he was born there, though it seems unlikely that he was actually born in all three.  Dabo castle was built on top of a huge, balanced rock.  There's not much left of the castle, but it's a stunning site.  (The church there now is nineteenth-century.  It's dedicated to Saint Leo IX and has a statue of him.)  If I were an Alsatian countess, I would not choose to give birth up there.

Eguisheim is now one of France's most charming villages.  Both the castle on the hill above town and the town square claim to be his birthplace.  The present (ruined) castle on the hill is mostly thirteenth-century, though it has older origins.  The town square is where another castle stood until torn down in the French Revolution.  But it's okay--a modern statue of Leo IX is now erected there.

Young Bruno had been bishop of Toul (in Lorraine) for over twenty years when elected pope.  He was the third German to be elected pope after the (German) emperor Henry III had tried to clean up the papacy by deposing all the Italians fighting in the streets of Rome over the right to be pope.  The first two had quickly died, probably poisoned, and Leo had the sense to get out of town.

He spent most of his five years as pope traveling around western Europe, holding councils, establishing that the pope was the head of the church hierarchy.  The bishops, who had been running Christianity between them for a millennium, took it surprisingly well.

His biggest triumph was the 1049 Council of Reims.  Here he was especially concerned that all bishops demonstrate they had been properly elected, by "clergy and people," rather than buying their office, which would be "simony," a serious sin.  One by one he had the assembled bishops swear on the relics of Saint Remi--the saint who had baptized Clovis--that they had been elected properly.

The first few went well.  Then a noted simoniac started to swear--and suddenly choked, foamed at the mouth, and collapsed.  Whoa!  Several other bishops started tiptoeing toward the exits but were stopped by the papal guard.  Others asked for a "private audience" and were told they could say in public whatever they had to say.

Recognizing that surrender is often a good weapon, many bishops now fell on their faces, sobbing and confessing and offering to resign, offering up their staffs.  The pope accepted the resignation of many, including the liar (who didn't actually die), but forgave a number and gave them their staffs back.  So those who seemed otherwise good moral men, and who could claim that they'd always felt terrible that their families had bought their office without their knowledge, could continue as bishop.  But it was now established that the pope alone had the authority to make the final decision if one could or couldn't be bishop.  Forgiving establishes the power not to forgive but to punish.

One bishop showed up late to the council, saying, "Hot-cha, Holy Father, I hear you're looking into irregularities of how people obtained their office of bishop.  Let me tell you about irregularities!  You won't believe how much I was overcharged for mine."  He was one of the ones who did not get his staff back.

Continuing his travels, Leo consecrated the new abbot of Montier-en-Der (on the Champagne-Lorraine border).  The new abbot was named Wandelgar, but he took a new name as abbot, Bruno (this was unusual, as abbots and bishops, unlike popes, almost never took new names on election).  Wandelgar said proudly that Pope Leo had said he could have the name Bruno, since he didn't need it anymore, and spent the rest of his life as Abbot Bruno.

One of Pope Leo's last acts in 1054 was sending a delegation to Constantinople to try to repair the rocky relations between the Latin (Roman) and Greek orthodox churches.  But the delegation instead excommunicated the Patriarch (head of Greek orthodoxy), who excommunicated the pope and his minions right back.  Leo had died before the bad news reached him.  Only now, nearly a thousand years later, are the pope and patriarch trying to find common ground.

The reform of the western church, getting rid of simony, unchaste priests, and the like, is often called the Gregorian Reform for Pope Gregory VII, a generation later.  But it really should be called the Leontine Reform for the pope who started it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on the papacy and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.