The Templars

So far I've been able to avoid a certain topic which seems to inspire conspiracy theories about the Middle Ages.  But it's time.

The Templars have received far more excited attention that they deserve.  They began with the success of the First Crusade, founded as a cross between a monastic order and a group of knights.  That is, they lived like monks, chaste, sharing everything, with no personal possessions, obedient to a Master.  And yet rather than spending their days in prayer or copying manuscripts or doing useful chores around the monastery, they spent their days riding out to protect pilgrims.

The image below, of two knights riding one horse, was also used for their official seal.  It emphasized both their military prowess and their poverty--they could only afford the one horse.

There were two of these Crusading Orders, the Hospitallers and the Templars, the first attached to the “Hospital” of Saint John (we would call it a hostel rather than a hospital) and the latter having their headquarters near the ruins of Solomon’s Temple (on Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the ruins are the so-called Wailing Wall).  For whatever reason, the Templars get all the attention.

The Templars came out of the idea that knights could use their knightly skills to save their souls rather than to lose them, if they used these skills properly in defending Christians.  The idea was pushed by the influential Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, who also got the Second Crusade off the ground.  The first Master of the Templars was Bernard’s uncle.

After the fall of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187, the Templars, along with just about everybody else, headed back to western Europe, primarily to France (a few lingered for another generation or two).  The Templars established houses, essentially monasteries (though called commanderies), extremely austere.  Here, rather uneasily, they settled down to become monks, but they never quite succeeded at being monks.  They were still knights, and they would go after bandits and try to protect travelers.  But without Muslims to fight they rather lost their mission.

However, they soon found a new mission, becoming bankers.  By the late thirteenth century they had banking houses all over western Europe and were reputed to be extremely wealthy.

In the early fourteenth century, King Philip IV “the Fair” of France decided that some of that wealth would suit him just fine, especially as he was fighting the English and needed money for his armies.  (Philip is called the Fair for his hair color, not his temperament.)  He trumped up some heresy charges against the Master of the Templars, tried him, and, what a surprise, found him guilty, even though the Master refused to confess.

The charges against the Templars included that they denounced God and spat on the cross, that they engaged in homosexual behavior, and especially that they had a disembodied head in a box which talked to them and from which they sought counsel, clearly something demonic.  Some Templars confessed to these things under torture, which made a sensation.

The pope, who at this point wanted to be the little friend of the French king, officially dissolved the Templars in 1312.  In 1314, the Master died under torture, and a number of other Templars were burned at the stake, in spite of recanting their earlier confessions.  King Philip went to seize all the Order’s wealth, and was grievously disappointed to find there was extremely little there.  There have been rumors ever since of vast “Templar treasure” hidden someplace or other.

Another story is the curse that the dying Master of the Templars supposedly put on Philip as he was being tortured, that the king’s line would end with him.  Philip laughed this off, because he had three sons.  But in fact his three sons each became king in turn and died without sons of their own.  The Capetian line thus officially came to an end, and the throne went to Philip’s nephew (his brother’s son), first of the Valois line.

The Templars have continued to excite the imagination ever since.  Several modern groups (like the Masons) consider themselves the heirs to the Templars, though it’s hard to account for a gap of well over 400 years.  It is nothing but a fantasy that the Templars continue the secret blood-line of Jesus and Mary Magdalene (if you think this, you’ve been reading too much Da Vinci Code).

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

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

Positively Medieval

For those of you who have been following this blog, it's now a book!  I've taken the best bits of the blog and organized them into a social history of the Middle Ages, everything from medieval farm animals, to marriage and divorce, to brothels, to the medieval diet, to life as a medieval teenager.

The book is called "Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages."  It's a big one, something like 400 pages.  It's available as an ebook on Amazon, Nook, Kobo, and iTunes;  a paperback version is also for sale on Amazon and is coming soon to a store near you.

Here's the link to the book on the US Amazon site.

 And here's the Preface, to give you a taste:

***

What was life like in the Middle Ages?  It’s a fascinating historical period, where to the modern reader everything can seem larger than life, more dramatic, much more interesting than a modern life centered on driving to work, paying the bills, picking up something at the grocery store, and urging the kids to do their homework.  Between The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, almost everyone has become interested in the Middle Ages.

But it was more than a time of sword fights and capes and dramatic contests for the crown.  It was also the period when much of what we think of as “modern” was first established, from universities to the legal profession to sword-and-sorcery stories to parish churches to Europe’s political and linguistic boundaries.

Four years ago I started a blog to inform those interested of aspects of medieval life.  I wanted to counter common misconceptions, such as that medieval people were all brutal and superstitious, or that everyone lived under “feudalism,” or that medieval women had no rights, or that everyone was middle-aged.  I also wanted to give a little more context than those who arrived at my blog after a Google search probably expected—no simple answers here to questions like, “How many silver coins make a gold coin?” or “What was a queen’s illegitimate child called?”  (I actually don’t have handy answers to either of those.)

In this book I’ve pulled together a lot of the ideas from the blog with the hope that both those who have been reading it and those who have not will discover some of the fascination that has kept me involved with medieval history my entire adult life.  There is a little political history, the “kings and battles” kind of history that they may have tried to make you memorize at some point.  But most of it is social history, how people lived and tried to get along.

The book is arranged topically.  Under broad headings, you will find out about medieval society in general, how people lived their lives, as well as more specific information about everything from farming to the church.  Because every chapter cannot possibly cover a thousand-year span, I tend to focus primarily on the high Middle Ages, the period from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, although you will also find plenty here on both the early and late Middle Ages.  This isn’t a textbook—it doesn’t have to be read in any particular order, and there won’t be a quiz on Monday.  So plunge in, and I hope you enjoy it!

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

Frederick II

In an earlier post on the Holy Roman Empire, I noted that, from the middle of the tenth century on, the kings of Germany were also crowned Roman Emperor.  (Some might find this ironic, given that Germanic peoples are supposed to have overthrown the original Roman Empire.  They really didn't, as discussed more here, though the establishment of Roman Emperors in Germany--with another Roman Emperor in Constantinople--is an interesting story.)

Today I want to discuss one of the most interesting of the Holy Roman emperors, Frederick II (1194-1250).  He was grandson of Frederick Barbarossa, son of Emperor Henry VI and of Constance of Sicily.  His mother was queen of Sicily, although at the time she and Henry married it had not been expected that she would take the throne.  But several male relatives died within a short time, and she took over.

This meant that baby Frederick II was heir to two kingdoms, Germany and Sicily, with Italy sort of squeezed in between--especially disturbing to the pope.  The popes had been fighting on and off with the German kings/Roman emperors for over a century when Frederick was born, and were understandably concerned.

Constance had a slightly different concern--that her son be accepted by the Sicilians.  She was forty when she became pregnant, and in order to avoid any question of whether the baby was really hers, she had the bishop of Palermo be present when she gave birth--as the story went, in a tent in the middle of the main piazza.

Frederick's father died when he was very young.  The pope of his youth, Innocent III (1198-1216), thought he had won the papacy's long conflict with the emperors.  Young Frederick seemed a pliant boy who promised to give up Sicily in return for being crowned emperor, and who did the equivalent of telling him, "I'll do whatever you want, Uncle Innocent!"  (He had his fingers crossed.)

In practice Frederick had no interest in giving up Sicily, where he grew up and which he considered home.  He went to Germany just long enough to be crowned king and to grant the great dukes and princes pretty much freedom to do whatever they wanted, which worked for them (and was the beginning of the disintegration of Germany into small principalities, not to be reunited until the late nineteenth century).

Though Innocent died without realizing what a problem Frederick was going to be, his successors as pope found out all too well.  Frederick promised to go on Crusade, then didn't because he said was sick.  The pope excommunicated him.  Then, saying he felt better, he took off for the East, and got excommunicated a second time, because you weren't supposed to go on Crusade while excommunicate.  Then he got to the East, had a nice chat with the sultan rather than fighting, and got excommunicated a third time for doing Crusading wrong, even though he came home calling himself the King of Latin Jerusalem.

He was very interested in science and learning and had Arabic scholars at his court as well as speaking Arabic himself--he also knew Greek.  Muslims served in his court and in his army, enough that he was accused of being a secret Muslim himself.  He dabbled in alchemy enough to be considered a magician.  He had a zoo with giraffes and an elephant.  He established a university in Naples.

He drew up law codes for Sicily, with, big surprise, the king in charge, supported by an efficient bureaucracy and good record keeping.  Interested in the effect of exercise on digestion, he had (it was said) two condemned criminals given a nice big meal, had one run around and the other sit still, then had them both cut open to see how digestion was going (scientific method in action).  He ordered that some infants be brought up not hearing any human speech, to see if they would speak Hebrew (the supposed first language) or the language of their parents; the experiment failed, because the children did not speak at all.  He wrote a manual on falconry, how to train falcons, which is still used today.

At the time he was called "Stupor Mundi," the wonder of the world, for his learning, his wide interests, and power (the king of Sicily controlled the bottom half of Italy, not only the island).

When he died in 1250, the popes decided that enough was enough and hunted down and had killed all his sons and grandsons, legitimate and illegitimate.  It took a few years, but at the end the popes felt they had finally won the pope-emperor wars, that at this point had been going on for close to two centuries.

They had however lost a great deal of moral authority in the meantime, but that's another story.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more about medieval monarchs, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval.

Hundred Years War

 The Hundred Years' War, as the name suggests, went on for an awfully long time.  It was a war between France and England that lasted over a century (1337-1453), through the Black Death and the invention of gunpowder. The central issue was the crown of France, and it was entirely fought in France, where the results were grim for the population.  France lost almost all the battles yet ultimately won the war, due to Joan of Arc.

The war is a sharp indication of the dangers of having hereditary rulers.  When family and politics mix, the results can be deadly.

The problem went back to the twelfth century, when Eleanor of Aquitaine, duchess of Aquitaine (essentially the southwest quarter of France), divorced her husband, the king of France, and married King Henry II of England.  For the next two centuries, through various incidents and adventures, the English crown held onto much of Aquitaine.  The French were not pleased.

Then (1328) the last direct Capetian monarch, Charles IV, died without a son.  The French crown was taken by his cousin Philip VI, the beginning of the so-called Valois line--Philip was a direct male-line descendant of Hugh Capet (d. 996), the first Capetian king, but his line went through a younger son.  So far, so good--except that Charles had a sister who had married King Edward II of England.  She thought her son, King Edward III, was the rightful king of France.

There were a few years of grumbling and threatening, and then in 1337 the French and English kings got into a big argument over Scotland (still a separate kingdom and an ally of France).  King Philip declared that King Edward III had failed as a vassal and thus no longer could hold Aquitaine, and the war was on.

There are multi-volume modern accounts of all the ins and outs of the war.  The English kept winning, including at one point capturing the French king and holding him for ransom.  When the ransom wasn’t paid, he left England to go home and get the money together, promising to return if he couldn’t get it.  He couldn’t get it.  He returned to captivity in England.  These guys believed in “honor.”  The actual battles, however, were brutal.  English bowmen and pikemen, and then the newly developed cannons devastated cavalry charges.

In 1420, there was an attempt to settle the war, basically by doing the same thing that had started it in the first place (maybe they were slow learners...).  After winning the battle of Agincourt, still considered a great triumph of English warfare, King Henry V of England married a French princess, with the understanding that their future son would be king of both France and England.  (Shakespeare wrote a play about this, that has been turned into several quite splendid movies.  The play makes it sound as if all was set now.  It wasn’t.)

The queen of England (French princess)’s brother, Charles VII, was declared illegitimate and set aside.  This is where Joan of Arc enters the picture, having been told by angels to get Charles crowned as rightful king of France, which, although it seems startlingly unlikely, she actually did in 1429.  The angels told her he really was legitimate, and he had perked right up when Joan gave him the news.

The English, in alliance with a number of great French nobles who had turned against Charles VII, captured Joan and had her burned at the stake as a heretic.  In 1430, the boy king Henry VI of England was formally crowned king of France.  But Joan had inspired the French, and a lot of the great French nobles switched sides back to Charles VII.  It took another generation to make peace formally, but in spite of some ongoing battles it was clear that France had won.

When both Charles VII of France and Henry VI of England died in 1453, the war was officially over.  Just in time for the English to start the War of the Roses.

The memory of the Hundred Years’ War still lingers in southwestern France (old Aquitaine), where much of the fighting took place.  They’d barely gotten over the Albigensian Crusade when the war started.  Many of the castles switched hands (French-English and back) multiple times, including Beynac, illustrated above.  The area is peaceful, even dreamy now, but that’s a recent phenomenon.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018 

For more about the war, Joan of Arc, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and so much more, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Famine

It's Easter, the end of Lent, of six-plus weeks of giving up excess luxuries.  For medieval people, Lent was almost a famine period, because last fall's stored food would be about gone, but the spring crops hadn't produced yet.  Some people certainly go hungry in the US, but unlike some other parts of the world, it's been an awful long time since we've had widespread famine.  Medieval people would say we're lucky.  Let's feel some sympathy for our ancestors while we munch those chocolate bunnies.

Famine, in the past as now, comes about through a combination of overpopulation and failure to produce enough food.  The modern world actually grows enough food to feed everybody, due to improvements in crop genetics and fertilizers (though the planet’s current warming may make many areas less and less suitable for crop growing).  Our problem is distribution.

In the US, for example, farmers produce at least 4000 calories a day for every man, woman, and child.  That is about twice what an adult needs (on average), unless they are an elite athlete training heavily.  So what happens to the rest?  A lot is exported to other countries, a lot goes to explain why, shall we say, the American population is a tad plumper than it was fifty years ago, and a lot is wasted.

Unless you plan your shopping carefully, so you never have to throw out spoiled food, and unless you clean up everything on your plate every meal, you’re throwing out food that could have fed someone.  Grocery stores throw out fruits and vegetables that look malshapen and cans with dents or even just torn labels.  Restaurants fill up their dumpsters every night.

So a lot of the modern world’s problem is getting food to people who need it.  If we have a distribution problem in the US, where grocery stores throw out perfectly edible food that looks funky, where many have refrigerators stuffed with food they will never eat even though others in the same community do not have enough, then just imagine the problem in the Middle Ages, when it was very difficult to move food around from one place to another.  And they didn’t just have distribution issues.  They had genuine shortages.

Even though today less than 5% of the US population lives on a working farm, that tiny group still manages to feed everybody.  In the Middle Ages however almost everyone had to be engaged in farming to produce enough food. The breakdown of trade routes and the cooling of the climate that started in the sixth century brought genuine food shortages in the early Middle Ages.  An inopportune hail storm that wiped out a crop in one area would lead to local famine, because other areas would not have enough extra food to feed anyone but themselves, even aside from the difficulty of transporting the food.

But in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, a period where the climate had warmed up just enough to improve the likelihood of getting in the crop, and when farmers had adopted new technology like the carruca, there were long stretches without famine.  City councils stockpiled grain in good years to be prepared for future shortages.  Count Charles the Good of Flanders was called “the good” in part because he took the lead in distributing stockpiled grain in a bad year and keeping hoarders from jacking up prices.

Periodic famines still happened, and there were always stories told of the horrors (usually involving cannibalism) that the famine led to—in the next county over, never in the immediate vicinity of the person telling about.  But overall most people, most of the time, got enough to eat.

Not surprisingly, the population grew.  By the late thirteenth century western Europe’s rural population was probably about what it is now (though not of course the urban or suburban population).  With more mouths to feed, more and more land had to be cultivated to grow food.  Even the lower slopes of the Alps were growing grain.

Then, in the early fourteenth century, Europe became overpopulated.  “Over” populated is a relative term; it doesn’t mean actual numbers of people but rather too many people for the food supply.  More marginal cultivated areas started giving out just as the climate grew worse, going into what has been called a mini ice age, when even rich, productive lands might see crop failures.

Then there were several years in a row of really awful weather, “years without a summer” as they were called.  Crops failed miserably.  Europe had been able to deal with local famines, but nothing on this scale.  Starving people took off in bands, trying desperately to find food, stealing anything they could get their hands on that was edible.  With weakened conditions, the population was not prepared for a major outbreak of a pandemic, the Black Death.  Let's just say the fourteenth century was a difficult time.  It's also when the Hundred Years War got underway, but that's a story for another day.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018 

For more about feast and famine during the Middle Ages, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

The Carthusians

The eleventh and twelfth centuries, as I have earlier noted, was a busy time for the foundation of new monastic orders.  One of those with the longest success was the Carthusian order, founded by Saint Bruno in the late eleventh century in what is now the French Alps.  The name of the order comes from the medieval Latin name for their valley, Carthusia.  It is now called Chartreuse.

The Carthusians managed to combine elements of the life of a hermit with the life of a monk.  The monks lived in solitary cells, like hermits, not seeing or speaking with anyone else all week.  But the cells were relatively close together, and they all got together to walk and talk on Sunday.  They were considered admirably holy, and the order soon spread to other areas.  In England a Carthusian monastery is called a Charterhouse.  The Carthusians are intensely proud that, after more than 900 years, their Order has never needed radical reform.

They were an extremely strict order from their beginning.  Women were not even allowed in their valley (though since a modern road now goes right by, they've had to give up that idea).  At the time the story was that they wouldn't even allow hens, though this seems somewhat fanciful.

The Carthusians had so-called lay brothers, men who wanted the holiness of associating with the monks but who weren’t ready to become monks themselves and who probably didn’t known Latin.  These took care of their flocks and brought the monks their sparse meals, leaving trays outside their cells.  Lay brothers became accepted at other monasteries as well, because it meant that very ascetic monks could focus all their attention on prayer without having to starve, and it meant that peasants could become virtual monks without the education necessary for the liturgy.

Fun fact:  The liqueur chartreuse (and the yellow-green color the liqueur has) is named for the valley.  In the eighteenth century, well after the end of the Middle Ages, the lay brothers started making and selling this liqueur.  You can buy it at the gift shop at La Grande Chartreuse.  (But you can't visit the monks.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more about medieval monasticism, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Albigensian Crusade

What we now know as the Crusades began, as I have discussed previously, with efforts in 1095 to conquer the Muslims in the Holy Land (essentially what is now Israel and Syria) and make it a Christian territory.  But the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem fell to the Turks in 1187, never to be regained.  This did not stop the desire for Crusades, just their likelihood of success.

The crusading movement quickly branched out to be wars against heretics (or even personal enemies in a few cases), rather than only against Muslims.  The first big war against heretics was the Albigensian Crusade, launched in 1209, called that because much of the fighting was near the town of Albi in southern France.

A heresy we now call Catharism had been growing and spreading for some time.  It was actually an alternate version of Christianity, a dualist religion related to Zoroastrianism and to the Manichaean heresy of late antiquity.  It seems to have reached western Europe via Bulgaria, and its adherents were sometimes called Bogomils.  The basic tenet was that the universe was divided equally between forces of light and darkness, locked in eternal conflict (and no, we're not talking here about the Star Wars' Force).  For adherents, the physical universe was the creation of the devil, not of God, and the ultimate goal was to free oneself from all hint of physicality until finally starving to death.

There is a fair amount of dualism in orthodox Christianity, but it has always held that God, not the devil, created the physical world (reread Genesis), and that when we rise again we will rise in the flesh, not as disembodied spirits.

For a long time this growing heresy was considered deplorable but nothing more.  When towns in southern France started having two bishops, one adhering to Roman Christianity and one to Cathar beliefs, Cistercian monks were sent south to preach and to try to talk the locals out of what was considered their mistaken faith.  It didn't work.  Even the count of Toulouse, the most powerful lord of southwestern France, adopted at least some tenets of Catharism.

The pope sent a legate (representative) to try to help coordinate the preaching.  His legate, Pierre de Castelnau, was murdered in 1208, some said at the orders of the count of Toulouse.  No more Mister Niceguy!  Calling the heresy a cancer that must be cut from the body of Christendom before it spreads, the pope declared a Crusade.  The count of Toulouse's efforts to calm everything down were unsuccessful, and he was placed under anathema.  The Crusade, essentially a war of northern France against southern France, began in 1209.

It was a vicious war.  Northern forces were led by Simon de Montfort.  You should still not tell Simon de Montfort jokes in southern France, because these are not considered funny jokes.  When asked how they could tell who was and wasn't a heretic before burning a whole village, he was said to have quipped, "Burn them all.  The Lord will know His own."

Having (sort of) won, the northern armies settled down to hold southern lands.  They took over and enlarged a number of quite stunning castles that the heretics had held.  These are now sometimes called "citadels of vertigo" from being perched on high peaks and cliffs.  The newly established order of Dominican friars continued the efforts to try to convert people they kept hoping were just confused.  The Inquisition got underway, trying to find and deal with hidden heretics.

One of the more remarkable events, a generation after the Crusade, was the Massacre at Montségur in 1244.  A group of heretics, with their families, held out in a castle on a mountaintop for close to a year.  When the castle was finally captured (Swiss rock climbers went up the back of the mountain, so steep as to be thought inaccessible), the attackers gave any heretics who would renounce their faith two weeks to get out, not wanting to kill children and admiring the defenders' resolve.  But at the end of two weeks most were still there.  And, feeling they really had to do so, the attackers burned everybody.  You can now visit Montségur and, after paying a few euros, climb to the top.

My husband, Robert Bouchard, and I co-wrote a fantasy novel, Count Scar, set in a slightly reimagined version of southern France in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade.  It is available as an ebook on Amazon and other e-tailers.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on real medieval heresy, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.