Romans 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.