Sunday, March 17, 2024

Global Middle Ages

 Recently medievalists have begun talking about what is called "the global Middle Ages," that is extending their study beyond western Europe to what was going on in the rest of the world in the same period of roughly 500 to 1500.  It was also intended to make it clear that Europe's Middle Ages could not be taken as some sort of model for white Christian nationalism:  isolated, uniform in religion and skin color, dismissive of outsiders.

The earliest versions of trying to make medieval history global were somewhat awkward.  "First let's talk about Charlemagne.  Now let's talk about Great Zimbabwe in Africa.  Now let's have a brief interlude on imperial China, followed by the Aztecs."  This clearly didn't advance understanding very far.  Nor did attempts to compare institutions in different places that had essentially no contact with each other (though at least this approach didn't treat different cultures as a series of self-contained, unrelated units).  For example, for a while it was common to try to make comparisons between Japanese "feudalism" and that of medieval Europe, an attempt made problematic from the beginning by creating a rigid and a-historical model of "European feudalism," to which Japanese institutions, defined as second-class, could be compared.

More recently there has begun to be more emphasis on interactions between western Europeans and peoples beyond their borders.  There was always interaction with Byzantium, the Greek Roman Empire, centered in what is now Turkey.  Although Latin Christendom and Greek Orthodoxy have declared each other heretics since the eleventh century, learning and ideas and a great deal of trade went back and forth.

The Muslims who predominated in much of the Mediterranean basin from the seventh century on were a constant presence.  Sometimes, as in the Spanish peninsula and southern Italy (especially Sicily), Christians and Muslims got along at least part of the time.  In other cases, especially the Crusades, there were fierce religious wars, which the Europeans almost always lost.  The Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem of the twelfth century was marked by congenial Muslim-Christian interactions in between the fighting.

Eastern Europe was certainly known to the West.  The kingdom of Hungary, the grand duchy of Lithuania, and the Rus kingdom centered at Kiev all sent their princesses to marry western monarchs.  The West knew at least something about sub-Saharan Africa, as occasional elephants were brought to Europe (a medieval picture of one appears below), and the pope wrote to the Christians of Ethiopia (though it is unknown if they ever wrote back).

 Europeans were certainly aware of Asia.  Their silk came from China along the Silk Roads, and their spices came from Southeast Asia, brought to the Mediterranean by Arabic traders.  The arrival of the Mongols in the thirteenth century, a horde that came from Mongolia in central Asia (as you probably already guessed), certainly got everyone's attention.  Marco Polo is famous for his own trip to China, where he lived for many years during the time Mongol rule stretched from Europe to east Asia.  (That's Marco shown below.)


The one area with which Europe really did not have contact was the Americas.  Vikings reached what is now the Canadian Maritimes around the year 1000, but there was no lasting contact or influence, despite what some Scandinavian-Americans may tell you.  Still, that they arrived there at all is an indication that medieval Europe was not sealed off from the rest of the world.

There's lots more to be said about the idea of a global Middle Ages.  I'll continue the discussion next time.


© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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


Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Medieval Queens

 Medieval queens exercised a great deal of authority, sometimes from "behind the throne," sometimes in their own right.  As I have earlier discussed, medieval women had more of what we would call "rights" (autonomy, ability to control their own property) than women in the nineteenth century in the US or UK.  Queens of course had an authority that most women never had, but then most men never had that kind of authority either.


 

A number of queens ruled in their own right.  In England, Mathilda, granddaughter of William the Conqueror, was declared ruling queen of England after her father's death.  She spent her whole reign battling her cousin Stephen for the throne.  He ended up being declared the rightful king in modern lists of kings of England, but at the time the English barons were more than happy to switch allegiance back and forth between Mathilda and Stephen, depending on who offered a better deal.  Stephen lived longer, which is probably why he now gets the nod.  Her being a woman wasn't so much of an issue as the fact that she was married to the count of Anjou, the county that had always been in competition with Normandy, where most of the English barons had property.

Mathilda's son Henry became King Henry II of England after Stephen's death in 1154.  Henry married Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had earlier been queen of France, married to Louis VII, who divorced her for not bearing a son (she had five sons with Henry, showing it wasn't her fault).  She was the only medieval queen to get to be queen of two different countries (France and England), though never actually a ruling queen.  On the other hand, as duchess of Aquitaine she brought essentially the whole southwest quarter of France to each of her husbands.  She also was very active during her life, going on Crusade with Louis VII, aiding and abetting her sons in their revolts against Henry II, and arranging the marriages of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In the fifteenth-century Iberian peninsula, the two most powerful kingdoms were Aragon and Castile, ruled respectively by Ferdinand and Isabelle.  They married, and their joint rule as "the Catholic kings" (both being king, you notice) was very significant both for a unified Spain and for world history.  They drove the last of the Moors out of Spain, finishing a 600 year project (the Reconquista), drove out the Jews while they were at it, and sponsored Columbus in 1492.

In addition to ruling in their own right, many queens were powers behind the throne.  They had their own courts, with their own court officials, their own hangers-on, and their own petitioners.  Anyone with an important request for the king would do well to start with the queen.  If she agreed, she would use her powers of persuasion to win the king around.

A major constraint on queens was the necessity that they produce an heir (as suggested in the example of Eleanor of Aquitaine).  The problem with heredity is that without children the property (or in this case the kingdom) can end up being passed off to some cousin.  And the queen had to be assumed to be totally pure, so that any child she bore would undeniably be the king's.  Kings were allowed a little latitude in their love life, to the point that by the early modern period (post medieval) Royal Mistress was a recognized position.  But queens were not any latitude.  Queens caught in adultery were supposed to be put to death, although in fact medieval queens were faithful enough (or discreet enough) that this didn't happen (but then in the post-medieval period you get Henry VIII and the wives beheaded for adultery).


© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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


Monday, February 26, 2024

The Armourer

 As I have discussed previously, knights in the twelfth century normally wore chain mail, made of iron rings riveted or welded together to provide protection against swords and other weapons.  Although we have plenty of illustrations from the period of chain mail, actual chain mail from the twelfth century is now essentially non-existent.  It would be used until it disintegrated, and it was especially subject to rust.

When we think of armor we usually think instead of plate armor.  Here we have lots of surviving examples, the earliest from the thirteenth century but continuing up through the seventeenth century.  England's Tower of London long collected helmets and swords from the late medieval and early modern periods.  Recently these have been moved to their own museum in Leeds (Yorkshire), called (appropriately enough) the Armouries.  The entryway is seen below.


The person responsible for making all the pre-modern armor was known (again appropriately) as an armourer.  It was a highly skilled occupation, and armourers had their own late medieval guilds.  A royal court would have several armourers on staff, and they were kept busy.

Plate armor was made from steel, not iron, produced by working the charcoal from the great furnaces (used to melt iron) into the metal.  Because most medieval iron came out of mines in Germany, that region also became the center of steel making.  Armor made by German armourers might be sold all over Europe.  Plates of steel, ready to be made into armor, would also be sold, or a powerful lord might buy raw iron to be worked up locally.

The armourer was in many ways like a blacksmith, using metal, a furnace, and hammer and anvil to shape metal into protective gear.  The advantage of plate armor over chain mail was that it was designed to deflect the blow of a sword or lance, even to turn aside a bullet unless it came in on a perfectly direct course.  Late medieval helmets often took on fanciful shapes, which while certainly embracing fashion, were ultimately based on theories of the best shapes to send an incoming shot or blow skittering away.

Realistically plate armor will not do a lot against musket fire, and it's useless against cannon fire, but it was highly effective against the footsoldiers increasingly pressed into service in late medieval warfare.  A heavily armored knight on a heavily armored horse could ride down footsoldiers with impunity.


But plate armor achieved its great flourishing in post-medieval tournaments.  When the cavalry charges, for which tournaments had originally been designed to train knights, no longer served in wars fought with cannons and pikemen on foot, tournaments became very popular games for the powerful.  The above mounted knight is clearly a tournament fighter.

The heavy plate armor used for tournaments of the early modern period would have been awkward and confining in a regular battle.  But it didn't matter.  Knights would be hoisted into the saddle with cranes and aimed at each other.  Armourers really came into their own, shaping the armor to fit each individual, decorating it with scenes from epics or tales of antiuity, inventing new styles.  King Henry VIII of England loved such tournaments.  Several of his suits of armor survive, getting larger and larger around over the years as he did.


© 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.


Sunday, February 18, 2024

Medieval Gemstones

 Medieval people valued gemstones.  They were widely used metaphorically, as, for example, the Heavenly Jerusalem had its walls studded with gems, or a larger-than-life hero in an epic tale would have jewels set in the hilt of his sword.  But they also used both precious and semi-precious stones to decorate everything from Bible covers to royal crowns to reliquaries to communion cups.


Although these days few churches would stud their holy objects with gems, medieval people did so regularly.  Just as crown jewels marked the high position of a king or queen, so gemstones attached to the reliquary that held the bones or other relics of a saint marked this saint as something very special.


The above image is the twelfth-century reliquary of Sainte Foy, patron saint of Conques, apparently at origin a Roman statue of a man (Foy was a woman), repurposed to hold Foy's relics and covered with gems to show her value.  Many of these gems may have come from jewels people donated to show their gratitude to Foy when she healed them (she was particularly known for healing blindness and diseases of the eye).  In the stories, if someone came to be healed but carefully left their rings at home (so Foy wouldn't claim them), their hands would swell unbearably the next time they wore the withheld rings.  A quick return visit to Conques would be needed.

Gemstones could also have what we would call magical powers.  The proper gem placed under the tongue, or dipped in liquid that one then drank, or placed on the body could supposedly heal disease, or reveal a secret (like adultery), or protect travelers, or help a mother in childbirth.  It was agreed that these gems might lose their potency with time, so there are accounts of priests blessing them or putting them on the altar or anointing them with special herbs to revive their power.

The powerful had much of what we would call their liquid wealth tied up in gemstones.  Women wore highly valuable necklaces, and rings set with jewels were frequent gifts from the wealthy to their closest associates, or gifts made in response to a special service.

Diamonds were extremely rare in the Middle Ages and highly valued; most diamonds in more modern times have come from deep African mines.  Other precious stones included rubies, emeralds, sapphires, opals, and amethysts, plus pearls, which are actually not stones at all, although they are minerals.  Most of these precious jewels can now be created in the laboratory, but of course they were not then.  Medieval people also valued what were considered semi-precious stones (the distinction between precious and semi-precious went back to antiquity), like topaz, lapis lazuli, jade, beryl, and tourmaline.


© C. Dale Brittain 2024


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


Thursday, February 8, 2024

Building in wood

We tend to think of medieval buildings as stone, and indeed that was the most common material for castles and churches, at least from the eleventh century onward.  I've blogged earlier about building in stone.  But medieval people also built in wood.  It's just that wood hasn't held up nearly as well over the intervening centuries, for obvious reasons.

Houses in towns and villages were usually wooden before the late Middle Ages.  Wood is cheaper than stone and much easier to work, as anyone who has ever tried to build a stone wall will tell you.  On some early medieval manors, part of a peasant's rent might be paid in wooden shingles (such was the case with the peasant Bodo, who has been made perhaps unduly famous as a "typical" peasant).

The danger of course is that wood will burn.  Tightly packed medieval cities could be devastated by fire, and wooden shingles are especially a problem, as flying sparks land right on them.  (Wooden shingles are forbidden in parts of the US today for that reason.)  Medieval cities tried to mandate slate or tiles for roofs, even if the houses were wattle and daub, that is made of small pieces of wood with mud plaster in between.

The small pieces of wood are the clue for why late medieval villages and towns increasingly started being built in stone, in spite of the expense.  Wood was becoming increasingly scarce, and large pieces of wood, such as one might need to build a house, were becoming increasingly expensive as a result.  Wood after all was used for all sorts of purposes, primarily fuel as well as building, and as the population grew and with it the appetite for wood, trees were not given much of a chance to grow very big.  It didn't help that an increased population meant a greater need for food, which meant clearing new fields for crops.

But even buildings constructed primarily of stone needed wood.  A house with a slate or tile roof (much less a thatched roof or one with wooden shingles) needed beams to support the roofing.  A castle would generally have wooden floors, supported by corbels in the stone walls.  Both castles and churches needed large, heavy pieces of wood for their doors.


 

A stone church with a lead roof needed roofing beams just as much as did a barn or simple house.  The beams for Notre Dame of Paris were made from tall oaks, gathered over a number of years in the twelfth century and stored in the Seine until they had enough.  When the church burned in April of 2019, the dry, 850 year old oak went up like tinder.  It's taken several years, but those rebuilding Notre Dame, trying to make it as much like what it was before the fire as possible, have managed to find enough tall oaks to reproduce the rafters.  Many had thought it impossible, but eastern Europe had more big oaks than originally thought.


 
© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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



Tuesday, January 23, 2024

Courtship

 Courtship, as the name implies, is something that is done at court.  We are talking here not about a law court but about a king's or great lord's court, where he (or she) would gather all their powerful men and women around them.  Now in fact a law court and an aristocratic court were essentially the same thing in the Middle Ages, as the great lords were the law-givers, but let's focus on courtship for now.

At its most basic courtship meant making a case to a powerful person that one's position should be supported.  There might be only a small difference between asking for a grant of property as a favor (in return, of course though probably unsaid explicitly, for loyalty) and asking for a favorable ruling in a legal case.  All great lords were surrounded by petitioners, and the lords' wives often in effect had their own courts, with petitioners of their own.  Someone who feared a duke might not look kindly on their petition would start with the duchess, in the hope that if he could persuade her, she might persuade her husband.

In a broader sense, "courtship" applies to men seeking the affection and favor of women.  Women were petitioned for their love in the same way that a petitioner might ask a count for the revenue from a toll bridge.  We in fact still use the term courtship in that way, asking for a woman's love, even though the idea of sweet-talking a great lord into making one gifts has fallen by the wayside.  As scholars have recently demonstrated, women, especially aristocratic women, had a great deal of authority in the Middle Ages, so such courting made sense.

At a great lord's court a number of young people might be assembled, some hoping to rise in the world through association with the powerful, some there as hostages for a parent's good behavior.  With few responsibilities day to day, these young men and women enjoyed hunting and hawking, playing games like chess, and especially having romantic entanglements.  As a student of mine once said, like college without the muss and fuss of going to class.

The women gave every sign of having had a blast.  They could act coy, or allow an embrace, or give way to jealousy, or have secret trysts, or gossip mercilessly.  Because the men were asking for anything from a sweet smile to a kiss to a whole lot more, they were in a subservient position, the humble petitioner, making gifts in the hopes of winning that smile (or something more).  Women at the court of Champagne in the twelfth century made up a whole lot of arbitrary rules for the men to follow (which has led some scholars who ought to know better to suggest that there were clear mandates for "courtly love" throughout the Middle Ages).

Financial transactions as a part of romance may seem odd to us today, but not to the wealthy who now routinely draw up pre-nuptial agreements.  Not just among the well to do young people at court, but among all of medieval society, marriage arrangements involved discussions about money.  There was the dowry to decide on, what the bride would bring to the marriage, and the dower, what would be settled on her if her husband died.  Potential inheritance and very cost of the wedding required discussion.  So a man of whatever status looking for a wife would engage in courtship that might begin with a gift of something like a ring or a puppy to engage the woman's affection but quickly became much more financially serious.

Such courting was not restricted to men looking for a wife.  The duchess being "courted" so that she would persuade her husband to grant someone a toll bridge would receive gifts and asked for her "love" as well as her agreement, such love not being actually romantic, though it used the same language, but rather something closer to a friendly business deal.

The single women found in many late medieval cities, running businesses or working in crafts and trades, would also be courted, by men looking not necessarily for a wife but for female companionship, of a variety of possible sorts.  The poverty in which many of these women lived could be alleviated by allowing men to court them -- as well as providing entertainment and friendship.  The January 2024 issue of the medieval studies journal Speculum has a good article about late medieval single women being courted in cities.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

 


Friday, January 12, 2024

The Cerne Abbas Giant

On a hillside above the English village of Cerne Abbas, in Dorset, there is an outline of a gigantic figure.  He is naked and carrying a huge club.  The outline is done with white chalk, the rock underlying the region.  Little ditches dug into the soil are filled with pieces of chalk.  An informative sign erected along the highway below the hillside explains that the giant is 180 feet tall and goes on to give the dimensions of his club and several other aspects, though on one point the sign is strangely silent.


Understandably, people have long wondered who might have created this figure and what he is supposed to represent.  Most commonly he is considered to be a depiction of the Roman demigod Hercules, who too was often pictured naked and carrying a large, knotted club.  Hercules was usually seen holding a lion skin, and although the Cerne Abbas giant certainly has no lion skin, his outstretched left hand might have been draped with something in the past.

Incidentally, Christian Europe was perfectly comfortable with a pagan figure like Hercules, who was treated like a myth or fable.  The throne in Rome on which Emperor Charles the Bald sat in 875, after being crowned emperor by the pope, was decorated with ivory plates depicting the life and deeds of Hercules.

The question of whether the giant might once have been holding a lion skin gets to a fundamental issue, that there is nothing permanent about this giant.  Unlike a statue, which once carved stays (relatively) the same, the giant is chalk lines surrounded by grass.  Grass likes to grow over gaps, as anyone who sets stepping-stones into a lawn knows.  Because the giant is on a hillside, it is easy for silt to wash down over the chalk  The local people have long gone out every few years to clear away grass and renew the chalk lines, usually by adding more bits of chalk.  Over the years lines can move or, if not renewed, disappear.

After all, the people working on the lines wouldn't be able to see the big picture, being too close to it.  A vague shape intended to depict a lion skin, hanging from the left arm, might have seemed like a mistake, something to quietly ignore.  The so called White Horse of Uffington, another hillside depiction done in chalk (not far from the giant though done far earlier), seems to have moved considerably over the years, based on old drawings; it might not even have been originally intended as a horse.

 

But when was the Cerne Abbas giant originally created?  Dates have been suggested ranging from the Stone Age to the seventeenth century, when churchwarden accounts note a payment of three shillings "for repair of the giant."  Most recently however it has been argued that the giant was from the Anglo-Saxon era, the early Middle Ages.  Hercules was a well known personage in medieval art, so a gigantic masculine figure might have been made to look like him, even if not specifically intended to show a Roman demigod.

The most recent arguments, in an article in the new (January 2024) issue of the medieval studies journal Speculum, written by Thomas Morcom and Helen Gittos, propose that the giant, visible from far away and projecting a strong manly aura, marked a place where armies would gather. Archaeology of the layers of chalk added over the years suggests that the giant was originally created around the time the Anglo-Saxons were fighting the Vikings.

An intriguing reinterpretation of the giant seems to have taken place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  An abbey located at Cerne (why it is called Cerne Abbas) claimed to have the relics of Saint Eadwold, a holy man supposedly from an Anglo-Saxon royal family who became a hermit.  The monks appear to have sought to depict the giant on the hillside above their abbey as their saint—a saint whose pilgrim staff sprouted buds and twigs when he found his appropriate hermitage site—though even scantily clad hermits usually did not get as naked as Hercules.

One final note:  The most recent scholarship dispenses with the notion that the giant was a depiction of a pagan god named Helith (who is mentioned nowhere else).  A sixteenth-century antiquarian, reading a thirteenth-century rather confused account of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons five centuries earlier, said that in ancient Dorset a god named Helith was worshiped.  In the eighteenth century it was suddenly announced that the giant was this god.  This is all very implausible.

I myself have always been struck by the tradition established locally, from Anglo-Saxon times through Normans and Tudors and all the changes that have affected England over the last millennium and a half, to go out regularly and tend to the chalk images.


© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on the Anglo-Saxons and medieval monasteries, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in print.