Medieval Russia

 Russia is not usually considered part of medieval Europe, but its history is closely tied to the countries to the west.  For that matter, it's difficult to draw lines between western Europe, eastern Europe, central Asia, and east Asia, given that they are all on a big contiguous land mass with no sharp dividing lines (south Asia, that is India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, at least has the Himalayas for demarcation).

Everything happened later in Russia, if one takes medieval France as the model to which all must conform (medieval French monks and knights would certainly have so argued, as do a number of modern scholars in France), from organized government to organized religion.  Its ethnic and cultural history is very complicated, because the wide grasslands and steppes provide no barriers to various people coming to settle or to conquer.

Russia first appears in written history in the ninth century, when its first organized government was established by the so-called Rus Vikings.  Bet you didn't know Vikings were so far inland.  But they had established trade routes stretching from the Baltic Sea all the way across central Asia to fetch up in Constantinople, where a number of Norsemen signed on as soldiers, the so-called Varangian guard.  Some of them however decided to settle down halfway there and carve out their own kingdom, with Kyiv established as the capital.

So although the Russian version of the story is that Ukraine is part of Russia, historically speaking Russia is part of Ukraine.

The Vikings mingled with the native Slavic peoples in a kingdom bigger than anything further west.  It included (very roughly) the same territory as modern Ukraine, Belarus, and the more western parts of Russia.  They adopted Christianity late in the tenth century, getting it from Constantinople, but Russian Orthodoxy (as it is now known) had a number of differences from Greek Orthodoxy, starting with using Old Church Slavonic as the main language of religion rather than Greek.

The first ruler of Kyiv to convert was named Volodymyr, and this name (or its Russian version, Vladimir) continues to be a popular name in the region today.  Volodymyr's son Yaroslav's children were the first generation to be brought up Christian from birth, and they quickly began marrying the royal families of western Europe.  Western kings had almost exhausted the supply of royal princesses to whom they were not already closely related, and the conversion of the rulers of Kyiv provided many brides.  Anna, the queen of King Henry I of France (d. 1060), for example, was one of Yaroslav's daughters.

But in the thirteenth century this flourishing principality was conquered by the Mongols, the Golden Horde (think Genghis Khan).  They continued under Mongol rule for the next two hundred years.  During this time the dukes of Moscow were able to establish themselves, in part by being little friends of the Mongols, but in the fifteenth century they led the war that ended Mongol rule.  Since then, Russian territory has had Moscow as its capital.

The history of the whole region becomes even more complicated in the early modern period.  Just for example, Lithuania, now a tiny Baltic republic, was part of the great Polish-Lithuanian empire in the seventeenth century.  Then, in the eighteenth century, Poland (and Lithuania) were divided up three-ways between Russia, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian empire.  (Later they came back.)

But both Ukraine and Russia began in this period to consider themselves true nations, with their own language and culture (Ukrainian is similar to Russian though not the same).  Russia had the advantage of having its own emperors, the tsars, throughout this period, starting in the sixteenth century.  (The word tsar, of course, comes from Caesar, indicating their conception of themselves as continuing the traditions of ancient Rome and ancient Byzantium.)

Ukraine was not so successful, as they were usually controlled either by Russia or by Poland.  The name Ukraine means "border land," the land between the Baltic and the Russians of Moscow.  (The country wants to be known as Ukraine, rather than the Ukraine, because they fear the latter would suggest they were just an outlying border region of Russia.)  When Russia went Communist in 1917, Ukraine tried to assert independence but were dragged back into the fold.  They have only been a recognized separate country since 1991, when they became their own republic during the breakup of the old Soviet Union.

And I haven't even talked about how Russia didn't really get serfs until the early modern period, when serfdom was long gone in western Europe.  "Medieval" Russia, unlike western Europe, is assumed to persist until the eighteenth century or so, rather than stopping in 1500.  The history of the region continues today to be the basis of sweeping arguments about what the region ought to be like today.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval nations, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

The Restoration of Notre Dame

 Three years ago this spring, the cathedral of Notre Dame burned.  This was a heartbreaking loss of a cathedral that had stood in the middle of Paris for 850 years.  Today it is being restored, and the goal is still, as announced in April 2019 right after the fire was put out, to have it open again by the summer Olympics of 2024, which will be held in Paris.

So what exactly does "restoration" mean?  It has a specific meaning that is not just rebuilding or repairing.  It means putting it back to its "last known state," what it was like before the fire, i.e. like the image below.

 

This is not the twelfth-century version of Notre Dame (building began in 1163).  The twelfth-century version was a construction site.  It was not actually finished until the 1220s, some sixty years after construction began, and those bell towers were among the last things built.  And Notre Dame has had plenty of changes over the centuries, even though the overall structure has remained pretty much the same since the thirteenth century.  The flying buttresses were added not long after it was officially finished, because the weight of the roof threatened to push out the walls, built tall and thin with lots of windows.  (Once the fire took off the roof, those buttresses threatened to push the walls in, though lots of trusses have now staved off collapse.)

Other changes happened over the centuries.  In the seventeenth century, the cathedral canons decided the original stained glass was silly and old-fashioned and knocked a lot of it out, replacing it with plain glass.  In the eighteenth century, with the French Revolution, the heads of the kings and queens of the Old Testament, arrayed across the front over the doors, were knocked off.  Down with tyranny!  A smaller fire scorched the cathedral in 1830, during a revolt against the archbishop.  So when Victor Hugo published Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831 (known in the English-speaking world as The Hunchback of Notre Dame), the cathedral was in a deplorable condition, to which his book brought attention.

Viollet-le-Duc to the rescue!  He was an architect who essentially invented the restoration of historic buildings in the 1850s, putting them back to what they had been.

Before then, a damaged historic building, or one that was no longer serving the desired purpose, was either just patched up or rebuilt in whatever the current style was, whether or not it was anything like the original.  Medieval architects had little interest in restoration.  When the current Notre Dame was first being built in the twelfth century, the remains of the various cathedrals that had stood on the spot since the fourth century were cleared away.  Some of their stones were reused in the foundations of the new structure.

Viollet-le-Duc intended not only to restore Notre Dame to what it had been like in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries, but to make it what he thought it should have been like.  He thus had new heads made for the kings and queens of the Old Testament, much sweeter and more simpering looking than the thirteenth-century originals (now knocked off).  He made the gargoyles now considered iconic.  His work was finished by about 1870.

Most notably, he made a really enormous spire to rise above the crossing of the nave and transept and decorated the area with copper figures of the Apostles.  It is Viollet-le-Duc's version of the cathedral that is now being restored, medieval with a nineteenth-century twist.

I personally have doubts about that spire.  When it caught fire, it crashed through the stone vaulting below, causing most of the damage that occurred to the church's interior.  In the rest of the church, the medieval stone vaulting (sort of like a ceiling, below the roof) held up fine, protecting the cathedral's interior even while the fire raged above.  The vaulting may have indeed been weak where the spire fell, because Viollet-le-Duc had removed it at the crossing point, to bring up his enormous spire in sections from below.  He then replaced it, but I bet his techniques weren't up to the thirteenth century.

Some of the limestone from which the church walls were built was badly weakened by the fire.  Stone won't actually burn, but limestone, when heated in a lime kiln, breaks down to become one of the ingredients to make cement.  Some of the stone in the upper walls near the roof broke down badly in the heat, so new limestone is being quarried to replace it.

The biggest disaster was the roof.  It was supported by what was called a "forest" of oak beams, and the 900 year old timbers burned like crazy.  Originally it was thought that there was no way that 1200 or 1300 oaks big enough could be found in modern Europe to replace them, so other plans were suggested, including a glass roof supported by steel beams, with a garden growing on top of the stone vaulting.  But the architects claim to have found 1200 big enough oaks, mostly from France though some from eastern Europe, many planted in the eighteenth century with the intention of growing them into masts for ships.

One might wonder if building back in wood is the best plan, but they're going with it (sprinkler systems are supposed to be involved).  Timber framers have been studying medieval methods for a long time, so they will reconstruct the "forest" as it was (it was thoroughly documented), using mostly medieval techniques, though some sawmills will be involved.

The roof itself was a topic of intense discussion.  It was 500 tons of lead, which spewed toxic lead dust over central Paris with the fire.  But at least for now the plan is to go with lead, based on the argument that no one will climb up and lick the roof, so don't worry about it.

The cathedral of Reims was heavily damaged in World War I, with the vaulting taken out as well as the roof.  It was restored over a twenty year period, just in time for World War II, when fortunately it was not bombed again.  Today it looks a lot like it did in the thirteenth century, or the early twentieth century anyway (they had plenty of photos to work from).  They reused as many of the fallen stones as they could.  So Notre Dame may well soon be looking like itself again, again welcoming 50 or more times as many tourists as people attending Mass.

 

The February 2022 National Geographic has a good article on the people doing the restoration work.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

Iceland

 Iceland is a parliamentary democracy, established on an island with a lot of volcanoes (a source of geothermal heat and electricity), one of the world's largest islands (in Europe second only to Great Britain, being bigger than Ireland), and a member of NATO.  Sounds sort of normal and boring, right?  But it's a country shaped by its medieval past even more than most of the rest of Europe.

The first human settlers of Iceland came from Scandinavia during the ninth century.  They found good land for their sheep and governed themselves through what was called the Althing (meaning the thing that has everyone represented), now considered the world's oldest parliament, even though it didn't meet for a century or so from the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries.  It's back in business now, and Icelandic people are intensely proud of its ninth-century roots, making it 400 years older than Britain's Parliament.  In the year 1000, the Althing voted to adopt Christianity, the only example we know of where people voted to become Christian, rather than a ruler deciding to convert and converting his people.

From Iceland, explorers went to Greenland and to what is now maritime Canada, although the New World settlements were short-lived and the Greenland colony eventually died out after several centuries.  The other Scandinavian countries claimed Iceland as their own at various times, most recently Denmark, but in 1944 the Icelanders became their own independent democracy.

The main economy of Iceland, both then and now, was based on sheep raising and fishing.  Wool is used to make lovely warm sweaters, which you can buy in the convenient gift shop at the airport if you're changing planes or have a layover.  The Icelandic word usually translated as "meat" means lamb or mutton by itself, and then there's "cow-mutton" (beef), "pig-mutton" (pork), and so on.  

The big problem with raising sheep is that they keep all the plant life cropped short.  In fact, gracious English manors in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries used to keep sheep to take care of the lawns.  But after the early Icelanders cut down the local trees, to build ships or open up grazing lands, trees were gone for good, any seed that somehow arrived from the mainland being nipped off before it could grow.  (These days Iceland plants and protects trees.)

These peaceful medieval sheep-farmers wrote sagas, accounts of historical events like the adoption of Christianity or the discovery of the New World, that also included a whole lot of feuds, insults, and people killing their relatives.  Although these are sometimes seen as glorifying violence, in fact they are about not getting into those situations in the first place, and women are often portrayed as the peace-keepers.

The sagas were written in Old Norse, the ancestor of the languages now spoken in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.  In Iceland, the everyday spoken language is still very close to Old Norse.  Proud of their medieval linguistic heritage, the Icelanders have avoided adopting modern words from other languages, instead creating new words from Old Norse roots for things like television or internet.  Children learn Danish in school, which they consider a simple language, good for talking to Scandinavians who have given up on complex declensions and conjugations.

They have also continued the tradition of having surnames based on a parent's name.  So "Peterson" as a last name originally meant "son of Peter," but in Denmark-Sweden-Norway these have just become hereditary, so Torvald Peterson's kids will all have the last name Peterson, not Torvaldson or Torvaldsdottir.  Not so in Iceland!  There each person's surname is quite literally so-and-so's daughter or son.  Torvald Peterson's daughter might be Kristin Torvaldsdottir.  The phone book is arranged by first name, not last name.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval Scandinavia, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval Rome

As I have discussed previously, the idea of a "fall of Rome" ushering in the Middle Ages is a misconception.  Both the city of Rome itself and the idea of a Roman empire continued throughout the Middle Ages.  Since after Charlemagne was crowned Roman emperor by the pope in 800 there were Roman emperors right there in western Europe, as well as the Roman emperors in Constantinople, it's kind of hard to say that Rome disappeared.

But many things were different.  For one thing, Roman emperors were rarely in Rome.  The western emperors were also kings of Germany for much of the Middle Ages and would come to Rome to be crowned by the popes, maybe have a brief war with some Italian city states, and head north again.  For all practical purposes, the real rulers of medieval Rome were the popes, revered at least in the abstract as heirs of Peter.  They had their headquarters at the Lateran palace until the fifteenth century, when they moved to the Vatican to be closer to the basilica of Saint Peter's—the Lateran palace is not even in the modern city-state of the Vatican (officially its own country only since 1929).

Just as the rulers of Rome had changed since antiquity, so had the city itself.  Ancient Rome had been an enormous city, at least a million people, stretched over its seven hills, with a long wall (some twenty kilometers long) surrounding it, punctuated by guard towers.  But with the population declines of the early Middle Ages, it shrank to a fraction of its former size, maybe only twenty thousand people, getting a new set of walls well within the old set, to surround the population of a much smaller city.  (The Colosseum and forum in the center of this shrunken city.)

In between the old, imperial walls and the medieval walls were woodlots, orchards,  and many ancient monuments.  Some of these were monuments of antiquity, while others were basilicas or churches (or remnants thereof) that honored the early Christians who had been martyred by the pagan Romans.  Medieval pilgrims who came to Rome, of which there were always a large number, would visit both the Christian sites and the monuments erected by the ancient Caesars.  There was indeed a popular twelfth-century guidebook, "The Marvels of Rome," which instructed pilgrims on many of the interesting things to see.

Even now, Rome is thick with ancient sites that disrupt traffic and hopelessly delay things like subway tunnels or new sewer lines.  With a thousand year less of wear and tear, medieval Rome had even more.

In my most recent book, "The Knight of the Short Nose," the hero goes to Rome on pilgrimage and, following the guidebook, visits many of these sites.  (He also ends up in a fight to the death with the champion of a king who wants to sack Rome, but you have to read the book to find out what happens.)

The most important site in Rome was the basilica of Saint Peter's.  It was built over what was supposed to be the tomb of Peter, leader of the apostles, and there was a grate in the floor through which the faithful could lower bits of cloth to touch his bones, thus creating their own tertiary relics.  It was not actually within the walls of the medieval city, being instead on the outskirts, across the Tiber river.  The pope built walls around Saint Peter's and the immediately surrounding area in the ninth century.

This was not the Renaissance basilica of Saint Peter's that is there today; that was built only in the sixteenth century.  Old Saint Peter's went back to the fourth century and was considered hopelessly dark and old-fashioned when it was replaced.

Peter was certainly not the only saint venerated in Rome.  In fact, the city was thick with them, both saints who had died in Rome and saints who had died elsewhere but were honored there, with their own altars if not indeed own churches.  And then there were the countless people buried in the catacombs, tunnels below the city where originally building stone had been quarried out (see image below).  The catacombs had become a Roman graveyard, and early Christians met there if they feared persecution, not fearing the dead as did the pagan Romans.  Relics from Rome saw a brisk trade throughout the Middle Ages.

A good recent book on early medieval Rome is by Maya Maskarinec, City of Saints (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval churches and pilgrimage, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.