More Medieval Spain

As I earlier posted, medieval Spain is much less studied than the rest of medieval Europe.  Part of the issue is the language barrier.  One really has to know both the medieval and the modern versions of Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Arabic, as well as Latin.  But a number of younger scholars, most notably Americans, have started studying this fascinating territory.

 

The Iberian peninsula, although its own separate world, was closely tied to the rest of Europe through the Christian rulers who tried for over six centuries to make it their own.  A lot of these Christian kings were in origin French, especially Burgundian.  In addition, Christian Europe did a great deal of trading with Spain, as its ports along its eastern side could take goods into the Mediterranean, where they could be easily transported.  Spanish horses and leather were considered especially valuable.

But there were distinct differences, such as that for most of the Middle Ages the Christians (and even some of the Muslims) used the Era dating, where the years were always 38 more than "anno Domini," so that while it was 1100 in France it was 1138 in Spain.  No one knows how this started.  There was talk at the time of it having something to do with Julius Caesar.

Today I want to expand on some of what I discussed earlier, concentrating especially on what's called the ta'ifa, a term which might be translated as "city state," a small, powerful principality.  Medieval Spain was full of them.  Indeed, there were at least three periods in medieval Spanish history when ta'ifas multiplied, at the expense of those rulers trying to establish large, centralized territories. Political historians tend to focus on those rulers with the most territory, but most politics then (as now) was local, and the ta'ifas filled the vacuum when the centralizers weakened.

Although one can see medieval Spain's history as permeated with conflicts between Christians and Muslims, it's more complicated, because Muslims also fought Muslims and Christians fought Christians.  Political alliances did not always follow religion.  As well as the various Christians trying to conquer their way south from the Pyrenees, there were Christians who had been there since the heyday of the Roman Empire.  As well as Muslims who recognized the rulership of the local caliphs, there were also powerful lords from North Africa who thought that they ought to be in charge, and the local Muslims did not always agree.  The rulers of the ta'ifas were right in the middle of all this.

(If you look at the map, you can see how close southern Spain is to North Africa, and not only at the Straits of Gibraltar.  Spain was influenced as much by North Africa as by the rest of Europe.)

One of the last of the individual principalities to hold out against the governmental centralization that both Christian and Muslim rulers were trying to impose was headed by the dynasty of  Banu Hud.  They had held power as emirs in the northern part of the Iberian peninsula. but they lost their position in the early twelfth century. Far from giving up, they went on to establish a new center, a ta'ifa, in south-eastern Iberia.

But it was not enough to conquer, or even to make alliances with others who could help them.  They also had to project an air of legitimacy, so that they would be accepted by the people they ruled.  They ruled for over a century, even though there is serious doubt whether this dynasty actually was a series of fathers and sons or a succession of men who attached themselves to the line.

They were able to rule their ta'ifa for as long as they did because they were accepted, and the thirteenth-century members of the dynasty were considered native sons.  This legitimacy was created through a combination of success as warriors (against both Christians and Muslims) and grandiose building projects, minting of coins, establishing laws, wearing clothing copied from the caliphs, and corresponding with the rulers of Baghdad as equals.

A fascinating history of this dynasty has recently been published by Anthony H. Minnema, The Last Ta'ifa:  The Banu Hud and the Struggle for Political Legitimacy in al-Andalus (Cornell University Press, 2024).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

Nicene Creed

 The "Nicene Creed" is trending today, so I thought I'd blog about it, given its importance for medieval Christianity.

The word creed means something that one believes, coming from the Latin "credo," meaning "I believe."  The first words of the Nicene Creed are "I believe," so that makes sense, even though the Creed was originally written in Greek.  The whole creed is a list of things a Christian believes.  Although I've seen some discussions where people on-line are saying, "I don't need a creed! I have the Bible!" they are fundamentally misunderstanding it.  The Nicene Creed is the short version of what you need to believe in order to call yourself a Christian.

The Nicene Creed is named that because it came out of the 325 Council of Nicaea.  By the early fourth century the main wave of persecution of Christians was over, but that just meant that Christians were free to disagree with each other.  There had been a lot of debate and discussion in the first three centuries of Christianity about exactly what were the fundamental tenets of Christianity, especially what was the nature of the Trinity.  All the different people with different views naturally declared that everyone else was a heretic.

For example, was Jesus just a man, divinely-inspired but not divine himself?  Was he in fact God who just put on a facade of looking human in order to fool people?  Had he started as straight human but become divine at some point, either before or after the Crucifixion?  The Gospels had him calling himself both "son of Man" and "son of God" and even saying "I and the Father are one," so that didn't help.  And where did the Holy Spirit fit into this?  If you've got Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, does that mean three Gods?  Since the Christian Bible didn't settle on (more or less) the form it has now for another century or two, and was itself a topic of heated discussion, that wasn't going to help.

The emperor Constantine, who had recently decided to become a Christian, believed this arguing was unseemly.  (He was not baptized yet, but Christian women in his family were persuasive, as was a burning cross he saw in the sky over a battle field, which would certainly have gotten my attention.)  Roman emperors had always been the heads of Roman state paganism, so he found it appropriate to call a council to decide.  The council was presided over by the emperor, but he didn't make the decisions, rather encouraging all the assembled bishops, from all over the Empire, to resolve their differences and vote.

What they came up with is essentially the Nicene Creed of today, though some editing was done at the 381 Council of Constantinople, and the precise wording depends on the translation used.  It defined the Trinity as one God in three persons and Jesus as both wholly divine and wholly human.  There.  No multiple gods, no Jesus as just an ordinary human, no Jesus as a divine being in disguise as a human.  It was a compromise to which the majority of the attending bishops agreed.

Of course it didn't stop those people who left the Council convinced that all those bishops were heretics, or those who heard about the Council and disagreed with what they heard or thought they heard.  Heresies concerning the humanity of Jesus and the nature of the Trinity swirled around the Mediterranean for three more centuries, until the rise of Islam essentially ended them.

But mainstream Christianity had settled on a basic definition, supported by all the bishops of the major cities of the Empire.  It began, "I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth."  So far it could also be a statement of basic Judaism.  But then it immediately adds, "And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten son of God ... co-substantial with the Father."  There's the just-one-substance, more-than-one-person part.

The Creed continues to give a brief summary of Jesus coming to earth to save everyone, being crucified and rising again, ascending to Heaven from which He will come again to judge us all.  Then finally the Creed gets to the Holy Spirit, who always gets overlooked, "And in the Holy Spirit ... who proceeds from the Father."

Somewhere between the sixth and ninth century western (Latin) Christendom added what's known as "filioque" clause to "from the Father."  The term means, "and the son," so the Holy Spirit was said to proceed both from the Father and from the Son.  Greek orthodoxy declared this was a total heresy.  Eastern and Western versions of Christianity have still not resolved this one, twelve hundred years later.

The 381 Council of Constantinople added a final wrap-up to the Nicene Creed, adopted as part of it, saying that one believed in "one holy, catholic, and apostolic church" and in "one baptism for the remission of sins."  Here the stress was on the idea of a universal church, all Christians being one body (the word catholic means universal, though it's been adopted by one version of Latin Christendom as meaning specifically them).  Stress was also put on the church's origins with Jesus's apostles, not just some people somewhere having some ideas.  Christianity (like Judaism) has always emphasized historical continuity.

The wording seems to suggest that you only get one chance to wipe out sins with baptism, so for a while people would wait until they were dying to be baptized, once they were pretty sure they weren't going to sin any more.  Constantine himself was baptized on his death bed.  However, in another century or so infant baptism came in, as wiping away Original Sin, so that infants and children wouldn't go straight to Hell if they died.  This requires bonus actions to wipe away subsequent sins.  Original Sin assumes everyone since Adam and Eve is born already laden with sin, but Nicaea didn't worry about that, and that's a different story.

Today the Nicene Creed is taught to all Catholics and is sort-of part of the doctrine of most western Protestant churches (not the Unitarians obviously).  The Southern Baptists are currently trying to decide about it, worried over the word "catholic," and feeling that the purpose of baptism isn't stated correctly.  (Some have even questioned whether modern Catholics are even really Christians.  I'm not getting into that discussion.)

As a medieval historian, I'm always sort of bemused by how many modern Christians in the West don't realize that you can't jump straight from the first century to the twentieth or twenty-first.  All versions of western Christendom are the products of medieval Christianity, even if there were conscious efforts to reject big parts of it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

Oath Helpers

 People in the Middle Ages totally believed in the rule of law.  They were not always sure what the law was, and often they seemed to be making it up as they went along, but they believed at least as much as do modern people in doing things in a lawful manner.  Even though modern laws in the West grew directly out of medieval legal practice, there are plenty of differences.

One of the best examples of this is oath helpers.  Most discussions of guilt and innocence, of who did what to whom, turned as they did today on witness testimony and physical evidence.  But how to tell if someone was actually telling the truth?

As I have discussed previously, someone's truthfulness might be tested by ordeal, that is that they would swear to something and grasp a red-hot iron as proof of their veracity.  If the burn healed up as it should, they were indeed telling the truth.  Understandably, most people would prefer to be proven to be truthful by less extreme means.  Indeed, more people threatened to undertake trial by ordeal than actually went through with it.  (In some ways it was a bluff, saying "I'm so certain I'm innocent that I'll accept a horrible burn to prove it," forcing the other side to start to doubt their accusations.)

An alternate method was to gather oath helpers.  These fidejussores as they were known in medieval Latin would swear to the truthfulness of someone else's oath.  They were not witnesses, as they need not have any insights into what had happened, and they were not even character witnesses, as they were not expected to say (for example) that the accused was an affectionate husband and father who wouldn't hurt a fly.  Instead they swore oaths that someone else's oath was true.

So someone accused of (say) murder would swear on holy relics that they had never touched the victim.  Everyone would watch to see if he started frothing at the mouth and falling down.  If he didn't, he would provide oath helpers who would similarly swear.  Six or twelve men (or some different number, it wasn't absolute) would swear that this oath was true.  If any of them gasped and choked and fell down while trying to swear falsely, guilt would be pretty well established (pending of course further discussion, medieval judgments always required a big discussion).

But even if the accused managed to get all his oath helpers to swear to his own oath's veracity, he was not necessarily found "not guilty."  Part of any trial was "what everyone knew."  If the accused was, in everyone's mind, clearly the murderer (in this example), then they'd keep going.  They might require an ordeal, with further oaths from the fidejussores.  They might have a combat or dunk the accused in water.  Best of all, they might find that the knife stuck in the victim's throat was the accused's own distinctive knife.

When someone ultimately found guilty was to be punished,  all his oath helpers were also punished.  In the stories they were sometimes hung, although that was probably an extremely rare outcome.  But being an oath helper was a serious business, as the fidejussor knew that if the person whose oath he was helping actually was guilty, he himself would be punished, by the court or by God.

(In the "Court Scar" series I've written with my husband, we include several examples of legal judgments that carry the plot along, based on real medieval events.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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