To Be Roman

 As I discussed back when I first started this blog, it is wrong to think of the Roman Empire of antiquity as "falling" to barbarian hordes.  Rather, Germanic peoples moved into the Roman Empire, dropped their Germanic language and much of their Germanic culture like hot potatoes, and established client kingdoms within the Empire.

This happened for example with the Visigoths in Spain and the Franks in what is now France, where Clovis (d. 511) is now considered the first French king.  He wore a toga, had his people's laws written down in Latin, wrote off to the Roman emperor in Constantinople for a special commendation, and converted to the Roman religion of Christianity.  Sure looks Roman to me.

Medieval people certainly considered themselves as continuing Rome's traditions.  Latin continued to be the language of learning and the law.  Most cities in western continental Europe had been provincial capitals under the Empire; most still had their Roman walls.  Roman roads were still the main arteries of communication and transportation.

Western Christianity was headquartered in Rome itself, with the pope.  Medieval people knew that there were Roman emperors in Constantinople, and after 800, when Charlemagne was crowned Roman emperor, by the pope in Rome, there were perfectly good Roman emperors right nearby.

 (That's one of Charlemagne's coins, portraying him as a Roman emperor of antiquity.)

In the tenth century, after Charlemagne's descendants lost much of their pizzazz, and there had been several Italian princes claiming to be Roman emperors, the title settled down with the German kings.  Germany and, to the extent that they could keep control of it, Italy, became known as the Holy Roman Empire in the twelfth century.  It is perhaps ironic that Germany, which was never part of the original Roman empire, became the center of the medieval Roman empire (which segued into the Austro-Hungarian empire, which persisted in one form or another until World War I).

And it wasn't just emperors who wanted to be Romans.  In the late Middle Ages, stories grew up both in Lithuania and in Ireland, asserting that the original populations of their countries had originally come from Rome.  Now neither Lithuania, up on the Baltic, nor Ireland, across the Irish Sea from Great Britain, had ever been under Roman rule in antiquity.  But that didn't stop the myth-makers.

According to their creative re-working of the past, scholars in both of these countries were able to assert that the first settlers of their territories were Romans, refugees from a war or adventurous pioneers or something, but at any rate Romans.  How could anyone think the Roman empire had fallen when Rome's descendants were still there, in the farthest reaches of Europe?

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

Cheese

 Cheese has been a staple food in the West for a very long time, probably going back to the period when people around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East first started keeping flocks of sheep and goats, close to 10,000 years ago.  Milk is an excellent source of protein, but it doesn't keep well without refrigeration, and it is only available part of the time, when the mother sheep or goat or cow has just given birth.  Also, a lot of people develop intolerance to the lactic acid in milk (though if one keeps drinking it all the time growing up, this intolerance is much less likely).  Cheese to the rescue!

To make cheese, fresh milk is deliberately curdled using rennet, which used to come from an animal's stomach lining.  The cow gives birth and starts producing milk, you kill the calf to have a tasty veal dinner, and now you have the calf's stomach lining as rennet to make cheese from the milk the cow continues to produce while you keep milking her.  (Note:  modern cheese uses cultures for the curdling process, not requiring death of a calf or kid or lamb every time.)

Properly curdled milk gives you curds and whey, basically cottage cheese.  This can be pressed to get the whey out, formed into a wheel or other shape, sometimes washed or heated, and aged so it develops a rind and hardens up.  Some cheese, like Roquefort, is aged in caves where interesting molds are found, to give it the distinctive blue veins.  There are hundreds of different kinds of cheese, some very local productions, some made in big factories.  Some of the modern French varieties are about as specific as "Madame Grangier makes this cheese in the spring from the milk of her cows Bessie and Bossie."

The Romans enjoyed cheese, and our word comes from the Latin caseus, meaning (you guessed it) cheese.  They distinguished between caseus (any kind of cheese) and caseus formatus, the latter specifically hard cheese made (formed) into a wheel.  This formatus was one of the foods given to soldiers in the legions, and is the root of the modern French  "fromage" and Italian "formaggio" (both of course meaning cheese).

The medieval diet included a lot of cheese.  It was more readily available than meat and acceptable to monks as meat was not.  Even those wealthy enough to enjoy meat on a regular basis would eat cheese or fish on Fridays instead of meat.

A story told about Charlemagne related that he visited a monastery on a Friday, and because they had no fish, they served him their local cheese (which would have been considered second-rate for a king, behind a nice trout).  When Charlemagne started cutting off the rind, the abbot unwisely corrected him, saying the rind was perfectly edible.  Now, no one tells the king he's doing something wrong.  Charlemagne pretended not to mind, ate the rind, said it was all very good, then got his revenge by ordering the abbot to send the royal court 200 big wheels of this tasty cheese every year.  After five years of the abbot scrambling madly to get enough milk to make this much cheese, leaving nothing for his monks, Charlemagne forgave him, but he'd learned his lesson!

Final note:  So-called "cheese food product" is an abomination before the Lord.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

William of Orange

 As I have discussed previously, medieval people loved epic tales.  Although there had been epics written in classical antiquity (the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, the Latin Aeneid), epic was re-invented in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  Most famous of the medieval epics is doubtless the Song of Roland, but there were plenty of others, including the cycle of epics about William of Orange.

William was a real person, although there is only a slight overlap between the historical William, who died at the beginning of the ninth century, and the William of the epics.  The historical William, a rough contemporary of Charlemagne, was a powerful lord of southern France, of a family that for a while acted as rivals to the Carolingian dynasty.  His grandson ended up as a hostage at the royal court, and let's just say that story doesn't end well.  The real William founded the monastery of Gellone, and when he grew old he retired there.

During his time, southern France had a number of Saracen settlements; the Mediterranean was mostly controlled by Muslims, not by Christians.  This real feature of the eighth-ninth centuries was one of the few realistic elements that made it into the epics.

The epics starring William were supposedly set in the time of Charlemagne, although everything about the castles, the armors, and the culture of the people in the stories was a slightly larger-than-life version of aristocratic life in the twelfth century.  In the epics, William fights the Saracens, converts a Muslim princess to Christianity and marries her, and at the end of his life becomes a monk at Gellone.

The stories were told both as entertainment and as a commentary on the author's own twelfth century.  The same thing is true today, when authors bring into historical fiction points that they want to make about their society:  one will notice for example that a lot of women have written a lot of historical novels about queens of England.

In the case of William of Orange, much of the entertainment value was provided by big battle scenes.  The author drove a path of destruction through armies on both sides.  This person is beheaded, that person has his brains knocked out, the other person has a spear driven all the way through his body.  One assumes the audience loved it.

The stories also routinely portray priests and bishops as weak hypocrites.  Knights and great secular lords were more than a match for these fellows, the author seems to be saying.

But there was also a strong critique of knighthood in these epics.  William was portrayed as huge, ferocious, a terrific fighter, and yet also ridiculous.  When he becomes a monk, he is very bad at it, to the extent that the other monks want to drive him out.  As he faces Saracens, he keeps saying, "We're all going to die!"  It usually takes a woman to save the day, and for a twelfth-century male audience, having to be saved by a woman added to the humiliation.  Good times.

If you'd like to see these epics, they are translated as Guillaume d'Orange by Joan M. Ferrante.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Beards

 

 In the Middle Ages, beards were mostly worn by old men.  Venerable old men were described as having long white beards; in the epic Song of Roland, for example, Charlemagne is described like this.  The length of the beard indicated age and wisdom.  Hermits also would typically have beards.  The image below is of a reliquary at Aachen containing part of Charlemagne's skull; you will notice he is shown with a beard.

But young or middle-aged men did not have beards, nor did monks, those who tried to follow an austere religious life in a group (the monastery) rather than individually as hermits.

This meant that they had to shave.  They didn't have modern safety razors, much less Norelco electrics, and certainly no shaving cream in a handy aerosol can.  Water or, with luck, soap and water got the beard ready, then a sharp knife was used to cut the bristles, ideally not cutting any skin or blood vessels in the process.  One could shave oneself, but in the towns and aristocratic courts one was usually shaved by a barber.

Barbers also functioned as surgeons.  They had lots of sharp blades around the place, so they would do any amputations that seemed necessary.  They were also skilled in figuring out how to stop bleeding.  Alternately, they knew how to cut someone carefully and precisely if they needed to be "bled," getting rid of the bad humors, to allow someone to heal more readily (before you mock bleeding, recall that it continued into the nineteenth century).  After a battle, the barber-surgeons went out to check on the wounded and see if they could be saved.

Getting back to beards, the "clean shaven" look was not exactly what we would call clean-shaven.  In certain circles today the two-day-growth look has become popular (you can buy trimmers to keep your beard constantly at that length), and medieval men would have fitted right in.  No one bothered to shave every day.  Young men, however, were normally depicted with smooth cheeks, often rosy.  Because they were also depicted with shoulder-length hair, it might at first glance be hard to tell the men from the women in many a medieval illustration--but in fact it's easy, because men wore knee length tunics, women floor-length dresses.

It has been suggested that young men didn't wear beards because they would catch in their helmets.  This seems unlikely, because peasants and townsmen too were always depicted as beardless until they became old and venerable.  Also, until the late Middle Ages a helmet just covered the crown, back of the head, and top half of the face.

In the monastery, monks not only shaved their beards but also the top of their heads, the so-called tonsure.  The effect was something like male pattern baldness, except the rim of hair went across the front of the head too (unless the monk actually had male pattern baldness).

The monks were thus distinguished from the rest of society at a glance if they tried to run away from the monastery.

Monasteries normally shaved everybody, face and head, on Saturday to be ready for Sunday.  Saturday was also the time for the weekly bath.  They might also be bled at the same time if they were feeling too frisky.  The barbers at the monastery had a long and busy day.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback!

Silk

 Medieval people valued silk cloth.  It was smooth next to the skin (unlike homespun wool), it took colors well, it was lustrous due to the structure of its fibers, it didn't fade, it was very strong for its weight, and moths wouldn't eat it.  (Clothes moths have been a perennial issue for people and their clothes--there are clothes moths in the Bible, where heaven is described among other things as a place where moths will not crawl around and chew holes.)

But the early medieval West did not have silk worms.  In fact, the general belief was that silk was spun from some special stone, found in the fabled East.  The Obviously False slur of silk coming from some worm was roundly rejected.

Now in fact silk does come from worms, raised in China for for at least the past four thousand years.  The worms graze on mulberry leaves, then spin cocoons, which can be carefully unwound to produce the filament, after boiling up the cocoons to kill the pupae.  They would emerge as a moth (not a clothes moth! which eats wool, not mulberry leaves) if they lived.  In fact, so-called raw silk or wild silk is made from cocoons where the moth has emerged, breaking through the cocoon and breaking a lot of the filaments, so the result is a less smooth texture.

Silk was extremely valuable in medieval Europe.  One of the things that Charlemagne ordered the overseers of his manors to do each year was count up how many lengths of silk cloth they had, as recorded in his "Capitulare de villis."  The epics and romances showed how luxurious their heroes and heroines were by insisting that they wore silk, slept under silk blankets, and had silk tents.

 

The above is a nice piece of silk from eleventh-century Egypt, revered for many years at Cadouin as a Holy Hanky (see more on the Hanky here).

A big part of the expense was getting the silk over thousands of miles from China.  The Silk Road (not really a road, a network of routes) led from China across central Asia and ended up eventually at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.  There in the Middle Ages it was picked up by Italian trading ships and taken to Italy.  From there it was sold throughout Europe.

The Near East was also where spices from southeast Asia were bought by Italian merchants.  The spices had not come via the Silk Road, however.  Instead they had come on Arabic dhows, across the Indian Ocean.  But in the medieval mind, silk and spices both came from the mystic East, which was why Columbus was distraught when the "Indians" he encountered seemed to have neither silk nor spices.

Understandably, the medieval West was eager to find the secret of silk production.  Silk worms appear to have reached Byzantium in the sixth century AD, smuggled there probably from India.  By the twelfth century some Italian cities had figured out about the worms and were raising them in secret, while still putting out the story of the special, magical stone.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval clothing, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval Communication

 These days most of our communication is done by means other than talking to someone who is right next to you.  We telephone, we skype or zoom call, we email or text, we make posts on Twitter or Facebook, sometimes we even write letters.

Other than the last of these, all were impossible during the Middle Ages.  The ability to allow one's friends and relatives and co-workers, or thousands (or millions) of social media followers, to know what one is thinking has of course changed communication drastically in the last century and a half, especially the last twenty years or so.  But medieval people of course did communicate, just not the same way we do.

For them, almost all communication was of necessity face to face.  Whereas today most of feel overwhelmed by the amount of information coming in, via various communication sources (and I haven't even yet mentioned radio, TV, streaming news services, or newspapers and magazines), medieval people would have been starved for news.  Any new person coming to town, or any person returning from a trip, would have been expected to provide all sorts of information and updates, from personal news to details of battles, births of royal heirs, or miracles at a shrine.

Medieval cities were run by mayors and town councils, as I have discussed earlier, and their meetings of course would have to be done in-person.  New regulations would have to be promulgated by someone going around and telling people (hence the image of the "town crier," which persisted into early New England).

Kings would have to rely on personal representatives to spread their orders.  Charlemagne, for example, had a whole system of so-called missi (meaning "those who are sent"), people sent out from court to convey royal commands and to check up on his local counts.  Although medieval people were all comfortable with the idea of kings, they might not always know who their king was.

Then there's writing. When you think about it, it's almost magical, not only can you communicate with people who are far away, but you can receive messages from people who have been dead for centuries, or leave messages for people of the future.  Many of the messages sent out by kings would have been in writing, to avoid confusion.  Writing was valued, because preparing parchment (or in the late Middle Ages paper), making ink, and writing carefully by hand  was difficult.  The problem was that most of the population couldn't read.

If they received a written communication, they would have to have it read out to them.  For that matter, letters were normally read out loud, even if the recipient could read.  Until the thirteenth century, letters were in Latin, and even someone who could read Latin might prefer to have a number of people read and comment on a letter, to make sure the meaning was clear.

Because writing letters was rare, there was nothing like a postal system.  Letters had to be hand carried.  We know that husbands wrote their wives from Crusade, and that monks wrote to their friends at other monasteries, because these letters were preserved and often copied into books.  They only could reach the recipient if someone was going that way and could carry the letter.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval communication, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback from on-line retailers.

Polyptyques

Now there's a curious word.  Like Egypt, it looks like it has too many descenders (letters with tails that hang below the line).  But it's a perfectly good word.  Polyptyque means a survey of people and property on a manor.

Polyptyques were an invention of the ninth century, and although a few were created in later centuries, the ninth century was their golden era.  They appear to have begun with Charlemagne ordering inventories of property and payments both on his own lands and on the lands of the great monasteries of his realm.

That's an image of Charlemagne on one of his coins.  You'll note that he is portrayed like a Roman emperor.

Anyway, there is some thought that Charlemagne considered all the Frankish monasteries his property, which is why he wanted to know what was on their manors.  The royal polyptyques do not survive, but there are still maybe a dozen monastic ones, plus fragments of others.  They are a major source of information on the rural economy of the period.

For each manor (and a monastery would typically own dozens of manors), the polyptyque would list how much revenue was expected.  Often the names of the tenants would be given, but a polyptyque was not intended to be a a census of people, so one cannot determine total population of a manor.  The legal status of the tenants might be specified, using such terms as hospes, colonus, mancipius, or ingenuus.  Although those composing the polyptyques clearly knew what was meant by these terms, scholars today have had serious debates over their meaning, and the twelfth-century successors of those who composed them seem to have had even less idea.

The tenants were sometimes although not always listed by name.  The overwhelming majority of these names are male, which led a few decades ago to a scholar who should have known better claiming this showed that ninth-century peasant families killed baby girls.  Now one would have thought that something as serious as infanticide would be mentioned in other sources if it was indeed practiced—it isn't.  Even more basically, the lists of tenants just gave the name of the head of the household, not of spouse and children, and, as in the US through the twentieth century, the man was considered the natural head of household.  Thus there is no reason to use the polyptyques to argue for female infanticide.

Most polyptyques do not survive on their original ninth-century parchment, but only as copied into cartularies in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  Here's a picture of a cartulary, a collection of documents all carefully copied into a single book.

Enough had changed in the rural economy and manorial organization between the ninth century and the twelfth or thirteenth centuries that the cartulary scribes often had trouble figuring out what the polyptyques meant.  Sometimes property enumerated in them had been lost to the monastery for generations.  The ninth-century handwriting was clear enough three centuries later, but the vocabulary had changed.  Yet clearly these lists of manors and dues were an important part of a monastery's history.  The scribes abbreviated heavily and hoped for the best.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on monks, kings, and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback!

End of the Merovingians

As I posted last week, medieval people could and did get rid of monarchs.  It was unusual, it was difficult, and it didn't always work.  The usual reason was that the monarch had become a tyrant.  Today I want to blog about the first known example of people getting rid of a monarch for incompetence.

Let's go back to the middle of the eighth century.  The Merovingian dynasty had ruled the Franks for three centuries, since the Frankish people (Germanic in origin) had come wandering west into the Roman Empire and settled down in what is now France to become Roman themselves.  These descendants of the Sea Serpent as the kings considered themselves wore their hair long as an apparent symbol of status—most Romans and Romanized peoples in the Empire had short hair.  They converted to Christianity in the late fifth century and were learned, cunning, and by all accounts ruthless.

The above is a modern reproduction of a Merovingian-era belt buckle.

By the middle of the eighth century the dynasty appears to have weakened, or at least run short of male heirs.  At least one monk had to be brought out of the cloister to become king, and at one point the mayor of the palace, who one might think of as chief of staff or even secretary of state, ruled without a king for several years, acting in the name of the last dead king.

In 751 this mayor of the palace's son, Pippin (called "the Short," his wife was called Bertha "Broadfoot," people tended to have nicknames for their rulers) decided he himself should be king.  But this was going to be complicated.  Pippin and his older brother, who had been co-mayor of the palace with him until deciding to go to Italy and become a monk, had found themselves a Merovingian king, Childeric III, probably a boy, and put him on the throne.  So how to get him off the throne?

The argument used was that Childeric was incompetent.  Pippin said that he wrote to the pope, Zacharias, asking if someone who actually wielded royal power, meaning himself, should in fact be the king.  According to Pippin, the pope agreed.  It is at any rate clear that Pippin was formally elected king by the great Frankish lords, which was standard, that the bishops anointed him as king, almost like baptizing him, which was not standard, and two years later he had Zacharias's successor as pope come and bless him and his sons.  This last wasn't standard at all.

So it appears that, in order not to look like a usurper, Pippin lined up the full force of secular and religious power to support his ascension to the throne.  But the story gets even more complicated.  What happened to Childeric?

Strangely, nobody at the time said anything about Childeric.  Contemporary accounts speak of how wonderful it was that Pippin should have been elected, crowned, anointed, and blessed, but without a whisper of how Childeric was removed.  Even the account of Pippin writing to Pope Zacharias shows up for the first time only forty years later, and the contemporary biography of Zacharias doesn't mention it, which would have to be considered odd, since the popes then were very close to the Frankish kings and mayors of the palace.  It may well have been so shocking to end the Merovingian dynasty after three centuries that no one at the time wanted to mention that aspect.

Well after the fact, it was said that Childeric had become a monk, which was indeed a common fate for Merovingian kings if a brother or cousin in the dynasty pushed someone off the throne.  But it is also possible that Childeric had just died, and Pippin and his successors needed the story of the removal of an incompetent to justify seizing the crown, rather than ruling in the name of a dead king or finding another Merovingian boy somewhere.  After all, the same account that says that Childeric had been shuffled off to a monastery says that he had a son who was shuffled off with him.

The story of the removal of an incompetent blossomed in the following years.  Some seventy years after the fact, Charlemagne's biographer Einhard gave a long and vivid portrait of how bad the Merovingians had become.  They were too feeble to ride a horse, he said, and had to be driven around in an ox-cart like some peasant.  They sat on the throne with a long beard dangling to their knees (but Childeric was a boy?), saying whatever the wise mayor of the palace told them to say.  Einhard mistakenly named not Zacharias but his successor (Pope Stephen), the one who actually came to Francia and blessed Pippin, as the one who agreed that Pippin should depose the last Merovingian.  In this account, it was a real kindness to the Merovingian kings and to the Franks to get them out of the way.

This tale of the fainéant (do-nothing) Merovingian kings was so compelling that historians believed it for 1200 years.  Lately, however, the Merovingians have seen something of a scholarly rehabilitation.  For more on the end of their dynasty, see the article, "Childeric III and the Emperors Drogo Magnus and Pippin the Pious," in the journal Medieval Prospography (volume 28, 2013).

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval monarchs and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  (Also in print!)

Getting rid of a monarch

In the US this week an ultimately unsuccessful effort was made to convict and remove the president. It thus seems like a good time to talk about getting rid of a medieval monarch.  After all, you can't just drag a king (or a president for that matter) to the curb on Blue Box day (or Major Appliance Disposal day).

As I have discussed earlier, medieval kings were not absolute rulers (that developed only in the post-medieval period with kings like Louis XIV of France).  But they were still hard to get rid of if those around them didn't like what they were doing.  One possibility was always assassination, as Julius Caesar had been murdered by his sometime-friends in 44 BC, because they were hoping (erroneously) that with him gone, Rome would go back to being a Republic rather than being ruled by emperors.

Once Europe became Christian, the option of murdering people, even kings thought to be on the wrong path, seemed less viable.  Other ways were often sought.  The most famous example is probably the replacement of the Merovingian dynasty on the Frankish throne by Pippin "the Short," father of Charlemagne, in 751.  The official story was that Pippin, the mayor of the palace for the last Merovingian king (sort of like chief of staff or secretary of state), who had actually been running the kingdom, asked the pope if it was right for an incompetent to have the name of king, and the pope said no (25th amendment!).  Pippin deposed the king and had himself elected by the Franks, anointed and crowned by the bishops, and blessed by the pope.

(This official story appears for the first time 40 years later and seems dubious.  I'll discuss it properly another time.)

Deposing incompetents continued.  Among Charlemagne's descendants, Charles the Simple was deposed and locked up when he didn't seem to be doing his job protecting France from the Vikings.  In England in 1066, Harold Godwinson was declared king, but Duke William of Normandy claimed that Harold was an oath-breaker, that he (William) had been promised the English throne, and he took the throne by force.  This didn't count (maybe) as assassination because Harold was an oath-breaker and died in battle.

Sometimes kings were just threatened with deposition.  In England in 1215, the great barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, a document spelling out the rights of the great lords and churches of England, if he didn't want to be deposed.  John grumbled and complained and tried to get out of it, but he died the next year (natural causes), which certainly solved the barons' immediate problem.

At the end of the fourteenth century in England, King Richard II again seriously displeased the barons, who thought he was acting as if he were above the law.  The final straw was when he seized the duchy of Lancaster, held by his first cousin Henry.  Henry raised an armed rebellion and captured Richard.  Parliament, coming into its own in the late Middle Ages, declared that Richard had broken England's laws and forced him to abdicate in 1399.  Henry became King Henry IV, claiming his right to the throne by inheritance, by conquest, and by act of Parliament.

Parliament entered the picture again in 1461, when Henry IV's grandson Henry VI, who came to the throne as a baby and had serious mental health issues as an adult.  During his periods of incompetence, England was ruled by various relatives, with Parliament's support, but this was complicated by the relatives' fights with each other and Henry's efforts to regain control.  We're here plunging into the War of the Roses, which I won't discuss here, but Henry was finally conquered and deposed in 1461, with the combination of conquest and Parliamentary support leading to the reign of his third cousin, Richard III.  The same set of circumstances that had led to Henry IV becoming king led, two generations later, to his grandson Henry VI being kicked off the throne (but at least left alive).

In late medieval France meanwhile, during the Hundred Years' War, during the phase when the English were winning, they were able to get the "dauphin," the heir to the French throne, declared illegitimate, by having his mother attest that the boy's father was someone other than the late king.  This got him out of the way, but only until Joan of Arc's angel voices told her he really was legitimate the whole time and got him crowned as Charles VII (see more on Joan here).

You will note that medieval people rarely just tossed (or killed) a king.  There was always an effort to justify, usually on the basis of abuse of power by the king, sometimes on the basis of his legitimacy.  Getting the great lords on board was usually Step One.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

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

Alsace

Alsace is part of France, the area right up against Germany.  But it has been under German control at least as much as French over the centuries, and although everyone speaks French there, and the schools are run in French (and the hotels give you croissants in the morning), the locals speak a dialect of German at home.

So how did Alsace end up in the middle, so that in much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was handed back and forth multiple times between the two countries?  Since this is my Life in the Middle Ages blog, you won't be surprised to learn that a big reason is medieval political history.

Let's go back to that magical year of 843 and the Treaty of Verdun.  Although Charlemagne, Roman emperor, and king of what is now France, Germany, the Benelux countries, and northern Italy, only had one surviving son when he died in 814, he had three grandsons who all wanted to kill each other.  They decided instead to divide Europe between them (hence the treaty).  Charles "the Bald" got France, Louis "the German" got Germany (you probably already guessed that), and Lothar, the oldest, got Lotharingia, the strip between France and Germany and extending down into Italy.  He also got to be crowned Roman emperor.

In the map above, the pink area was under the French king, the yellow area under the German king, and the green area is Lotharingia.

Alsace was already a perfectly good duchy, and it was included in Lotharingia (so was Lorraine, whose name is a corruption of Lotharingia).  As you can imagine, both the French and German kings decided Lotharingia was rightfully theirs.  For most of the Middle Ages, the German kings (who elbowed their way into being Roman emperors too) held Alsace (though Lorraine was French, it's where Joan of Arc came from).

Because it was always a border area, Alsace is still thick with castles.  It also has extremely cute half-timbered villages, the way one imagines places like Bavaria might look like.  Because Alsace was taken very quickly during World War II, it was devastated much less than most of Germany.  Visit cute Germany while still getting croissants for breakfast!

© C. Dale Brittain 2019
For more on medieval kings, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  The cover image is a staircase cut into the bedrock in an Alsatian castle, Fleckenstein.

Reform of the Church

Reform has been part of Christianity since the beginning.  Although one usually associates the word "reform" with the Protestant Reformation, in fact there had been numerous waves of reform in the preceding fifteen centuries.

The "reformed" branch of modern Judaism is made up of people fitting in with their society, keeping their traditions and holy days but not getting hung up on things like bacon or head coverings or not walking too far on the Sabbath.  However, in Christianity "reformed" always meant the opposite, more strict.

Christianity was always based on radical calls for personal reform, for separating oneself from the mundane concerns of the world and becoming a better, more spiritual person.  This is hard.  Repeatedly over the centuries, people within the church decided that standards were slipping, that it was getting too easy to be a "Christian on Sunday," and that changes were needed in the institution to bring people back to the path to perfection.

Monasticism, for example, began in the third century when Saint Anthony decided that proper observance of Christianity demanded that he go out in the desert and become a hermit.  As the Roman Empire became thoroughly Christianized, bishops worried that the church was becoming too much a part of everyday life, rather than something to transform people's lives.  They urged priests to stop what they saw as pagan practices, like wearing amulets, consulting auguries, or exchanging gifts on January 1.

During the reign of Charlemagne, a series of reforming councils (as they were called) sought to create a more accurate version of the Bible, stressed that priests had to be well educated, and ordered monks to follow the Rule of Saint Benedict, to make sure they had not become lax.

The eleventh and twelfth centuries were a great age of religious reform.  Reformers tried to stop laymen interfering in the affairs of the church (including choosing its leaders), a process that began with Pope Leo IX; decided that monks had to be even stricter than they had been, a movement exemplified by the Cistercians; and set out to define the sacraments.

One aspect of this reform was trying to simplify.  The eleventh and twelfth centuries were a time of economic growth and social mobility, when, in contrast, poverty became embraced as a sign of holiness.  Cistercian churches rejected the rich decorations of many twelfth-century churches, as in the example below.

The late Middle Ages had numerous heresies (such as that of the Cathars) where the heretics proclaimed that they represented the true faith, because they were stricter, more reformed, more radical than the organized church.  These were rejected, but they were part of a constant, on-going effort to make the church better, quite literally to re-form it to its original purpose.

So when Martin Luther came along in 1517, he considered himself working in a long tradition.  He had no idea he was about to split western Christendom.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

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

Royal nicknames

We think of royal rulers as having numbers.  The queen of England, for example, is Elizabeth II.  But for most of the Middle Ages, kings with the same names were identified by nicknames, not by numbers.

Charlemagne, of course, was "Charles the Great," Carolus magnus (magnus being Latin for great).  He was doubtless called this during his lifetime.  His grandfather was also named Charles, often referred to as Charles Martel, "Charles the Hammer," because he was a great war leader and defeated a Muslim army in southwestern France in the middle of the eighth century.

These are the kinds of nicknames anyone would be proud to bear.  But Charlemagne's father (Charles Martel's son) was known as Pippin the Short.  One might wonder how Charlemagne managed to be so tall--he was a good six feet tall in an age when few men passed five and a half feet--with a short father. Well, Pippin the Short was married to Bertha Broadfoot, who one assumes was big in more aspects than just her shoe size.

Charlemagne's oldest son was Pippin the Hunchback.  Now, it's not entirely clear that he actually was hunchbacked, but after Charlemagne divorced his mother (to marry the mother of the rest of his sons) he was removed from the line of legitimate succession.  To add insult to injury, one of his younger half-brothers was also named Pippin, their grandfather's name.  Pippin the Hunchback, feeling aggrieved, rebelled against his father and ended up being imprisoned in a monastery for the rest of his life.  (One did not rebel against Charlemagne.)  The "hunchback" nickname seems to have been made up after the fact to explain that he never could have succeeded to the throne anyway.

Charlemagne's eventual successor, Louis the Pious, got off fairly easy in the nickname department, but his own son, who became king of France, was called Charles the Bald, presumably not to his face.  It is in fact not totally clear whether he really was bald or perhaps was just very hairy, and this was supposed to be a joke.

He is depicted above; you can't tell if he's really bald or not because of the crown.  But if being bald is bad, how would you like to be Louis the Stammerer, the next French king?  Or how about his son, Charles the Simple?

In comparison to the Carolingians, the Capetians had more innocuous nicknames, though Louis the Fat probably again would not have been called that to his face.  But his grandson was Philip "Augustus," a nickname intended to invoke Caesar Augustus, and his grandson was Saint Louis.  You don't get much better than that.  Saint Louis's grandson was Philip the Fair, named for his blond hair.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

The Holy Roman Empire

There were at least three different Roman Empires before about 1500, all centered in different places.  To make it more confusing, they all asserted they were the same Roman Empire.

Let's start with the original Roman Empire, the territory conquered in (roughly) the five centuries BC, which ended up including the whole Mediterranean basin and Europe west of the Rhine.  Its capital was Rome, and from the first century BC it was ruled by emperors, absolute rulers who originally were assumed to be semi-divine.

This Empire split in the first half of the fourth century, when the Emperor Constantine moved his capital to Constantinople (the modern city of Istanbul), in Greek-speaking Byzantium (now Turkey).  (I wonder why it's named Constantinople?)  (See more here on the "fall" of the Roman Empire.)

Constantine also converted to Christianity, a religion that soon became official throughout the Empire.  Though no longer semi-divine, the emperors continued to be absolute rulers.

From the early fourth century to the late fifth, the real capital of the Empire was Constantinople, but there were still sometimes co-emperors headquartered in the city of Rome.  The last of these western co-emperors was killed at the orders of the Byzantine emperor, leading to over three centuries of just one Roman emperor.  These Byzantine Roman emperors indeed continued to rule until 1453, when the Turks finally took Constantinople.

Meanwhile, back in the west, the Frankish king Charlemagne was crowned emperor by the pope in the year 800.  (See more here on Charlemagne.)  Now there were two emperors, one with his capital at Aachen, near what is now the French-German border, and the other in Constantinople.  Both called themselves Roman Emperors.  Neither was in Rome.

Charlemagne's empire, which was originally (more or less) the territory that now corresponds to France, Italy, and western Germany, became by the eleventh century just Germany and Italy, as France went its own way.  German kings would be elected by the German princes, then cross the Alps, beat up some Italians, and be crowned Roman emperor by the pope.  (See more here on medieval Italy.)  Since 800, it was very clear that no western king could call himself emperor unless the pope crowned him.

As you can doubtless imagine, there was a great deal of hard feeling between emperors and popes, who felt that the other guy ought to do what he wanted.  The Investiture Controversy (on which see more here) was a knock-down, drag-out fight that continued on and off from the late eleventh century to the late twelfth.  At one interlude during this Controversy, the German emperor decided that not only was he Roman emperor, he was Holy Roman Emperor.  (Take that, pope!)  The title sticks.  Indeed, to avoid confusion, a lot of historians refer to the "Holy Roman Empire" as starting with Charlemagne, to keep it distinct from either the original Roman empire of antiquity or the Byzantine Roman empire.

In the late Middle Ages, the German princes, deciding that if they elected someone king that was good enough, declared that one could be Holy Roman Emperor without the bother of crossing the Alps and beating up Italians in order to be crowned at Rome.  The Holy Roman Empire eventually was joined by marriage to the Spanish Empire of Ferdinand and Isabella, busy conquering the Mediterranean and the New World, but that takes us into the post-medieval period.

To reiterate, there's the original Roman Empire, centered at Rome, until the early fourth century.  There's the Byzantine Roman Empire, centered at Constantinople, from the fourth century until 1453.  And there's the Holy Roman Empire, not called "holy" until the twelfth century, but really starting with Charlemagne and persisting (with majors changes) until the end of the Middle Ages.  All clear now?

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

For more on the Holy Roman Empire and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Charlemagne

Even if a person knows very little medieval history, they have almost certainly heard of Charlemagne.  "He was great or something."  (That's right, the name means "Charles the Great," the great-part from the Latin magnus, as in 'magnum'.)

The real Charlemagne was king of the Franks from 768 to 814, king not only of what is now France but also of much of western Germany and the Benelux countries.  He was also king of Lombardy (northern Italy) in at least his own mind, though the Lombards had doubts.  He is now imagined as "father of Europe," and there is a statue of him at the European Union headquarters.  Given that he became king of all these territories through conquest, and that his biographer was very irritated with the Germans who refused to stay conquered, maybe we shouldn't press this analogy too far.

In the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned Roman Emperor by the pope.  Now you'll recall from earlier posts that the capital of the Roman Empire had moved in the fourth century from Rome to Constantinople (what is now Istanbul, in Turkey).  There were intermittently independent emperors in Rome as well as Constantinople for over a century, but from the 470s on, the Roman Emperors, the heirs to the Caesars, were solely in the Greek East (Constantinople), where they remained until their empire finally fell to the Turks in 1453.

So how did Charlemagne get declared Roman Emperor?  (Usually modern history books call him "Holy Roman Emperor" to keep him distinct both from the Caesars and from the Greek Orthodox emperors in Constantinople, but the term "Holy Roman Emperor" wasn't used until the twelfth century.)

In part the popes owed him one.  Early medieval popes were quite weak and little respected, and the pope of 800 had been having terrible trouble with the Lombards.  He also had decided that the current Emperor in Constantinople was a heretic.  Irene, the emperor, was also a woman, which only made it worse.  She believed that the Ten Commandments forbidding "graven images" meant that one could not have images in the church and was thus an "iconoclast," one who broke up such images.  (This is very depressing to art historians.)  This was not at all how western theologians and the pope interpreted the Ten Commandments.

Feeling that the imperial throne was thus vacant, the pope announced that Charlemagne was the only true emperor and crowned him on Christmas Day 800 in the church of St. Peter's in the Lateran.

On the one hand, this was great, Charlemagne and his descendants (known as the Carolingians, from Carolus, the Latin version of the name Charles) got to call themselves emperors.  But a precedent had been set, that one was not really an emperor until crowned by the pope, which gave the pope power at least potentially.  The bases of the eleventh-century crisis of church and state were laid down.

A thousand years later, Napoleon remembered this all too well and refused to be crowned emperor by the pope, instead snatching the crown from the pope's hands and crowning himself.

Charlemagne himself had doubts about the whole procedure, mostly because he was concerned about the Greek Roman Emperors.  He seems even to have asked Irene to marry him, hoping to resolve it that way.  But she died quickly, and her successor, a man, basically told Charlemagne that if he wanted to call himself emperor in the God-forsaken northern European forests, where they didn't even speak Greek, he was welcome to do so.

The image is from one of his coins.  To the left, behind his head (crowned with laurel like a Roman), you should be able to read his name, Karolus.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval kings, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Early Medieval Popes

Many people now mistakenly think, "In the Middle Ages, people had to do whatever the pope said."  This is far from true.  Most of the time, most people didn't even know who the pope was.

Let's start at the beginning.  As Christian communities were first established in the late first and second centuries AD, they acquired bishops, leaders who were locally elected (click here for more on bishops).  The bishops originally ran Christianity between them, holding conferences to decide important issues.  By the fourth and fifth centuries, as Christianity became first tolerated in the Roman Empire and then eventually the official imperial religion, five of these bishops became "first among equals," the five patriarchs as they were known.

The five patriarchs were the bishops of Rome (naturally), of Constantinople (the "new Rome" since the imperial capital was moved there in the fourth century), of Jerusalem (naturally), of Alexandria (in Egypt, the greatest center of learning in the ancient world), and of Antioch.  Antioch was where the apostle Peter went, according to the New Testament.  In Latin, all patriarchs, and many other bishops, were called papa, meaning "father."

The bishop of Rome, the only patriarch in western Europe, was looked up to by Europeans, and he took over effective governance of the city of Rome once the emperors were off in the East.  He also encouraged the Christianization of European territories not already Christian; for example, around the year 600 Gregory I first sent missionaries to the pagan Anglo-Saxons in England.  By this time, the bishops of Rome were arguing that the apostle Peter had been their first bishop, having come to Rome from Antioch, joining Paul, whom the New Testament puts in Rome (though not as bishop).

In the seventh century, with the rise of Islam, the Christian communities in Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria essentially disappeared, leaving just the patriarchs of Constantinople and Rome.  East and West, Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking, drew further and further apart.  From this point on, one can really call the Roman pontiff "the pope."

But popes still had no real authority outside of Rome.  People loved to make pilgrimages to Rome, to visit the catacombs under the city where early Christians were buried (and to snag a bone or two to take home as a relic), to visit the Tomb of Peter.  But a lot of popes were non-entities, sons of powerful Roman families put into office by their relatives, who had dropped the previous pope into the Tiber.  They had constant problems with the Lombard kings (northern Italy) and the Saracens (southern Italy).

The highpoint for early medieval popes was the coronation of Charlemagne in the year 800.  Charlemagne was king of "Francia" (essentially France and western Germany), and he had come to Italy at the pope's request to beat up the Lombards.  As a reward, on Christian Day 800, in Saint Peter's basilica, the pope crowned him Roman Emperor.

The pope was convinced at the time that the Roman Emperor in Constantinople was a heretic, following a deviant version of Christianity.  To make it worse, the emperor of 800 was a woman.  From now on, there were two Roman Emperors, one in Constantinople and one in France or Germany.

The western one (not the eastern one) had the precedent of having to be crowned by the pope to be considered truly the emperor.  Many a German king in the next two centuries came to Italy to be crowned emperor, even if he first had to beat up the pope to get him to do it.  But the popes still had little authority the rest of the time and continued to be pawns of powerful Roman families.

In a later post, I'll pick up the story in the eleventh century.

Click here for more on medieval Christianity.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014