"Unheard of" violence

 Medieval Europe was violent, which should not be surprising, given that pretty much all societies are if a lot of people live close to each other (including ours).  It of course didn't help that macho swagger among the well-to-do required walking around with a sword on one's hip.

But violence was neither considered normal nor acceptable in the high Middle Ages.  In fact, the most common characterization of violent acts in twelfth-century chronicles was that they were "unheard of," inaudita.  That is, when describing some act of violence a chronicler would want readers to know that such acts were unusual, in fact so unusual that no one had ever heard of such things before.

This made for excellent rhetoric.  In refusing to accept violence as normal, the chroniclers were telling their contemporaries that it was never acceptable.  Now in fact they did recognize some violence as acceptable.  Self-defense was fine, and so was protecting the weak, generally characterized as women, churchmen, and the poor.  But in all these cases the other guy, the bad guy, had started it.

Attacks by the powerful against the weak, bullying writ large, were especially "unheard of."  Chroniclers would really emphasize all the horrible things the malefactor had done to peasants or artisans or churchmen or women, justifying their brutal slaying in retaliation.  Unfortunately some modern scholars seem to have missed the inaudita, arguing that such attacks on the weak must have been everyday events, or they wouldn't keep showing up in the chronicles.

Epics and sagas from the Middle Ages are sometimes read as glorifying violence. And they do have a lot of people whacking away at each other.  But these stories always end up demonstrating that violence is not the answer.  When the hero ends up dead and everyone else in the story is grief-stricken, that's usually an indication that the author is saying that violence is a bad idea.  A lot of epic authors tried to work their moral in delicately, portraying all the great deeds of knightly violence (against other knights only, however) to draw in their audience before showing them that peace-making was the better way.

These days in the US one tends to fear the poor.  One is told not to go into "certain" neighborhoods.  This idea was upside down in the Middle Ages.  Then the violent people one feared were the elite.  Let's face it, a lot more damage can be done with a sword than a simple club.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Medieval vegetarianism

 Medieval people ate a largely vegetarian diet.  Unlike modern vegetarians in the West, who usually choose vegetarianism primarily because they think it wrong to kill and eat animals, or else because they believe a vegetarian diet is healthier, medieval people for the most part did not have nearly as easy access to meat as we do.

Raising meat for food is always going to be more expensive than raising vegetables or grains, because you have to grow the food for the animals first, and a lot of the calories in that animal feed are going to be spent in having the animal grow and run around before you can eat it.  Hunting animals that feed themselves in the wild solves part of this problem, but over-hunting can quickly reduce the number of potential game animals.

Hence for most medieval people for most of the time one's principal foods were bread and vegetables.  In a recent post I discussed the fruits and vegetables medieval people grew.  There were a lot of them, although of course the emphasis was on those that could be dried and stored (like peas and beans) or that would keep for a long time anyway (like onions and turnips).  Lettuce could be eaten all summer long, but forget having a salad in the winter.  The same was true of most fruits, though some, like apples, will keep at least a little while.  They did not of course have the New World vegetables we now take for granted, most notably potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and winter squash.

 Between the turnips, the radishes, the beans, the zucchini, the leeks, and the sauerkraut, there was at least some variety in the vegetables to be eaten.  I've read that the single most common vegetable eaten in the US now is the potato, and that mostly eaten as French fries.

Still, medieval people liked their meat.  Because most of the population was not vegetarian out of principle but rather because meat was hard to get, they ate it whenever they could.  Indeed, meat was considered a health food.  If someone was sick, they were given meat broth.  The wealthy ate meat when they could get it, putting restrictions on hunting to keep the peasants from getting all the wild animals.  Everyone ate pork in the fall, when the pigs, who had been running wild for months, were rounded up and slaughtered.

Even if mostly vegetarian, medieval people were not vegans.  They were happy to have milk, butter, and especially cheese.  Eggs were also fine.  The most determinedly vegetarian people were monks and nuns, who gave up meat along with other pleasures of the flesh, in order to focus more on spiritual matters.  They were still generally fine with eggs and cheese, and, depending on the monastic order, they might have fish once a week.  If someone in the monastery was sick, they got beef broth.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval social history, see my book Positively Medieval, available either as an ebook or a paperback, from Amazon and other book sellers.

Descended from Charlemagne

 It has been suggested that everyone with European ancestry is descended from Charlemagne.

You remember Charlemagne.  He was crowned Roman emperor by the pope in the year 800, the first independent western Roman emperor since the late fifth century--although there continued to be emperors in Byzantium (basically modern-day Turkey) who were considered Roman emperors until the fifteenth century.

Charlemagne's empire is sometimes called the Holy Roman Empire to keep it separate from the empire of antiquity, and the European Union considers him (in some sense) their founder.  He had France, western Germany, and, he thought, Italy, though Italy tended to disagree.  France claims him as theirs, as the nineteenth-century statue shown below seeks to "prove," whereas the Germans call him theirs.  (The Italians figure you can have him.)

 

So how did we get to where everybody in the west is considered to be descended from him?  Well, all of Europe's royalty were.  He had multiple wives, multiple concubines, and multiple children, including a whole lot of daughters.  As long as one counts (as one should!) one's descendants through the female as well as male line, and the illegitimate as well as legitimate line, it is clear that his descent quickly spread throughout Europe's leading families.  Those who were kings of France, Germany, and Italy in the tenth century were all descended via women from Charlemagne.  So are all of today's European royalty, including King Juan Carlos of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of England.

It was considered appropriate in the Middle Ages (as is still the case) for great nobles to marry great nobles.  (The reason Prince Charles married Diana Spencer was because she was of noble ancestry, descended from an illegitimate child of King Charles II.)  Although the actual medieval kings and queens quickly became too closely related to keep on marrying each other, due to prohibitions on consanguinity, there were plenty of rising lords for them to marry.  The great counts and dukes then quickly passed royal blood to their children, who in turn passed it to their children, often offspring of lesser lords.

You can see that in the 1200 years since Charlemagne there has been plenty of opportunity for his descendants to spread out.  If someone has multiple children, and they have multiple children, one can come up with a whole lot of descendants very quickly.  There was a proud announcement in our paper the other day of a couple welcoming the birth of their 100th great-grandchild.  And this is far from the record, even for a couple, much less for someone with many wives and/or concubines.

Cystic fibrosis, which has a strong genetic component, seems to have originated about 1200 years ago in the European population.  Did it begin with a mutation in Charlemagne's genes?  Intriguing thought.  The leading families of Europe can trace their family trees with excellent documentation right back to the eighth century.  The rest of us can just imagine a lot of those entries in the family tree.

Before anyone reading this blog becomes too excited about having imperial blood, let's think about how ancestry works.  You've got two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on.  Just mathematically by the time you get back to the late Middle Ages you have more European ancestors than there were people in Europe then.  Okay, all of us have ancestors who may pop up on more than one line of descent.  And we all have to take a deep breath and recognize that the majority of our European ancestors were peasants.  But it's pretty clear that everyone is related to everyone.

And if you've had your "DNA done" you'll find that you have maybe 1 or 2% of something you had no idea about.  (Where did that Middle Eastern or South Asian descent come from?  I thought we were lily-white!)  And even the nationality or ethnic group that's responsible for your last name may only be a minority of your DNA.  So we may all be "blood of kings" (as well of course "blood of peasants").  Pro tip:  If you're visiting Charlemagne's palace in Aachen, don't announce that you are the returning heir.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Exotic Birds

 The wealthy in the Middle Ages liked luxury goods—as of course do the wealthy in the modern world.  Something unusual, rare, exotic, and gorgeous, which also cost a whole lot, was both something to enjoy and something to show off to other people.

Rare and unusual animals were real luxury items, both because they were expensive and because the proper care and feeding were complicated and expensive.  Both Charlemagne at the beginning of the ninth century and the emperor Frederick II in the first half of the thirteenth century had elephants, given to them as gifts from distant rulers in the Middle East/North Africa--who of course would have had to obtain them from sub-Saharan Africa, making them even more of a novelty.

Frederick II also had a cockatoo.  Wait, you say, I thought cockatoos were native to Australia, and Australia was totally cut off from the rest of the world until centuries later.  So how did he get it?  Was it really a cockatoo?

Yes, it was really a cockatoo.  He wrote a book, which we still have, about birds.  Most of it was about training hawks (the art of falconry), but he also described other birds, and there are several very detailed descriptions and drawings of his cockatoo.

Although cockatoos are most commonly found in Australia, they are also found in Indonesia and parts of the Philippines.  So the emperor's bird almost certainly started life in southeast Asia.  Then, as now, wild-caught chicks were raised in captivity, so they would be used to humans (they do not breed well in captivity—trade in wild-caught chicks in some areas today threatens the wild population).

It would have then passed through many hands before ending up in the emperor's court in Sicily, being bought and sold for increasing sums of money as it traveled across the Indian Ocean or across central Asia, on the spice routes, and fetched up in the Middle East.  There it was acquired by the Egyptian ruler (referred to as the Sultan of Babylon in the Sicilian records), who made a gift of it to Frederick.  He was also the source of Frederick's elephant.  Being able to give someone a rare luxury item was even more of an opportunity to increase one's prestige than just owning it.

Although this is the only cockatoo we know about in the thirteenth century, medieval wealthy people sometimes had other exotic birds, especially parrots.  These were African parrots, and they too reached Europe via a long, complicated road.

Another cockatoo shows up in a Renaissance painting, done by the artist Mantegna and commissioned by the Gonzaga family that ruled Mantua in the fifteenth century.  The main picture shows the duke kneeling at the feet of the Madonna, and up at the top are all sorts of decorative motifs, including an extremely lifelike cockatoo.  Although there is no written record of either Mantegna or the Gonzaga family acquiring the bird, the inventory of the artist's possessions does include a large and extremely elaborate birdcage, which could have been the bird's home.  Was he given it in partial payment for the painting?

The cockatoos in medieval Europe are an indication that Europe was never completely cut off from the rest of the world.  Trade continued to tie different areas together, and both spices and exotic birds were considered worth the expense.

An article in the New Yorker by Rebecca Mead, July 5 2021, discusses the original identification of the cockatoo in Mantegna's painting.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Medieval fruits and vegetables

 In a medieval-style fantasy or historical fiction about the Middle Ages, the people always seem to eat a lot of stew, which tends to be characterized as "brown."  The elite are shown eating meat (generally whole haunches) cooked over an open fire.  But what about the fruits and vegetables?

When I first started this blog two of my earliest posts (still popular favorites!) were on what medieval people did or did not eat.  More recently I discussed a ninth-century garden.  But today I want to focus on what went into a medieval vegetarian diet, which is what peasants ate almost all the time, what monks and nuns ate all the time unless they were sick, and what the elites ate much of the time.

Bread was the basic staple for everybody.  Most of it was made from wheat, essentially the same winter wheat still grown today, but one could also make bread from barley or oats or rye or spelt (a close relative of wheat). Grains could also be made into porridge.  Barley could also be made into beer, the standard drink for everybody.  Ninth-century inventories of monastic property always indicated the grain fields right up front.  Grain of course can be stored without refrigeration and will last quite well if the mice and rats don't get into it.

Storage in a pre-modern era was vital.  Dried peas and lentils and chickpeas and beans would last as well as grain (the beans were like the beans now made into bean soup or baked beans, not green beans, which they didn't have).  Root vegetables would be harvested in the fall and, if kept dry, would last much of the winter.  Here onions were universal, along with onion-relatives like leeks, garlic, shallots, and chives.  Medieval people also ate beets, turnips, and parsnips.

 Root vegetables are not nearly as popular in the modern West as they were in the Middle Ages, now that we have refrigeration plus the ability to get fresh vegetables year round.  Modern Germans are in fact averse to turnips, which Germans ate a whole lot of during the privations of World War II (because they were available) and are now considered cow food.

Some vegetables just could not be stored, like lettuce, but medieval people still grew and ate it in the spring and summer.  Cabbage is leafy but stores fairly well, especially if made into sauerkraut.  They also had summer squash (like zucchini), which will last a certain amount of time without refrigeration, though not the winter squashes (like pumpkin) of the New World.  Celery, radishes, peppers, and cucumbers were popular in the right season.

(You will notice an absence of such New World foods as potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and avocados.  Plus no chocolate!  Maybe there's a reason one hears reference to the Dark Ages....)

A big hearty dish of lentils and turnips can be pretty bland.  Salt helps, but salt was expensive—it was all sea salt from salt panning along the coast, with few exceptions.  Spices like black pepper were very expensive because they were imported from Asia, so most people could not afford them.  But they did grow a wide variety of herbs, which could be dried and kept fairly indefinitely.  These included parsley, sage, rosemary (do we hear a Simon & Garfunkel song coming on?), fenugreek, coriander, and caraway.

Among fruits, the most important were wine grapes, grown wherever the climate was suitable and some places where it really was not, because wine was both the preferred drink of the well-to-do and required for the liturgy (though in Scandinavia beer was often substituted for the communion wine).

 A good sized manor would have an orchard with a number of fruit trees.  They grew a wide variety of apples (no Fuji or Honeycrisp or Granny Smith—ninth-century apple varieties included "gozmaringa" and "geroldinga," now unknown), pears, peaches, plums, quinces, mulberries, and cherries.  An orchard would also have nut trees, walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, and chestnuts.  Wild fruits (especially berries) and wild nuts could supplement what was cultivated.  We now preserve fruit by boiling it up with sugar to make jam, but this doesn't work nearly as well with honey, their only sweetener (and they didn't have a lot of it), so most fruit was eaten fresh.

Medieval people were primarily vegetarians but not vegans.  That is, eggs, butter, and milk (usually made into cheese because it lasts a lot better) and fish were considered fine even for austere monks.  Chicken could count as "not red meat," but everyone liked red meat when they could get it.

A good discussion of medieval food is found in the article, "Nutrition and the Early Medieval Diet" by Kathy L. Pearson, in the journal Speculum (journal of the Medieval Academy of America), vol. 72 (January 1997).

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

The Knight of the Short Nose

"Count Guillaume is the biggest, boldest knight in southern France. So why does he keep needing a woman to get him out of trouble? A rollicking (semi) epic tale. Adventure, humor, a touch of romance, and occasional sword fights."

I've got a new book!  It's called The Knight of the Short Nose.  As I mentioned earlier, I originally posted the story on Kindle-Vella, where people can read it one episode at a time on their phones (first three episodes are free, plus you can get "free tokens" to "unlock" later episodes).  Now I've also made the book available on Amazon (you can "borrow" it if you're a Kindle Unlimited member), either as an ebook or a paperback.

Here's the Amazon link.  Also available on Kobo, B&N/Nook, and Apple Books.  It also remains on Vella for those who enjoy serials (19 episodes await you).

 

The cover artist is RL Sather.  I've used a lot of her covers.  She specializes in medieval-style fantasy, which works for me!  This one may be my favorite of hers.

This book isn't, strictly speaking, fantasy, because there are no wizards or magic.  It's a loose retelling of a twelfth-century epic, that was written both to glorify and to mock chivalrous deeds.  That aspect I've most definitely kept.

The epic (actually a series of epics) was based on a real eighth-ninth-century Count William of Gellone, who was a rough contemporary of Charlemagne.  In the twelfth century, the epics made him more or less a contemporary of Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's son and heir.  They also filled their story with a variety of real eleventh- and twelfth-century people, none of whom were contemporary of course with the original (real) Count William.

So I've taken this twelfth-century William of Orange epic cycle, which sort of tells about the ninth century while actually commenting on its own contemporary society, and retold it for a twenty-first century audience.  Take some humor and stir.  "Alternate history" at its finest.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

Archives

 Historians love and rely on archives.  An archive is a storage facility for documents, and there are hundreds and hundreds of archives in the US and around the world.  In these days of digital imaging, it is no longer always necessary to travel to an archive (and the dangers of losing everything in a fire or other disaster are to some extent mitigated), but most documents have never been digitized and may well never will be.

A local historical society may accumulate such things as minutes of the city council meetings, or old newspapers, or photographs, or the diary of a Civil War soldier found in someone's attic.  The archives of presidential libraries may include books a president read, with his marginal notes, along with correspondence, signed bills, videos of press conferences, etc.

As a medievalist who works especially on France, my favored archives are the archives départementales.  Where the US is divided into states, France is divided into "departments" for administrative purposes.  There were originally 89 of them, but a few more have been added for the heavily-populated Paris region.  They go back to the French Revolution, when they were created to replace the old counties and duchies (defined by aristocracies).  Every department has its own archives, set up in the early nineteenth century and intended to preserve the region's history and "patrimony" as it is called.

Because France officially went atheistic during the Revolution, church archives were broken up and an awful lot lost.  But when the departmental archives were established, everything that could be found was taken there.  So you have confirmations of a church's possessions from the ninth century, charters of donation from the twelfth century, seventeenth-century parish records recording births and deaths, and so much more.

The documents I myself work on are mostly from the twelfth century, handwritten on parchment (sheep skin).  There is something extremely satisfying about holding in one's hand a piece of parchment someone used to record something important nine centuries ago, to see where he or she was getting tired and sloppy, or made a mistake and corrected it by scraping the ink off the parchment, or carefully stretched the words in a line out to fill the width of the parchment, or decided to write some capital letters very big, and so on.  I'll be sitting there in the archives looking at my documents while other folks there are looking for great-great-grandpa in the parish records.

But where were all these documents before the French Revolution?  Churches all had their own archives.  Some were very careful and systematic, organizing them in boxes by topic, writing brief summaries on the back.  Others were fairly sloppy, just piling everything up in a big pile in a back room.  Monasteries, which were undying entities, tended to be better at preserving their archives than bishoprics.  When a new bishop came into office, he usually brought in a new staff, who might or might not have the slightest interest in the records of what his predecessor had done.  A lot of documents were lost well before the Revolution, to careless storage, rats (who may nibble on parchment), mildew, and the destructive Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Most documents found in the archives are entirely authentic.  But medieval scribes might sometimes feel compelled to "improve" the record by creating a few documents that really should have been there.  The people they were most likely to fool were their own successors, who might be startled to discover, a generation later, that they had legal title to some property they hadn't realized they had, and that a king centuries earlier had confirmed it to them in perpetuity.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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