The Year 1000

Along with the mistaken belief that medieval people thought the world was flat, one of the most persistent myths about the Middle Ages is that everyone thought the world was going to end in the year 1000.  This is, in fact, untrue.

For one thing, most people had no idea what year it was.  Without calendars, newspapers, cell phones that display the date, or the like, they would not have had any easy way of telling the year.  When the year 2000 came along there was a quite real possibility of messed-up computers on January 1, as everyone heard about in great detail, but there was nothing similar a millennium earlier.

For that matter, there was not even general agreement then on when the new year began.  Some places began the new year on January 1, which was the Roman norm.  Others began it on Easter.  This of course could create problems:  if Easter was early one year and late the next, a year might have two months of April, one at the beginning and a partial one at the end.  Others began the new year with the supposed date of the Incarnation, that is the conception of Jesus, March 25 of the previous year.  So different regions, even different cities, could easily be a year apart in what year it was.

And of course, even for those who tried to keep track of the year, without outside verification it was very easy to slip up (remember, they were using Roman numerals, always confusing).

The millennial event which medieval people did celebrate was 1033, the thousandth year after the Crucifixion, when, as one chronicler put it, "France was covered with a white mantle of churches."  No one expected the world to end--rather, they anticipated a spiritual awakening.  (The image above is of Tournus, an eleventh-century church in southern Burgundy, an example of what the chronicler meant.)

However, some nineteenth-century scholars read these accounts of 1033 and misinterpreted  them thoroughly.  There was not indeed any suggestion, either by people at the time or by historians, of the "terrors of the year 1000" until the nineteenth century.

These nineteenth-century scholars took as "proof" some preambles to charters, "We who live in the final days…"  There are two main problems with this "proof."  First, these charters, which are only found in one or two places, all date to about 950, two generations too early to suggest fear of the year 1000.  Secondly, and even more importantly, the scribes who wrote out these charters were using an old "formulary book," a handbook on what charters were supposed to look like.  This formulary book dates from the seventh century.  So the apocalyptic charter language which some thought "showed" that people feared the end in the year 1000 actually showed that at least one person feared it three centuries earlier.

In fact, there have been repeated predictions over the centuries that the world was about to end.  There certainly were charismatic preachers in the Middle Ages who announced the Second Coming was right around the corner, just not in the year 1000--and then as now, most people ignored them.

So far, the world has been very stubborn and persistent.  In the Middle Ages, as now, the response to a failure of apocalyptic prophecy was generally to slip quietly home and pretend one never believed it anyway.  Other possibilities included saying the end was still coming, but somehow the date had been miscalculated; here the difficulty was getting anyone to believe you next time.  More imaginatively, leaders could announce that the piety and prayers of their little apocalyptic group had "saved the world" from destruction, or, even better, say that the world really had ended, but everyone else was too stupid to notice.

The one year that there really was a belief in the imminent end was 1260, but that's a topic for another day.

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

Tomatoes and Potatoes

Tomatoes and potatoes are a major staple of the modern American diet.  It's September as I write, and the crops of both have just come in.  Between French fries, baked potatoes, mashed and boiled potatoes, some people eat potatoes every day.  Potato starch is found in many other prepared foods.  Tomatoes are now found in everything from salsa to salad to ketchup to pizza to spaghetti sauce.

And yet, as I noted in a previous post on the medieval diet, these foods were unknown in the Middle Ages.  They are native to South America, not Europe.  Yet they have become such an integral part of the European as well as American diet that it may be hard to realize what dinner might have been like without them.

Because tomatoes are related to deadly nightshade, the (quite logical) assumption was that they were poisonous.  They were introduced into Europe as an ornamental plant, with attractive red fruits, and it was a couple of centuries before anyone tried eating them.  Once it became clear, however, that one would not keel over from a bite of tomato, they became very popular.

But how, you ask, did the Italians eat spaghetti without tomato sauce?  They would have eaten it with olive oil, cheese, maybe some mushrooms or other sautéed vegetables.  Pizza was the same thing--a piece of bread dough topped with olive oil, maybe some olives and cheese.  In fact, in Italy even today, pizza is often such a simple dish.  The deep-dish, meat-lover's, extra-toppings, extra-cheese pizza is uniquely American.  (And don't even get me started on pineapple and chicken wings as pizza toppings.)

It did not take long, however, for Italians to recognize the possibilities of tomatoes in sauce, once they were proven non-poisonous.  Because the Italians had made much of their flour into pasta rather than bread, they saw potatoes, once they were introduced, as something else to top with an interesting sauce.  This means that Mediterranean dishes based on potatoes, even today, are more imaginative than northern European dishes.  There potatoes were seen as a substitute for bread, and once you put butter on them there wasn't much else to do (sour cream instead of butter is not a big difference).

Incidentally, there is a common myth that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China.  This is completely false.  Marco Polo, a late medieval Italian explorer, did indeed make it to China, where he commented, for example, that some of the Chinese he encountered did not seem to know at all about bread, subsisting solely on vermicelli.  The vermicelli, of course, were noodles, and Marco gave a common Italian term for them.  He and his compatriots knew all about noodles.  Because the word means, literally, "little worms," a joking reference to their appearance, he is highly unlikely to have said that the Chinese ate worms instead of break, much less have decided to introduce Italy to such worms.

The myth that he introduced Italy to pasta with a Chinese import was in fact created in the early twentieth century, when an American noodle company created this "hilarious" story as part of an ad campaign.

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

Hunting in the Middle Ages

In the modern US, hunting is not considered an elite activity.  One tends to think of country folk and good old boys going hunting, often because they could use the food.  The last time hunting was considered something for the wealthy and powerful was back when it was considered appropriate to go to Africa or Alaska to shoot elephants or lions or polar bears in Africa or Alaska.

In the Middle Ages, in contrast, hunting was very much an activity for elites.  Nobles loved to hunt, to the the point that giving up hunting was a sign of serious penance.  Several saints started life as rich lords but were converted to the religious life when, on a hunting trip, they saw an animal carrying a cross.

Fantastic stories often involved hunting, such as capturing a white (albino) hart or trapping a unicorn, as seen in this late medieval tapestry.

Probably the main source of meat on a noble table was from hunting, rather then livestock raising.  Nobles hunted various kinds of deer (hart, roe) and also boar, though boar were both rarer and a lot more dangerous.  Hunting was both sport--competing to see who could catch the most--and a chance to show off.

Until extremely recently, England had fox hunts, where well-to-do riders and their hounds chased foxes across the countryside, leaping hedges and having a great time.  This was the last vestige of the medieval style of hunting, though in the Middle Ages they preferred to hunt something worth eating.

Medieval men and women also hunted with hawks.  A "mews," where the hawks were kept, was found in every castle.  Training a hawk to fly off, catch a bird, and bring it back was an important and time-consuming skill.  A variety of hawks went to the hunt on a rider's (gloved) fist, including goshawks, that could take a full-sized goose.

Then as now, over-hunting will reduce the game.  Nobles thus did not want the peasants to hunt, though no one particularly cared if they trapped a few rabbits or caught song-birds using lime spread on twigs.  Great landowners created game preserves where only they could hunt.

The New Forest in England is not actually "new," being established as a game preserve in the late eleventh century by King William II ("Rufus").  Although we think of the word 'forest' as just a place with trees, it originally meant a place set aside.  The New Forest now is mostly known for its semi-wild ponies, to be feared for liking to eat an unattended picnic lunch.

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

Medieval Medicine

As I noted earlier in my post on health and hygiene, we don't know how lucky we are to live in an era of modern medicine.  Essentially until the middle of the twentieth century, doctors essentially tried to keep people warm and dry and fed and hoped their immune systems would kick in soon.  (The image above is the thirteenth-century hospital at Tonnerre, where they sought to do the same.)  There were nineteenth-century advances like anesthetics and vaccination (thank you, Louis Pasteur), but until maybe seventy-five years ago medicine wasn't radically different than it had been in the Middle Ages.

The biggest difference was probably the difference in how medical workers were trained.  Medical doctors in the Middle Ages were trained at medical universities, Salerno and Montpellier, where they were given a largely theoretic training.  Some of what they learned came from the Arabs, but a lot (including a lot of the Arabic learning) came eventually from Aristotle, who seems to have based a lot of his own understanding of the human anatomy on pig anatomy.

The whole practice of medicine was based on the idea of "humors" and their relationship.  If your blood, bile, black bile, and phlegm got out of balance, all sorts of diseases were supposed to result.  Regular bleeding kept the blood from getting out of hand, and leeches might also be used in an infected area.

For practical, day-to-day medicine, one might prefer the barber-surgeons.  They had been trained as apprentices and journeymen to wield sharp instruments.  They would both shave people and perform surgery.  Things like a gangrenous hand would be cut off, with cauterization to stop the bleeding.  Medieval theologians routinely said that heresy was a "cancer" that would have to be "cut out," so medieval surgeons clearly operated for cancer, though one wonders with what success.  They would also cauterize skin lesions.

Midwives, not doctors, assisted in childbirth.  Women gave birth sitting up, not lying down, so that gravity would help.  They also did so without anesthesia.  Cesarian sections, which are now very common, were performed only as a last resort, to attempt to save the life of the child when it was obvious that it would be impossible to save the life of the mother.  Without modern sterile operating rooms and micro-clamps, the kind of abdominal surgery involved in Cesarians led almost immediately to death.

Medieval people, even without knowing about germs, understood the need for sterility--even if it was often hard to achieve.  Before cutting into someone, for example, a barber-surgeon would pass his knife through a flame.  Washing wounds in wine was common, and the alcohol may have helped against infection.

Every monastery would have a big herb garden and an infirmerian who knew herb-craft.  Some of the herbs may indeed have helped, though there were also all sorts of theoretic discussions which we would now reject--for example, if the Middle Ages had had kidney beans (which they did not), they would certainly have "known" they were good for kidney disease.  Remedies like mustard-plasters and steam for congestion can't have hurt.

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

Medieval Heresy

The early church worried a great deal about heresy.  For most of the early Middle Ages no one gave the topic much thought.  But starting in the eleventh and twelfth centuries heresy again became an issue for western Christianity, indeed a burning issue by the thirteenth century (forgive the bad pun).

In its simplest form, heresy is a deviant belief by someone who ought to know better, not just a mistake or a misunderstanding, but something clung to in the face of trying to be talked out of it.  So Christianity and Islam are not "heresies" to each other, because they are actually different religions (even though they believe in the same God).  Heresy was considered dangerous, because the person who rejects the True Faith is certainly going to Hell, and he will take with him anyone he has infected with his false beliefs.

In the early church there were a number of heresies about the relationship between Jesus and God.  Was Jesus just an inspired man?  Or was he God wearing a human disguise but not human at all?  What exactly does the Bible mean when it says that Christ saves?  Can we make our own salvation?  If we need the sacraments (like baptism) to be saved, what happens if the priest who administers the sacraments is a secret sinner?  Most of these questions were never satisfactorily resolved before the rise of Islam in the seventh century, when a predominantly Christian Mediterranean world became predominantly Muslim, and the Christians had other things to worry about than heresy.

The heresies that got western Europe all excited in the twelfth century were different.  They were mostly dualist, that is heresies that preached that the universe was the scene of an eternal struggle between absolute good and absolute evil, that neither would win.  The physical world belonged to the forces of evil in this heresy, and only the spirit was good.

Now it may at first seem odd that this was a heresy, because Christianity has a lot of dualism in it.  But in all orthodox (non-heretical) versions of Christianity, then and now, God is more powerful than the Devil and is going to win eventually, and the material world is God's creation, not the Devil's.  In Christian theology, the human will is the source of sin, not the body itself, which is sort of along for the ride.

Dualism became especially prevalent in southern France, where bishops, castellans, whole cities took it up, saying to anyone who would listen that they had finally figured out Christianity's true message.  Preachers trying to persuade them differently had no effect.  The eventual result in the thirteenth century was a war of northern France against southern France, the "Albigensian Crusade," blessed by the pope, who said that the heresy was a "cancer" that must be "cut out" before it spread further.

Southern France lost the war, and the heretics had to recant or go into hiding.  This was the war in which Simon de Montfort, the leader, famously said, when asked if they should massacre a whole town, "Kill them all.  The Lord will know His own."  It is still not a good idea to tell Simon de Montfort jokes in southern France.

The image above is the castle at Montfort in southern France, named for Simon (the castle has been rebuilt since his day).  The fantasy novel Count Scar that I wrote with my husband is a lightly fictionalized version of southern France in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade (available as an ebook at http://amzn.com/B0057CVI9S).

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

Development of Castles

Most people, including me, identify castles with the Middle Ages, even though, as I discussed earlier, castles were really only a feature of the period of the eleventh through fourteenth centuries.

The earliest castles were largely wooden, but very quickly they began to be built instead in stone.  A wooden castle could be set on fire, but with a stone castle, all that would burn were the various stables, kitchens, barracks and the like inside the walls--and even those were soon being built of stone.

Originally castle towers were square and built of field stone, that is stone picked up and brought to the site.  They still look grim and forbidding, and they certainly did at the time.  Early castles were generally built by the very wealthy and powerful, such as the counts of Anjou, who built dozens of castles in the early eleventh century.  (These were however plastered and whitewashed, which might have made them look less forbidding, though rooms were still dark inside.)

The keep, the original big square tower with the great hall on its main floor, remained as castles were rebuilt in subsequent generations.  Both advances in military technology and changes in fashion meant that any castellan lord with any sense of self-esteem (or self-preservation) was always rebuilding.  New towers were often round rather than square in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, both because they thus would not have a corner that could be undermined, and because it was easier to see in all directions.  These towers were pierced with numerous arrow-slits, narrow on the outside to present a small target, but wide on the inside, so an archer could shoot in either direction.

By the middle of the twelfth century, castles were being built of quarried stone rather than field stone.  Limestone and sandstone were preferred as relatively easy to quarry.  Walls were built very thick, and passages and stairways were often built into the walls.

No two castles were alike.  Each one was suited to its site.  Natural rock outcroppings were incorporated if possible.  A sharp bend in a river was often chosen, as providing a natural moat.  A steep hill looked to medieval lords like the obvious place to put a castle.  The Auvergne region of central France still has a certain number of castles built (somewhat precariously) on the sharp cones of extinct volcanos.

Once gunpowder came in, toward the end of the Middle Ages, the dynamics of castle building changed, because castles no longer were the impregnable fortresses they had been earlier.  As long as walls could be taken down with cannons anyway, those rebuilding decided they might as well have nice windows and let in some light.

Most medieval castles are now in ruins.  They have been done in not just by time but also by deliberate efforts in the early modern period.  Louis XIV in the seventeenth century did not want castles where rebellious nobles might try to defy him, so he sent his minister, Vauban, around France with a number of cannons to systematically break down castle walls.  The English Civil War of roughly the same period had the same result.

Some European towns and villages now have a big empty plaza where a castle used to be.  In other cases, the castle is still there and has been incorporated into the local architecture.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

Was the World Flat?

You have certainly heard that "everyone" before Columbus thought the world was flat.  This is however not true.  It is in fact wildly false.  Everyone knew the earth was a globe.

(Well, maybe a few ignorant folks thought it was flat.  But no one paying attention thought so.)

The ancient Greeks had known it was a globe.  Aristotle in fact had attempted to measure its size and come up with a figure that was a little small but a good guess.  It was pretty obvious that it was a globe, after all.  The sun and moon and stars were assumed to go around the earth.  During an eclipse of the moon, when the earth's shadow moves across it, you see the shadow of a globe.  If you watch a ship sail out to sea, it goes "hull down," that is the hull disappears while you can still see the sails, as it goes over the earth's curve.

Medieval people speculated about the people who lived on the other side of the globe.  Some thought that down was absolute, so that people on the other side would have trouble not falling off.  They were depicted with giant feet and toes, good for holding on.

In addition, since medieval people knew that the climate got colder as you went north and hotter as you went south, they were concerned about how people could survive down in the southern hemisphere, close to the "Hot Pole."  But in all this, even though we know better than to think that one could fall off the bottom of the globe, or that there is a Hot Pole, or that the universe revolves around the earth, we can recognize that our ancestors knew they were living on a globe.

So where did the "flat earth" notion come from?  From Washington Irving, best known now as the creator of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.  In a comparable burst of imagination, he write a fictional story about Columbus at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella.  In this hilarious (?) and very anti-Spanish story, the Spaniards all believed in 1492 that the earth was flat and warned Columbus he would fall off the edge if he sailed west.

This story made its way into the Big Little Book of Racist Stories for Children (or whatever it was called) during the nineteenth century.  Everyone knew it was fiction.  But at some point it migrated:  out of the storybook and into the history book.  Now American children were being taught that Columbus was a great scientific thinker, the only one not to believe in a flat earth.  (Interestingly, in Europe, where Washington Irving was never in the school storybooks, no such nonsense was ever taught.)

The real Spanish court of 1492 certainly knew the earth was a globe.  They were however concerned that the globe was much too big to get to India by sailing west.  (Columbus was claiming he could find a shortcut to India and beat the Portuguese.)  They were, in fact, right.  But Columbus, using Aristotle's measurements and thinking that, since he would be sailing close to the North Pole, it couldn't really be far at all, set off west.  And right about the time he thought he should be reaching India, he bumped into Hispaniola.

The Spanish court immediately recognized that there was a whole continent between the Atlantic and the Pacific, when they'd always assumed it was all ocean all the way.  They and the Portuguese divided up the globe between them a few years later.  Columbus, however, kept going back again and again, denying that he'd found a New World and thinking the silk and spices had to be there somewhere.  He is responsible for us calling native Americans "Indians."  (See here for more on Columbus.)

But in none of this, note, was there ever the slightest thought that the earth might be flat.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval understanding of the world, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.