Trade in the Dark Ages

Okay, to start, the Middle Ages was not the Dark Ages.  The term "Dark Ages" was coined by British scholars to describe the period, basically the sixth century, between when Angles and Saxons arrived in Britain (c. 500) and pretty much obliterated the Christian, Roman culture that was there in England (including the historical King Arthur), and when Christian missionaries reconnected England to the European mainstream (c. 600).

Now of course England is not the world (although to listen to some Brits, you might think so).  (Gee, they're almost as bad as Americans!)  But the sixth century was tough in a lot of places.  The Roman Empire (then centered in Byzantium, capital Constantinople) had shrunk, and the areas that are now France and Spain had "barbarian kingdoms" (respectively Franks and Visigoths) that were only very nominally in the Empire.  Then there were such disasters as global cooling and the Black Death.

And yet trade continued through this "dark" period, with sixth-century Byzantine coins, pottery, silver dishes, glass beads, even fabric found all over the Old World, especially Eurasia, as indicated by dots on this map.

This map was worked out by the British archaeologist Dr. Caitlin Green, on whose blog it was originally posted.  She gives a lot more detail, which I recommend.  Here note that while the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century (solid brown on the map) was fairly restricted to the Mediterranean (and not even all of that), including what's now Italy, Greece, Turkey (then Byzantium), the Near East, and bits of north Africa, Byzantine artifacts from the period have been found in Africa, in Asia (including India, China, and Japan), and in western and northern Europe, including Anglo-Saxon controlled Britain.

Now Byzantines themselves didn't go to all these places, but trade routes did.  Ships sailed down the Red Sea, and either continued down the African coast or went around the Arabian peninsula and on to India, where many artifacts have been found.  There were trade routes carrying Byzantine goods across the Sahara.  The silk roads across central Asia to China carried great luxuries to the Mediterranean.  A Japanese monastery still has a silk cushion cover (pictured below), given to it by the Japanese emperor in the eighth century, which was created in sixth-century Syria, from silk imported from China, and which then followed the silk roads back.

Byzantine gold coins have been found in Scandinavia, where the local people had long traded fur and walrus tusks—used as ivory—to the Romans and continued to do so.  Indeed, Scandinavian settlement of Greenland was, centuries later, driven by catching walruses for the ivory trade.  Although the Scandinavians themselves did not have a coin-based economy in the sixth century, they certainly recognized their value.  This gold coin minted in the early sixth century for Emperor Anastasius was found in Sweden and was pierced for use as a pendant.

Much of what archaeologists have found comes from burial sites—in England the bodies buried with them sometimes have DNA suggesting a North African origin.  Others were hoards that were buried when the person who buried them must have intended to hide them until able to come back, but then never came back.  Some, like beads and pieces of pottery, were lost accidentally or were tossed out when broken and no longer wanted.

The vast spread of Byzantine goods along trade routes, routes that continued even in a politically, socially, and economically deeply troubled time, indicates that there has never been a time when people could shut themselves up behind high walls and pretend the rest of the world didn't exist.  (On this see more here.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

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

Ashes of Heaven

I've got a new ebook that's just come out!  It's quite different from anything I've previously published and is titled Ashes of Heaven.

The brief description is "Passion and betrayal in mythic Cornwall."  It's based on the old Celtic stories of Tristan and Isolde but with my own twist.  Lots of love and tragedy and sword fights.  Also people between the sheets--it is not the PG world of Yurt.

It's available from Amazon both as an ebook and as a paperback and is also available on all other major ebook platforms.  Here's a teaser from the opening:

PART ONE - Brothers and Sisters

I

The passenger stood by the railing, watching the shore slowly emerge from darkness as the eastern sky lightened from grey to yellow.  A light breeze came up with the dawn, tugging at his cloak until he pulled it tighter around him.  Behind him, the sailors emerged from the hold, yawning, and began unfurling the sails.  It was too early for shouting or song, and they belayed the lines and raised the anchor in silence.

As the ship began to move, the water murmuring against its side, the passenger gestured toward the captain.  The captain came to him at once.  The man had paid enough that the voyage would have been worthwhile even without the cargo.  He had been a model passenger, giving no trouble, never sick, eating the same hard biscuits as the crew without complaint, even though demanding better for the woman and little girl who accompanied him.  But something about him always seemed to suggest that ferocity waited just beneath his good manners.

“Is this the coast of Cornwall?” the man asked, his voice soft with the accents of the south.  His hair and eyes were black, his chin clean-shaven in the southern style, and his cloak of patterned silk, but a two-handed broadsword was strapped across his back, and his boots were heavily worn with long use.  He, the woman, and the girl had come aboard with no more luggage than the clothes on their backs—and a heavy pouch of gold.

“This is still Bretagne,” the captain answered.  “We will cross to Cornwall tomorrow, and from there it will be on to Eire.  The journey will be over in another week.”

The man nodded, and when he seemed to have nothing more to say, the captain excused himself and went up to the prow.  The water was foaming now along the sides of the ship, and the rigging hummed as the sun rose over the coast of Bretagne.

The passenger caught a flicker of motion from the corner of his eye and turned, quick as a cat, one hand already on the knife in his belt.  But then he smiled, slipped the knife back, and beckoned.  “Are you feeling better, Brangein?”

The little girl emerged from behind a coil of rope.  Her curly hair was tangled, half hiding her bright black eyes.  “Yes, I felt much better as soon as Isolde gave me the potion.  But it’s stuffy in the cabin.  And I can hardly wait to see Eire.”

“Only a few more days, little cousin.  Another week is all, the captain tells me.”  He pulled her over to stand beside him, under a fold of his cloak.  She was shivering; the early morning sun had done nothing yet to dispel the night’s chill.  “Is my sister still asleep?”

Brangein nodded.  “I tried not to wake her.”  The two watched in silence for several minutes as the jagged black rocks of the coast slid by.  At one point a line of standing stones marched across the thin grass of a headland and right down into the sea.  Seabirds sailed overhead, their calls high and mournful.

Brangein went to the rail and put her head back to watch them.  Their broad circles and the steady movement of the ship under her feet made her dizzy, but she did not look away, only clung to the railing until it was slippery under her hands.  For a moment, looking straight up into the morning sky, she felt as though she had shaken free of ship and sea and might herself soar on the salt wind.

When her neck grew stiff and she looked down again, Isolde had emerged from the cabin and was standing beside her brother.  She was nearly as tall as he was, black-haired like him, with the same suggestion of carefully restrained ferocity.  She wore a necklace of silver besants and silver rings on all her fingers.

“I am sick of this ship, Morold,” she said, though in a low voice, that none but they might hear.  “Could you not have chosen some court closer than Eire?”

“Closer courts might be better informed of affairs in the south,” he said with a shrug.  “And we know the king of Eire is unmarried.  A few more days, and you will never have to sail anywhere again.”

“I like sailing,” piped up Brangein, slipping back to Morold’s side.  “I like seeing new places.”

“Eire will be new,” he promised, and bent to give her a one-armed hug and tousle her hair.

Suddenly she pointed, her arm emerging from under his cloak.  “Look at the castle!”

The castle emerged from behind a promontory, located on its own narrow bay.  Not very wide but very tall, its towers rose toward the sky, far higher than the mast of the ship passing below.  The castle walls were as black as the rocks of the coast, but the roofs were tiled in bright geometric patterns, red and blue and gold.  Everything about it suggested newness, order, and harmony.  Pennants snapped from the highest towers, and a faint line of smoke indicated that someone was cooking breakfast:  something doubtless better than hard and stale biscuits.

“I like that castle,” Brangein announced.  “I want to live there.”  She leaned her chin on the rail, straining to see better, all thought forgotten of flying with the seabirds.  Several boats floated in the bay, none of them rigged.  She spotted no people, but two cows appeared beyond the far side of the castle and wandered off toward pasture.

“That is just a little country castle,” said her cousin with a laugh.  “We’ll be living at the royal court in Eire.  It will be much finer.”

The captain had approached again.  “That is the castle of Parmenie.  If we had been an hour further along the coast at twilight yesterday, we might have anchored in its bay.  Its lord is named Rivalin.  Sometimes when we anchor there he buys goods from our cargo.”

“Lord Rivalin of Parmenie,” said Isolde, turning the words over thoughtfully and looking at her brother.  “Is he married?”

“Not unless he has married very recently,” the captain answered.  “He has not been much at home the last year or two; the castle is maintained by his steward.  The last I heard, Lord Rivalin had quarreled with his liege lord.  He is a fiery young man by all accounts.”

“You would not like that,” said Morold with a wink for his sister.  “A fiery man who quarrels with his liege lord?  Impossible!”

Brangein did not listen to their conversation but continued to watch the distant castle until it disappeared behind another tall headland.


© C. Dale Brittain 2017

Troubadours

Everyone sort of knows about troubadours, medieval guys who sang love songs.  But there's more to it.  There were gals as well as guys among the troubadours.  And they wrote the songs as well as singing them.  (The word troubadour comes from trobaire, meaning to compose.)  Some became very famous.

To be a troubadour was to be more than the wandering singer that we may now imagine.  Indeed, troubadours looked down on those who just sang other people's songs, the jongleurs, rather than writing their own.  The person usually considered the "first troubadour" was the Duke of Aquitaine.  The female troubadour, the trobairitz, was often a high status woman, whose songs were infused with classical learning as well as the many other influences on troubadour poetry.

Troubadours were part of the culture of what we would now call southern France during the twelfth century.  It was officially part of the French kingdom, but the French king hadn't been there in generations.  But the region had its own language, Occitan, so called because the people used the word oc instead of oui to mean "yes."  The region is therefore sometimes called Occitania.

(Fun fact:  Latin had no word for Yes.  Many Romance languages went for si for Yes, from the Latin "sic," meaning "So it is" or "like this."  Occitan got its oc from  "hoc," meaning "this one."  Modern French oui comes from "hoc-ille," meaning "this one - that one."  You had to be there.)

Troubadours wrote their songs in Occitan, but their language was close enough to Old French that the French could figure it out.  Many of their surviving songs are written as autobiographical, "I knew a woman …"  It is of course unclear whether they were actually relating experiences or, far more likely, using the first-person "I" the way modern song writers do.  ("I saw her standing there."  "I once knew a girl."  "I should be sleeping like a log."  Hum your favorite Beatles tune here.)

A lot of the women in the songs appear to have been powerful, well-known women, referred to under nick-names or teasing sobriquets, which were probably perfectly transparent at the time but are no longer.  The male troubadours acknowledged how powerful these women were, saying they wanted to serve them, urging them to be kind to the lowly singer.  In some cases male troubadours suggested there had been kisses and more, but the women of the songs were just as likely to Just Say No or to turn on their one-time lovers.

Scholars used to assume that these poems about service to women were part of some institution of "courtly love," where men claimed they were serving ladies, putting them on a pedestal, but it was all a game because the women were actually subservient, and if they were put on a pedestal it was just to get them out of the way.  This is now understood to be based on a complete misreading of medieval sources.

Instead, medieval women really did have a lot of very real power, as I have discussed elsewhere.  Ermengard, countess of Narbonne, for example, led her armies into battle and deliberately married someone whose center of power was hundreds of miles away, so that he would stay over there and not bother her, yet no one else could try to marry her himself and take over Narbonne because she wasn't single.  Ermengard shows up a lot in troubadour poems, often with a sword in her fist.

The original troubadour culture was thoroughly messed up when northern France conquered Occitania during the Albigensian Crusade of the early thirteenth century, but the idea of the composer-singer spread to other Mediterranean countries, to northern France, and even Germany.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017 

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

Vikings in the New World

When humanity's ancestors left Africa, maybe 120,000 years ago, some turned left and ended up in Europe, while others turned right and ended up in Asia and some, eventually, in the Americas, crossing during the end of the Ice Age when the seas were lower and people could get across between what is now Siberia and Alaska.  (In fact people left Africa in several waves, and many of course stayed, but let's keep it simple.)  When the Vikings met the people they called Skraelings in the Canadian Maritimes around the year 1000, the circle was complete, and people whose ancestors hadn't seen each other for 120,000 years met again.

I've discussed the Vikings before on this blog, but here I want to focus on their visits to the New World.  You can't really say they discovered America, because the natives knew it was there the whole time, and Columbus, not Leif Eriksson, was responsible for permanent contact between Europe and the Americas.  But they definitely got there in their long ships.

The Vikings/Norsemen were a lively lot, with exploration, raids, trade, colonies, and permanent homes from Scandinavia to the British Isles to France (Normandy) to Sicily (where they established a kingdom) to Ukraine, Russia, and Byzantium.  Everybody they met they called Skraelings, "the other," people who weren't them and therefore inferior.

Starting in the late ninth century they headed west from the Shetland and Hebrides islands, where they'd been well established, to see if there were any more good islands out there, and ended up in Iceland.  This became a very successful settlement, where a language very close to Old Norse is still spoken today, and the glaciers are balanced by the hot springs heated by volcanos.  The only big problem was that once they cut down the trees they didn't grow back, not having nearby trees to reseed them (as on the mainland).  But the Icelanders were mostly sheep farmers anyway.

From Iceland they kept exploring west and got to Greenland in the late tenth century.  The sagas tell that the explorers came back talking about how "green" everything was there in order to lure settlers, omitting to mention that most of Greenland is under a sheet of ice a mile thick (unfortunately now melting).  Several Viking colonies were established, which lasted until the late Middle Ages, when the climate cooled and their sheep-farming (their principal occupation beyond fishing) just wasn't working.

In the meantime, explorers kept heading out, going north with the current up the coast of Greenland, where they hunted walruses, then west to Baffin Island, and south along the coast of what is now Labrador.  Here they doubtless encountered Eskimo ancestors (who were heading east themselves and eventually reached Greenland, after the Vikings did, though their descendants survived when the Norse ones did not).

South of the Arctic Circle the Vikings got to L'Anse-aux-Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland.  This seemed like a much better place than what they'd been seeing recently.  They called the region Vinland because wild grapes grew there.  There were already people (ancestors of what are usually called Indians, or in Canada First Nations people) with whom they had an uneasy relationship.  This is all described in the saga of Leif Eriksson, but for a long time it was considered fanciful.  Then archaeologists started digging and found all sorts of Viking objects, as well as the remains of the sod long-houses they had built.  L'Anse-aux-Meadows is now a "living history" site, with reenact ors and everything, as well as ongoing archaeology.  You can visit it, and Newfoundland would love you to do so.

Vinland really was too far out, so although there was at least some Viking habitation there for twenty years or so, including women and families, they pulled back to Greenland.  This has not kept Scandinavian-Americans in Minnesota from imagining that they somehow made it a couple thousand miles further overland to reach their homeland.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

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

Old in the Middle Ages

As I indicated in an earlier post on growing old in the Middle Ages, medieval people tended to wear out, on average, earlier than we do.  This should not be surprising, given that they lived what we would consider a rough life and did not have the modern medicine that easily remedies things that would have killed a medieval person.  (Medieval medicine was just was not the same.  So much for all-natural cures and the secret wisdom of the ancients.)

This did not of course mean that people keeled over in their 30s.  Indeed, a man who survived childhood and the childhood illnesses that vaccinations have essentially eliminated could expect to make it at least into his 50s, short of death in battle or in a serious farm accident, and some lived substantially longer.  Women could expect to live about the same length of time, short of death in childbirth.

Here I want to discuss a bit more how medieval old people lived--defining of course "old" as they did, not how we do (I consider people in their 60s to be young and fun!).  Old people were a much smaller proportion of the medieval population than they are of the modern western population, however one may define "old," because fewer of them lived to what we'd now call a ripe old age.

There was no specific definition of when one became old.  Different authors came up with different definitions.  However, multiples of 7 appear very frequently.  "Age of reason" began at around 7, the age at which medieval children started their career training.  At 14 one was no longer a child but a youth and could get married.  At 21 one might or might not pass out of "youth"; interestingly, this is the one big turning-point we have kept.  At 35 one might become mature or middle-aged or even "old," depending on who you were talking to.  Or one might remain a youth or young man up to 49.  Everyone agreed, however, that someone past 70 was not just old but very old.  (This was of course approximate, because medieval people didn't really keep track of birthdays.)

One of the more obvious differences between a young or middle-aged man and an old one was that old men grew out their beards.  Youths prided themselves on clean-shaven, sweet faces, to the extent that modern people sometimes have trouble telling the difference between young men and women in medieval illustrations (the clothing is the giveaway).  Active men didn't want a beard that would get in the way of a helmet (for a knight).  Monks were shaved every Saturday whether they needed it or not, and peasants were probably the same.

But an old man in the high Middle Ages would be proud of growing out a long, white beard, which became a symbol of wisdom.  Charlemagne and Arthur were always described in twelfth-century epics as having such a beard.  Even in the image below, probably a tenth-century copy of an image created not long after Charlemagne's death, you can see Charlemagne on the left as having a solid beard and mustache, whereas his son on the right has at most a 5 o'clock shadow.  (Also note the scribe below; see my previous post.)

Medieval old people were expected to pass their wisdom on to the younger generation, stepping back from active farming, for example, as the next generation were able to take up the task.  The Amish still practice this today, where at a certain point the old generation move out of the main house to a small, adjacent house, leaving the main house and the responsibility for the farm to a son or daughter.  Medieval peasants probably wouldn't have the choice to stop working altogether, and they probably wouldn't move out, but they would hand off the heavier chores.

One of the concerns then, of course, as it is now, is who would take care of old people.  As now, one's children were the primary candidates.  But taking care of the old was also considered a "good work."  In part this was because being old and being poor often came together, and the Bible was very explicit about taking care of the poor.  In the late Middle Ages someone wealthy might establish a "hospital" that took care of the indigent poor whether or not they were sick.  Masters were expected to provide small amounts of money to help retired servants.  Servants would be expected to take care of an old master.  Guilds would take care of their members in their old age.  Churches routinely took in old people, as monks or nuns if they were educated enough to take part in the liturgy, or at least as part of the cluster of official poor people whom they fed and clothed.

These days, for most people, a major part of one's total lifetime medical spending occurs in the last few years of life, as serious illness (heart attack, cancer, stroke, broken bones) are treated to give the person another six months or sometimes several years of life.  All of these would have carried off medieval people quickly.  There was no medieval equivalent of the fear about being kept alive by machines.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

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

Writing in the Middle Ages

We take writing for granted.  Starting in kindergarten, children are taught to write the letters of the alphabet, including their own names.  In the Middle Ages, however, writing was a relatively rare skill, rarer for example than reading.  For us, reading and writing go together, but if you think about it there's no necessary reason that they should.

Charlemagne famously was well educated, able to speak both Old French and Old German fluently, able to read Latin and, he claimed, at least a little Greek, but he couldn't write.  He had never developed that fine motor control of his fingers (why we start kids in kindergarten), and a lifetime with a sword or a horse's reins in his hands had further coarsened them.  He used to keep a wax tablet and stylus by his bed and practice if he woke up in the night.

Writing was rarer than reading because it was highly technical.  Until the late Middle Ages, any permanent writing was done on parchment, sheepskin carefully prepared, which of course was far more expensive than paper.  This is why rough drafts and quick notes were done on a wax tablet, that could easily be wiped clean and reused.

Writing was done with a quill pen--which in fact continued to be the case until the nineteenth century.  So you needed a goose to produce the feather to use as a pen.  (Our word indeed comes from the Latin penna, meaning feather.)  If you were right-handed, you needed a feather from the goose's left wing, so it would curve away from your face as you wrote.  The right wing feathers were understandably cheaper.  This was not quite as big a deal as you might suppose, however, because the feather would be cut down to maybe eight inches long before use (not the enormous feathery pens you may see in movies).

A feather, being hollow, will draw up ink, but the scribe still needed frequent dipping.  As the scribe wrote, the quill would wear down, so it constantly needed trimming with a pen knife.  The knife was also used to split the quill, forming the nib, and to erase mistakes.  Without modern erasers (or the backspace key), medieval scribes had to carefully scrape incorrect words off the parchment.  Depictions of scribes at work, generally writing on a slanted lectern (as in the image above), often showed them with a quill pen in their right hand and a pen knife in the left.

The ink itself was usually made of soot, lampblack or charcoal, mixed with a binder.  The sap of plum or cherry trees was considered to make a good binder.  Some advocated boiling up hawthorne branches to make a thick, dark ink.  Whatever the ink was made from, it would have to be thinned before use, generally with vinegar (that wine that went bad still had a use!).  The prepared ink would be put in a horn for use (in images it appears to be the tip of a cow's horn).  Most "black" ink was actually dark brown, although Italian scribes prided themselves on really black ink.

Charters would be written in black (or brown) ink, but books usually had rubrics, that is red initials and/or headers to individual sections.  Someone copying a book would thus need to have both red ink and black ink handy.

Although we think of handwriting as very personal, in the Middle Ages different scribes at the same place were expected to write a very similar hand (although there was still some variation).  One can indeed give documents a place and rough date just by the style of the writing.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

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

Medieval color

Medieval people appreciated brightly colored flowers or sunsets or autumn leaves just as much as we do.  But they did not have the option of having those colors on their bathroom wall or on their clothing.

The bright colors we take for granted for manufactured items are products of chemical dyes, first developed in the nineteenth century.  The Middle Ages had to make do with natural dyes.  A few of these could produce very nice colors, but those were luxury items.  For most purposes, one had a choice of off-white, muddy green, subdued red, dark brown, dark blue, and maybe unconvincing yellow.

The white was usually off-white, the color of undyed sheep's wool or linen.  Linen could be bleached in the sun, and elegant ladies in the stories wore shifts of snow-white linen.  Keeping it spotless was an additional challenge.

Black sheep (actually dark brown) produced dark brown wool, which was used for monks' habits (so-called black monks) as well as anything else where you wanted a dark brown/black.  Some of the new monastic orders of the twelfth century, such as the Cistercians, went in for white habits instead, because black sheep were rarer than white and their wool was thus more expensive (and "showier").

Purple came from mollusks from the eastern Mediterranean.  This so-called Tyrian purple (actually closer to maroon) had been reserved in ancient Rome for colored strips on the togas of Senators.  In Byzantium, this purple was so rare that it was supposed to be reserved for the imperial family (hence the expression, "born in the purple" for someone of extremely high birth).

Real red was made from kermes insects, found in Italy.  The secret of this vivid red was closely guarded, so that cloth might be sent from the cloth markets of Champagne to Italy to be dyed and come back with its value more than doubled.

You could get a version of dark red from madder, an herbaceous plant with red roots.  It worked great to dye your hands red while you were trying to get some color on the cloth.  ("No, I don't have blood on my hands!")  Indigo, which came from the sap of certain shrubs, could give you a dark blue.  You could also get blue from woad, a plant in the mustard family.  Yellow was hard, but you could get at least pale yellow from some flowers and especially from pollen (in particular the pollen of crocuses, saffron).  You could get green (sort of) by mixing yellow and blue or by embracing grass stains.

Madder, indigo, and woad were all sold commercially, as was saffron, although the latter was very expensive and mostly used as a spice.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017