These austerities frightened potential novices; the little band grew slowly, and the new order might have died in infancy had not fresh ardor come to it in the person of St. Bernard. Born near Dijon (1091) of a knightly family, he became a shy and pious youth, loving solitude. Finding the secular world an uncomfortable place, he determined to enter a monastery. But, as if desiring companionship in solitude, he made effective propaganda among his relatives and friends to enter Cîteaux with him; mothers and nubile girls, we are told, trembled at his approach, fearing that he would lure their sons or lovers into chastity. Despite their tears and charms he succeeded; and when he was admitted to Cîteaux (1113) he brought with him a band of twenty-nine candidates, including brothers, an uncle, and friends. Later he persuaded his mother and sister to become nuns, and his father a monk, on the promise that “unless thou do penance thou shalt burn forever … and send forth smoke and stench.”22
Stephen Harding came presently to such admiration for Bernard’s piety and energy that he sent him forth (1115) as abbot, with twelve other monks, to found a new Cistercian house. Bernard chose a heavily wooded spot, ninety miles from Cîteaux, known as Clara vallis, Bright Valley, Clairvaux. There was no habitation there, and no human life. The initial task of the fraternal band was to build with their own hands their first “monastery”—a wooden building containing under one roof a chapel, a refectory, and a dormitory loft reached by a ladder; the beds were bins strewn with leaves; the windows were no larger than a man’s head; the floor was the earth. Diet was vegetarian except for an occasional fish; no white bread, no spices, little wine; these monks eager for heaven ate like philosophers courting longevity. The monks prepared their own meals, each serving as cook in turn. By the rule that Bernard drew up, the monastery could not buy property; it could own only what was given it; he hoped that it would never have more land than could be worked by the monks’ own hands and simple tools. In that quiet valley Bernard and his growing fellowship labored in silence and content, free from the “storm of the world,” clearing the forest, planting and reaping, making their own furniture, and coming together at the canonical hours to sing, without an organ, the psalms and hymns of the day. “The more attentively I watch them,” said William of St. Thierry, “the more I believe that they are perfect followers of Christ… a little less than angels, but much more than men.”23 The news of this Christian peace and self-containment spread, and before Bernard’s death there were 700 monks at Clairvaux. They must have been happy there, for nearly all who were sent from that communistic enclave to serve as abbots, bishops, and councilors longed to return; and Bernard himself, offered the highest dignities in the Church, and going to many lands at her bidding, always yearned to get back to his cell at Clairvaux, “that my eyes may be closed by the hands of my children, and that my body may be laid at Clairvaux side by side with the bodies of the poor.”24
He was a man of moderate intellect, of strong conviction, of immense force and unity of character. He cared nothing for science or philosophy. The mind of man, he felt, was too infinitesimal a portion of the universe to sit in judgment upon it or pretend to understand it. He marveled at the silly pride of philosophers prating about the nature, origin, and destiny of the cosmos. He was shocked by Abélard’s proposal to submit faith to reason, and he fought that rationalism as a blasphemous impudence. Instead of trying to understand the universe he preferred to walk unquestioning and grateful in the miracle of revelation. He accepted the Bible as God’s word, for otherwise, it seemed to him, life would be a desert of dark uncertainty. The more he preached that childlike faith the more surely he felt it to be the Way. When one of his monks, in terror, confessed to him that he could not believe in the power of the priest to change the bread of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ, Bernard did not reprove him; he bade him receive the sacrament nevertheless; “go and communicate with my faith”; and we are assured that Bernard’s faith overflowed into the doubter and saved his soul.25 Bernard could hate and pursue, almost to the death, heretics like Abélard or Arnold of Brescia, who weakened a Church which, with all her faults, seemed to him the very vehicle of Christ; and he could love with almost the tenderness of the Virgin whom he worshiped so fervently. Seeing a thief on the way to the gallows, he begged the count of Champagne for him, promising that he would subject the man to a harder penance than a moment’s death.26 He preached to kings and popes, but more contentedly to the peasants and shepherds of his valley; he was lenient with their faults, converted them by his example, and earned their mute love for the faith and love he gave them. He carried his piety to an exhausting asceticism; he fasted so much that his superior at Cîteaux had to command him to eat; and for thirty-eight years he lived in one cramped cell at Clairvaux, with a bed of straw and no seat but a cut in the wall.27 All the comforts and goods of the world seemed to him as nothing compared with the thought and promise of Christ. He wrote in this mood several hymns of unassuming simplicity and touching tenderness:
Iesu dulcis memoria,
dans vera cordi gaudia,
sed super mel et omnia
eius dulcis praesentia.
Nil canitur suavius,
auditur nil iocundius,
nil cogitatur dulcius
quam Iesu Dei filius.
Iesu spes poenitentibus,
quam pius es petentibus,
quam bonus es quaerentibus,
sed quid invenientibus?28
Jesus sweet in memory,
Giving the heart true joy,
Yea, beyond honey and all things,
Sweet is His presence.
Nothing sung is lovelier,
Nothing heard is pleasanter,
Nothing thought is sweeter
Than Jesus the Son of God.
Jesus hope of the penitent,
How gentle Thou art to suppliants!
How good to those seeking Thee!
What must Thou be to those finding Thee?
Despite his flair for graceful speech he cared little for any but spiritual beauty. He covered his eyes lest they take too sensual a delight from the lakes of Switzerland.29 His abbey was bare of all ornament except the crucified Christ. He berated Cluny for spending so much on the architecture and adornment of its abbeys. “The church,” he said, “is resplendent in its walls and wholly lacking in its poor. It gilds its stones and leaves its children naked. With the silver of the wretched it charms the eyes of the rich.”30 He complained that the great abbey of St. Denis was crowded with proud and armored knights instead of simple worshipers; he called it “a garrison, a school of Satan, a den of thieves.”31 Suger, humbly moved by these strictures, reformed the customs of his church and his monks, and lived to earn Bernard’s praise.
The monastic reform that radiated from Clairvaux, and the improvement of the hierarchy through the elevation of Bernard’s monks to bishoprics and archbishoprics, were but a part of the influence which this astonishing man, who asked nothing but bread, wielded on all ranks in his half century. Henry of France, brother of the king, came to visit him; Bernard spoke to him; on that day Henry became a monk, and washed the dishes at Clairvaux.32 Through his sermons—themselves so eloquent and sensuous as to verge on poetry—he moved all who heard him; through his letters—masterpieces of passionate pleading—he influenced councils, bishops, popes, kings; through personal contacts he molded the policies of Church and state. He refused to be more than an abbot, but he made and unmade popes, and no pontiff was heard with greater respect or reverence. He left his cell on a dozen errands of high diplomacy, usually at the call of the Church. When contending groups chose Anacletus II and Innocent II as rival popes (1130), Bernard supported Innocent; when Anacletus captured Rome Bernard entered Italy, and by the pure power of his personality and his speech roused the Lombard cities for Innocent; the crowds, drunk with his oratory and his sanctity, kissed his feet and tore his garments to pieces as sacred relics for their posterity. The sick came to him at Milan, and epileptics, paralytics, and other ailing faithful announced that they had been cured by his touch. On his return to Clairvaux from his diplomatic triumphs the peasants would come in from the fields, and the shepherds down from the hills, to ask his blessing; and receiving it they would return to their toil uplifted and content.
When Bernard died in 1153 the number of Cistercian houses had risen from 30 in 1134 (the year of Stephen Harding’s death) to 343. The fame of his sanctity and his power brought many converts to the new order; by 1300 it had 60,000 monks in 693 monasteries. Other monastic orders took form in the twelfth century. About 1100 Robert of Arbrissol founded the order of Fontevrault in Anjou; in 1120 St. Norbert gave up a rich inheritance to establish the Premonstratensian order of Canons Regular at Prémontré near Laon; in 1131 St. Gilbert constituted the English order of Sempringham—the Gilbertines—on the model of Fontevrault. About 1150 some Palestinian anchorites adopted the eremitical rule of St. Basil, and spread throughout Palestine; when the Moslems captured the Holy Land these “Carmelites” migrated to Cyprus, Sicily, France, and England. In 1198 Innocent III approved the articles of the order of Trinitarians, and dedicated it to the ransoming of Christians captured by Saracens. These new orders were a saving and uplifting leaven in the Christian Church.
The burst of monastic reform climaxed by Bernard died down as the twelfth century advanced. The younger orders kept their arduous rules with reasonable fidelity; but not many men could be found, in that dynamic period, to bear so strict a regimen. In time the Cistercians—even at Bernard’s Clairvaux—became rich through hopeful gifts; endowments for “pittances” enabled the monks to add meat to their diet, and plenty of wine;33 they delegated all manual labor to lay brothers; four years after Bernard’s death they bought a supply of Saracen slaves;34 they developed a large and profitable trade in the products of their socialistic industry, and aroused guild animosity through their exemption from transportation tolls.35 The decline of faith as the Crusades failed reduced the number of novices, and disturbed the morale of all the monastic orders. But the old ideal of living like the apostles in a propertyless communism did not die; the conviction that the true Christian must shun wealth and power, and be a man of unflinching peace, lingered in thousands of souls. At the opening of the thirteenth century a man appeared, in the Umbrian hills of Italy, who brought these old ideals to vigor again by such a life of simplicity, purity, piety, and love that men wondered had Christ been born again.
III. ST. FRANCIS*
Giovanni de Bernadone was born in 1182 in Assisi, son of Ser Pietro de Bernadone, a wealthy merchant who did much business with Provence. There Pietro had fallen in love with a French girl, Pica, and he had brought her back to Assisi as his wife. When he returned from another trip to Provence, and found that a son had been born to him, he changed the child’s name to Francesco, Francis, apparently as a tribute to Pica. The boy grew up in one of the loveliest regions of Italy, and never lost his affection for the Umbrian landscape and sky. He learned Italian and French from his parents, and Latin from the parish priest; he had no further formal schooling, but soon entered his father’s business. He disappointed Ser Pietro by showing more facility in spending money than in making it. He was the richest youth in town, and the most generous; friends flocked about him, ate and drank with him, and sang with him the songs of the troubadours; Francis wore, now and then, a parti-colored minstrel’s suit.36 He was a good-looking boy, with black eyes and hair and kindly face, and a melodious voice. His early biographers protest that he had no relations with the other sex, and, indeed, knew only two women by sight;37 but this surely does Francis some injustice. Possibly, in those formative years, he heard from his father about the Albigensian and Waldensian heretics of southern France, and their new-old gospel of evangelical poverty.
In 1202 he fought in the Assisian army against Perugia, was made prisoner, and spent a year in meditative captivity. In 1204 he joined as a volunteer the army of Pope Innocent III. At Spoleto, lying in bed with a fever, he thought he heard a voice asking him: “Why do you desert the Lord for the servant, the Prince for his vassal?” “Lord,” he asked, “what do you wish me to do?” The voice answered, “Go back to your home; there it shall be told you what you are to do.”38 He left the army and returned to Assisi. Now he showed ever less interest in his father’s business, ever more in religion. Near Assisi was a poor chapel of St. Damian. Praying there in February, 1207, Francis thought he heard Christ speak to him from the altar, accepting his life and soul as an oblation. From that moment he felt himself dedicated to a new life. He gave the chapel priest all the money he had with him, and went home. One day he met a leper, and turned away in revulsion. Rebuking himself for unfaithfulness to Christ, he went back, emptied his purse into the leper’s hand, and kissed the hand; this act, he tells us, marked an era in his spiritual life.39 Thereafter he frequently visited the dwellings of the lepers, and brought them alms.
Shortly after this experience he spent several days in or near the chapel, apparently eating little; when he appeared again in Assisi he was so thin, haggard, and pale, and his clothes so tattered, his mind so bewildered, that the urchins in the public square cried out, Pazzo! Pazzo!—“A madman! A madman!” There his father found him, called him a half-wit, dragged him home, and locked him in a closet. Freed by his mother, Francis hurried back to the chapel. The angry father overtook him, upbraided him for making his family a public jest, reproached him for making so little return on the money spent in his rearing, and bade him leave the town. Francis had sold his personal belongings to support the chapel; he handed the proceeds to his father, who accepted them; but he would not recognize the authority of his father to command one who now belonged to Christ. Summoned before the tribunal of the bishop in the Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore, he presented himself humbly, while a crowd looked on in a scene made memorable by Giotto’s brush. The bishop took him at his word, and bade him give up all his property. Francis retired to a room in the episcopal palace, and soon reappeared stark naked; he laid his bundled clothing and a few remaining coins before the bishop, and said: “Until this time I have called Pietro Bernadone my father, but now I desire to serve God. That is why I return to him this money … as well as my clothing, and all that I have had from him; for henceforth I desire to say nothing else than ‘Our Father, Who art in heaven.’”40 Bernadone carried off the clothing, while the bishop covered the shivering Francis with his mantle. Francis returned to St. Damian’s, made himself a hermit’s robe, begged his food from door to door, and with his hands began to rebuild the crumbling chapel. Several of the townspeople came to aid him, and they sang together as they worked.
In February, 1209, as he was hearing Mass, he was struck by the words which the priest read from the instructions of Jesus to the apostles:
And as ye go, preach, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils. Freely ye have received, freely give. Provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor a staff. (Matt. x, 7–10.)
It seemed to Francis that Christ Himself was speaking, and directly to him. He resolved to obey those words literally—to preach the kingdom of heaven, and possess nothing. He would go back across the 1200 years that had obscured the figure of Christ, and would rebuild his life on that divine exemplar.
So, that spring, braving all ridicule, he stood in the squares of Assisi and nearby towns and preached the gospel of poverty and Christ. Revolted by the unscrupulous pursuit of wealth that marked the age, and shocked by the splendor and luxury of some clergymen, he denounced money itself as a devil and a curse, bade his followers despise it as dung,41 and called upon men and women to sell all that they had, and give to the poor. Small audiences listened to him in wonder and admiration, but most men passed him by as a fool in Christ. The good bishop of Assisi protested, “Your way of living without owning anything seems to me very harsh and difficult”; to which Francis replied, “My lord, if we possessed property we should need arms to defend it.”42 Some hearts were moved; twelve men offered to follow his doctrine and his way; he welcomed them, and gave them the above-quoted words of Christ as their commission and their rule. They made themselves brown robes, and built themselves cabins of branches and boughs. Daily they and Francis, rejecting the old monastic isolation, went forth, barefoot and penniless, to preach. Sometimes they would be absent for several days, and sleep in haylofts, or leper hospitals, or under the porch of a church. When they returned, Francis would wash their feet and give them food.
They greeted one another, and all whom they met on the road, with the ancient Oriental salutation: “The Lord give thee peace.” They were not yet named Franciscans. They called themselves Fratres minores, Friars Minor, or Minorites; friars as meaning brothers rather than priests, minor as being the least of Christ’s servants, and never wielding, but always under, superior authority; they were to hold themselves subordinate to even the lowliest priest, and to kiss the hand of any priest they met. Very few of them, in this first generation of the order, were ordained; Francis himself was never more than deacon. In their own little community they served one another, and did manual work; and no idler was long tolerated in the group. Intellectual study was discouraged; Francis saw no advantage in secular knowledge except for the accumulation of wealth or the pursuit of power; “my brethren who are led by desire of learning will find their hands empty in the day of tribulation.”43 He scorned historians, who perform no great deed themselves, but receive honors for recording the great deeds of others.44 Anticipating Goethe’s dictum that knowledge that does not lead to action is vain and poisonous, Francis said, Tantum homo habet de scientia, quantum operatur —“A man has only so much knowledge as he puts to work.”45 No friar was to own a book, not even a psalter. In preaching they were to use song as well as speech; they might even, said Francis, imitate the jongleurs, and become ioculatores Dei, gleemen of God.46
Sometimes the friars were derided, beaten, or robbed of almost their last garment. Francis bade them offer no resistance. In many cases the miscreants, astonished at what seemed a superhuman indifference to pride and property, begged forgiveness and restored their thefts.47 We do not know if the following specimen of the Little Flowers of St. Francis is history or legend, but it portrays the ecstatic piety that runs through all that we hear of the saint:
One winter’s day as Francis was going from Perugia, suffering sorely from the bitter cold, he said: “Friar Leo, although the Friars Minor give good examples of holiness and edification, nevertheless write and note down diligently that perfect joy is not to be found therein.” And Francis went his way a little farther, and said: “O Friar Leo, even though the Friars Minor gave sight to the blind, made the crooked straight, cast out devils, made the deaf to hear and the lame to walk … and raised to life those who had lain four days in the grave —write: perfect joy is never found there.” And he journeyed on a little while, and cried aloud: “O Friar Leo, if the Friar Minor knew all tongues and sciences and all the Scriptures, so that he could foretell and reveal not only future things but even the secrets of the conscience and the soul—write: perfect joy is not there.” … Yet a little farther he went, and cried again aloud: “O Friar Leo, although the Friar Minor were skilled to preach so well that he should convert all infidels to Christ—write: not there is perfect joy.” And when this fashion of talk had continued for two miles, Friar Leo asked: … “Father, prithee in God’s name tell me where is perfect joy to be found?” And Francis answered him: “When we are come to St. Mary of the Angels” [then the Franciscan chapel in Assisi], “wet through with rain, frozen with cold, foul with mire, and tormented with hunger, and when we knock at the door, and the doorkeeper comes in a rage and says, ‘Who are you?’ and we say, ‘We are two of your friars,’ and he answers, ‘You lie, you are rather two knaves who go about deceiving the world and stealing the alms of the poor. Begone!’ and he opens not to us, and makes us stay outside hungry and cold all night in the rain and snow; then, if we endure patiently such cruelty … without complaint or mourning, and believe humbly and charitably that it is God who made the doorkeeper rail against us—O Friar Leo, write: there is perfect joy! And if we persevere in our knocking; and he issues forth, and angrily drives us away, abusing us and smiting us on the cheek, saying, ‘Go hence, you vile thieves!’—if this we suffer patiently with love and gladness, write, O Friar Leo: this is perfect joy! And if, constrained by hunger and by cold, we knock once more and pray with many tears that he open to us for the love of God, and he … issues forth with a ‘big knotted stick and seizes us by our cowls and flings us on the ground, and rolls us in the snow, bruising every bone in our bodies with that heavy club; if we, thinking on the agony of the blessed Christ, endure all these things patiently and joyously for love of Him—write, O Friar Leo, that here and in this is found perfect joy.”48
The remembrance of his early life of indulgence gave him a haunting sense of sin; and if we may believe the Little Flowers he sometimes wondered whether God would ever forgive him. A touching story tells how, in the early days of the order, when they could find no breviary from which to read the divine office, Francis extemporized a litany of contrition, and bade Brother Leo repeat after him words accusing Francis of sin. Leo at each sentence tried to repeat the accusation, but found himself saying, instead, “The mercy of God is infinite.”49 On another occasion, just convalescing from quartan fever, Francis had himself dragged naked before the people in the market place of Assisi, and commanded a friar to throw a full dish of ashes into his face; and to the crowd he said: “You believe me to be a holy man, but I confess to God and you that I have in this my infirmity eaten meat and broth made with meat.”50 The people were all the more convinced of his sanctity. They told how a young friar had seen Christ and the Virgin conversing with him; they attributed many miracles to him, and brought their sick and “possessed” to him to be healed. His charity became a legend. He could not bear to see others poorer than himself; he so often gave to the passing poor the garments from his back that his disciples found it hard to keep him clothed. Once, says the probably legendary Mirror of Perfection,51
when he was returning from Siena he came across a poor man on the way, and said to a fellow monk: “We ought to return this mantle to its owner. For we received it only as a loan until we should come upon one poorer than ourselves…. It would be counted to us as a theft if we should not give it to him who is more needy.”
His love overflowed from men to animals, to plants, even to inanimate things. The Mirror of Perfection, unverified, ascribes to him a kind of rehearsal for his later Canticle of the Sun:
In the morning, when the sun rises, every man ought to praise God, who created it for our use…. When it becomes night, every man ought to give praise on account of Brother Fire, by which our eyes are then enlightened; for we be all, as it were, blind; and the Lord by these two, our brothers, doth enlighten our eyes.
He so admired fire that he hesitated to extinguish a candle; the fire might object to being put out. He felt a sensitive kinship with every living thing. He wished to “supplicate the Emperor” (Frederick II, a great hunter of birds) “to tell him, for the love of God and me, to make a special law that no man should take or kill our sisters the larks, nor do them any harm; likewise that all the podestas or mayors of the towns, and the lords of castles and villages, should require men every year on Christmas Day to throw grain outside the cities and castles, that our sisters the larks, and other birds, may have something to eat.”52 Meeting a youth who had snared some turtle doves and was taking them to market, Francis persuaded the boy to give them to him; the saints built nests for them, “that ye may be fruitful and multiply”; they obeyed abundantly, and lived near the monastery in happy friendship with the monks, occasionally snatching food from the table at which these were eating.53 A score of legends embroidered this theme. One told how Francis preached to “my little sisters the birds” on the road between Cannora and Bevagna; and “those that were on the trees flew down to hear him, and stood still the while St. Francis made an end of his sermon.”
My little sisters the birds, much are ye beholden to God your Creator, and always and in every place ye ought to praise Him for that He hath given you a double and triple vesture. He hath given you freedom to go into any place…. Moreover ye sow not, neither do ye reap, and God feedeth you and giveth you the rivers and the fountains for your drink; He giveth you the mountains and the valleys for your refuge, and the tall trees wherein to build your nests; and for as much as ye can neither spin nor sew, God clotheth you and your children…. Therefore beware, little sisters mine, of the sin of ingratitude, but ever strive to praise God.54
We are assured by Friars James and Masseo that the birds bowed in reverence to Francis, and would not depart until he had blessed them. The Fioretti or Little Flowers from which this story comes are an Italian amplification of a Latin Actus Beati Francisci (1323); they belong less to factual history than to literature; but there they rank among the most engaging compositions of the Age of Faith.
Having been advised that he needed papal permission to establish a religious order, Francis and his twelve disciples went to Rome in 1210, and laid their request and their rule before Innocent III. The great Pope gently counseled them to defer formal organization of a new order until time should test the practicability of the rule. “My dear children,” he said, “your life appears to me too severe. I see indeed that your fervor is great … but I ought to consider those who will come after you, lest your mode of life be beyond their strength.”55 Francis persisted, and the Pope finally yielded—incarnate strength to incarnate faith. The friars took the tonsure, submitted themselves to the hierarchy, and received from the Benedictines of Mt. Subasio, near Assisi, the chapel of St. Mary of the Angels, so small—some ten feet long-that it came to be called Portiuncula—“little portion.” The friars built themselves huts around the chapel, and these huts formed the first monastery of the First Order of St. Francis.
Now not only did new members join the order, but, to the joy of the saint, a wealthy girl of eighteen, Clara dei Sciffi, asked his permission to form a Second Order of St. Francis, for women (1212). Leaving her home, she vowed herself to poverty, chastity, and obedience, and became the abbess of a Franciscan convent built around the chapel of St. Damian. In 1221 a Third Order of St. Francis—the Tertiaries—was formed among laymen who, while not bound to the full Franciscan rule, wished to obey that rule as far as possible while living in the “world,” and to help the First and Second Orders with their labor and charity.
The ever more numerous Franciscans now (1211) brought their gospel to the towns of Umbria, and later to the other provinces of Italy. They uttered no heresy, but preached little theology; nor did they ask of their hearers the chastity, poverty, and obedience to which they themselves were vowed. “Fear and honor God,” they said, “praise and bless Him…. Repent… for you know that we shall soon die…. Abstain from evil, persevere in the good.” Italy had heard such words before, but seldom from men of such evident sincerity. Crowds came to their preaching; and one Umbrian village, learning of Francis’ approach, went out en masse to greet him with flowers, banners, and song.56 At Siena he found the city in civil war; his preaching brought both factions to his feet, and at his urging they ended their strife for a while.57 It was on these missionary tours in Italy that he contracted the malaria which was to bring him to an early death.
Nevertheless, encouraged by his Italian success, and knowing little of Islam, Francis resolved to go to Syria and convert the Moslems, even the sultan. In 1212 he sailed from an Italian port, but a storm cast his ship upon the Dalmatian coast, and he was forced to return to Italy; legend, however, tells how “St. Francis converted the soldan of Babylon.”58 In the same year, says a story probably also mythical, he went to Spain to convert the Moors; but on arrival he fell so ill that his disciples had to bring him back to Assisi. Another questionable narrative takes him to Egypt; he passed unharmed, we are told, into the Moslem army that was resisting the Crusaders at Damietta; he offered to go through fire if the sultan would promise to lead his troops into the Christian faith in case Francis emerged unscathed; the sultan refused, but had the saint escorted safely to the Christian camp. Horrified by the fury with which the soldiers of Christ massacred the Moslem population at the capture of Damietta,59 Francis returned to Italy a sick and saddened man. To his chilling malaria, it is said, he added in Egypt an eye infection that would in later years almost destroy his sight.
During these long absences of the saint his followers multiplied faster than was good for his rule. His fame brought recruits who took the vows without due reflection; some came to regret their haste; and many complained that the rule was too severe. Francis made reluctant concessions. Doubtless, too, the expansion of the order, which had divided itself into several houses scattered through Umbria, made such demands upon him for administrative skill and tact as his mystic absorption could hardly meet. Once, we are told, when one monk spoke evil of another, Francis commanded him to eat a lump of ass’s dung so that his tongue should not relish evil any more; the monk obeyed, but his fellows were more shocked by the punishment than by the offense.60 In 1220 Francis resigned his leadership, bade his followers elect another minister-general, and thereafter counted himself a simple monk. A year later, however, disturbed by further relaxations of the original (1210) rule, he drew up a new rule—his famous “Testament”—aiming to restore full observance of the vow of poverty, and forbidding the monks to move from their huts at the Portiuncula to the more salubrious quarters built for them by the townspeople. He submitted this rule to Honorius III, who turned it over to a committee of prelates for revision; when it came from their hands it made a dozen obeisances to Francis, and as many relaxations of the rule. The predictions of Innocent III had been verified.
Reluctantly but humbly obedient, Francis now gave himself to a life of mostly solitary contemplation, asceticism, and prayer. The intensity of his devotion and his imagination occasionally brought him visions of Christ, or Mary, or the apostles. In 1224, with three disciples, he left Assisi, and rode across hill and plain to a hermitage on Mt. Verna, near Chiusi. He secluded himself in a lonely hut beyond a deep ravine, allowed none but Brother Leo to visit him, and bade him come only twice a day, and not to come if he received no answer to his call of approach. On September 14, 1224, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, after a long fast and a night spent in vigil and prayer, Francis thought he saw a seraph coming down from the sky, bearing an image of the crucified Christ. When the vision faded he felt strange pains, and discovered fleshy excrescences on the palms and backs of his hands, on the soles and tops of his feet, and on his body, resembling in place and color the wounds—stigmata—presumably made by the nails that were believed to have bound the extremities of Jesus to the cross, and by the lance that had pierced His side.*
Francis returned to the hermitage, and to Assisi. A year after the appearance of the stigmata he began to lose his sight. On a visit to St. Clara’s nunnery he was struck completely blind. Clara nursed him back to sight, and kept him at St. Damian’s for a month. There one day in 1224, perhaps in the joy of convalescence, he composed, in Italian poetic prose, his “Canticle of the Sun”:62
Most High, Omnipotent, Good Lord.
Thine be the praise, the glory, the honor, and all benediction;
to Thee alone, Most High, they are due,
and no man is worthy to mention Thee.
Be Thou praised, my Lord, with all Thy creatures,
above all Brother Sun,
who gives the day and lightens us therewith.
And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor;
of Thee, Most High, he bears similitude.
Be Thou praised, my Lord, of Sister Moon and the stars;
in the heaven hast Thou formed them, clear and precious and comely.
Be Thou praised, my Lord, of Brother Wind,
and of the air, and the cloud, and of fair and of all weather,
by the which Thou givest to Thy creatures sustenance.
Be Thou praised, my Lord, of Sister Water,
which is much useful and humble and precious and pure.
Be Thou praised, my Lord, of Brother Fire,
by which Thou hast lightened the night,
and he is beautiful and joyful and robust and strong.
Be Thou praised, my Lord, of our Sister Mother Earth,
which sustains and hath us in rule,
and produces divers fruits with colored flowers and herbs.
Be Thou praised, my Lord, of those who pardon for Thy love
and endure sickness and tribulations.
Blessed are they who will endure it in peace,
for by Thee, Most High, they shall be crowned.
In 1225 some physicians at Rieti, having to no good effect anointed his eyes with “the urine of a virgin boy,” resorted to drawing a rod of white-hot iron across his forehead. Francis, we are told, appealed to “Brother Fire: you are beautiful above all creatures; be favorable to me in this hour; you know how much I have always loved you”; he said later that he had felt no pain. He recovered enough sight to set forth on another preaching tour. He soon broke down under the hardships of travel; malaria and dropsy crippled him, and he was taken back to Assisi.
Despite his protestations he was put to bed in the episcopal palace. He asked the doctor to tell him the truth, and was told that he could barely survive the autumn. He astonished everyone by beginning to sing. Then, it is said, he added a stanza to his Canticle of the Sun:
Be praised, Lord, for our Sister Bodily Death, from whom
no man can escape.
Alas for them who die in mortal sin;
Blessed are they who are found in Thy holy will,
for the second death will not work them harm.63
It is said that in these last days he repented of his asceticism, as having “offended his brother the body.”64 When the bishop was called away Francis persuaded the monks to remove him to Portiuncula. There he dictated his will, at once modest and commanding: he bade his followers be content with “poor and abandoned churches,” and not to accept habitations out of harmony with their vows of poverty; to surrender to the bishop any heretic or recreant monk in the order; and never to change the rule.65
He died October 3, 1226, in the forty-fifth year of his age, singing a psalm. Two years later the Church named him a saint. Two other leaders dominated that dynamic age: Innocent III and Frederick II. Innocent raised the Church to its greatest height, from which in a century it fell. Frederick raised the Empire to its greatest height, from which in a decade it fell. Francis exaggerated the virtues of poverty and ignorance, but he reinvigorated Christianity by bringing back into it the spirit of Christ. Today only scholars know of the Pope and the Emperor, but the simple saint reaches into the hearts of millions of men.
The order that he had founded numbered at his death some 5000 members, and had spread into Hungary, Germany, England, France, and Spain. It proved the bulwark of the Church in winning northern Italy from heresy back to Catholicism. Its gospel of poverty and illiteracy could be accepted by only a small minority; Europe insisted on traversing the exciting parabola of wealth, science, philosophy, and doubt. Meanwhile even the modified rule that Francis had so unwillingly accepted was further relaxed (1230); men could not be expected to stay long, and in needed number, on the heights of the almost delirious asceticism that had shortened Francis’ life. With a milder rule the Friars Minor grew by 1280 to 200,000 monks in 8000 monasteries. They became great preachers, and by their example led the secular clergy to take up the custom of preaching, heretofore confined to bishops. They produced saints like St. Bernardino of Siena and St. Anthony of Padua, scientists like Roger Bacon, philosophers like Duns Scotus, teachers like Alexander of Hales. Some became agents of the Inquisition; some rose to be bishops, archbishops, popes; many undertook dangerous missionary enterprises in distant and alien lands. Gifts poured in from the pious; some leaders, like Brother Elias, learned to like luxury; and though Francis had forbidden rich churches, Elias raised to his memory the imposing basilica that still crowns the hill of Assisi. The paintings of Cimabue and Giotto there were the first products of an immense and enduring influence of St. Francis, his history and his legend, on Italian art.
Many Minorites protested against the relaxation of Francis’ rule. As “Spirituals” or “Zealots” they lived in hermitages or small convents in the Apennines, while the great majority of Franciscans preferred spacious monasteries. The Spirituals argued that Christ and His apostles had possessed no property; St. Bonaventura agreed; Pope Nicholas III approved the proposition in 1279; Pope John XXII pronounced it false in 1323; and thereafter those Spirituals who persisted in preaching it were suppressed as heretics. A century after the death of Francis his most loyal followers were burned at the stake by the Inquisition.
IV. ST. DOMINIC
It is unjust to Dominic that his name should suggest the Inquisition. He was not its founder, nor was he responsible for its terrors; his own activity was to convert by example and preaching. He was of sterner stuff than Francis, but revered him as the saintlier saint; and Francis loved him in return. Essentially their work was the same: each organized a great order of men devoted not to self-salvation in solitude but to missionary work among Christians and infidels. Each took from the heretics their most persuasive weapons—the praise of poverty and the practice of preaching. Together they saved the Church.
Domingo de Guzman was born at Calaruega in Castile (1170). Brought up by an uncle priest, he was one of thousands who in those days took Christianity to heart. When famine struck Palencia he is said to have sold all his goods, even his precious books, to feed the poor. He became an Augustinian canon regular in the cathedral of Osma, and in 1201 accompanied his bishop on a mission to Toulouse, then a center of the Albigensian heresy. Their very host was an Albigensian; it may be a legend that Dominic converted him overnight. Inspired by the advice of the bishop and the example of some heretics, Dominic adopted the life of voluntary poverty, went about barefoot, and strove peaceably to bring the people back to the Church. At Montpellier he met three papal legates—Arnold, Raoul, and Peter of Castelnau. He was shocked by their rich dress and luxury, and attributed to this their confessed failure to make headway against the heretics. He rebuked them with the boldness of a Hebrew prophet: “It is not by the display of power and pomp, nor by cavalcades of retainers and richly houseled palfreys, nor by gorgeous apparel, that the heretics win proselytes; it is by zealous preaching, by apostolic humility, by austerity, by holiness.”66 The shamed legates, we are told, dismissed their equipage and shed their shoes.
For ten years (1205–16) Dominic remained in Languedoc, preaching zealously. The only mention of him in connection with physical persecution tells how, at a burning of heretics, he saved one from the flames.67 Some of his order proudly called him, after his death, Persecutor haereticorum—not necessarily the persecutor but the pursuer of heretics. He gathered about him a group of fellow preachers, and their effectiveness was such that Pope Honorius III (1216) recognized the Friars Preachers as a new order, and approved the rule drawn up for it by Dominic. Making his headquarters at Rome, Dominic gathered recruits, taught them, inspired them with his almost fanatical zeal, and sent them out through Europe as far east as Kiev, and into foreign lands, to convert Christendom and heathendom to Christianity. At the first general chapter of the Dominicans at Bologna in 1220, Dominic persuaded his followers to adopt by unanimous vote the rule of absolute poverty. There, a year later, he died.
Like the Franciscans, the Dominicans spread everywhere as wandering, mendicant friars. Matthew Paris describes them in the England of 1240:
Very sparing in food and raiment, possessing neither gold nor silver nor anything of their own, they went through cities, towns, and villages, preaching the Gospel… living together by tens or sevens … thinking not of the morrow, nor keeping anything for the next morning…. Whatsoever was left over from their table of the alms give them, this they gave forthwith to the poor. They went shod only with the Gospel, they slept in their clothes on mats, and laid stones for pillows under their heads.68
They took an active, and not always a gentle, part in the work of the Inquisition. They were employed by the popes in high posts and diplomatic missions. They entered the universities and produced the two giants of Scholastic philosophy, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas; it was they who saved the Church from Aristotle by transforming him into a Christian. Together with the Franciscans, the Carmelites, and the Austin Friars they revolutionized the monastic life by mingling with the common people in daily ministrations, and raised monasticism in the thirteenth century to a power and beauty which it had never attained before.
A large perspective of monastic history does not bear out the exaggerations of moralists nor the caricatures of satirists. Many cases of monastic misconduct can be cited; they draw attention precisely because they are exceptional; and which of us is so saintly that he may demand an untarnished record from any class of men? The monks who remained faithful to their vows—who lived in obscure poverty, chastity, and piety—eluded both gossip and history; virtue makes no news, and bores both readers and historians. We hear of “sumptuous edifices” possessed by Franciscan monks as early as 1249, and in 1271 Roger Bacon, whose hyperboles often forfeited him a hearing, informed the pope that “the new orders are now horribly fallen from their original dignity.”69 But this is hardly the picture that we get from Fra Salimbene’s candid and intimate Chronicle (1288?). Here a Franciscan monk takes us behind the scenes and into the daily career of his order. There are peccadilloes here and there, and some quarrels and jealousy; but over all that arduously inhibited life hovers an atmosphere of modesty, simplicity, brotherliness, and peace.70 If, occasionally, a woman enters this story, she merely brings a touch of grace and tenderness into narrow and lonely lives. Hear a sample of Fra Salimbene’s guileless chatter:
There was a certain youth in the convent of Bologna who was called Brother Guido. He was wont to snore so mightily in his sleep that no man could rest in the same house with him, wherefore he was set to sleep in a shed among the wood and straw; yet even so the brethren could not escape him, for the sound of that accursed rumbling echoed throughout the whole convent. So all the priests and discreet brethren gathered together … and it was decreed by a formal sentence that he should be sent back to his mother, who had deceived the order, since she knew all this of her son before he was received among us. Yet was he not sent back forthwith, which was the Lord’s doing…. For Brother Nicholas, considering within himself that the boy was to be cast out through a defect of nature, and without guilt of his own, called the lad daily about the hour of dawn to come and serve him at Mass; and at the end of the Mass the boy would kneel at his bidding behind the altar, hoping to receive some grace of him. Then would Brother Nicholas touch the boy’s face and nose with his hands, desiring, by God’s gifts, to bestow on him the boon of health. In brief, the boy was suddenly and wholly healed, without further discomfort to the brethren. Thenceforth he slept in peace and quiet, like any dormouse.71
V. THE NUNS
As early as the time of St. Paul it had been the custom, in Christian communities, for widows and other lonely or devout women to give some of all of their days and their property to charitable work. In the fourth century some women, emulating monks, left the world and lived the life of religious in solitude or in communities, under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. About 530 St. Benedict’s twin sister Scholastica established a nunnery near Monte Cassino under his guidance and rule. From that time Benedictine convents spread through Europe, and Benedictine nuns became almost as numerous as Benedictine monks. The Cistercian Order opened its first convent in 1125, its most famous one, Port Royal, in 1204; by 1300 there were 700 Cistercian nunneries in Europe.72 In these older orders most of the nuns came from the upper classes,73 and nunneries were too often the repository of women for whom their male relations had no room or taste. In 458 the Emperor Majorian had to forbid parents to rid themselves of supernumerary daughters by compelling them to enter a convent.74 Entry into Benedictine nunneries usually required a dowry, though the Church prohibited any but voluntary offerings.75 Hence a prioress, like Chaucer’s, could be a woman of proud breeding and large responsibilities, administering a spacious domain as the source of her convent’s revenues. In those days a nun was usually called not Sister but Madame.
St. Francis revolutionized conventual as well as monastic institutions. When Santa Clara came to him in 1212, and expressed her wish to found for women such an order as he had founded for men, he overlooked canonical regulations and, though himself only a deacon, received her vows, accepted her into the Franciscan Order, and commissioned her to organize the Poor Clares. Innocent III, with his usual ability to forgive infractions of the letter by the spirit, confirmed the commission (1216). Santa Clara gathered about her some pious women who lived in communal poverty, wove and spun, nursed the sick, and distributed charity. Legends formed around her almost as fondly as around Francis himself. Once, we are told, a pope
went to her convent to hear her discourse of divine and celestial things…. Santa Clara had the table laid, and set loaves of bread thereon that the Holy Father might bless them…. Santa Clara knelt down with great reverence, and besought him to be pleased to bless the bread…. The Holy Father answered: “Sister Clare, most faithful one, I desire that thou shouldst bless this bread, and make over it the sign of the most holy cross of Christ, to which thou hast completely devoted thyself.” And Santa Clara said: “Most Holy Father, forgive me, but I should merit great reproof if, in the presence of the Vicar of Christ, I, who am a poor, vile woman, should presume to give such benediction.” And the Pope answered: “To the end that this be not imputed to thy presumption but to the merit of obedience, I command thee, by holy obedience, that thou … bless this bread in the name of God.” And then Santa Clara, even as a true daughter of obedience, devoutly blessed the bread with the sign of the most holy cross. Marvelous to tell! forthwith on all those loaves the sign of the cross appeared figured most beautifully. And the Holy Father, when he saw this miracle, partook of the bread and departed, thanking God and leaving his blessing with Santa Clara.76
She died in 1253, and was canonized soon afterward. Franciscan monks in divers localities organized similar groups of Clarissi, or Poor Clares. The other mendicant orders—Dominicans, Augustinians, Carmelites—also established a “second order” of nuns; and by 1300 Europe had as many nuns as monks. In Germany the nunneries tended to be havens of intense mysticism; in France and England they were often the refuge of noble ladies “converted” from the world, or deserted, disappointed, or bereaved. The Ancren Riwle—i.e., the Rule of the Anchorites—reveals the mood expected of English nuns in the thirteenth century. It may have been written by Bishop Poore probably for a convent at Tarrant in Dorsetshire. It is darkened with much talk of sin and hell, and some blasphemous abuse of the female body;77 but a tone of fine sincerity redeems it, and it is among the oldest and noblest specimens of English prose.78
It would be a simple matter to gather, from ten centuries, some fascinating instances of conventual immorality. A number of nuns had been cloistered against their wills,79 and found it uncomfortable to be saints. Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury and Bishop Egbert of York deemed it necessary to forbid the seduction of nuns by abbots, priests, and bishops.80 Bishop Ivo of Chartres (1035–1115) reported that the nuns of St. Fara’s Convent were practicing prostitution; Abélard (1079–1142) gave a similar picture of some French convents of his time; Pope Innocent III described the convent of St. Agatha as a brothel that infected the whole surrounding country with its evil life and repute.81 Bishop Rigaud of Rouen (1249) gave a generally favorable report of the religious groups in his diocese, but told of one nunnery in which, out of thirty-three nuns and three lay sisters, eight were guilty, or suspected, of fornication, and “the prioress is drunk almost any night.”82 Boniface VIII (1300) tried to improve conventual discipline by decreeing strict claustration, or seclusion from the world; but the decree could not be enforced.83 At one nunnery in the diocese of Lincoln, when the bishop came to deposit this papal bull, the nuns threw it at his head, and vowed they would never obey it;84 such isolation had probably not been in their vows. The prioress in Chaucer’s Tales had no business there, for the Church had forbidden nuns to go on pilgrimage.85
If history had been as careful to note instances of obedience to conventual rules as to record infractions, we should probably be able to counter each sinful lapse with a thousand examples of fidelity. In many cases the rules were inhumanly severe, and merited violation. Carthusian and Cistercian nuns were required to keep silence except when speech was indispensable—a command sorely uncongenial to the gentle sex. Usually the nuns attended to their own needs of cleaning, cooking, washing, sewing; they made clothing for monks and the poor, linen for the altar, vestments for the priest; they wove and embroidered hangings and tapestries, and depicted on them, with nimble fingers and patient souls, half the history of the world. They copied and illuminated manuscripts; they received children to board, and taught them letters, hygiene, and domestic arts; for centuries they provided the only higher education open to girls. Many of them served as nurses in hospitals. They rose at midnight for prayers, and again before dawn, and recited the canonical hours. Many days were fast days, on which they ate no food till the evening meal.
Let us hope that these hard rules were sometimes infringed. If we look back upon the nineteen centuries of Christianity, with all their heroes, kings, and saints, we shall find it difficult to list many men who came so close to Christian perfection as the nuns. Their lives of quiet devotion and cheerful ministration have made many generations blessed. When all the sins of history are weighed in the balance, the virtues of these women will tip the scale against them, and redeem our race.
VI. THE MYSTICS
Many such women could be saints because they felt divinity closer to them than hands and feet. The medieval imagination was so stimulated by all the forces of word, picture, statue, ceremony, even by the color and quantity of light, that supersensory visions came readily, and the believing soul felt itself breaking through the bounds of nature to the supernatural. The human mind itself, in all the mystery of its power, seemed a supernatural and unearthly thing, surely akin to—a blurred image and infinitesimal fraction of—the Mind behind and in the matter of the world; so the top of the mind might touch the foot of the throne of God. In the ambitious humility of the mystic the hope burned that a soul unburdened of sin and uplifted with prayer might rise on the wings of grace to the Beatific Vision and a divine companionship. That vision could never be attained through sensation, reason, science, or philosophy, which were bound to time, the many, and the earth, and could never reach to the core and power and oneness of the universe. The problem of the mystic was to cleanse the soul as an internal organ of spiritual perception, to wash away from it all stain of selfish individuality and illusory multiplicity, to widen its reach and love to the uttermost inclusion, and then to see, with clear and disembodied sight, the cosmic, eternal, and divine, and thereby to return, as from a long exile, to union with the God from Whom birth had meant a penal severance. Had not Christ promised that the pure in heart would see God?
Mystics, therefore, appeared in every age, every religion, and every land. Greek Christianity abounded in them despite the Hellenic legacy of reason. St. Augustine was a mystic fountain for the West; his Confessions constituted a return of the soul from created things to God; seldom had any mortal so long conversed with the Deity. St. Anselm the statesman, St. Bernard the organizer, upheld the mystical approach against the rationalism of Roscelin and Abélard. When William of Champeaux was driven from Paris by the logic of Abélard, he founded in a suburb (1108) the Augustinian abbey of St. Victor as a school of theology; and his successors there, Hugh and Richard, ignoring the perilous adventure of young philosophy, based religion not on argument but on the mystical experience of the divine presence. Hugh (d. 1141) saw supernatural sacramental symbols in every phase of creation; Richard (d. 1173) rejected logic and learning, preferred the “heart” to the “head” à la Pascal, and described with learned logic the mystical rise of the soul to God.
The passion of Italy kindled mysticism into a gospel of revolution. Joachim of Flora—Giovanni dei Gioacchini di Fiori—a noble of Calabria, developed a longing to see Palestine. Impressed on the way by the misery of the people, he dismissed his retinue and continued as a humble pilgrim. Legend tells how he passed an entire Lent in an old well on Mt. Tabor; how, on Easter Sunday, a great splendor appeared to him, and filled him with such divine light that he understood at once all the Scriptures, all the future and the past. Returning to Calabria, he became a Cistercian monk and priest, thirsted for austerity, and retired to a hermitage. Disciples gathered, and he formed them into a new Order of Flora, whose rule of poverty and prayer was approved by Celestine III. In 1200 he sent to Innocent III a series of works which he had written, he said, under divine inspiration, but which, nevertheless, he submitted for papal censorship. Two years later he died.
His writings were based on the Augustinian theory—widely accepted in orthodox circles—that a symbolic concordance existed between the events of the Old Testament and the history of Christendom from the birth of Christ to the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Joachim divided the history of man into three stages: the first, under the rule of God the Father, ended at the Nativity; the second, ruled by the Son, would last, according to apocalyptic calculations, 1260 years; the third, under the Holy Ghost, would be preceded by a time of troubles, of war and poverty and ecclesiastical corruption, and would be ushered in by the rise of a new monastic order which would cleanse the Church, and would realize a worldwide utopia of peace, justice, and happiness.86
Thousands of Christians, including men high in the Church, accepted Joachim’s claim to divine inspiration, and looked hopefully to 1260 as the year of the Second Advent. The Spiritual Franciscans, confident that theirs was the new Order, took courage from Joachim’s teachings; and when they were outlawed by the Church they carried on their propaganda through writings published under his name. In 1254 an edition of Joachim’s main works appeared under the title of The Everlasting Gospel, with a commentary proclaiming that a pope tainted with simony would mark the close of the Second Age, and that in the Third Age the need of sacraments and priests would be ended by the reign of universal love. The book was condemned by the Church; its presumptive author, a Franciscan monk Gherardo da Borgo, was imprisoned for life; but its circulation secretly continued, and deeply affected mystical and heretical thought in Italy and France from St. Francis to Dante—who placed Joachim in paradise.
Perhaps in excited expectation of the coming Kingdom, a mania of religious penitence flared up around Perugia in 1259, and swept through northern Italy. Thousands of penitents of every age and class marched in disorderly procession, dressed only in loincloths, weeping, praying God for mercy, and scourging themselves with leather thongs. Thieves and usurers fell in, and restored their illegal gains; murderers, catching the contagion of repentance, knelt before their victims’ kin and begged to be slain; prisoners were released, exiles were recalled, enmities were healed. The movement spread through Germany into Bohemia; and for a time it seemed that a new and mystical faith, ignoring the Church, would inundate Europe. But in a little while the nature of man reasserted itself; new enmities developed, sinning and murder were renewed; and the Flagellant craze disappeared into the psychic recesses from which it had emerged.87
The mystic flame burned less fitfully in Flanders. A priest of Liege, Lambert le Bégue (i.e., the stutterer), established in 1184 on the Meuse a house for women who, without taking monastic vows, wished to live together in small semi-communistic groups, supporting themselves by weaving wool and making lace. Similar maisons-Dieu, or houses of God, were established for men. The men called themselves Beghards, the women Beguines. These communities, like the Waldenses, condemned the Church for owning property, and themselves practiced a voluntary poverty. A similar sect, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, appeared about 1262 in Augsburg, and developed in the cities along the Rhine. Both movements claimed a mystical inspiration which absolved them from ecclesiastical control, even from state or moral law.88 State and Church combined to suppress them; they went underground, emerged repeatedly under new names, and contributed to the origin and fervor of the Anabaptists and other radical sects in the Reformation.
Germany became the favorite land of mysticism in the West. Hildegarde of Bingen (1099–1179), the “Sibyl of the Rhine,” lived all but eight of her eighty-two years as a Benedictine nun, and ended as abbess of a convent on the Rupertsberg. She was an unusual mixture of administrator and visionary, pietist and radical, poet and scientist, physician and saint. She corresponded with popes and kings, always in a tone of inspired authority, and in Latin prose of masculine power. She published several books of visions (Scivias), for which she claimed the collaboration of the Deity; the clergy were chagrined to hear it, for these revelations were highly critical of the wealth and corruption of the Church. Said Hildegarde, in accents of eternal hope:
Divine justice shall have its hour… the judgments of God are about to be accomplished; the Empire and the Papacy, sunk into impiety, shall crumble away together…. But upon their ruins shall appear a new nation…. The heathen, the Jews, the worldly and the unbelieving, shall be converted together; springtime and peace shall reign over a regenerated world, and the angels will return with confidence to dwell among men.89
A century later Elizabeth of Thuringia (1207–31) aroused Hungary with her brief life of ascetic sanctity. Daughter of King Andrew, she was married at thirteen to a German prince, was a mother at fourteen, a widow at twenty. Her brother-in-law despoiled her and drove her away penniless. She became a wandering pietist, devoted to the poor; she housed leprous women and washed their wounds. She too had heavenly visions, but she gave them no publicity, and claimed no supernatural powers. Meeting the fiery inquisitor Conrad of Marburg, she was morbidly fascinated by his merciless devotion to orthodoxy; she became his obedient slave; he beat her for the slightest deviation from his concept of sanctity; she submitted humbly, inflicted additional austerities upon herself, and died of them at twenty-four.90 Her reputation for saintliness was so great that at her funeral half-mad devotees cut off her hair, ears, and nipples as sacred relics.91 Another Elizabeth entered the Benedictine nunnery of Schonau, near Bingen, at the age of twelve (1141), and lived there till her death in 1165. Bodily infirmities and extreme asceticism generated trances, in which she received heavenly revelations from various dead saints, nearly all anticlerical. “The Lord’s vine has withered,” her guardian angel told her; “the head of the Church is ill, and her members are dead…. Kings of the earth! the cry of your iniquity has risen even to me.”92
Toward the end of this period the mystic tide ran high in Germany. Meister Eckhart, born about 1260, would come to his ripe doctrine in 1326, to his trial and death in 1327. His pupils Suso and Tauler would continue his mystic pantheism; and from that tradition of unecclesiastical piety would flow one source of the Reformation.
Usually the Church bore patiently with the mystics in her fold. She did not tolerate serious doctrinal deviations from the official line, or the anarchic individualism of some religious sects; but she admitted the claim of the mystics to a direct approach to God, and listened with good humor to saintly denunciations of her human faults. Many clergymen, even high dignitaries, sympathized with the critics, recognized the shortcomings of the Church, and wished that they too could lay down the contaminating tools and tasks of world politics and enjoy the security and peace of monasteries fed by the piety of the people and protected by the power of the Church. Perhaps it was such patient ecclesiastics who kept Christianity steady amid the delirious revelations that periodically threatened the medieval mind. As we read the mystics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it dawns upon us that orthodoxy was often a barrier to contagious superstitions, and that in one aspect the Church was belief—as the state was force—organized from chaos into order to keep men sane.
VII. THE TRAGIC POPE
When Gregory X came to the papacy in 1271 the Church was again at the summit of her power. He was a Christian as well as a pope: a man of peace and amity, seeking justice rather than victory. Hoping to regain Palestine by one united effort, he persuaded Venice, Genoa, and Bologna to end their wars; he secured the election of Rudolf of Hapsburg as Emperor, but soothed with courtesy and kindness the defeated candidates; and he reconciled Guelf and Ghibelline in factious Florence and Siena, saying to his Guelf supporters: “Your enemies are Ghibellines, but they are also men, citizens, and Christians.”93 He summoned the prelates of the Church to the Council of Lyons (1274); 1570 leading churchmen came; every great state sent a representative; the Greek emperor sent the heads of the Greek Church to reaffirm its submission to the Roman See; Latin and Greek churchmen sang together a Te Deum of joy. Bishops were invited to list the abuses that needed reform in the Church; they responded with startling candor;94 and legislation was passed to mitigate these evils. All Europe was magnificently united for a mighty effort against the Saracens. But on the way back to Rome Gregory died (1276). His successors were too busy with Italian politics to carry out his plans.
Nevertheless when Boniface VIII was chosen pope in 1294 the papacy was still the strongest government in Europe, the best organized, the best administered, the richest in revenue. It was the misfortune of the Church that at this juncture, nearing the end of a virile and progressive century, the mightiest throne in Christendom should have fallen to a man whose love of the Church, and sincerity of purpose, were equaled by his imperfect morals, his personal pride, and his tactless will to power. He was not without charm: he loved learning, and rivaled Innocent III in legal training and wide culture; he founded the University of Rome, and restored and extended the Vatican Library; he gave commissions to Giotto and Arnolfo di Cambio, and helped finance the amazing façade of Orvieto Cathedral.
He had prepared his own elevation by persuading the saintly but incompetent Celestine V to resign after a pontificate of five months—an unprecedented act that surrounded Boniface with ill will from the start. To scotch all plans for a restoration, he ordered the eighty-year-old Celestine to be kept in detention in Rome; Celestine escaped, was captured, escaped again, wandered for weeks through Apulia, reached the Adriatic, attempted a crossing to Dalmatia, was wrecked, was cast ashore in Italy, and was brought before Boniface. He was condemned by the Pope to imprisonment in a narrow cell at Ferentino; and there, ten months later, he died (1296).95
The temper of the new Pope was sharpened by a succession of diplomatic defeats and costly victories. He tried to dissuade Frederick of Aragon from accepting the throne of Sicily; when Frederick persisted Boniface excommunicated him, and laid an interdict upon the island (1296). Neither King nor people paid any heed to these censures;96 and in the end Boniface recognized Frederick. To prepare for a crusade he ordered Venice and Genoa to sign a truce; they continued their war for three years more, and rejected his intervention in making peace. Failing to secure a favorable order in Florence, he placed the city under interdict, and invited Charles of Valois to enter and pacify Italy (1300). Charles accomplished nothing, but won the hatred of the Florentines for himself and the Pope. Seeking peace in his own Papal States, Boniface had attempted to settle a quarrel among the members of the powerful Colonna family; Pietro and Jacopo Colonna, both cardinals, repudiated his suggestions; he deposed and excommunicated them (1297); whereupon the rebellious nobles affixed to the doors of Roman churches, and laid upon the altar of St. Peter’s, a manifesto appealing from the Pope to a general council. Boniface repeated the excommunication, extended it to five other rebels, ordered their property confiscated, invaded the Colonna domain with papal troops, captured its fortresses, razed Palestrina to the ground, and had salt strewn over its ruins. The rebels surrendered, were forgiven, revolted again, were again beaten by the warrior Pope, fled from the Papal States, and planned revenge.
Amid these Italian tribulations Boniface was suddenly confronted by a major crisis in France. Philip IV, resolved to unify his realm, had seized the English province of Gascony; Edward I had declared war (1294); now, to finance their struggle, both kings decided to tax the property and personnel of the Church. The popes had permitted such taxation for crusades, but never for a purely secular war. The French clergy had recognized their duty of contributing to the defense of the state that protected their possessions, but they feared that if the power of the state to tax were unchecked, it would be a power to destroy. Philip had already reduced the role of the clergy in France; he had removed them from the manorial and royal courts, and from their old posts in the administration of the government and in the council of the king. Disturbed by this trend, the Cistercian Order refused to send Philip the fifth of their revenues which he had asked for the war with England, and its head addressed an appeal to the Pope. Boniface had to move carefully, for France had long been the chief support of the papacy in the struggle with Germany and the Empire; but he felt that the economic basis of the power and freedom of the Church would soon be lost if she could be shorn of her revenues by state taxation of Church property without papal consent. In February, 1296, he issued one of the most famous bulls in ecclesiastical history. Its first words, Clericis laicos, gave it a name, its first sentence made an unwise admission, and its tone recalled the papal bolts of Gregory VII:
Antiquity reports that laymen are exceedingly hostile to the clergy; and our experience certainly shows this to be true at present…. With the counsel of our brethren, and by our apostolic authority, we decree that if any clergy … shall pay to laymen… any part of their income or possessions … without the permission of the pope, they shall incur excommunication… And we also decree that all persons of whatever power or rank, who shall demand or receive such taxes, or shall seize or cause to be seized, the property of churches or of the clergy … shall incur excommunication.97
Philip for his part was convinced that the great wealth of the Church in France should share in the costs of the state. He countered the papal bull by prohibiting the export of gold, silver, precious stones, or food, and by forbidding foreign merchants or emissaries to remain in France. These measures blocked a main source of papal revenue, and banished from France the papal agents who were raising funds for a crusade in the East. In the bull Ineffabilis amor (September, 1296) Boniface retreated; he sanctioned voluntary contributions from the clergy for the necessary defense of the state, and conceded the right of the King to be the judge of such a necessity. Philip rescinded his retaliatory ordinances; he and Edward accepted Boniface—not as pope but as a private person—as arbitrator of their dispute; Boniface decided most of the issues in Philip’s favor; England yielded for the moment; and the three warriors enjoyed a passing peace.
Perhaps to replenish the papal treasury after the decline of receipts from England and France, perhaps to finance a war for the recovery of Sicily as a papal fief, and another war to extend the Papal States into Tuscany,98 Boniface proclaimed 1300 as a jubilee year. The plan was a complete success. Rome had never in its history seen such crowds before; now, apparently for the first time, traffic rules were enforced to govern the movement of the people.99 Boniface and his aides managed the affair well; food was brought in abundantly and was sold at moderate prices papally controlled. It was an advantage for the Pope that the great sums so collected were not earmarked for any special purpose, but could be used according to his judgment. Despite half victories and severe defeats, Boniface was now at the crest of his curve.
In the meantime, however, the Colonna exiles were entertaining Philip with tales of the Pope’s greed, injustice, and private heresies. A quarrel arose between Philip’s aides and a papal legate, Bernard Saisset; the legate was arrested on a charge of inciting to insurrection; he was tried by the royal court, convicted, and committed to the custody of the archbishop of Narbonne (1301). Boniface, shocked by this summary treatment of his legate, demanded Saisset’s immediate release, and instructed the French clergy to suspend payment of ecclesiastical revenues to the state. In the bull Ausculta fili (“Listen, son”; December, 1301) he appealed to Philip to listen modestly to the Vicar of Christ as the spiritual monarch over all the kings of the earth; he protested against the trial of a churchman before a civil court, and the continued use of ecclesiastical funds for secular purposes; and he announced that he would summon the bishops and abbots of France to take measures “for the preservation of the liberties of the Church, the reformation of the kingdom, and the amendment of the King.”100 When this bull was presented to Philip, the count of Artois snatched it from the hands of the Pope’s emissary and flung it into the fire; and a copy destined for publication by the French clergy was suppressed. Passion was inflamed on both sides by the circulation of two spurious documents, one allegedly from Boniface to Philip demanding obedience even in temporal affairs, the other from Philip to Boniface informing “thy very great fatuity that in temporal things we are subject to no one”; and these forgeries were widely accepted as genuine.101
On February 11, 1302, the bull Ausculta fili was officially burned at Paris before the King and a great multitude. To forestall the ecclesiastical council proposed by Boniface, Philip summoned the three estates of his realm to meet at Paris in April. At this first States-General in French history all three classes —nobles, clergy, and commons—wrote separately to Rome in defense of the King and his temporal power. Some forty-five French prelates, despite Philip’s prohibition, and the confiscation of their property, attended the council at Rome in October, 1302. From that council issued the bull Unam sanctam, which made arrestingly specific the claims of the papacy. There is, said the bull, but one true Church, outside of which there is no salvation; there is but one body of Christ, with one head, not two; that head is Christ and His representative, the Roman pope. There are two swords or powers—the spiritual and the temporal; the first is borne by the Church; the second is borne for the Church by the king, but under the will and sufferance of the priest. The spiritual power is above the temporal, and has the right to instruct it regarding its highest end, and to judge it when it does evil. “We declare and define and pronounce,” concluded the bull, “that it is necessary for salvation that all men should be subject to the Roman pontiff.”102
Philip replied by calling two assemblies (March and June, 1303), which drew up a formal indictment of Boniface as a tyrant, sorcerer, murderer, embezzler, adulterer, sodomite, simoniac, idolator, and infidel,103 and demanded his deposition by a general council of the Church. The King commissioned William of Nogaret, his chief legist, to go to Rome and notify the Pope of the King’s appeal to a general council. Boniface, then in the papal palace at Anagni, declared that only the pope could call a general council, and prepared a decree excommunicating Philip and laying an interdict upon France. Before he could issue it William of Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna, heading a band of 2000 mercenaries, burst into the palace, presented Philip’s message of notification, and demanded the Pope’s resignation (September 7, 1303). Boniface refused. A tradition “of considerable trustworthiness”104 says that Sciarra struck the Pontiff in the face, and would have killed him had not Nogaret intervened. Boniface was seventy-five years old, physically weak, but still defiant. For three days he was kept a prisoner in his palace, while the mercenaries plundered it. Then the people of Anagni, reinforced by 400 horsemen from the Orsini clan, scattered the mercenaries and freed the Pope. Apparently his jailers had given him no food in the three days; for standing in the market place he begged: “If there be any good woman who would give me an alms of wine and bread, I would bestow upon her God’s blessing and mine.” The Orsini led him to Rome and the Vatican. There he fell into a violent fever; and in a few days he died (October 11, 1303).
His successor, Benedict XI (1303–4), excommunicated Nogaret, Sciarra Colonna, and thirteen others whom he had seen breaking into the palace at Anagni. A month later Benedict died at Perugia, apparently poisoned by Italian Ghibellines.105 Philip agreed to support Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, for the papacy if he would adopt a conciliatory policy, absolve those who had been excommunicated for the attack upon Boniface, allow an annual income tax of ten per cent to be levied upon the French clergy for five years, restore the Colonnas to their offices and property, and condemn the memory of Boniface.106 We do not know how far Bertrand consented. He was chosen Pope, and took the name of Clement V (1305). The cardinals warned him that his life would be unsafe in Rome; and after some hesitation, and perhaps a pointed suggestion from Philip, Clement removed the papal seat to Avignon, on the east bank of the Rhone just outside the southeastern boundary of France (1309). So began the sixty-eight years of the “Babylonian Captivity” of the popes. The papacy had freed itself from Germany, and surrendered to France.
Clement, against his weak will, became the humiliated tool of the insatiable Philip. He absolved the King, restored the Colonna family, withdrew the bull Clericis laicos, allowed the spoliation of the Templars, and finally (1310) consented to a post-mortem trial of Boniface by an ecclesiastical consistory at Groseau, near Avignon. In the preliminary examinations held before the Pope and his commissioners, six ecclesiastics testified to having heard Boniface, a year before his pontificate, remark that all supposedly divine laws were inventions of men to keep the common people in good behavior through fear of hell; that it was “fatuous” to believe that God was at once one and three, or that a virgin had borne a child, or that God had become a man, or that bread could be changed into the body of Christ, or that there was a future life. “So I believe and so I hold, as doth every educated man. The vulgar hold otherwise. We must speak as the vulgar do, and think and believe with the few.” So these six quoted Boniface, and three of them, later re-examined, repeated their testimony. The Prior of St. Giles at San Gemino reported that Boniface, as Cardinal Gaetani, had denied the resurrection of either body or soul; and several other ecclesiastics confirmed this testimony. One ecclesiastic quoted Boniface as saying, of the consecrated Host, “It is mere paste.” Men formerly belonging to the household of Boniface accused him of repeated sexual sins, natural and unnatural; others accused the supposed skeptic of attempting magical communication with the “powers of darkness.”107
Before the actual trial could be held, Clement persuaded Philip to leave the question of Boniface’s guilt to the coming ecumenical Council of Vienne. When that Council met (1311), three cardinals appeared before it and testified to the orthodoxy and morality of the dead Pope; two knights, as challengers, threw down their gauntlets to maintain his innocence by wager of battle; no one accepted the challenge; and the Council declared the matter closed.
VIII. RETROSPECT
The testimony against Boniface, true or false, reveals the undercurrent of skepticism that was preparing to end the Age of Faith. Likewise the blow-physical or political—given Boniface VIII at Anagni marks in one sense the beginning of “modern times”: it was the victory of nationalism against supernationalism, of the state against the Church, of the power of the sword over the magic of the word. The papacy had been weakened by its struggle against the Hohenstaufens, and by the failure of the Crusades. France and England had been strengthened by the collapse of the Empire, and France had been enriched by acquiring Languedoc with the help of the Church. Perhaps the popular support given to Philip IV against Boniface VIII reflected public resentment of the excesses of the Inquisition and the Albigensian Crusade. Some of Nogaret’s ancestors, it was said, had been burned by the inquisitors.108 Boniface had not realized, in undertaking so many conflicts, that the weapons of the papacy had been blunted by overuse. Industry and commerce had generated a class less pious than the peasantry; life and thought were becoming secularized; the laity was coming into its own. For seventy years now the state would absorb the Church.
Looking back over the panorama of Latin Christianity, we are impressed, above all, by the relative unanimity of religious faith among diverse peoples, and the overspreading hierarchy and power of the Roman Church, giving to Western Europe—non-Slavic, non-Byzantine Europe—a unity of mind and morals such as it has never known again. Nowhere else in history has an organization wielded so profound an influence over so many men for so long a time. The authority of the Roman Republic and Empire over its immense realm endured from Pompey to Alaric, 480 years; that of the Mongol Empire or the British Empire, some 200 years; but the Roman Catholic Church was the dominant force in Europe from the death of Charlemagne (814) to the death of Boniface VIII (1303) —489 years. Her organization and administration do not appear to have been as competent as that of the Roman Empire, nor was her personnel as capable or cultured as the men who governed the provinces and cities for the Caesars; but the Church inherited a barbarous bedlam, and had to find a laborious way back to order and education. Even so her clergy were the best instructed men of the age, and it was they who provided the only education available in Western Europe during the five centuries of her supremacy. Her courts offered the justest justice of their time. Her papal Curia, sometimes venal, sometimes incorruptible, constituted in some degree a world court for the arbitration of international disputes and the limitation of war; and though that court was always too Italian, the Italians were the best trained minds of those centuries, and any man could rise to membership in that court from any rank and nation in Latin Christendom.
Despite the chicanery usually accompanying collective human power, it was good that above the states and kings of Europe there should be an authority that could call them to account and moderate their strife. If any world state was to be, what could seem fitter than that its seat should be the throne of Peter, whence men, however limited, could see with a continental eye and from the background of centuries? What decisions would be more peaceably accepted, or could be more easily enforced, than those of a pontiff revered as the Vicar of God by nearly all the population of Western Europe? When Louis IX left on crusade in 1248, Henry III of England made extreme demands upon France, and prepared to invade; Pope Innocent IV threatened England with interdict should Henry persist; and Henry refrained. The power of the Church, said the skeptical Hume, was a rampart of refuge against the tyranny and injustice of kings.109 The Church might have realized the high conception of Gregory VII—might have made her moral power supreme over the physical forces of the states—had she used her influence only for spiritual and moral purposes, and never for material ends. When Urban II united Christendom against the Turks the dream of Gregory was almost realized; but when Innocent III, Gregory IX, Alexander IV, and Boniface VIII gave the holy name of crusade to their wars against the Albigensians, Frederick II, and the Colonnas, the great ideal broke to pieces in papal hands stained with Christian blood.
Where the Church was not threatened she responded with considerable tolerance for diverse, even heretical, views. We shall find an unexpected freedom of thought among the philosophers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even among professors at universities chartered and supervised by the Church. All that she asked was that such discussions should be confined and intelligible only to the educated, and should not take the form of revolutionary appeals to the people to abandon their creed or the Church.110 “The Church,” says her most industrious recent critic, “as it embraced the whole population, embraced also every type of mind, from the most superstitious to the most agnostic; and many of these unorthodox elements worked far more freely, under the cloak of outward conformity, than is generally supposed.”111
All in all, the picture that we form of the medieval Latin Church is that of a complex organization doing its best, despite the human frailties of its adherents and its leaders, to establish moral and social order, and to spread an uplifting and consoling faith, amid the wreckage of an old civilization and the passions of an adolescent society. The sixth-century Church found Europe a flotsam of migratory barbarians, a babel of tongues and creeds, a chaos of unwritten and incalculable laws. She gave it a moral code buttressed with supernatural sanctions strong enough to check the unsocial impulses of violent men; she offered it monastic retreats for men, women, and classic manuscripts; she governed it with episcopal courts, educated it with schools and universities, and tamed the kings of the earth to moral responsibility and the tasks of peace. She brightened the lives of her children with poetry, drama, and song, and inspired them to raise the noblest works of art in history. Unable to establish a utopia of equality among unequally able men, she organized charity and hospitality, and in some measure protected the weak from the strong. She was, beyond question, the greatest civilizing force in medieval European history.
CHAPTER XXX
The Morals and Manners of Christendom
700–1300
I. THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC
MAN in the jungle or hunting stage had to be greedy—to seek food eagerly and gorge himself zealously—because, when food came, he could not be sure when it would come again. He had to be sexually sensitive, often promiscuous, because a high death rate compelled a high birth rate; every woman had to be made a mother whenever possible, and the function of the male was to be always in heat. He had to be pugnacious, ever ready to fight for food or mate. Vices were once virtues, indispensable to survival.
But when man found that the best means of survival, for individual as well as species, was social organization, he expanded the hunting pack into a system of social order in which the instincts once so useful in the hunting stage had to be checked at every turn to make society possible. Ethically every civilization is a balance and tension between the jungle instincts of men and the inhibitions of a moral code. The instincts without the inhibitions would end civilization; the inhibitions without the instincts would end life. The problem of morality is to adjust inhibitions to protect civilization without enfeebling life.
In the task of moderating human violence, promiscuity, and greed, certain instincts, chiefly social, took the lead, and provided a biological basis for civilization. Parental love, in beast and man, created the natural social order of the family, with its educative discipline and mutual aid. Parental authority, half a pain of love and half a joy of tyranny, transmitted a life-saving code of social conduct to the individualistic child. The organized force wielded by chieftain, baron, city, or state circumscribed and largely circumvented the unorganized force of individuals. Love of approval bent the ego to the will of the group. Custom and imitation guided the adolescent, now and then, into ways sanctioned by the trial-and-error experience of the race. Law frightened instinct with the specter of punishment. Conscience tamed youth with the detritus of an endless stream of prohibitions.
The Church believed that these natural or secular sources of morality could not suffice to control the impulses that preserve life in the jungle but destroy order in a society. Those impulses are too strong to be deterred by any human authority that cannot be everywhere at once with awesome police. A moral code bitterly uncongenial to the flesh must bear the seal of a supernatural origin if it is to be obeyed; it must carry a divine sanction and prestige that will be respected by the soul in the absence of any force, and in the most secret moments and coverts of life. Even parental authority, so vital to moral and social order, breaks down in the contest with primitive instincts unless it is buttressed by religious belief inculcated in the child. To serve and save a society, a religion must oppose to insistent instinct no disputable man-made directives, but the undebatable, categorical imperatives of God Himself. And those divine commandments (so sinful or savage is man) must be supported not only by praise and honor bestowed for obeying them, nor only by disgrace and penalties imposed for violating them, but also by the hope of heaven for unrequited virtue, and the fear of hell for unpunished sin. The commandments must come not from Moses but from God.
The biological theory of primitive instincts unfitting man for civilization was symbolized in Christian theology by the doctrine of original sin. Like the Hindu conception of karma, this was an attempt to explain apparently unmerited suffering: the good endured evil here because of some ancestral sin. In Christian theory the whole human race had been tainted by the sin of Adam and Eve. Said Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1150), unofficially accepted by the Church as her teaching, “Every human being who is conceived by the coition of a man with a woman is born with original sin, subject to impiety and death, and therefore a child of wrath”;1 and only divine grace, and the atoning death of Christ, could save him from wickedness and damnation (only the gentle example of the martyred Christ could redeem man from violence, lust, and greed, and save him and his society from destruction). The preaching of this doctrine, combined with natural catastrophes that seemed unintelligible except as punishments for sin, gave many medieval Christians a sense of inborn impurity, depravity, and guilt, which colored much of their literature before 1200. Thereafter that sense of sin and fear of hell diminished till the Reformation, to reappear with fresh terror among the Puritans.
Gregory I and later theologians spoke of seven deadly sins—pride, avarice, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, and sloth; and opposed to them the seven cardinal virtues: four “natural” or pagan virtues praised by Pythagoras and Plato-wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance; and three “theological” virtues —faith, hope, and charity. But though accepting the pagan virtues, Christianity never assimilated them. It preferred faith to knowledge, patience to courage, love and mercy to justice, abstention and purity to temperance. It exalted humility, and ranked pride (so prominent in Aristotle’s ideal man) as the deadliest of the Deadly Sins. It spoke occasionally of the rights of man, but it stressed rather the duties of man—to himself, his fellow man, his Church, and God. In preaching a “gentle Jesus meek and mild” the Church had no fear of making men effeminate; on the contrary, the men of medieval Latin Christendom were more masculine—because they met more hardships—than their modern beneficiaries and heirs. Theologies and philosophies, like men and states, are what they are because in their time and place they have to be.
II. PREMARITAL MORALITY
How far did medieval morality reflect or justify medieval ethical theory? Let us first look at the picture, with no thesis to prove.
The first moral incident of the Christian life was baptism: the child was solemnly inducted into the community and the Church, and was vicariously subjected to their laws. Every child received a “Christian name”—that is, usually, the name of some Christian saint. Surnames (i.e., added names) were of motley origin, and could go back through generations to kinship, occupation, place, a feature of body or character, even a bit of church ritual: Cicely Wilkinsdoughter, James Smith, Margaret Ferrywoman, Matthew Paris, Agnes Redhead, John Merriman, Robert Litany, Robert Benedicite or Benedict.2
Gregory the Great, like Rousseau, urged mothers to nurse their own infants;3 most poor women did, most upper-class women did not.4 Children were loved as now, but were beaten more. They were numerous, despite high infantile and adolescent mortality; they disciplined one another by their number, and became civilized by attrition. They learned a hundred arts of the country or the city from relatives and playmates, and grew rapidly in knowledge and wickedness. “Boys are taught evil as soon as they can babble,” said Thomas of Celano in the thirteenth century; “and as they grow up they become steadily worse until they are Christians only in name”5—but moralists are bad historians. Boys reached the age of work at twelve, and legal maturity at sixteen.
Christian ethics followed, with adolescents, a policy of silence about sex: financial maturity—the ability to support a family—came later than biological maturity—the ability to reproduce; sexual education might aggravate the pains of continence in this interval; and the Church required premarital continence as an aid to conjugal fidelity, social order, and public health. Nevertheless, by the age of sixteen the medieval youth had probably sampled a variety of sexual experiences. Pederasty, which Christianity had effectively attacked in late antiquity, reappeared with the Crusades, the influx of Oriental ideas, and the unisexual isolation of monks and nuns.6 In 1177 Henry, Abbot of Clairvaux, wrote of France that “ancient Sodom is springing up from her ashes.”7 Philip the Fair charged that homosexual practices were popular among the Templars. The Penitentials—ecclesiastical manuals prescribing penances for sins—mention the usual enormities, including bestiality; an astonishing variety of beasts received such attentions.8 Where amours of this sort were discovered they were punishable with the death of both participants; and the records of the English Parliament contain many cases of dogs, goats, cows, pigs, and geese being burned to death with their human paramours. Cases of incest were numerous.
Premarital and extramarital relations were apparently as widespread as at any time between antiquity and the twentieth century; the promiscuous nature of man overflowed the dikes of secular ecclesiastical legislation; and some women felt that abdominal gaiety could be atoned for by hebdomadal piety. Rape was common9 despite the severest penalties. Knights who served highborn dames or damoiselles for a kiss or a touch of the hand might console themselves with the lady’s maids; some ladies could not sleep with a good conscience until they had arranged this courtesy.10 The Knight of La Tour-Landry mourned the prevalence of fornication among aristocratic youth; if we were to believe him, some men of his class fornicated in church, nay, “on the altar”; and he tells of “two queens which in Lent, on Holy Thursday … took their foul delight and pleasance within the church during divine service.”11 William of Malmesbury described the Norman nobility as “given over to gluttony and lechery,” and exchanging concubines with one another12 lest fidelity should dull the edge of husbandry. Illegitimate children littered Christendom, and gave a plot to a thousand tales. The heroes of several medieval sagas were bastards—Cuchulain, Arthur, Gawain, Roland, William the Conqueror, and many a knight in Froissart’s Chronicles.
Prostitution adjusted itself to the times. Some women on pilgrimage, according to Bishop Boniface, earned their passage by selling themselves in the towns on their route.13 Every army was followed with another army, as dangerous as the enemy. “The Crusaders,” reports Albert of Aix, “had in their ranks a crowd of women wearing the habit of men; they traveled together without distinction of sex, trusting to the chances of a frightful promiscuity.”14 At the siege of Acre (1189), says the Arabic historian Emad-Eddin, “300 pretty Frenchwomen … arrived for the solace of the French soldiers … for these would not go into battle if they were deprived of women”; seeing which, the Moslem armies demanded similar inspiration.15 In the first crusade of St. Louis, according to Joinville, his barons “set up their brothels about the royal tent.”16 The university students, particularly at Paris, developed urgent or imitative needs, and filles established centers of accommodation.17
Some towns—e.g., Toulouse, Avignon, Montpellier, Nuremberg—legalized prostitution under municipal supervision, on the ground that without such lupanars, bordelli, Frauenhäuser, good women could not venture safely into the streets.18 St. Augustine had written: “If you do away with harlots the world will be convulsed with lust”;19 and St. Thomas Aquinas agreed.20 London in the twelfth century had a row of “bordells” or “stews” near London Bridge; originally licensed by the Bishop of Winchester, they were subsequently sanctioned by Parliament.21 An act of Parliament in 1161 forbade the brothel keepers to have women suffering from the “perilous infirmity of burning”—the earliest known regulation against the spread of venereal disease.22 Louis IX, in 1254, decreed the banishment of all prostitutes from France; the edict was enforced; soon a clandestine promiscuity replaced the former open traffic; the bourgeois gentlemen complained that it was well nigh impossible to guard the virtue of their wives and daughters from the solicitations of soldiers and students; at last criticism of the ordinance became so general that it was repealed (1256). The new decree specified those parts of Paris in which prostitutes might legally live and practice, regulated their dress and ornaments, and submitted them to supervision by a police magistrate popularly known as the roi des ribauds, or king of the bawds, beggars, and vagabonds.23 Louis IX, dying, advised his son to renew the edict of expulsion; Philip did, with results much as before; the law remained in the statutes, but was not enforced.24 In Rome, according to Bishop Durand II of Mende (1311), there were brothels near the Vatican, and the pope’s marshals permitted them for a consideration.25 The Church showed a humane spirit toward prostitutes; she maintained asylums for reformed women, and distributed among the poor the donations received from converted courtesans.26
III. MARRIAGE
Youth was brief, and marriage came early, in the Age of Faith. A child of seven could consent to a betrothal, and such engagements were sometimes made to facilitate the transfer or protection of property. Grace de Saleby, aged four, was married to a great noble who could preserve her rich estate; presently he died, and she was married at six to another lord; at eleven she was married to a third.27 Such unions could be annulled at any time before the normal age of consummation, which in the girl was presumed to be twelve, in the boy fourteen.28 The Church reckoned the consent of parents or guardian unnecessary for valid marriage if the parties were of age. She forbade the marriage of girls under fifteen, but allowed many exceptions; for in this matter the rights of property overruled the whims of love, and marriage was an incident in finance. The bridegroom presented gifts or money to the girl’s parents, gave her a “morning gift,” and pledged her a dower right in his estate; in England this was a life interest of the widow on one third of the husband’s inheritance in land. The bride’s family gave presents to the family of the groom, and assigned to her a dowry consisting of clothing, linen, utensils, and furniture, and sometimes of property. Engagement was an exchange of gages or pledges; the wedding itself was a pledge (Anglo-Saxon weddian, promise); the spouse was one who had re-sponded “I will.”
State and Church alike accepted as valid marriage a consummated union accompanied by the exchange of a verbal pledge between the participants, without other ceremony legal or ecclesiastical.29 The Church sought in this way to protect women from abandonment by seducers, and preferred such unions to fornication or concubinage; but after the twelfth century she denied validity to marriages contracted without ecclesiastical sanction; and after the Council of Trent (1563) she required the presence of a priest. Secular law welcomed the ecclesiastical regulation of marriage; Bracton (d. 1268) held a religious ceremony essential to valid matrimony. The Church raised marriage to a sacrament, and made it a sacred covenant between man, woman, and God. Gradually she spread her jurisdiction over every phase of marriage, from the duties of the nuptial bed to the last will and testament of the dying spouse. Her canon law drew up a long list of “impediments to matrimony.” Each party must be free from any previous marriage bond, and from any vow of chastity. Marriage with an unbaptized person was forbidden; nevertheless there were many marriages between Christian and Jew.30 Marriage between slaves, between slave and free, between orthodox Christian and heretic, even between the faithful and the excommunicate, was recognized as valid.31 The parties must not be related within the fourth degree of kinship—i.e., must not have an identical ancestor within four generations; here the Church rejected Roman law and accepted the primitive exogamy that feared degeneration from inbreeding; perhaps also she deprecated the concentration of wealth through narrow family alliances. In rural villages such inbreeding was difficult to avoid, and the Church had to close her eyes to it, as to many another gap between reality and law.
After the marriage ceremony came the wedding procession—with blaring music and flaunting silk—from the church to the bridegroom’s home. Festivities would there ensue through all the day and half the night. The marriage was not valid until consummated. Contraception was forbidden; Aquinas accounted it a crime second only to homicide;32 nevertheless diverse means-mechanical, chemical, magical—were used to effect it, with chief reliance on coitus interruptus.33 Drugs were peddled that would produce abortion, or sterility, or impotence, or sexual ardor; the penitential formulas of Rabanus Maurus decreed three years of penance for “her who mixes the semen of her husband with her food so that she may better receive his love.”34 Infanticide was rare. Christian charity established foundling hospitals in various cities from the sixth century onward. A council at Rouen, in the eighth century, invited women who had secretly borne children to deposit them at the door of the church, which would undertake to provide for them; such orphans were brought up as serfs on ecclesiastical properties. A law of Charlemagne decreed that exposed children should be the slaves of those who rescued and reared them. About 1190 a Montpellier monk founded the Fraternity of the Holy Ghost, dedicated to the protection and education of orphans.
Penalties for adultery were severe; Saxon law, for example, condemned the unfaithful wife at least to lose her nose and ears, and empowered her husband to kill her. Adultery was common notwithstanding;35 least so in the middle classes, most in the nobility. Feudal masters seduced female serfs at the cost of a modest fine: he who “covered” a maid “without her thanks”—against her will—paid the court three shillings.36 The eleventh century, said Freeman, “was a profligate age,” and he marveled at the apparent marital fidelity of William the Conqueror,37 who could not say as much for his father. “Medieval society,” said the learned and judicious Thomas Wright, “was profoundly immoral and licentious.”38
The Church allowed separation for adultery, apostasy, or grave cruelty; this was called divortium, but not in the sense of annulling the marriage. Such annulment was granted only when the marriage could be shown to have contravened one of the canonical impediments to matrimony. It is hardly probable that these were deliberately multiplied to provide grounds of divorce for those who could afford the substantial fees and costs required for an annulment. The Church used these impediments to meet with flexible judgment exceptional cases where divorce would promise an heir to a childless king, or would otherwise serve public policy or peace. Germanic law allowed divorce for adultery, sometimes even by mutual agreement.39 The kings preferred the laws of their ancestors to the stricter law of the Church; and feudal lords and ladies, reverting to the ancient codes, sometimes divorced one another without ecclesiastical leave. Not till Innocent III refused divorce to Philip Augustus, the powerful King of France, was the Church strong enough, in authority and conscience, to hew bravely to her own decrees.
IV. WOMAN
The theories of churchmen were generally hostile to woman; some laws of the Church enhanced her subjection; many principles and practices of Christianity improved her status. To priests and theologians woman was still in these centuries what she had seemed to Chrysostom—“a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, a painted ill.”40 She was still the ubiquitous reincarnation of the Eve who had lost Eden for mankind, still the favored instrument of Satan in leading men to hell. St. Thomas Aquinas, usually the soul of kindness, but speaking with the limitations of a monk, placed her in some ways below the slave:
The woman is subject to the man on account of the weakness of her nature, both of mind and of body.41 … Man is the beginning of woman and her end, just as God is the beginning and end of every creature.42… Woman is in subjection according to the law of nature, but a slave is not.43 … Children ought to love their father more than their mother.44
Canon law gave to the husband the duty of protecting his wife, and to the wife the duty of obeying her husband. Man, but not woman, was made in the image of God; “it is plain from this,” argued the canonist, “that wives should be subject to their husbands, and should almost be servants.”45 Such passages have the ring of wistful wishing. On the other hand the Church enforced monogamy, insisted upon a single standard of morals for both sexes, honored woman in the worship of Mary, and defended woman’s right to the inheritance of property.
Civil law was more hostile to her than canon law. Both codes permitted wife-beating,46 and it was quite a forward step when, in the thirteenth century, the “Laws and Customs of Beauvais” bade a man beat his wife “only in reason.”47 Civil law ruled that the word of women could not be admitted in court, “because of their frailty”;48 it required only half as high a fine for an offense against a woman as for the same offense against a man;49 it excluded even the most high-born ladies from representing their own estates in the Parliament of England or the Estates-General of France. Marriage gave the husband full authority over the use and usufruct of any property that his wife owned at marriage.50 No woman could become a licensed physician.
Her economic life was as varied as the man’s. She learned and practiced the wondrous unsung arts of the home: to bake bread and puddings and pies, cure meats, make soap and candles, cream and cheese; to brew beer and make home medicines from herbs; to spin and weave wool, and make linen from flax, and clothing for her family, and curtains and drapes, bedspreads and tapestries; to decorate her home and keep it as clean as the male inmates would allow; and to rear children. Outside the agricultural cottage she joined with strength and patience in the work of the farm: sowed and cultivated and reaped, fed chickens, milked cows, sheared sheep, helped to repair and paint and build. In the towns, at home or in the shop, she did most of the spinning and weaving for the textile guilds. It was a company of “silkwomen” that first established in England the arts of spinning, throwing, and weaving silk.51 Most of the English guilds contained as many women as men, largely because craftsmen were permitted to employ their wives and daughters, and enlist them in the guilds. Several guilds, devoted to feminine manufactures, were composed wholly of women; there were fifteen such guilds at Paris at the end of the thirteenth century.52 Women, however, rarely became masters in bisexual guilds, and they received lower wages than men for equal work. In the middle classes women displayed in raiment the wealth of their husbands, and took an exciting part in the religious feasts and social festivities of the towns. By sharing their husbands’ responsibilities, and accepting with grace and restraint the grandiose or amorous professions of knights and troubadours, the ladies of the feudal aristocracy attained a status such as women had rarely reached before.
As usual, despite theology and law, the medieval woman found ways of annulling her disabilities with her charms. The literature of this period is rich in records of women who ruled their men.53 In several respects woman was the acknowledged superior. Among the nobility she learned something of letters and art and refinement, while her letterless husband labored and fought. She could put on all the graces of an eighteenth-century salonnière, and swoon like a Richardson heroine; at the same time she rivaled man in lusty liberty of action and speech, exchanged risqué stories with him, and often took an unabashed initiative in love.54 In all classes she moved with full freedom seldom chaperoned; she crowded the fairs and dominated the festivals; she joined in pilgrimages, and took part in the Crusades, not only as a solace but now and then as a soldier dressed in the panoply of war. Timid monks tried to persuade themselves of her inferiority, but knights fought for her favors, and poets professed themselves her slaves. Men talked of her as an obedient servant, and dreamed of her as a goddess. They prayed to Mary, but they would have been satisfied with Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Eleanor was but one of a score of great medieval women—Galla Placidia, Theodora, Irene, Anna Comnena, Matilda, Countess of Tuscany, Matilda, Queen of England, Blanche of Navarre, Blanche of Castile, Héloïse…. Eleanor’s grandfather was a prince and a poet, William X of Aquitaine, patron and leader of the troubadours. To his court at Bordeaux came the best wits and graces and gallants of southwestern France; and in that court Eleanor was reared to be a queen to life and letters both. She absorbed all the culture and character of that free and sunny clime: vigor of body and poetry of motion, passion of temper and flesh, freedom of mind and manners and speech, lyric fantasies and sparkling esprit, a boundless love of love and war and every pleasure, even to the death. When she was fifteen (1137) the King of France offered her his hand, anxious to add her duchy of Aquitaine, and the great port of Bordeaux, to his revenues and his crown. She did not know that Louis VII was a man stolid and devout, gravely absorbed in affairs of state. She went to him gay and lovely and unscrupulous; he was not charmed by her extravagance, and did not care for the poets who followed her to Paris to reward her patronage with lauds and rhymes.
Hungry for a living romance, she resolved to accompany her husband to Palestine on the Second Crusade (1147). She and her attendant ladies donned male and martial costumes, sent their distaffs scornfully to stay-at-home knights, and rode off in the van of the army, flying bright banners and trailing troubadours.55 Neglected or chided by the King, she allowed herself, at Antioch and elsewhere, a few amours; rumor gave her love now to her uncle Raymond of Poitiers, now to a handsome Saracen slave, now (said ignorant gossip) to the pious Saladin himself.56 Louis bore these dalliances, and her keen tongue, patiently, but St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the watchdog of Christendom, denounced her to the world. In 1152, suspecting that the King would divorce her, she sued him for divorce on the ground that they were related in the sixth degree. The Church smiled at the pretext, but granted the divorce; and Eleanor returned to Bordeaux, resuming her title to Aquitaine. There a swarm of suitors courted her; she chose Henry Plantagenet, heir to the throne of England; two years later he was Henry II, and Eleanor was again a queen (1154)—“Queen of England,” as she was to say, “by the wrath of God.”
To England she brought the tastes of the South; and she continued in London to be the supreme lawgiver, patron, and idol of the trouvères and troubadours. She was now old enough to bear fidelity, and Henry found no scandal in her. But the tables were turned: Henry was eleven years her junior, quite her equal in temper and passion; soon he was spreading his love among the ladies of the court; and Eleanor, who had once scorned a jealous husband, fretted and fumed in jealousy. When Henry deposed her. she fled from England, seeking the protection of Aquitaine; he had her pursued, arrested, imprisoned; and for sixteen years she languished in a confinement that never broke her will. The troubadours roused the sentiment of Europe against the King; his sons, at her behest, plotted to dethrone him, but he fought them off until his death (1189). Richard Coeur de Lion succeeded his father, released his mother, and made her regent of England while he crusaded against Saladin. When her son John became king she retired to a convent in France, and died there “through sorrow and anguish of mind,” at the age of eighty-two. She had been “a bad wife, a bad mother, and a bad queen”;57 but who would think of her as belonging to a subject sex?
V. PUBLIC MORALITY
In every age the laws and moral precepts of the nations have struggled to discourage the inveterate dishonesty of mankind. In the Middle Ages—not demonstrably more nor less than in other epochs—men, good and bad, lied to their children, mates, congregations, enemies, friends, governments, and God. Medieval man had a special fondness for forging documents. He forged apocryphal gospels, perhaps never intending them to be taken as more than pretty stories; he forged decretals as weapons in ecclesiastical politics; loyal monks forged charters to win royal grants for their monasteries;58 Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, according to the papal Curia, forged a charter to prove the antiquity of his see;59 schoolmasters forged charters to endow some colleges at Cambridge with a false antiquity; and “pious frauds” corrupted texts and invented a thousand edifying miracles. Bribery was general in education, trade, war, religion, government, law.60 Schoolboys sent pies to their examiners;61 politicians paid for appointments to public office, and collected the necessary sums from their friends;62 witnesses could be bribed to swear to anything; litigants gave presents to jurors and judges;63 in 1289 Edward I of England had to dismiss most of his judges and ministers for corruption.64 The laws arranged for solemn oaths at every turn; men swore on the Scriptures or the most sacred relics; sometimes they were required to take an oath that they would keep the oath they were about to take;65 yet perjury was so frequent that trial by combat was sometimes resorted to in the hope that God would identify the greater liar.66
Despite a thousand guild and municipal statutes and penalties, medieval craftsmen often deceived purchasers with shoddy products, false measures, and crafty substitutes. Some bakers stole small portions of dough under their customers’ eyes by means of a trap door in the kneading board; cheap cloths were secretly put in the place of better cloths promised and paid for; inferior leather was “doctored” to look like the best;67 stones were concealed in sacks of hay or wool sold by weight;68 the meat packers of Norwich were accused of “buying measly pigs, and making from them sausages and puddings unfit for human bodies.”69 Berthold of Regensburg (c. 12 20) described the different forms of cheating used in the various trades, and the tricks played upon country folk by merchants at the fairs.70 Writers and preachers condemned the pursuit of wealth, but a medieval German proverb said, “All things obey money”; and some medieval moralists judged the lust for gain stronger than the urge of sex.71 Knightly honor was often real in feudalism; but the thirteenth century was apparently as materialistic as any epoch in history. These examples of chicanery are drawn from a great area and time; though such instances were numerous they were presumably exceptional; they do not warrant any larger conclusion than that men were no better in the Age of Faith than in our age of doubt, and that in all ages law and morality have barely succeeded in maintaining social order against the innate individualism of men never intended by nature to be law-abiding citizens.
Most states made grave theft a capital crime, and the Church excommunicated brigands; even so, theft and robbery were common, from pickpockets in the streets to robber barons on the Rhine. Hungry mercenaries, fugitive criminals, ruined knights made roads unsafe; and city streets after dark saw many a brawl, robbery, rape, and murder.72 Coroners’ records from thirteenth-century Merrie England show “a proportion of manslaughters which would be considered scandalous in modern times”;73 murders were almost twice as numerous as deaths by accident; and the guilty were seldom caught.74 The Church labored patiently to repress feudal wars, but her modest measure of success was won by diverting men and pugnacity to the Crusades, which were, in one aspect, imperialistic wars for territory and trade. Once at war, Christians were no gentler to the defeated, no more loyal to pledges and treaties, than the warriors of other faiths and times.
Cruelty and brutality were apparently more frequent in the Middle Ages than in any civilization before our own. The barbarians did not at once cease to be barbarians when they became Christians. Noble lords and ladies buffeted their servants, and one another. Criminal law was brutally severe, but failed to suppress brutality and crime. The wheel, the caldron of burning oil, the stake, burning alive, flaying, tearing the limbs apart with wild animals, were often used as penalties. Anglo-Saxon law punished a female slave convicted of theft by making each of eighty female slaves pay a fine, bring three faggots, and burn her to death.75 In the wars of central Italy in the late thirteenth century, says the chronicle of the contemporary Italian monk Salimbene, prisoners were treated with a barbarity that in our youth would have been incredible:
For some men’s heads they bound with a cord and lever, and strained it with such force that their eyes started from their sockets and fell upon their cheeks; others they bound by the right or left thumb only, and thus lifted the whole weight of their bodies from the ground; others again they racked with yet more foul and horrible torments which I blush to relate; others … they would seat with hands bound behind their backs, and laid under their feet a pot of live coals… or they bound their hands and legs together round a spit (as a lamb is carried to the butcher), and kept them thus hanging all day long, without food or drink; or again, with a rough piece of wood they would rub and grate their shins until the bare bone appeared, which was a misery and sore pity even to behold.76
Medieval man bore suffering bravely, and perhaps with less sensitivity than the men of Western Europe would show today. In all classes men and women were hearty and sensual; their festivals were feasts of drinking, gambling, dancing, and sexual relaxation; their jokes were of a candor hardly rivaled today;77 their speech was freer, their oaths vaster and more numerous.78 Hardly a man in France, says Joinville, could open his mouth without mentioning the Devil.79 The medieval stomach was stronger than ours, and bore without flinching the most Rabelaisian details; the nuns in Chaucer listen unperturbed to the scatology of the Miller’s Tale; and the chronicle of the good monk Salimbene is at times untranslatably physical.80 Taverns were numerous, and some, in modern style, supplied “tarts” with ale.81 The Church tried to close the taverns on Sundays, with small success.82 Occasional drunkenness was the prerogative of every class. A visitor to Lübeck found some patrician ladies in a wine cellar, drinking hard under their veils.83 At Cologne there was a society that met to drink wine, and took for its motto, Bibite cum hilaritate; but it imposed upon its members strict rules for moderation in conduct and modesty in speech.84
The medieval man, like any other, was a thoroughly human mixture of lust and romance, humility and egotism, cruelty and tenderness, piety and greed. Those same men and women who drank and cursed so heartily were capable of touching kindnesses and a thousand charities. Cats and dogs were pets then as now; dogs were trained to lead the blind;85 and knights developed an attachment for their horses, falcons, and dogs. The administration of charity reached new heights in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Individuals, guilds, governments, and the Church shared in relieving the unfortunate. Almsgiving was universal. Men hopeful of paradise left charitable bequests. Rich men dowered poor girls, fed scores of the poor daily, and hundreds on major festivals. At many baronial gates doles of food were distributed thrice weekly to all who asked.86 Nearly every great lady felt it a social, if not a moral, necessity, to share in the administration of charity. Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth century, advocated a state fund for the relief of poverty, sickness, and old age;87 but most of this work was left to the Church. In one aspect the Church was a continent-wide organization for charitable aid. Gregory the Great, Charlemagne, and others required that one fourth of the tithes collected by any parish should be applied to succor the poor and the infirm;88 it was so done for a time; but the expropriation of parish revenues by lay and ecclesiastical superiors disrupted this parochial administration in the twelfth century, and the work fell more than ever upon bishops, monks, nuns, and popes. All nuns but a few human sinners devoted themselves to education, nursing, and charity; their ever-widening ministrations are among the brightest and most heartening features of medieval and modern history. Monasteries, supplied by gifts and alms and ecclesiastical revenues, fed the poor, tended the sick, ransomed prisoners. Thousands of monks taught the young, cared for orphans, or served in hospitals. The great abbey of Cluny atoned for its wealth by an ample distribution of alms. The popes did what they could to help the poor of Rome, and continued in their own way the ancient imperial dole.
Despite all this charity, begging flourished. Hospitals and almshouses tried to provide food and lodging for all applicants; soon the gates were surrounded by the halt, the decrepit, the maimed, the blind, and ragged vagabonds who went from “spital to spital, prowling and poaching for lumps of bread and meat.”89 Mendicancy reached in medieval Christendom and Islam a scope and pertinacity unequaled today except in the poorest areas of the Far East.
VI. MEDIEVAL DRESS
Who were the people of medieval Europe? We cannot divide them into “races”; they were all of the “white race” except the Negro slaves. But what a baffling unclassifiable variety of men! Greeks of Byzantium and Hellas, the half-Greek Italians of southern Italy, the Greco-Moorish-Jewish population of Sicily, the Romans, Umbrians, Tuscans, Lombards, Genoese, Venetians of Italy—all so diverse that each at once betrayed his origin by dress and coiffure and speech; the Berbers, Arabs, Jews, and Christians of Spain; the Gascons, Provencals, Burgundians, Parisians, Normans, of France; the Flemings, Walloons, and Dutch of the Lowlands; the Celtic, Anglian, Saxon, Danish, Norman stocks in England; the Celts of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland; the Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes; the hundred tribes of Germany; the Finns and Magyars and Bulgars; the Slavs of Poland, Bohemia, the Baltic States, the Balkans, and Russia: here was such a farrago of bloods and types and noses and beards and dress that no one description could fit their proud diversity.
The Germans, by a millennium of migrations and conquests, had made their type prevail in the upper classes of all Western Europe except central and southern Italy, and Spain. The blond type was so definitely admired in hair and eyes that St. Bernard struggled through an entire sermon to reconcile with this preference the “I am black but beautiful” of the Song of Songs. The ideal knight was to be tall and blond and bearded; the ideal woman in epic and romance was slender and graceful, with blue eyes and long blond or golden hair. The long hair of the Franks gave place, in the upper classes of the ninth century, to heads closely cropped in back, with only a cap of hair on the top; and beards disappeared among the European gentry in the twelfth century. The male peasantry, however, continued to wear long and unclean beards, and hair so ample that it was sometimes gathered in braids.90 In England all classes kept long hair, and the male beaux of the thirteenth century dyed their hair, curled it with irons, and bound it with ribbons.91 In the same land and century the married ladies tied up their hair in a net of golden thread, while highborn lasses let it fall down their backs, with sometimes a curl falling demurely over each shoulder upon the breast.92
The West Europeans of the Middle Ages were more abundantly and attractively dressed than before or since; and the men often excelled the women in splendor and color of costume. In the fifth century the loose toga and tunic of the Roman fought a losing war with the breeches and belt of the Gaul; the colder climate and military occupations of the North required tighter and thicker clothing than had been suggested by the warmth and ease of the South; and a revolution in dress followed the transfer of power across the Alps. The common man wore close-fitting pantaloons and tunic or blouse, both of leather or strong cloth; at the belt hung knife, purse, keys, sometimes the worker’s tools; over the shoulders was flung a cloak or cape; on the head a cap or hat of wool or felt or skins; on the legs long stockings; and on the feet high leather shoes curled up at the toe to forestall stubbing. Toward the end of the Middle Ages the hose grew longer till they reached the hips and evolved into the uncomfortable trousers that modern man has substituted, as a perennial penance, for the hair shirt of the medieval saint. Nearly all garments were of wool except some of skin or leather among peasants or hunters; nearly all were spun, woven, cut, and sewed at home; but the rich had professional tailors, known in England as “scissors.” Buttons, occasionally used in antiquity, were avoided before the thirteenth century, and then appeared as functionless ornaments; hence the phrase “not worth a button.”93 In the twelfth century the tight Germanic costume was overlaid in both sexes with a girdled gown.
The rich embellished these basic garments in a hundred fancy ways. Hems and necklines were trimmed with fur; silk, satin, or velvet replaced linen or wool when the weather allowed; a velvet cap covered the head, and shoes of colored cloth followed closely the form of the feet. The finest furs came from Russia; the choicest was ermine, made from white weasel; barons were known to mortgage their lands to buy ermine for their wives. The rich wore drawers of fine white linen; hose often colored, usually of wool, sometimes of silk; a shirt of white linen, with flaunty collar and cuffs; over this a tunic; and over all, in cold or rainy weather, a mantle or cape or chaperon—a cape with a cowl that could be drawn up over the head. Some caps were made with a flat square top; these mortiers or “mortar-boards” were affected in the later Middle Ages by lawyers and doctors, and survive in our college dignities. Dandies wore gloves in any weather, and (complained the monk Ordericus Vitalis) “swept the dusty ground with the prodigal trains of their mantles and robes.”94
Jewelry was displayed by men not only on the person but on the clothing—cap, robe, shoes. Some garments were embroidered with sacred or profane texts in pearls;95 some were trimmed with gold or silver lace, some wore cloth of gold. Kings had to distinguish themselves with extra finery: Edward the Confessor wore a robe resplendently embroidered with gold by his accomplished wife Edgitha, and Charles the Bold of Burgundy wore a robe of state so thickly inlaid with precious stones that it was valued at 200,000 ducats ($1,082,000). All but the poor wore rings; and every man of any account had a signet ring bearing his personal seal; a mark made with this seal was accepted as his personal signature.
Dress was an index of status or wealth; each class protested against the imitation of its raiment by the class below it; and sumptuary laws were vainly passed—as in France in 1294 and 1306—seeking to regulate a citizen’s expenditure on wardrobe according to his fortune and his class. The retainers, or dependent knights, of a great lord wore, at formal functions, robes presented to them by him and dyed in his favorite or distinctive color; such robes were called livery (livrée) because the lord delivered them twice a year. Good medieval garments, however, were made to last a lifetime, and some were carefully bequeathed by will.
Wellborn ladies wore a long linen chemise; over this a fur-trimmed pelisson or robe reaching to the feet; over this a bliaut or blouse worn loose in dishabille, but tightly laced against the coming of company; for all fine ladies longed for slenderness. They might also wear jeweled girdles, a silken purse, and chamois-skin gloves. Often they wore flowers in their hair, or bound it with fillets of jeweled silk. Some ladies aroused the clergy, and doubtless worried their husbands, by wearing tall conical hats adorned with horns; at one time a woman without horns was subject to unbearable ridicule.96 In the later Middle Ages high heels became the fashion. Moralists complained that women found frequent occasions to raise their robes an inch or two to show trim ankles and dainty shoes; female legs, however, were a private and costly revelation. Dante denounced the ladies of Florence for public décolleté that “showed the bosom and the breasts.”97 The dress of ladies at tournaments furnished an exciting topic for clergymen; and cardinals legislated on the length of women’s robes. When the clergy decreed veils as vital to morality, the women “caused their veils to be made of fine muslin and silk inwoven with gold, wherein they showed ten times fairer than before, and drew beholders’ eyes all the more to wantonness.”98 The monk Guyot of Provins complained that women used so much paint on their faces that none was left to color the icons in the churches; he warned them that when they wore false hair, or applied poultices of mashed beans and mares’ milk to their faces to improve their complexion, they were adding centuries to their durance in purgatory.99 Berthold of Regensburg, about 1220, berated women with vain eloquence:
Ye women, ye have bowels of compassion, and ye go to church more readily than the men … and many of you would be saved but for this one snare: … in order that ye may compass men’s praise ye spend all your labor on your garments…. Many of you pay as much to the seamstress as the cost of the cloth itself; it must have shields on the shoulders, it must be flounced and tucked all round the hem. It is not enough for you to show your pride in your very buttonholes; you must also send your feet to hell by special torments…. Ye busy yourselves with your veils: ye twitch them hither, ye twitch them thither; ye gild them here and there with gold thread, and spend thereon all your trouble. Ye will spend a good six months’ work on a single veil, which is sinful great travail—and all that men may praise your dress: “Ah, God! how fair! Was ever so fair a garment?” “How, Brother Berthold” (you say), “we do it only for the goodman’s sake, that he may gaze the less on other women.” No, believe me, if thy goodman be a good man indeed he would far rather behold thy chaste conversation than thy outward adorning…. Ye men might put an end to this, and fight against it doughtily; first with good words; and if they are still obdurate step valiantly in … tear it from her head, even though four or ten hairs should come with it, and cast it into the fire! Do thus not thrice or four times only; and presently she will forbear.100
Sometimes the women took such preaching to heart, and—two centuries before Savonarola—cast their veils and ornaments into the fire.101 Fortunately, such repentance was brief and rare.
VII. IN THE HOME
There was not much comfort in a medieval home. Windows were few, and seldom glazed; wooden shutters closed them against glare or cold. Heating was by one or more fireplaces; drafts came in from a hundred cracks in the walls, and made high-backed chairs a boon. In winter it was common to wear warm hats and furs indoors. Furniture was scanty but well made. Chairs were few, and usually had no backs; but sometimes they were elegantly carved, engraved with armorial bearings, and inlaid with precious stones. Most seats were cut into the masonry walls, or built upon chests in alcoves. Carpets were unusual before the thirteenth century. Italy and Spain had them; and when Eleanor of Castile went to England in 1254 as the bride of the future Edward I, her servants covered the floors of her apartment at Westminster with carpets after the Spanish custom—which then spread through England. Ordinary floors were strewn with rushes or straw, making some houses so malodorous that the parish priest refused to visit them. Walls might be hung with tapestries, partly as ornaments, partly to hinder drafts, partly to divide the great hall of the house into smaller rooms. Homes in Italy and Provence, still remembering Roman luxuries, were more comfortable and sanitary than those of the North. The homes of German bourgeois, in the thirteenth century, had water piped into the kitchen from wells.102
Cleanliness, in the Middle Ages, was not next to godliness. Early Christianity had denounced the Roman baths as wells of perversion and promiscuity, and its general disapproval of the body had put no premium on hygiene. The modern use of the handkerchief was unknown.103 Cleanliness was next to money, and varied with income; the feudal lord and the rich bourgeois bathed with reasonable frequency, in large wooden tubs; and in the twelfth century the spread of wealth spread personal cleanliness. Many cities in Germany, France, and England had public baths in the thirteenth century; one student reckons that Parisians bathed more frequently in 1292 than in the twentieth century.104 One result of the Crusades was the introduction into Europe of public steam baths in the Moslem style.105 The Church frowned upon public baths as leading to immorality; and several of them justified her fears. Some towns provided public mineral baths.
Monasteries, feudal castles, and rich homes had latrines, emptying into cesspools, but most homes managed with outhouses; and in many cases one outhouse had to serve a dozen homes.106 Pipes for carrying off waste were one of the sanitary reforms introduced into England under Edward I (1271–1307). In the thirteenth century the chamber pots of Paris were freely emptied from windows into the street, with only a warning cry of Gar’ l’eau! —such contretemps were a cliché of comedies as late as Molière. Public comfort stations were a luxury; San Gimignano had some in 1255, but Florence as yet had none.107 People eased themselves in courtyards, on stairways and balconies, even in the palace of the Louvre. After a pestilence in 1531 a decree ordered Parisian landlords to provide a latrine for every house, but this ordinance was much honored in the breach.108
The upper and middle classes washed before and after meals, for most eating was done with the fingers. There were but two regular meals daily, one at ten, another at four; but either repast might last several hours. In great houses the meal was announced by blasts on a hunting horn. The dinner board might be rude planks on trestles, or a great table strongly built of costly wood and admirably carved. Around it were stools or benches—in French, bancs, whence banquet. In some French homes ingenious machines raised or lowered into place, from a lower or upper story, a full table ready served, and made it disappear in a moment when the meal was finished.109 Servants brought ewers of water to each diner, who washed the hands therein and wiped them on napkins which were then put away; in the thirteenth century no napkins were used during the meal, but the diner wiped his hands on the tablecloth.110 The company sat in couples, gentleman and lady paired; usually each couple ate from one plate and drank from one cup.111 Each person received a spoon; forks were known in the thirteenth century, but seldom provided; and the diner used his own knife. Cups, saucers, and plates were normally of wood;112 but the feudal aristocracy and the rich bourgeoisie had dishes of earthenware or pewter, and some displayed dinner sets of silver, even, here and there, of gold.113 Dishes of cut glass might be added, and a large silver vessel in the shape of a ship, containing various spices, and the knife and spoon of the host. Instead of a plate each couple received a large piece of bread, flat, round, and thick; upon this tranchoir the diner placed the meat and bread that he took with his fingers from the platters passed to him; when the meal was over the “trencher” was eaten by the diner, or given to the dogs and cats that swarmed around, or sent out to the neighboring poor. A great meal was completed with spices and sweets and a final round of wine.
Food was abundant, varied, and well prepared, except that lack of refrigeration soon made meats high, and put a premium on spices that could preserve or disguise. Some spices were imported from the Orient; but as these were costly, other spices were grown in domestic gardens—parsley, mustard, sage, savory, anise, garlic, dill…. Cookbooks were numerous and complex; in a great establishment the cook was a man of importance, bearing on his shoulders the dignity and reputation of the house. He was equipped with a gleaming armory of copper caldrons, kettles, and pans, and prided himself on serving dishes that would please the eye as well as the palate. Meat, poultry, and eggs were cheap,114 though still dear enough to make most of the poor unwilling vegetarians.115 Peasants flourished on coarse whole-grain bread of barley, oats, or rye, baked in their homes; city dwellers preferred white bread—baked by bakers—as a mark of caste. There were no potatoes, coffee, or tea; but nearly all meats and vegetables now used in Europe—including eels, frogs, and snails—were eaten by medieval man.116 By the time of Charlemagne the European acclimatization of Asiatic fruits and nuts was almost complete; oranges, however, were still a rarity in the thirteenth century north of the Alps and the Pyrenees. The commonest meat was pork. Pigs ate the refuse in the streets, and people ate the pigs. It was widely believed that pork caused leprosy, but this did not lessen the taste for it; great sausages and black puddings were a medieval delight. Lordly hosts might have a whole roast pig or boar brought to the table, and carve it before their gaping guests; this was a delicacy almost as keenly relished as partridges, quails, thrushes, peacocks, and cranes. Fish was a staple food; herring was a main recourse of soldiers, sailors, and the poor. Dairy products were less used than today, but the cheese of Brie was already renowned.117 Salads were unknown, and confections were rare. Sugar was still an import, and had not yet replaced honey for sweetening. Desserts were usually of fruits and nuts. Pastries were innumerable; and jolly bakers, quite unreproved, gave cakes and buns the most interesting shapes imaginable—quaedam pudenda muliebra, aliae virilia.118 It seems incredible that there was no after-dinner smoking. Both sexes drank instead.
As unboiled water was seldom safe, all classes found substitutes for it in beer and wine. “Drinkwater” and “Boileau” were unusual names, indicating unusual tastes. Cider or perry was made from apples or pears, and provided cheap intoxicants for the peasantry. Drunkenness was a favorite vice of the Middle Ages, in all classes and sexes. Taverns were numerous, ale was cheap. Beer was the regular drink of the poor, even at breakfast. Monasteries and hospitals north of the Alps were normally allowed a gallon of ale or beer per person per day.119 Many monasteries, castles, and rich homes had their own breweries, for in the northern countries beer was reckoned as second only to bread as a necessary of life. Among the well-to-do of all nations, and in all ranks of Latin Europe, wine was preferred. France produced the most famous wines, and proclaimed their glory in a thousand popular songs. At vintage time the peasants worked harder than usual, and were rewarded by good abbots with a moral holiday. A customal of the abbey of St. Peter in the Black Forest includes some tender clauses:
When the peasants have unladen the wine, they shall be brought into the monastery, and shall have meat and drink in abundance. A great tub shall be set there and filled with wine … and each shall drink … and if they wax drunken and smite the cellarman or the cook, they shall pay no fine for this deed; and they shall drink so that two of them cannot beat the third to the wagon.120
After a banquet the host would usually offer entertainment by jugglers, tumblers, players, minstrels, or buffoons. Some manor houses had their own staff of such entertainers; some rich men kept jesters whose merry impudence and ribald humor could be vented without fear and without reproach. If the diners preferred to provide their own amusement they could tell stories, hear or make music, dance, flirt, play backgammon, chess, or parlor games; even barons and baronesses romped about in “forfeits” and “blind man’s buff.” Playing cards were still unknown. French laws of 1256 and 1291 forbade making, or playing with, dice, but gambling with dice was widespread nonetheless, and moralists told of fortunes and souls lost in the game. Gambling was not always forbidden by law; Siena provided booths for it in the public square.121 Chess was prohibited by a council at Paris (1213) and by an edict of Louis IX (1254); no one paid much attention to these demurrers; the game became a consuming pastime among the aristocracy, and gave its name to the royal exchequer—a chequered table or chessboard on which the revenues of the state were reckoned.122 In Dante’s youth a Saracen player set all Florence agape by playing three games of chess at once against the best players of the city; he looked at one board and kept the plays on the other two in his head; of the three games he won two and tied the third.123 The game of checkers was played in France as dames, in England as “draughts.”
Dancing was condemned by preachers, and was practiced by nearly all persons except those dedicated to religion. St. Thomas Aquinas, with characteristic moderation, allowed dancing at weddings, or on the homecoming of a friend from abroad, or to celebrate some national victory; and the hearty saint went so far as to say that dancing, if kept decent, was a very healthy exercise.124 Albertus Magnus showed a like liberality, but medieval moralists generally reprobated the dance as an invention of the Devil.125 The Church frowned upon it as provocative of immorality;126 the young blades of the Middle Ages did their best to justify her suspicions.127 The French and Germans in particular were fond of the dance, and developed many folk dances to mark the festivals of the agricultural year, to celebrate victories, or to sustain public spirit in depression or plague. One of the Carmina Burana describes the dances of girls in the fields as among the sweetest pleasures of spring. When knighthood was conferred all the knights of the vicinity gathered in full armor and performed evolutions on horseback or on foot, while the populace danced around them to the accompaniment of martial music. Dancing could become an epidemic: in 1237 a band of German children danced all the way from Erfurt to Arnstadt; many died en route; and some survivors suffered to the end of their lives from St. Vitus’ dance, or other nervous disorders.128
Most dancing took place by day and in the open air. Houses were poorly lit at night—by standing or hanging lamps with wick and oil, or a rushlight torch of mutton fat; and as fat and oils were expensive, very little work or reading was done after sunset. Soon after dark the guests dispersed, and the household retired. Bedrooms seldom sufficed; it was not uncommon to find an extra bed in the hall or reception room. The poor slept well on beds of straw, the rich slept poorly on perfumed pillows and feather mattresses. Lordly beds were overhung with mosquito netting or a canopy, and were mounted with the aid of stools. Several persons, of any age or sex, might sleep in the same room. In England and France all classes slept nude.129
VIII. SOCIETY AND SPORT
The general coarseness of medieval manners was smoothed by certain graces of feudal courtesy. Men shook hands on meeting, as a pledge of peace through unreadiness to draw a sword. Titles were innumerable, in a hundred grades of dignity; and by a charming custom each dignitary was addressed by his title and his Christian name, or the name of his estate. A code of manners was drawn up for polite society in any circumstance—at home, at the dance, on the street, at tournament, at court; ladies had to learn how to walk, curtsey, ride horseback, play, carry falcons gracefully on the wrist…; all this, and a like code for men, constituted courtoisie, the manners of the court, courtesy. The thirteenth century saw the publication of many guides to etiquette.130
In traveling, one expected courtesies and hospitality from persons of his own class. The poor for charity, the rich for fee or gift, would be sheltered en route by convents or monasteries. As early as the eighth century monks established hospices in the passes of the Alps. Some monasteries had great guest-houses capable of sheltering 300 wayfarers, and stabling their horses.131 Most travelers, however, put up at wayside inns; rates were low there, and a wench might be had at a reasonable rate, if one guarded his purse. Offered such comforts, many braved the dangers of travel—merchants, bankers, priests, diplomats, pilgrims, students, monks, tourists, tramps. The highways of the Middle Ages, however discouraging, were alive with curious and hopeful people who thought that they would be happier somewhere else.
Class distinctions were as sharp in amusement as in travel. The mighty and the lowly mingled now and then: when the. king held a public assembly of his vassals, and distributed food to the crowd; when the aristocratic cavalry performed martial maneuvers; when some prince or princess, king or queen, entered the city in panoplied state, and masses lined the highway to feed on pageantry; or when a tournament or trial by combat was opened to the public eye. Planned spectacles were a vital part of medieval life; church processions, political parades, guild celebrations, filled the streets with banners, floats, wax saints, fat merchants, prancing knights, and military bands. Traveling mummers staged short plays in the village or city square; minstrels sang and played and strummed romantic tales; acrobats tumbled and juggled, and men and women walked or danced on tightropes across mortal chasms; or two blindfolded men belabored each other with sticks; or a circus would come to town, exhibit strange animals and stranger men, and pit one animal against another in combat to the death.
Among the nobility hunting rivaled jousting as the royal sport. Game laws restricted the season to brief periods, and poaching laws kept game preserves for the aristocracy. The woods of Europe were still inhabited by beasts who had not yet acknowledged the victory of man in the war for the planet; medieval Paris, for example, was several times invaded by wolves. In one aspect the hunter was engaged in maintaining man’s precarious ascendancy; in another he was adding to the food supply; and, not least, he was preparing himself for inevitable war by hardening body and spirit to danger, combat, and the shedding of blood. At the same time he made this, too, a pageant. Great olifants—hunting horns of ivory, sometimes chased with gold —rounded up the ladies and gentlemen and dogs: women sitting daintily sidesaddle on prancing steeds; men in colorful attire and varied armament—bow and arrow, small ax, spear, and knife; greyhounds, staghounds, bloodhounds, boarhounds pulling on the leash. If the chase led across a peasant’s fields, the baron, his vassals, and his guests were free to cross them at whatever cost to seeds and crops; and only reckless peasants would complain.132 The French aristocracy organized hunting into a system, gave it the name of chasse, and developed for it a complex ritual and etiquette.
The ladies joined with especial flair in the most aristocratic game of all—falconry. Nearly all great estates had aviaries housing a variety of birds, of which the falcon was most prized. It was taught to perch on my lord or lady’s wrist at any time; some piquant dames kept them so while hearing Mass. The Emperor Frederick II wrote an excellent book on falconry, running to 589 pages, and introduced into Europe from Islam the custom of controlling the nerves and curiosity of the bird by covering its head with a leather hood. Different varieties were trained to fly up and attack diverse birds, kill or wound them, and return to the hunter’s wrist; there, lured and rewarded by a bit of meat, they allowed their feet to be snared in straps until fresh prey flew into view. A well-trained falcon was almost the finest gift that could be made to noble or king. The duke of Burgundy ransomed his son by sending twelve white hawks to the captor, Sultan Bajazet. The office of grand falconer of France was one of the highest and best paid in the kingdom.
Many another sport made tolerable the summer’s heat and the winter’s cold, and turned the passions and energies of youth to vital skills. Practically every lad learned to swim; and in the North all learned to skate. Horse racing was popular, especially in Italy. All classes practiced archery; but only the working classes had the leisure to fish. There were divers games of bowling, hockey, quoits, wrestling, boxing, tennis, football…. Tennis developed in France, probably from Moslem antecedents; the name was apparently derived from the tenez!—“play!”—with which a player announced his serve.133 The sport became so popular in France and England that it was sometimes played before large crowds in theaters or the open air.134 The Irish played hockey as early as our second century; and a Byzantine historian of the twelfth century gives a vivid description of a polo match played with cord-strung racquets as in lacrosse.135 Football, says a horrified medieval chronicler, “is an abominable game wherein young people propel a huge ball not by throwing it into the air but by striking and rolling it along the ground, not with their hands but with their feet.”136 Apparently the game had come from China to Italy137 to England, where it became so popular and violent in the thirteenth century that Edward II banned it as. leading to breaches of the peace (1314).
Life was more social then than later; group activities stirred the monasteries, nunneries, universities, villages, guilds. Life was especially hilarious on Sundays and solemn holy days; then the peasant, the merchant, and the lord dressed their best, prayed the longest, drank the most.138 On May Day the English raised Maypoles, lit bonfires, and danced around them in semiconscious recollection of pagan fertility feasts. At Christmas time many towns and châteaux appointed a Lord of Misrule to organize pastimes and spectacles for the populace. Mummers in masks and beards and jolly garb went about performing street plays or pranks, or singing Christmas carols; houses and churches were decked with holly, ivy, “and whatsoever the season afforded to be green.”139 There were festivals for the agricultural seasons, for national or local triumphs, for saints, and for guilds; and rare was the man who on those occasions did not drink his fill. Merrie England had “scot-ales,” or money-raising bazaars at which ale flowed fast but not free; the Church denounced these festivities in the thirteenth century, and adopted them in the fifteenth.140
Some festivals adapted the ceremonies of the Church to boisterous parodies that ranged from simple humor to scandalous satire. Beauvais, Sens, and other French towns through many years celebrated on January 14 a fête de l’âne, or Festival of the Ass: a pretty girl was placed on an ass, apparently to represent Mary on the Flight to Egypt; the ass was led into a church, was made to genuflect, was stationed beside the altar, and heard a Mass and hymns sung in its praise; and at the end both the priest and the congregation brayed thrice in honor of the animal that had saved the Mother of God from Herod, and borne Jesus into Jerusalem.141 A dozen cities of France celebrated annually—usually on the Feast of the Circumcision—a fête des fous, or Feast of Fools. On that day the lower clergy were allowed to revenge themselves for their subordination to priest and bishop during the year by taking over the church and the ritual; they dressed themselves in feminine costumes, or in ecclesiastical vestments turned inside out; they chose one of their number to be episcopus fatuorum or fools’ bishop; they chanted ribald hymns, ate sausages on the altar, played dice at its foot, burned old shoes in the censer, and preached hilarious sermons.142 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries many towns in England, Germany, and France chose an episcopus puerorum, or boys’ bishop, to lead his fellows in a good-humored imitation of ecclesiastical ceremonies.143 The local clergy smiled on these popular buffooneries; the Church closed her eyes to them for a long time; but as they tended to ever greater irreverence and indecency she was forced to condemn them, and they finally disappeared in the sixteenth century.*
In general the Church was lenient with the lusty humor of the Age of Faith; she knew that men must have a moral holiday now and then, a moratorium on the unnatural moral restraints normally necessary to a civilized society. Some ultra-Puritans like St. John Chrysostom might cry out: “Christ is crucified, and yet you laugh!”—but there continued to be “cakes and ale,” and wine ran hot in the mouth. St. Bernard was suspicious of mirth and beauty; but most churchmen in the thirteenth century were hearty livers who enjoyed their meat and drink with a good conscience, and took no offense at a well-turned joke or ankle. The Age of Faith was not so solemn after all; rather it was an age of abounding vitality and full-blooded merriment, and tender sentiment, and a simple joy in the blessings of the earth. On the back of a medieval vocabulary book some wistful student wrote a wish for all of us:
And I wish that all times were April and May, and every month renew all fruits again, and every day fleur-de-lis and gillyflower and violets and roses wherever one goes, and woods in leaf and meadows green, and every lover should have his lass, and they to love each other with a sure heart and true, and to everyone his pleasure and a gay heart.145
IX. MORALITY AND RELIGION
Does the general picture of medieval Europe support the belief that religion makes for morality?
Our general impression suggests a wider gap between moral theory and practice in the Middle Ages than in other epochs of civilization. Medieval Christendom was apparently as rich as our own irreligious age in sensuality, violence, drunkenness, cruelty, coarseness, profanity, greed, robbery, dishonesty, and fraud. It seems to have outdone our time in the enslavement of individuals, but not to have rivaled it in the economic enslavement of colonial areas or defeated states. It surpassed us in the subjection of women; it hardly equaled us in immodesty, fornication, and adultery, or in the immensity and murderousness of war. Compared with the Roman Empire from Nerva to Aurelius, medieval Christendom was a moral setback; but much of the Empire had in Nerva’s day enjoyed many centuries of civilization, while the Middle Ages, through most of their duration, represented a struggle between Christian morality and a virile barbarism that largely ignored the ethics of the religion whose theology it indifferently received. The barbarians would have called some of their vices virtues, as necessary to their time: their violence as the other side of courage, their sensuality as animal health, their coarse and direct speech, and their shameless talk about natural things, as no worse than the introverted prudery of our youth.
It would be an easy matter to condemn medieval Christendom from the mouths of its own moralists. St. Francis bemoaned the thirteenth century as “these times of superabundant malice and iniquity”;146 Innocent III, St. Bonaventura, Vincent of Beauvais, Dante considered the morals of that “wonderful century” to be dishearteningly gross; and Bishop Grosseteste, one of the most judicious prelates of the age, told the pope that “the Catholic population, as a body, was incorporate with the Devil.”147 Roger Bacon (1214?-94) judged his time with characteristic hyperbole:
Never was so much ignorance…. Far more sins reign in these days than in any past age… boundless corruption… lechery… gluttony…. Yet we have baptism and the revelation of Christ… which men cannot really believe in or revere, or they would not allow themselves to be so corrupted…. Therefore many wise men believe that Antichrist is at hand, and the end of the world.148
Such passages, of course, are the exaggerations necessary to reformers, and could be matched in any age.
Apparently the fear of hell had less effect in raising the moral level than the fear of public opinion or the law has now—or had then; but the public opinion, and in a measure the law, had been formed by Christianity. Probably the moral chaos, born of half a millennium of invasion, war, and devastation, would have been far worse without the moderating effect of the Christian ethic. Our selection of instances in this chapter may have been unwittingly biased; at best they are fragmentary; statistics are lacking or unreliable; and history always leaves out the average man. There must have been, in medieval Christendom, thousands of good and simple people like Fra Salimbene’s mother, whom he describes as “a humble lady and devout, fasting much, and gladly dispensing alms to the poor”;149 but how often do such women make the pages of history?
Christianity brought some moral retrogressions and some moral advances. The intellectual virtues naturally declined in the Age of Faith; intellectual conscience (fairness with the facts) and the search for truth were replaced by zeal and admiration for sanctity, and a sometimes unscrupulous piety; “pious frauds” of textual doctoring and documentary forgery seemed negligible venial sins. The civic virtues suffered from concentration on the afterlife, but more from the disintegration of the state; nevertheless there must have been some patriotism, however local, in the men and women who built so many cathedrals and some lordly town halls. Perhaps hypocrisy, so indispensable to civilization, increased in the Middle Ages as compared with the frank secularism of antiquity, or the unabashed corporate brutality of our time.
Against these and other debits many credits stand. Christianity struggled with heroic tenacity against an inundation of barbarism. It labored to diminish war and feud, trial by combat or ordeal; it extended the intervals of truce and peace, and sublimated something of feudal violence and pugnacity into devotion and chivalry. It suppressed the gladiatorial shows, denounced the enslavement of prisoners, forbade the enslavement of Christians, ransomed numberless captives, and encouraged—more than it practiced—the emancipation of serfs. It taught men a new respect for human life and work. It stopped infanticide, lessened abortion, and softened the penalties exacted by Roman and barbarian law. It steadfastly rejected the double standard in sexual morality. It immensely expanded the scope and operations of charity. It gave men peace of mind against the baffling riddles of the universe, though at the cost of discouraging science and philosophy. Finally, it taught men that patriotism unchecked by a higher loyalty is a tool of mass greed and crime. Over all the competing cities and petty states of Europe it established and maintained one moral law. Under its guidance, and at some necessary sacrifice of liberty, Europe achieved for a century that international morality for which it prays and struggles today—a law that shall raise states out of their jungle code, and free the energies of men for the battles and victories of peace.
CHAPTER XXXI
The Resurrection of the Arts
1095–1300
I. THE ESTHETIC AWAKENING
WHY is it that Western Europe, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, reached a climax of art comparable with Periclean Athens and Augustan Rome?
The Norse and Saracen raids had been beaten off, the Magyars had been tamed. The Crusades aroused a fever of creative energy, and brought back to Europe a thousand ideas and art forms from the Byzantine and Moslem East. The reopening of the Mediterranean, and the opening of the Atlantic to Christian commerce, the security and organization of trade along the rivers of France and Germany and on the northern seas, and the expansion of industry and finance, generated a wealth unknown since Constantine, new classes capable of affording art, and prosperous communes each resolved to build a finer cathedral than the last. The coffers of abbots, bishops, and popes were swelling with the tithes of the people, the gifts of the merchants, the grants of nobles and kings. The Iconoclasts had been defeated; art was no longer branded as idolatry; the Church, which once had feared it, found in it now a propitious medium for inculcating her faith and ideals among the letterless, and for stirring souls to a devotion that lifted spires like supplicating litanies to the sky. And the new religion of Mary, rising spontaneously from the hearts of the people, poured its love and trust of the Divine Mother into magnificent temples where thousands of her children might gather at once to do her homage and beg her aid. All these influences, and many more, came together to flood half a continent with profuse streams of unprecedented art.
The ancient techniques had here and there survived barbarian devastation and municipal decay. In the Eastern Empire the old skills were never lost; and it was above all from the Greek East and Byzantine Italy that artists and art themes now entered the life of the resurrected West. Charlemagne drew into his service Greek artists fleeing from Byzantine Iconoclasts; hence the art of Aachen married Byzantine delicacy and mysticism to German solidity and earthiness. The monk artists of Cluny, inaugurating in the tenth century a new era in Western architecture and adornment, began by copying Byzantine models. The school of monastic art developed at Monte Cassino by Abbot Desiderius (1072) was taught by Greek teachers on Byzantine lines. When Honorius III (1218) wished to decorate San Paolo fuori le mura he sent to Venice for mosaicists; and those who came were steeped in the Byzantine tradition. Colonies of Byzantine artists could be found in a score of Western cities; and it was their style of painting that molded Duccio, ‘Cimabue, and the early Giotto himself. Byzantine or Oriental motives—palmettes, acanthus leaves, animals within medallions—came to the West on textiles and ivories and in illuminated manuscripts, and lived hundreds of years in Romanesque ornament. Syrian, Anatolian, Persian forms of architecture—the vault, the dome, the tower-flanked façade, the composite column, the windows grouped by two or three under a binding arch—appeared again in the architecture of the West. History makes no leaps, and nothing is lost.
Just as the development of life requires variation as well as heredity, and the development of a society needs experimental innovation as well as stabilizing custom, so the development of art in Western Europe involved not only the continuity of a tradition in skills and forms, and the stimulation of Byzantine and Moslem examples, but also the repeated turning of the artist from the school to nature, from ideas to things, from the past to the present, from the imitation of models to the expression of self. There was a somber and static quality in Byzantine art, a fragile and feminine elegance in Arabic ornament, that could never represent the dynamic and masculine vitality of a rebarbarized and reinvigorated West. Nations that were rising out of the Dark Ages toward the noon of the thirteenth century preferred the noble grace of Giotto’s women to the stiff Theodoras of Byzantine mosaics; and, laughing at the Semitic horror of images, they transformed mere decoration into the smiling angel of the Reims Cathedral, and the Golden Virgin of Amiens. The joy of life conquered the fear of death in Gothic art.
It was the monks who, as they preserved classic literature, maintained and disseminated Roman, Greek, and Oriental art techniques. Seeking self-containment, the monasteries trained their inmates to the decorative as well as the practical crafts. The abbey church required altar and chancel furniture, chalice and pyx, reliquaries and shrines, missal, candelabra, perhaps mosaics, murals, and icons to inform and inspire piety; these the monks for the most part fashioned with their own hands; indeed, the monastery itself was in many cases designed and built by them, as Monte Cassino rises by Benedictine labor today. Most monasteries included spacious workshops; at Chartres, for example, Bernard de Tiron founded a religious house and gathered into it, we are told, “craftsmen both in wood and iron, carvers and goldsmiths, painters and stonemasons … and others skilled in all manner of cunning work.”1 The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages were almost all the work of monks; the finest textiles were produced by monks and nuns; the architects of the early Romanesque cathedrals were monks;2 in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries the abbey of Cluny furnished most of the architects for Western Europe, and many of the painters and sculptors;3 and in the thirteenth century the abbey of St. Denis was a thriving center of varied arts. Even the Cistercian monasteries, which in the days of the watchful Bernard had closed their doors to decoration, soon surrendered to the lure of form and the excitement of color, and began to build abbeys as ornate as Cluny or St. Denis. As the English cathedrals were usually monastic minsters, the regular or monastic clergy continued to the end of the thirteenth century to dominate ecclesiastical architecture in England.
FIG. 16—Cimabue: Madonna with Angels and St. Francis Cathedral of Assisi
FIG. 17—Portrait of a Saint Book of Kells
FIG. 18—Glass Painting, 12th Century Chartres Cathedral
FIG. 19—Rose Window Strasbourg Cathedral
FIG. 20—Notre Dame Paris
FIG. 21—Gargoyle Notre Dame, Paris
FIG. 22—Gargoyle Notre Dame, Paris
FIG. 23—Cathedral, West View Chartres
FIG. 24—“Modesty” North transept, Chartres Cathedral
FIG. 25—“he Visitation” North transept, Chartres Cathedral
But a monastery, however excellent as a school and refuge for the spirit, is condemned by its seclusion to be a repository of traditions rather than a theater of living experiment; it is better fitted to preserve than to create. Not until the widened demands of a richer laity nourished secular artists did medieval life find the exuberant expression, in unhackneyed forms, that brought Gothic art to fullness. First in Italy, most in France, least in England, the emancipated and specializing laymen of the twelfth century, grouped in guilds, took the arts from monastic teachers and hands, and built the great cathedrals.
II. THE ADORNMENT OF LIFE
Nevertheless it was a monk who wrote the most complete and revealing summary of medieval arts and crafts. Theophilus—“lover of God” in the monastery of Helmershausen near Paderborn—wrote, about 1190, a Schedula diversarum artium:
Theophilus, a humble priest… addresses his words to all who wish, by the practical work of their hands, and by the pleasing meditation of what is new, to put aside … all sloth of mind and wandering of spirit.… [Here shall such men find] all that Greece possesses in the way of diverse colors and mixtures; all that Tuscany knows of the working of enamels … all that Arabia has to show of works ductile, fusible, or chased; all the many vases and sculptured gems and ivory that Italy adorns with gold; all that France prizes in costly variety of windows; all that is extolled in gold, silver, copper, or iron, or in subtle working of wood or stone.4
Here in a paragraph we see another side of the Age of Faith—men and women, and not least monks and nuns, seeking to satisfy the impulse to expression, taking pleasure in proportion, harmony, and form, and eager to make the useful beautiful. The medieval scene, however suffused with religion, is above all a picture of men and women working. And the first and basic purpose of their art is the adornment of their work, their bodies, and their homes. Thousands of woodworkers used knife, drill, gouge, chisel, and polishing materials to carve tables, chairs, benches, chests, caskets, cabinets, stairposts, wainscots, beds, cupboards, buffets, icons, altarpieces, choir stalls… with an incredible variety of forms and themes in high or low relief, and often with a mischievous humor that recognized no barrier between the sacred and the profane. On the misericords one might find figures of misers, gluttons, gossipers, grotesque beasts and birds with human heads. In Venice the wood carvers sometimes made frames more beautiful and costly than the pictures they enclosed. The Germans began in the twelfth century that remarkable wood sculpture which would become a major art in the sixteenth.*
The workers in metal rivaled the workers in wood. Iron was wrought into elegant gratings for windows, courtyards, and gates; for mighty hinges that spread across massive doors in a variety of floral designs (as on Notre Dame at Paris); for cathedral choir grilles as “strong as iron” and as delicate as lace. Iron or bronze or copper was fused or hammered into handsome vases, goblets, caldrons, ewers, candelabra, censers, caskets, and lamps; and bronze plates covered many cathedral doors. Armorers liked to add a touch of decoration to swords and scabbards, helmets, breastplates, and shields. The gorgeous bronze chandelier presented to the cathedral of Aachen by Frederick Barbarossa attested the ability of the German metalworkers; and the great bronze candlestick from Gloucester (c. 1100), now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, bears like testimony to English skill. The medieval fondness for making art of the simplest articles shows in the adornment of bolts, locks, and keys. Even weathervanes were carefully decorated with ornament that only a telescope could see.
The arts of the precious metals and stones flourished amid general poverty. The Merovingian kings had gold plate, and Charlemagne collected at Aachen a treasure of goldsmiths’ work. The Church pardonably felt that if gold and silver brightened the tables of barons and bankers, they should also be used in the service of the King of Kings. Some altars were of chased silver, some of chased gold, as in the church of St. Ambrose at Milan, and the cathedrals of Pistoia and Basel. Gold was normal for the ciborium or pyx that held the consecrated Host, for the monstrance in which it was exposed to the veneration of the faithful, for the chalice that contained the sacramental wine, and for the reliquaries in which saintly relics were preserved; these vessels were in many cases more beautifully worked than the most costly prize cups of today. In Spain the goldsmiths made resplendent tabernacles to bear the Host in processions through the streets; in Paris the goldsmith Bonnard (1212) used 1544 ounces of silver, and 60 of gold, to make a shrine for the bones of St. Genevieve. We may judge the scope of the goldsmith’s art from the seventy-nine chapters devoted to it by Theophilus. There we find that every medieval goldsmith was expected to be a Cellini—at once smelter, sculptor, enameler, jewel mounter, and inlay worker. Paris in the thirteenth century had a powerful guild of goldsmiths and jewelers; and Parisian jewel cutters had already a reputation for producing artificial gems.5 The seals that rich men used to stamp the wax on their letters or envelopes were carefully designed and carved. Every prelate had an official ring; and every real or specious gentleman flaunted at least one ring on his hands. Those who cater to human vanity seldom starve.
Cameos—small reliefs on precious material—were popular among the rich. Henry III of England had a “great cameo” valued at £ 200 ($40,000); Baldwin II brought a still more celebrated cameo from Constantinople to house it at Paris in Sainte Chapelle. Ivory was painstakingly carved throughout the Middle Ages: combs, boxes, handles, drinking horns, icons, book covers, diptychs and triptychs, episcopal staffs and croziers, reliquaries, shrines…. Astonishingly close to perfection is a thirteenth-century ivory group in the Louvre depicting the Descent from the Cross. Towards the end of that century romance and humor gained upon piety, and delicate carvings of sometimes very delicate scenes appeared on mirror cases and toilet boxes designed for ladies who could not be pious all the time.
Ivory was one of many materials used for inlay, which the Italians called intarsia (from the Latin interserere, insert), and the French termed marquetry (marquer, to mark). Wood itself might be used as an inlay in other woods: a design was chiseled into a block of wood, and other woods were pressed and glued into the design. One of the more recondite medieval arts was niello (Latin nigellus, black)—inlaying an incised metal surface with a black paste composed of silver, copper, sulphur, and lead; when the inlay hardened, the surface was filed till the silver in the mixture shone. From this technique, in the fifteenth century, Finiguerra would develop copperplate engraving.
The ceramic arts matured again out of industrial pottery as the returning Crusaders aroused Europe from the Dark Ages. Cloisonné enamel entered the West from Byzantium in the eighth century. In the twelfth a plaque representing the Last Judgment* gave an excellent example of champlevé; i.e., the spaces between the lines of the design were hollowed out into a copper ground, and the depressions were filled with enamel paste. Limoges, in France, had made enameled wares since the third century; in the twelfth it was the chief center, in the West, of champlevé and cloisonné. In the thirteenth century Moorish potters in Christian Spain coated clay vessels with an opaque tin glaze or enamel as a base for painted decoration; in the fifteenth century Italian merchants imported such wares from Spain in Major can trading ships, and called the material majolica, changing r to l in their melodious way.
The art of glass, so nearly perfected in ancient Rome, returned to Venice from Egypt and Byzantium. As early as 1024 we hear of twelve phiolarii there, whose products were so varied that the government took the industry under its protection, and voted the title “gentlemen” to glassmakers. In 1278 the glassworkers were removed to a special quarter on the island of Murano, partly for safety, partly for secrecy; strict laws were passed forbidding Venetian glassmakers to go abroad, or to reveal the esoteric techniques of their art. From that “foot of earth” the Venetians for four centuries dominated the art and industry of glass in the Western world. Enameling and gilding of glass were highly developed; Olivo de Venezia made textiles of glass; and Murano poured out glass mosaic, beads, phials, beakers, tableware, even glass mirrors, which in the thirteenth century began to replace mirrors of polished steel. France, England, and Germany also made glass in this period, but almost entirely for industrial use; the stained glass of the cathedrals was a brilliant exception.
Women have always received less credit in histories of art than they deserved. The adornment of the person and the home are precious elements in the art of life; and the work of women in dress design, interior decoration, embroidery, drapery, and tapestry has contributed more than most arts to that often unconscious pleasure which we derive from the intimate and silent presence of beautiful things. Delicate tissues deftly woven, and welcome to sight or touch, were highly prized in the Age of Faith; they clothed altars, relics, sacred vessels, priests, and men and women of high estate; and they themselves were wrapped in soft, thin paper which took from them its “tissue paper” name. In the thirteenth century France and England dethroned Constantinople as the chief producer of artistic embroidery; we hear of embroiderers’ guilds in Paris in 1258; and Matthew Paris, under the year 1246, tells how Pope Innocent IV was struck by the gold-embroidered vestments of English prelates visiting Rome, and ordered such opus anglicanum for his copes and chasubles. Some ecclesiastical garments were so heavy with jewels, gold thread, and small enamel plaques that the priest so robed could hardly walk.6 An American millionaire paid $60,000 for an ecclesiastical vestment known as the Cope of Ascoli.* The most famous of medieval embroideries was the “dalmatic of Charlemagne”; it was believed to be a product of Dalmatia, but was probably a Byzantine work of the twelfth century; it is now one of the most precious objects in the treasury of the Vatican.
In France and England embroidered hangings or tapestries took the place of paintings, especially in public buildings. Their full display was reserved for festal days; then they were hung under the arches of church bays, and in the streets, and on processional floats. Usually they were woven of wool and silk by the “tirewomen” or maids of feudal châteaux under the superintendence of the chatelaine; many were woven by nuns, some by monks. Tapestries made no pretense to rival the subtler qualities of painting; they were to be seen from some distance, and had to sacrifice nicety of line and shading to clarity of figure and brilliance and permanence of color. They commemorated an historical event or a famous legend, or cheered gloomy interiors with representations of landscapes, flowers, or the sea. Tapestries are mentioned as early as the tenth century in France, but the oldest extant full specimens hardly antedate the fourteenth. Florence in Italy, Chinchilla in Spain, Poitiers, Arras, and Lille in France, led the West in the art of tapestry and rugs. The world-renowned Bayeux tapestries were not strictly such, since their design was embroidered upon the surface instead of forming part of the weave. They derive their name from the cathedral of Bayeux that long housed them; tradition ascribed them to William the Conqueror’s Queen Matilda and the ladies of her Norman court; but ungallant scholarship prefers an anonymous origin and a later date.8 They rival the chronicles as an authority for the Norman Conquest. Upon a strip of brown linen nineteen inches wide and seventy-one yards long, sixty scenes show in procession the preparation for the invasion, the Norse vessels cleaving the Channel with high and figured prows, the wild battle of Hastings, the transfixing and death of Harold, the rout of the Anglo-Saxon troops, the triumph of blessed force. These tapestries are impressive examples of patient needlework, but they are not among the finer products of their kind. In 1803 Napoleon used them as propaganda to rouse the French to invade England;9 but he neglected to secure the blessing of the gods.
III. PAINTING
1. Mosaic
The pictorial art in the Age of Faith took four principal forms: mosaic, miniatures, murals, and stained glass.
The mosaic art was now in its old age, but in the course of 2000 years it had learned many subtleties. To make the gold ground they loved so well, mosaicists wrapped gold leaf around glass cubes, covered the leaf with a thin film of glass to keep the gold from tarnishing, and then, to avoid surface glare, laid the gilded cubes in slightly uneven planes. The light was reflected at diverse angles from the cubes, and gave an almost living texture to the whole.
It was probably Byzantine artists who in the eleventh century covered the east apse and west wall of an old cathedral at Torcello—an island near Venice—with some of the most imposing mosaics in medieval history.10 The mosaics of St. Mark’s range over seven centuries in authorship and style. Doge Domenico Selvo commissioned the first interior mosaics in 1071, presumably using Byzantine artists; the mosaics of 1153 were still under Byzantine tutelage; not until 1450 were Italian artists predominant in the mosaic adornment of St. Mark’s. The twelfth-century Ascension mosaic of the central cupola is a summit of the art, but it has a close rival in the Joseph mosaics of the vestibule dome. The marble mosaic of the pavement has survived through 700 years the tread of human feet.
At the other end of Italy Greek and Saracen workers united to produce the mosaic masterpieces of Norman Sicily—in the Capella Palatina and Martorana of Palermo, the monastery of Monreale, the cathedral of Cefalù (1148). The wars of the papacy in the thirteenth century may have retarded art in Rome; however, resplendent mosaics were made in that period for the churches of Santa Maria Maggiore, Santa Maria in Trastevere, St. John Lateran, and St. Paul Outside the Walls. An Italian, Andrea Tafi (1213–94), designed a mosaic for the Baptistery at Florence, but it was not up to the Greek work in Venice or Sicily. Suger’s abbey at St. Denis (1150) had a magnificent mosaic floor, partly preserved in the Cluny Museum; and the pavement (c. 1268) of Westminster Abbey is an admirable mingling of mosaic shades. But the mosaic art never prospered north of the Alps; stained glass outshone it; and with the coming of Duccio, Cimabue, and Giotto, murals crowded it out even in Italy.
2. Miniatures
The illumination of manuscripts with miniature paintings and decoration in liquid silver and gold and colored inks continued to be a favorite art, gratefully adapted to monastic quiet and piety. Like so many phases of medieval activity, it reached its Western apogee in the thirteenth century; never again has it been so delicate, inventive, or profuse. The stiff figures and drapes, and hard greens and reds, of the eleventh century were gradually replaced with forms of grace and tenderness in richer hues on backgrounds of blue or gold; and the Virgin conquered the miniature even as she was capturing the cathedral.
During the Dark Ages many books were destroyed; those that remained were doubly precious, and constituted, so to speak, a thin life line of civilization in their text and art.11 Psalters, gospels, sacramentaries, missals, breviaries, books of hours were cherished as the living vehicles of a divine revelation; no effort was too great for their fit adornment; one might reasonably spend a day on an initial, a week on a title page. Hartker, a monk of St. Gall, perhaps expecting the end of the world with the century, made a vow in 986 to remain within four walls the rest of his earthly life; he stayed in his tiny cell till he died fifteen years later; and there he illuminated—brightened with pictures and ornament—the Antiphonary of St. Gall.12
Perspective and modeling were now less ably practiced than in the Carolingian exuberance; the enlumineur, as the French called the miniaturist, sought depth and splendor of color, and a crowded fullness and vitality of representation, rather than the illusion of tridimensional space. Most frequently his subjects were taken from the Bible, or the apocryphal gospels, or the legends of the saints; but sometimes a herbal or a bestiary sought illustration, and he took delight in picturing real or imaginary plants and animals. Even in religious books the ecclesiastical rules for subject and treatment were less defined in the West than in the East, and the painter was allowed to range and frolic widely within his narrow room. Animal bodies with human heads, human bodies with animal heads, a monkey disguised as a monk, a monkey examining with proper medical gravity a phial of urine, a musician giving a concert by scraping together the jawbones of an ass—such were the topics that graced a Book of the Hours of the Virgin.13 Other texts, sacred as well as profane, came to life with scenes of hunting, tournament, or war; one thirteenth-century psalter included in its pictures the inside of an Italian bank. The secular world, recovering from its terror of eternity, was invading the precincts of religion itself.
English monasteries were fertile in this peaceful art. The East Anglian school produced famous psalters: one treasured by the Brussels library, another (“Ormsby”) at Oxford, a third (“St. Omer”) in the British Museum. But the finest illumination of the age was French. The psalters painted for Louis IX inaugurate a style of centered composition, and division into framed medallions, obviously taken from the stained glass of the cathedrals. The Lowlands shared in this movement; the monks of Liege and Ghent attained in their miniatures something of the warm feeling and flowing grace of the sculptures at Amiens and Reims. Spain produced the greatest single chef-d’oeuvre of thirteenth-century illumination in a book of hymns to the Virgin—Las cantigas del Rey Sabio (c. 1280)—“The Canticles of [Alfonso X] the Wise King”; its 1226 miniatures suggest the labor and loyalty that medieval books might receive. Such books, of course, were works of calligraphic as well as pictorial art. Sometimes the same artist copied or composed and wrote the text, and painted the illumination. In several manuscripts one hesitates to decide which seems more beautiful—the decoration or the text. We paid a price for print.
3. Murals
It is difficult to tell how far the miniatures, in subject and design, influenced murals, panels, icons, ceramic painting, sculptural relief, and stained glass, and how far these influenced illumination. There was among these arts a free trade in themes and styles, a continuous interaction; and sometimes the same artist practiced them all. We do injustice to art and artist alike when we separate one art too sharply from the rest, or the arts from the life of their time; reality is always more integrated than our chronicles; and the historian disintegrates for convenience’ sake the elements of a civilization whose components flowed as a united stream. We must try not to sever the artist from the cultural complex that reared and taught him, gave him traditions and topics—praised or tormented him, used him up, buried him, and—more often than not—forgot his name.
The Middle Ages, like any age of faith, discouraged individualism as insolent impiety, and bade the ego even of genius submerge itself in the work and current of its time. The Church, the state, the commune, the guild were the lasting realities; they were the artists; individuals were the hands of the group; and when the great cathedral took form its body and soul would stand for all the bodies and souls that its design and building and adornment had consecrated and consumed. So history has swallowed up nearly all the names of the men who painted the walls of medieval structures before the thirteenth century; and war, revolution, and the damp of time have almost swallowed up their work. Were the methods of the muralists to blame? They used the ancient processes of fresco and tempera—applying the colors to freshly plastered walls, or painting upon dry walls with colors made adhesive by some glutinous material. Both methods aimed at permanence, through permeation or cohesion; even so the colors tended to flake off in the course of years, so that very little remains of mural painting before the fourteenth century. Theophilus (1190) described the preparation of oil colors, but this technique lay undeveloped till the Renaissance.
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