by Simon Winder
This is an over-elaborate way of saying that in as much as the era after the Roman Empire is ‘dark’ it is because it has been overlaid by many centuries of further things happening – and I have talked only about human agency rather than the terrors of mould, mice, lightning and damp. Our own ‘library’ at home suffered catastrophic loss from a house-rabbit called Dusty who in his short life ate the spines of innumerable books. My copy of Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund is cherished, partly because I have owned it for so long, but also because of its memorial teeth marks.
When was the very last beautiful Roman fabric so sun-rotted that it was chucked away? And that is as nothing compared to the almost totally successful attempts during the early Christian centuries in Europe to erase all trace of native paganism. This last issue is often overlooked. At the back of our minds when thinking about the centuries when the Roman Empire mutated into medieval Europe we are unconsciously taking on the spurious guise of specific communities. We are happy to read about Charlemagne destroying the Avar Empire and taking all its gold because at some level we emotionally sneak ourselves into Charlemagne’s baggage-train. But the Avars ruled Central Europe for over two centuries, and it is not a given that their civilization had no worth and did not represent a future we would have flourished in. Or earlier, there are the Alemanni in what is now south-west Germany and Alsace (and after whom the French call Germany Allemagne) who were broken by the Frankish ruler Clovis. Of course, we are the heirs of Christianity, but only in a passive, non-contributive way – to see ourselves on one specific side in these ancient contests is awkward. I might hiss at the pagan antics of the Saxons and Vikings, but as someone part English and part Irish I am much more likely to have their genes than Frankish ones.
These issues become vivid in the town of Tournai – for centuries a French-ruled enclave squeezed between the County of Flanders and the County of Hainaut and now part of Belgium, a classic crossroads through which every army has marched, from the legionaries of the Roman Empire to Allied troops in 1944. I may as well say here that Tournai is a fantastic historical palimpsest and somewhere that always puts a spring in my step. I once found myself changing trains there late at night and realizing that I had just enough time to haul my bag up the road through the freezing dark to look in renewed wonder at the vast, sombre drum – like a stonebuilt gasometer – of the Henry VIII Tower. In this current context, however, what makes Tournai so remarkable is the discovery during routine repairs to the Hospice of St Brice in the 1650s of the tomb of Childeric I. This accidental find catapulted everything back some two hundred and fifty years before Charlemagne, to the century after the Western Roman Empire had collapsed, a world which must have still been densely Roman in its appearance, probably with much smaller populations in towns and more limited trade. Childeric’s son, Clovis I, was baptized, united the Frankish tribes and founded the Merovingian dynasty which lasted until Charlemagne’s dad put the last of them into a monastery.
The management of Childeric’s rediscovered tomb has not exactly been a curatorial model. It started well as by sheer good luck Tournai was then part of the Spanish Netherlands under the benign and intelligent leadership of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, who as part of his vast expenditure on art objects commissioned a superb book on the tomb from Jean-Jacques Chifflet, an antiquarian from the Spanish-ruled Franche-Comté. This has immaculate pictures of the heaps of extraordinary stuff Childeric was buried with – gold objects of great variety and beauty from a bull’s head to coins, buckles, a crystal globe, seal-rings and intricate pieces of cloisonné. It was downhill for the hoard from then on. Leopold Wilhelm took everything back to Vienna when he retired and left it to his nephew the Emperor Leopold I. He gave it to Louis XIV as a present but, in one of the many instances where Louis is so disappointing, he took no interest in the gifts and simply stored them. They survived the Revolution but were stolen in 1831 and dispersed or melted down. The hoard’s great aesthetic intervention came from its including dozens of small gold bees (or possibly cicadas), which must have decorated some object which had since rotted away, perhaps a cloak. In his search for an appropriate new symbol for his dynasty (the ancient fleur-de-lys being patently unacceptable to a new era) Napoleon decided to make these bees the imperial motif, scattering them on everything from coats of arms to Josephine’s slippers. They cluster all over the decorations of the French Empire and it is one of the sadder aspects of Napoleon’s defeat and exile that they then disappear from the decorative arts until their rather wan revival under his nephew Napoleon III.
What remains in Tournai now however (aside from some reproduction bees) is a too-good-to-be-true archaeological museum which lays out everything we can still know about the huge scale of Childeric’s tomb and several associated burials. As his son Clovis turned Christian this was the last of the fabulous, full-blown pagan Frankish affairs, with twenty-one cavalry horses buried nearby in an associated mound and what was clearly a sprawling sacred space with Childeric’s body at its centre. An aristocratic woman buried nearby slightly later had objects such as scissors, amber and a wine-strainer which linked her to trade across Europe. Indeed, the more time spent looking at these shield-bosses, necklaces and pins (and not least a debonair and alarming scramasax – a wonderful word for a long knife), the more clear it becomes that this was a highly sophisticated, confident civilization – which just happened to exist a very long time ago and whose achievements were about to be completely disregarded by the new Christian regime of Clovis, who moved his capital from Tournai to Paris. The process by which Childeric’s tomb became forgotten is a puzzling one as his dynastic if not his religious significance lasted so long. Somehow, the King of the Salian Franks and his favourite horses, his crystal globe, bees, scramasax and all sank into oblivion, eventually disappearing completely under church buildings, until being summoned back to the surface nearly twelve hundred years later.
The rule of the saints
For reasons I can no longer remember I seem always to have been preoccupied with the poems of the great seventeenth-century religious mystic Henry Vaughan. In the context of this book, I have kept referring to his despairing poem ‘Corruption’, where he bitterly imagines that somewhere ‘in those early days’ after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, man perhaps still
… shin’d a little, and by those weak Rays
Had some glimpse of his birth.
Vaughan is writing towards the end of the tradition that the present was merely ever further from the time of human happiness. At some much squabbled-over point a bit later some Europeans began to abandon this view and believe in a world they could actively improve and build on: the onward-and-upward feeling about human achievement which we continue to aver despite some overwhelming setbacks.
Wandering around the religious buildings of the Rhine and Low Countries it is hard not to be oppressed by these often huge remains of a great old tradition: that modern humanity is now merely, in Vaughan’s terms, ‘stone and earth’ but was once great. The landscape is encrusted with buildings which express this sense of ancient, constant pleas for mercy. Monks and nuns devoted their lives to intercession on behalf of fallen mankind in a battle between the promise of Jesus’s sacrifice and the temptations of the Devil. Humans were doubly fallen though – not just expelled from Eden, but also expelled from the classical ancient world. The medieval rulers of Western Europe were obsessed by a sense that they too were the mere followers of ancient greatness. Their battle tents and palaces were festooned with huge tapestry images of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. Monks would routinely have to read out loud at what must have been slightly boring mealtimes page after page of the astonishing activities of Hannibal and Pompey. Again, this tradition only begins to splinter and become silly in the eighteenth century, perhaps with the ever less plausible images of Louis XIV trying to square looking like Scipio with also wearing an absurd wig. To understand most of Europe’s history however it has to be seen as in important ways rueful,
melancholic and nostalgic – about backsliding, temptation and the struggle to interpret the world almost entirely through biblical and Latin exemplars, handed down to us from an older, more powerful world.
Put in these terms, Europe becomes an ancient, agonized landscape filled with churches and monasteries which remain as sites that most people now ignore, but which were witnesses to centuries of struggle with invaders, earlier heroism and self-sacrifice; and where communities were often forced to rebuild almost from nothing, with their town burned down and much of their population enslaved and dragged away. From the fourth century onwards what became Lotharingia was swept by waves of invaders as Roman power mutated and then fell away. In AD 275 the original Colonia Ulpia Traiana (Xanten) was destroyed by German tribes, and centuries followed in which any number of indignities hit the locals. But these could also be the founding moments for new towns – and so many hundreds of years went by (until, say, the Vikings settled down in the eleventh century) during which each recorded disaster for a given community could have been followed by several generations of unrecorded, normal, steady life.
As soon as you become alert to this ancient past it bristles everywhere. Xanten is a good example. Its cathedral is built around the remains of St Victor, a Roman soldier executed for his Christian faith in the town’s arena (enjoyably rebuilt, incidentally, with oddly flabby men dressed up as gladiators play-fighting with plastic weapons – a rough line of work). Indeed, St Victor is just one among many members of the Theban Legion, who in a garbled and confused story were in AD 286 transferred from Egypt to fight in Gaul and on the banks of Lake Geneva refused to abjure their new faith, with the result that they were massacred there (although Victor somehow was also executed in Xanten). The town’s very name (from Sanctos) means ‘Place of the Saints’. The Thebans turn up all over the region – whether killed by Lake Geneva or up in Xanten they populate any number of religious sites. Two survivors from the original massacre, Felix and Regulus, together with their servant, managed to flee but were caught up with at Zürich, where they too were executed – but then picked up their own heads, walked forty paces, prayed and died. The Great Minster was founded in their name.
Very enjoyably, the legionaries feature in the magnificent Trier church of St Paulinus. This ancient foundation was first built in the late fourth century as a shrine to the Theban Legion. It has been through many indignities and was blown up in 1674 by French troops. This had the happy effect of allowing it to be completely rebuilt in the 1740s by, among others, the wonderful Johann Balthazar Neumann, master of late baroque confection. A gigantic ceiling painting seems to show pretty much every individual member of the Theban Legion being martyred in over-ingenious ways. But the real surprise is the crypt, where there are truly weird decorative uses for Theban Legion relics, including a group of three skulls arranged in a tightly packed row, which have a disturbing semblance to a doo-wop trio, with the smallest skull in the middle being that of the cheeky falsetto.
The Legion’s equally CinemaScope female equivalent is St Ursula and Her Eleven Thousand Virgins, massacred by the Huns in AD 451. There are various theories about the number eleven thousand, the most plausible being that the original story actually said that Ursula was a virgin who was eleven years old when she was martyred, with subsequent monkish copyists flailing about incompetently until the events emerged from their quills in their final form. Quite possibly even Ursula herself did not exist. In any event, the story became the basis for explaining an unlimited supply of bones when an old Roman graveyard or possibly plague pit was discovered in Cologne. Between them and the Legion there was in some ways rather an oversupply of material, making them the penny candy of the relic world: bits of them turn up all over the place, sometimes (as in the Châlon shrine in Bar-le-Duc) as a sort of sprinkled flavouring over a bigger blend of appropriate saints. The church of St Ursula in Cologne has a whole wall of bones, in gruesome decorative patterns – there is simply not enough room for them all.
These subjects later became some of the classic focuses for Rhineland and Flemish painting, works of extraordinary beauty and strangeness. But by that point these were not only ancient legends but also the foundation of real places and towns perhaps a thousand years old. After a while it becomes a bad habit to look out for these roots. The magical Cathedral of Metz is where it is because during the Hun raid of AD 451 the entire town was destroyed, but one hilltop area where there was a shrine to St Stephen remained miraculously inviolate. As the ambitions of the local church flourished, so the authorities came to curse the restricted site on which the miracle occurred as it required all kinds of very expensive and twisty feats of infilling and buttressing to clear a big enough platform for later versions of the building; hence its hunched up, box-like yet charismatic shape.
The Rhineland particularly needs to be seen as something equivalent to Angkor Wat – a dense network of churches, cathedrals, monasteries, convents, chapels and shrines with towns, villages and farms attached to service them. For much of its existence its principal role was to generate vast waves of devotional energy in the hope that humanity (or some of it) might be saved. Such atmospheric monsters as Mainz Cathedral could probably fit most of the rest of the medieval town inside their shadowy bulk, with the townsfolk’s year ruled by an elaborate zodiac of festivals, penances, processions, masses and prayers linked to specific chapels by guild or family association. A large part of the town worked directly or indirectly for the cathedral and its linked properties, at the most posh level with a job as one of the canons (reserved for the younger brothers of leading aristocrats) down to being a rural church-tied serf, with many monks themselves effectively being just a specialized variety of rural serf denied any involvement with women.
The great shrines had a constant flow of pilgrims from all over Europe, often treating such a journey as the defining moment in the individual’s life and with elaborate systems in place for hostels, way-station chapels and simple provisions. Trier, because it was briefly a Roman capital and kept many Roman buildings, was a particularly vigorous focus, including Constantine the Great’s old audience hall, which became converted into a church. The Porta Nigra, Trier’s intimidatingly gnarled and bulky Roman gateway, only survives because a wandering Greek holy man took up residence there in the early eleventh century and he so impressed the locals that after his death the Porta was turned into a very odd-looking church and monastery. This was impatiently decommissioned by Napoleon and most of the elaborate medieval accretions were pulled off, leaving something again looking fairly Roman. The greatest lure in Trier, however, is the abbey of St Matthias. Awkwardly, I was under the impression I had never visited it before and was walking down the seemingly endless Saarstrasse thinking how the outskirts of all German towns, with their Chinese restaurants and Turkish grocers, look exactly the same, when I reached the abbey with its distinctive cake-icing frontage. I realized that Saarstrasse looked the same because it was the same. So as an unintended repeat pilgrim (the most lukewarm possible kind there is) I found myself visiting again the simple stone box tomb of St Matthias, the disciple who replaced Judas. As the only disciple north of the Alps, Matthias seems a long way from home. It was possible his remains came here via Constantine himself. Nobody knows how long pilgrims have been visiting the shrine. A famous route is to walk from Cologne (itself no slouch as a town, having relics of the Three Kings in a dazzling shrine that has somehow stared down every subsequent military, religious and social threat) and the abbey has pilgrim badges going back to the seventeenth century.
This book needs to move on! I have now spent some ten years visiting religious buildings in north-west Europe and feel nowhere near jaded. So often there will be something strange or completely unexpected. Maastricht more than anywhere is the place where, in a parallel existence, I would like to have grown up – it seems a perfect balance of modern and ancient and the ratio of inhabitant to cake shop appears higher than anywhere in the world. But what is truly exceptional about
Maastricht is the Basilica of St Servatius. A wandering Armenian holy man, Servatius died in Maastricht at the end of the fourth century, and there still is his tomb, down some steps. Of course the site of the tomb has been fiddled with over the years, but you are encased in a chilly, claustrophobic space with very old stonework and a deep step so ancient it has been worn into a U-shape by centuries of pilgrims. We know, for example, that Charles Martel came to pray here (and was an important patron, giving thanks here after he defeated an Ummayad army at Narbonne in 737 on Servatius’s birthday); Charlemagne, Charles V, Philip II, most recently John Paul II. The church above it has been swept aside repeatedly by invaders and accidents, but somehow this tiny, cold space has survived every indignity.
Rhinegold
The Nibelungenlied states at the very first mention of its hero, Siegfried, ‘Of his best days, when he was young, marvels could be told’, but we never hear about them. So already, in one of the greatest works in European literature, there is a crushing sense of melancholy. We will only be told about the actions that end in Siegfried’s betrayal and death. If only we could know about these ‘marvels’ – did anybody once know these stories, or were they always just an imagined backdrop of regret? When Richard Wagner ransacked parts of the Nibelungenlied to create the four-opera sequence The Ring of the Nibelung he also plunged his audience into an after-time: before the action begins, the world was pristine, ruled by the power of Wotan’s spear, in the happy days just before his poor management skills led him to pay off some builders by handing them his sister; or before the Rhinemaidens, Europe’s most nubile security squad, had through sheer bloody amateurism explained to a megalomaniac dwarf how to steal their gold. I love both versions of the Nibelung story and happily hum Ring extracts almost unthinkingly when on the Cologne–Bad Godesberg commuter train or when hiking in the Siebengebirge where, slightly notionally, Brünnhilde once slumbered.