Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  c In the words of the percipient Jonathan Raban, “At the time, I heard it said that Bush used the word ‘crusade’ by accident and was probably ignorant of its significance, particularly for Muslims. This seems unlikely, given the amount of writing and rewriting that goes into presidential speeches. Perhaps Bush himself was not entirely aware of what he was saying, but some White House scribe surely intended to put us at least loosely in mind of Richard Coeur de Lion.”

  d Not only parked at our door but inside the house. There may be, for instance, more Muslims living in the United States than Jews and Episcopalians combined.

  e The gradual awareness that the world beyond Europe was large and diverse may be plotted in medieval depictions of the magi who came to pay homage to Jesus after his birth, as related in the second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. The incident is intended to emphasize that “the kings of the earth,” even those from exotic places far beyond Judea recognized Jesus as Savior. In later tradition, there were thought to have been three visiting magi (or kings), though Matthew gives no number and in art more are sometimes shown. Matthew tells us they all came “from the East,” almost certainly from Persia (if they are historical figures). But in early artistic depictions, one of the magi is often shown as a black African, the others as Europeans or as men of the Middle East. After the circulation of Marco Polo’s travel memoirs, however, one of the magi was sometimes depicted as Chinese.

  THREE

  Paris, University of Heavenly Things

  The Exaltation of Reason and Its Consequences

  Do you think God cares only for Italy?

  —FRANCIS OF ASSISI TO CARDINAL UGOLINO, WHO HAD WARNED THE SAINT AGAINST PREACHING IN FRANCE

  THE MIDDLE AAGES ARE A GREAT jumble. As I have put my manuscript together, I have sometimes felt I was not so much writing a book as sewing a gigantic quilt, full of disparate and even clashing remnants: a large patch of ancient Greece, swatches of late antique and early medieval Rome, oddly conjoined strips from maps both geographical and metaphysical, a not-so-blushing virgin, a blushless queen, and (as we shall soon see) a nun who prides herself on being her lover’s whore. What on earth do all these things have to do with one another? But to present the Middle Ages otherwise—as a seamless garment—would be to falsify their character and leave the reader grasping at a phantasm.

  A medievalist friend of mine once confided that he often daydreamed of living in medieval times. Of course, he added, he always imagined himself a lord of some sort, sitting in his great hall, being served a side of succulent wild boar from his woodland demesnes. He never imagined himself the housechurl who did the serving or the estate serf who had done the hunting and the butchering. Though distinctions between high and low were less acute then than they are in our world, they were sufficiently stark to steer any dreamer’s fancies away from the furrowed farms of Europe and toward its castellated hilltops. What appalls a modern dreamer about the Middle Ages is not so much the distance that lay between peasant and prince as that there was seldom any way of shortening that distance: the peasant would always be a peasant, the prince always a prince.

  And yet … the rigid stratification of social roles was shaken by the rise of the merchant class, the medieval bourgeoisie. Francis of Assisi’s youthful plan to “become a great prince” was unrealistic because he took no steps to realize it; but had he taken his father’s route, he could have become a great merchant prince. As time went on, wealth vied with nobility for political and social power, and wealth won out often enough, especially as independent cities and towns like Assisi grew into alternative centers of power. But withal, the trader’s route to self-improvement was a slippery one. Caravans could be raided by brigands and ships founder at sea. Markets could be cruelly affected by the cosmic vagaries of weather, war, and trade barriers—just as suddenly as markets in our day.

  However difficult it may be to characterize correctly the medieval class system, it is even more difficult to grasp medieval thinking, which was broadly metaphorical and analogical rather than merely logical and rational. The hagiographical stories that clustered around Francis’s life—that he preached even to birds (who stopped twittering to listen), tamed the ravening wolf of Gubbio, and received in his body the five wounds of the crucified Christ (the stigmata, or piercing of his hands, feet, and side)—were probably taken in a nonliteral spirit by many of the people who first heard them. Interactions with birds spoke of Francis’s instinctive resonance with the natural world, the chastened wolf of his ability to elicit good from even the worst of creatures, the stigmata of his thoroughgoing identification with the sufferings of Christ. Did medieval people think these things had actually happened? They might well have considered such a question beyond answering and would instead, like Frida Kahlo, have invoked “the extraordinary beauty of truth.”

  But because we do not think the way they did, we often misunderstand them. In the historian William Manchester, for instance, we find only contempt for all things medieval. “In all that time,” he claims preposterously, “nothing of real consequence had either improved or declined.…Shackled in ignorance, disciplined by fear, and sheathed in superstition, [medieval people] trudged into the sixteenth century in the clumsy, hunched, pigeon-toed gait of rickets victims, their vacant faces, pocked by smallpox, turned blindly toward the future they thought they knew—gullible, pitiful innocents who were about to be swept up in the most powerful, incomprehensible, irresistible vortex [that is, the Renaissance] since Alaric had led his Visigoths and Huns across the Alps, fallen on Rome, and extinguished the lamps of learning a thousand years before.”

  Manchester’s libel is peppered with his own unexamined anti-Catholicism, which leads him into one howler after another. (He fulminates against an “infallible” “Vatican,” seeming not to know that the doctrine of papal infallibility was virtually unknown in the Middle Ages and that the Vatican did not become the primary papal residence till the union of Italy in 1870.) How he imagines that the Renaissance of the sixteenth century could have arisen from the starved and shrunken medieval culture he describes, I just don’t know. As King Lear said (with exquisite medieval logic), “Nothing will come of nothing.”

  In fact, medieval Europe was far more cosmopolitan and international than it has been since—at least till the establishment and uncertain functioning of the EU. A Frenchman could be king of England; his archbishop of Canterbury might be Greek; a Provençal princess might wed a Spaniard, a German, or a Pole; a man from Umbria might consider himself more French than Italian. But there was a division even then between Europe north and Europe south. The south—Italy south of Lombardy, the parts of France that spoke Provençal, Spain, Portugal, and (to some extent) Ireland, a sort of Mediterranean island misplaced in the Atlantica—was sensuous and sexual. As one went north toward the Germanic tribes, the Saxons, the Franks, the Prussians, the Scandinavians, many pleasures lost their evident appeal, and one encountered more silence, less show, a more rigorous sense of order, both personal and social, and people who had probably never since adulthood taken all their clothes off—and who, if stripped naked, looked like plucked chickens, rather than like the sinuous, sun-loving, copper-colored humans of the south. (Think of the embarrassed white limbs of Adam and Eve in the paintings of Dutch and Flemish masters, as opposed to the expansively easeful biblical nudes given us by Michelangelo and his fellow Italians.) It was partly a matter of climate, of course, and partly of ethnicity. The Mediterranean lands of the old Romans (and even of the old Celts) would remain Catholic; those of the Germanic tribes—unless, like the Rhinelanders, the Schwarzwalders, the Bavarians, and the Austrians, they maintained southern connections—would tend in the sixteenth century to break away and form less ambiguous, more clearly rule-bound and austere societies.

  The lands of the Slavs, the snowmen, the toughest peoples of all, lay beyond such distinctions. For in Eastern Europe, whether Catholicism or Orthodoxy prevailed, there flourished a Christianity of inhuman fasts, unending winte
rs, and interminable liturgies, as well as a personal hygiene that included boiling oneself in steam, then rolling in ice. Whether one was naked or clothed, the point was never sensuality but survival. The Czechs, a partly Slavic, partly Celtic people, were an interesting exception.

  The great jumble that was medieval Europe should warn the historian against pronouncements too broad, for sprightly—and sometimes garish—exceptions to his generalizations spring up everywhere. As one considers Manchester’s depictions of medievals as “shackled in ignorance, disciplined by fear, and sheathed in superstition,” one wonders if he ever surveyed the freewheeling spirit of intellectual inquiry that invigorated the great urban universities of the thirteenth century.

  If you could walk the streets of Paris in the thirteenth century, you would encounter many familiar sights and sounds. The bustling city, full of impressive architecture, lively commerce and exotic wares, beggars and other casualties of urban life, self-regarding fashion plates, men on the make, and even gawking tourists, would remind you of many a modern city. Though much smaller than any contemporary capital, the Paris of eight centuries ago was a noisy warren of rough and splendid contrasts, a maze of stage sets featuring comic and tragic scenes in alternation, such as only a great city can produce.

  But nowhere in this always colorful, often dirty, sometimes sweaty panorama would you feel more at home, more sure of who was who and what was what, than along the city’s Left Bank, home to artists, writers, absentminded professors, and unruly students—indeed, the cultural nerve center of medieval Europe. The students, many thousands of them, constituted the largest population group on the Left Bank. They were especially numerous in the Latin Quarter, clustered around the famous rue du Fouarre.b They were divided into four principal groupings: the French, the Norman, the English-German, and the Picard (or students from the Low Countries). Students who didn’t fit obviously into one of the other three categories were assigned to the Picard. Since all had different mother tongues, Latin, the language in which the masters gave their lectures, became the lingua franca of student intercourse; hence, the Latin Quarter.

  The University of Paris was chartered in 1200, some fifty years after Europe’s first university at Bologna. But whereas Bologna distinguished itself immediately in the field of law (and thereby ensured that Latin would remain the technical language of law throughout the West), Paris seemed to distinguish itself in everything, if especially in philosophy and other liberal arts. Though we sometimes speak of ancient “universities” (such as one at Bordeaux in Gaul in the time of Ausonius and another at Glendalough in Ireland in the time of Saint Kevin), those were amorphous, informal, voluntary associations compared to the structured universities of the Middle Ages, which are the direct ancestors of our own. Students enrolled, paid tuition, and sat for announced series of lectures, which were delivered by salaried scholars who were members of specific faculties—medicine, law, theology, the arts—as well as of professional associations. The university itself was a chartered corporationc largely independent of the city and kingdom in which it was housed. The University of Bologna was even run by its students, who voted the members of the administration into and out of office.

  Other universities soon sprang up after the models of these first two: at Oxford, for instance, at Naples and Salerno, at Angers and Toulouse, at Valladolid and Salamanca, and by the fourteenth century at Prague, Vienna, Heidelberg, and Cologne, all of them blossoming from well-established and intellectually busy city schools of earlier centuries. Sometimes a university was born of student discontent, as when some dissident Oxfordians betook themselves to Cambridge and some outraged Bolognese exiled themselves permanently to Padua.

  Except at Bologna, students did not rule the roost. Their sheer numbers gave them much power, nonetheless, and their mass movements were rightly feared by administrators, masters, and townsmen, who had come gradually to depend on student patronage for their livelihoods. If the so-called student nations elected to close down a university and take their leave of the city in which they lodged, all their providers suffered, but none more than the local entrepreneurs who offered food, drink, lodging, books, paper, ink, and other services, such as laundry, housekeeping, and whoring. Most feared by administrators and townees alike was any common effort by faculty and student body to wrest concessions or new rights. Such “strikes” were no more unknown in medieval Paris than they were in the Paris of 1968. More common than strikes, however, was the widespread late-night student consumption of cheap and plentiful beer, as well as the deadly combination of drunken student hooliganism and police overreaction. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

  At the same time, there were many differences between the medieval university and the modern. Students generally entered the university at age fourteen and stayed for a minimum of eight years. Their basic study was of the seven liberal arts, divided in the Roman manner into the trivium (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (the mathematical sciences of arithmetic, Euclidean geometry, astronomy, and musical theory).d In grammar, one mastered Latin, the continent-wide language of the educated classes; in dialectic, one learned to fashion a logical argument, partly by imitation of philosophers, ancient and contemporary; and in rhetoric, one was taught the refinements of constructing prose, whether oral or written, in such a way as to seize the attention of listeners or readers and to hold their attention through the course of one’s exposition. That so much time was devoted to what would today be compressed into a single course with a title such as “Freshman Comp” meant that, unlike contemporary graduates, all the graduates of medieval universities were truly literate and markedly skilled in an impressive repertoire of communication techniques.

  Whereas the first six years at university were devoted to lectures by faculty, the last two were set aside to allow the students to show off what they had learned by putting forth specific theses and defending these publicly before audiences that were critical and vocal. University audiences could make a novice lecturer into an overnight intellectual celebrity. Just as peremptorily, they could pack him off to permanent provincial obscurity.

  After all this (and a battery of oral examinations), one might be awarded the symbolic laurel wreath of a bachelor of arts degree—though then, as now, there were students who failed to attain a degree, while others settled comfortably into the routine of the perpetual student, still taking courses when their contemporaries had long since taken up professions. An additional year beyond the baccalaureate could win you a master’s degree (or license to teach). But if you wished further study in, say, law, medicine, philosophy, or theology, you would need to be able to stay for as much as a dozen years more. Given such daunting prospects (and so many years with little chance of earned income), it is not surprising that the sons of the aristocracy made up a sizable portion of student populations, though there were also scholarships for poorer students, often instituted and administered by local lords or clergy who wished to raise intellectual standards in their home districts.

  Like all rich and abiding manifestations of human cultural life, universities took time to develop. We can trace their beginnings to the palace and cathedral schools of the Carolingian era,e staffed initially by Irish and English monks, who were the first to implement the trivium/quadrivium structure. Their pupils, both noble and poor (for there were scholarship students even then), were educated to take their places, some as lords who could actually read their own correspondence, others as court scribes or bishops’ scribes—the two professions that then required literacy and learning. From the ranks of these scribes the higher clergy (bishops, archbishops, and cardinals) would be chosen, but not parish priests, who were required to learn by heart—but not necessarily to read—the words inscribed in the splendidly ornamented books of Latin prayers and rituals.

  The collapse of the Roman Empire in the West had devastated European learning, and in the process literacy itself had become endangered. The enormous loss of books in the early Middle
Ages (through catastrophes large and small, connected to the fall of Rome and the barbarian invasions) meant that centuries had to pass for basic texts to be rediscovered, recopied, and distributed widely and for libraries to be built up again. But once this had happened, and libraries such as Disibodenberg’s were established, creative intellectual life began to percolate once more. Isolated monastic schools, however, could never quite morph into lively centers of learning, for they could not attract the variety of teachers who, in the end, make for intellectual excitement—if only because they are so often in disagreement with one another. For that to happen, cathedral schools in towns and cities had to grow to the point where they could support a larger range of lecturers. A full century before the formal chartering of the University of Paris, the city was already astir with new learning and new masters. And of these masters, none was more celebrated, hated, and sought after than a hot young Breton aristocrat in his early twenties named Peter Abelard.

  There can be no doubt that Abelard’s was the best mind of his age. Not only that, he was exceptionally handsome and utterly self-possessed; he spoke (and sang, for that matter) in an alluring timbre that few could match; and his ready wit was sharp as a short sword. Even as a student in Paris, he had publicly exposed the logical flaws in the propositions of one of his masters and, by sheer force of argument, lured most of the master’s students to his own unofficial lectures. The master, Anselm de Laon, was, to be sure, an obfuscating pontificator, and “anyone who knocked at his door to seek an answer to some question went away more uncertain than he came.” “He had,” recalled Peter much later, “a remarkable command of words, but their meaning was worthless and empty of all sense.” Abelard knew how good he was; and if he had a fault, it was the strutting cockiness of a young man who knows he’s smarter than everyone else—a quality few can admire, while many pray fervently for his bouleversement.