PRESERVING THE “PURITY” OF SPAIN
The Alhambra Palace was built by the Nasrid dynasty, but its architectural glories were a nostalgic tribute to the past rather than a guide to contemporary reality: Granada was obliged to raise troops for Castile and suffered major territorial losses as a result of Castilian invasions. The self-confident and united realms of Aragon and Castile conquered the kingdom of Granada in 1492, and it was taken over by the Castilian administration. By the terms of the Alhambra Decree (March 31, 1492) issued by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile, all Spanish Jews had to either become Christians or leave the country. The Inquisition that the monarchs established in Spain in 1478 was already investigating the cases of various “new Christians.” Conversos were former Jews and Moriscos were ex-Muslims. Both groups were suspected of a merely opportunistic conversion to Christianity and of a maintaining a secretive observance of their ancestral faith. Conversos and Moriscos could also be defined as individuals whose ancestors had converted during the reconquista, and their cases could therefore involve investigation of events that had occurred at least two or three centuries previously. An obsession with the “purity” of Spain meant that the reconquista lived on as a set of attitudes long after the completion of Iberia’s territorial re-conquest in the name of Christian faith.
THE ALHAMBRA
The architectural complex that Spain’s Muslims called the Calat Alhambra (“the red fortress”) was completed in the second half of the 14th century on a plateau bordering the city of Granada. It is the color of the local clay used in its construction that gives the Alhambra its name although the building’s external walls were originally white-washed.
Craftsmen were working on the earliest parts of the building in the mid-13th century but the history of the site as a fortification extends back to the late ninth century when a primitive red castle is known to have existed on the hill.
The idea of an enclosed palatine structure which is the ruler’s domestic base, his administrative center, and also a locale for public and religious ceremonies is middle eastern in its origins. Eighth century Baghdad’s palace society under its Abbasid rulers was a particularly influential example of that architectural conception. The finest example of such a complex in early medieval Europe was the Great Palace in Constantinople, a series of pavilions which adjoined the basilica of Hagia Sophia. The palace, originally raised by the emperor Constantine but substantially redesigned in subsequent centuries, provided the rulers of Byzantium with an institutional base, a ceremonial setting, and domestic quarters. Charlemagne’s early ninth century Aachen, with its palatine chapel, administrative offices and residential area, was a west European application of the same model.
The Alhambra’s earliest architectural feature consists of an alcazaba or citadel: defensive capability was a primary consideration during the earliest phase of construction on the site, and the entire complex is enclosed by a fortified wall with 13 towers. Designed and decorated by Muslim, Jewish and Christian artists and craftsmen during a period of over a century, the palace-fortress shows the vitality of differing culture in medieval Granada. A sophisticated irrigation system provided water for the numerous fountains, pools, bathhouses and gardens whose design furnishes the Alhambra with some of its most elaborate stylistic effects.
The distinctive clay and Islamic architecture of the Alhambra with, to the right, the renaissance facade of the palace built during the reign of the emperor Charles V.
SAINTS, RELICS AND HERETICS
c.325–1434
The saints honored by the Christian faithful during the medieval centuries were a specific group within the wider category of souls who had been admitted to heaven. When alive, the venerated saints had demonstrated exceptional holiness, and miraculous events that had occurred before and after their deaths were attributed to them. These interventions in the physical world took many forms: curing the sick and healing the lame as well as performing actions calculated to defeat their petitioners’ enemies. Above all, the saints could help to undo some of the consequences of sin—that fallen state which was, according to the Church, the universal human condition. It was their possession of virtus or power—a force bestowed on them by God—that enabled these saints to act in support of individuals who had asked them to intercede with the Creator.
The saints were souls who existed in the Almighty’s presence, and they were therefore well placed to help an anxious humanity. This they achieved not just through miracles but also by advocating before God the cause of prayerful penitents who speculated anxiously about their chances of gaining admittance to the court of heaven after death. For many medieval minds a persuasive analogy existed with the courtly societies of this world’s palaces, since here, too, there were powerful intermediaries in the form of courtiers who might be induced to represent outsiders who lacked influence.
Saints were carefully categorized. Martyrs such as the apostle Paul had deliberately chosen to suffer and die for the faith. Saints who died of natural causes included “confessors” who had lived exemplary lives. These included the fourth-century soldier Martin of Tours (316–97), who was especially venerated by successive French kings. “Doctors of the Church” such as the Dominican Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) merited canonization as saints because of their lucid exposition of Catholic orthodoxy. The practice of honoring such exceptional people was an ancient one, and the commemoration of the early martyrs had helped to maintain Christian solidarity in the second and third centuries when the faith was often proscribed. Celebratory meals were held at martyrs’ tombs such as the ones on the outskirts of Rome, and small shrines were sometimes built over them, as happened at Peter’s tomb on the Vatican Hill. The emperor Constantine’s mother Helena was credited with having discovered the remains of the True Cross in Jerusalem during the mid-320s, and the role of women in looking after relics and establishing shrines remained important throughout the Middle Ages. Large numbers of women attended the ceremonies held at the shrines and the church services commemorating saints’ lives.
RIGHT Saint Thomas Aquinas is shown on the far left of this fresco (c.1437) Coronation of the Virgin, by Fra Angelico (c.1390–1455) from the church of San Marco, Florence.
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SAINTS, RELICS AND HERETICS
c.325 The emperor Constantine’s mother Helena is credited with the discovery in Jerusalem of the remains of the True Cross.
c.700 Following the Islamic conquest of Syria and Palestine, Eastern Christian refugees have arrived in Western Europe—along with their collections of relics.
1155 A mass grave is uncovered in Cologne and is believed to contain the remains of Ursula and her 11,000 co-martyrs. The European relic market is flooded as a result.
1204 The crusaders’ sack of Constantinople leads to the mass export of relics to Western Europe.
1322 Pope John XXII denounces as heretical the view that Christ and his disciples owned nothing.
1415 Jan Huss, a Czech reformer influenced by John Wycliffe, is put to death by the Church Council meeting at Constance.
1420–34 The Hussite Wars: the followers of Jan Huss engage in armed conflict in Bohemia and other central European regions.
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RECOGNIZING SANCTITY
Saints who gained official recognition from the Church authorities were accorded a cultus or public honor. The cultus took many different forms. The Church nominated certain days—usually the anniversary of their death—for the saints’ liturgical commemoration during the performance of the mass or the monastic office. Particularly important saints would be the focus of major celebrations sometimes involving a procession of relics. Individual dioceses and monasteries had their own liturgical calendars specifying celebrations for saints whose appeal was particular to the locality or specific to the religious Order, and the popularity of saints remained highly regionalized right across Europe during the Middle Ages.
Official recognition of some kind was always needed before a saint’s cult cou
ld be established, but decisions about who should be venerated showed a degree of local initiative which clerical hierarchies often struggled to control. Establishing a relationship with certain chosen saints was one of the few ways in which the illiterate and the marginalized could exercise their freedom and assert their solidarity, and a saint’s body of supporters was often described as his or her “family.” For example, in the case of a saint who was the patron of a monastic community, that family would include not just the monks and the nobles who had endowed the foundation but also the serfs who worked the community’s lands and the pilgrims who came to seek the saint’s help. During the early medieval centuries bishops sought to establish a measure of control over who could be a saint within their dioceses. By the 12th century the papacy was exerting its own centralized authority by asserting a unique prerogative to issue the special bulls which canonized saints. This was also the time when the institution was preoccupied with a tight definition of orthodoxy and of its polar opposite—heresy.
HOLY REMAINS
Among the relics or reliquiae (“the remains”) left behind by the saints, it was the bones that attracted most attention. The Church taught that on Christ’s return to Earth on the day of the Last Judgment the body of every human being would be reassembled from the pieces that had once constituted it. This was the bodily resurrection, and it applied to the venerated saints no less than to the rest of the dead. A tomb or a reliquary casket did not just contain inert bones, therefore. These objects continued to be part of the saints’ identities and would be assembled to form their glorified bodies after the Last Judgment. To pray before the relics was to be in the physical presence of the saint—a real and identifiable personality offering a direct link with God who was the unique source of all power. Relics could also include physical objects used by the saints, such as items of clothing and books. Items brought into contact with relics—for example, pieces of cloth pressed onto a shrine or vials containing water used to wash a saint’s body—could themselves become relics, albeit of a minor kind.
LEFT The golden shrine of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, who died in 1231, once contained the saint’s body. The shrine, located in Marburg, Germany, was plundered, and some of its relics are now to be found in Sweden and Austria.
Relics were sometimes mere fragments of bones, and these could be placed inside altars or within reliquaries (a container for relics). Relics were also bought by the rich who used them in private devotions. The major shrines of the Middle Ages were more likely to contain a whole body or at least a significant collection of the relevant body parts. These frequently ornate structures were raised either over the original tombs or in places to which the bodies had been moved—as happened with James’s shrine in Compostela and Thomas Becket’s at Canterbury. The remains of Faith, a young girl tortured to death in c.300 by the Roman authorities, were originally to be found in her home town of Agen in Aquitaine. Faith’s refusal to make pagan sacrifices, along with her spectacular torture on a red-hot brazier, made her a celebrity saint, and her bones were stolen in the ninth century by a monk from the Benedictine foundation at nearby Conques. It was here, on the pilgrimage route to Compostela, that Faith’s relics became an object of mass devotion in the great 11th-century Romanesque abbey of Sainte Foy.
Eastern Christians had pioneered the veneration of relics, as evidenced by the scale of their devotions at the relic-rich holy places of Christendom in Syria and Palestine. The leadership of the Latin Church in Western Europe was often skeptical about the practice until at least the seventh century, and bishops tried to limit and control its local observance. However, the Islamic conquests in the Middle East led to a mass migration of Eastern Christians whose arrival in Western Europe—along with their relic collections—gave a new boost to the cult of relic veneration. Successive waves of popular devotion forced the clerical hierarchies to revise their views. The iconoclastic controversy that consumed the Greek Church for most of the eighth century and the first half of the ninth century also had an effect. Icons or pictures of the saints performed many of the roles (including miracles) attributed to relics, and the Byzantine emperors who supported the icon-breakers may well have wished to emphasize thereby their own unique authority as intermediaries between their subjects and God. Many Greeks were so devoted to their icons that they fled to Italy where they increased the numbers of those seeking to honor the saintly intermediaries. Nonetheless, the Church hierarchy remained wary, and the clergy tried to maintain control by subjecting relics to a process of authentication and by imposing order on the rituals marking their veneration.
From the 11th century onward development of feudal practices and of the institution of lordship, which included the exchange of gifts, paralleled another upswing in the popularity of both saints and relics. Vassals who placed themselves under the protection of a local lord by offering him their service could be seen as secular counterparts to the pious, who might seek to gain the protection of saintly souls by bringing gifts to the shrines. Many churches and monasteries had to be rebuilt and extended because of the saints’ popularity during the high Middle Ages. The great increase in the number of pilgrims drawn to Saint-Denis near Paris, for example, was one of the reasons why Abbé Suger embarked on a massive redesign of the abbey in the 1130s. The period also saw a steady growth in the numbers of female saints and their relics. From c.1050 onward the monks at the Benedictine abbey of Vézelay in Burgundy began to claim possession of Mary Magdalene’s relics. Later, the European relic market was flooded following the discovery in 1155 of a mass grave in Cologne alleged to contain the bones of Ursula and her equally legendary 11,000 co-martyrs. New trading contacts with the Middle East made as a result of the crusades, as well as the crusader’s sacking and looting of Constantinople in 1204, swelled the number of imported relics. Sainte-Chapelle in Paris was built in the 1240s by Louis IX (1214–70) specifically to house the remains of saints.
HOW RELIGIOUS ORDERS VIEWED SAINTS
Religious Orders could differ quite sharply in their attitudes to veneration of the saints. Cistercian monks followed an ideal of separation from mainstream society and Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) led the movement to international recognition. But when the monks of Clairvaux prayed to their sainted founder they asked Bernard specifically not to perform miracles at his tomb in the monastery since they had no wish to deal with large numbers of pilgrims. The Franciscans, an austerely mendicant Order pledged to poverty, did not tend any significant shrines in France, although they did perform that task in Italy—and especially so at Assisi where their great founder Francis (1181/2–1226) was buried.
BELOW This painting by Giovanni de Paolo (1403–83) dated 1455, shows Saint Clare of Assisi miraculously saving a child from being savaged by a wolf.
This was also a time when many saints acquired a rapid posthumous recognition, as in the cases of Louis IX and Bernard of Clairvaux, who were canonized in 1297 and 1174 respectively. The canonization of Dominic de Guzman (1170–1221), just 13 years after his death, rewarded his insight in establishing the Order of Preachers—a body of intellectual friars whose itinerancy and skills as communicators equipped them to move easily among the new urban centers of Europe. The rapid bestowal of a cultus recognized a saint’s inspirational general example and ability to intercede. And in the case of these swift promotions the background was rarely one of mass devotion at particular graves and shrines. But the bodies of these near-contemporary saints were nonetheless carefully preserved, and often by members of a religious community. Such was the case with Clare of Assisi, a follower of Francis and founder of the Order that bears her name, who was canonized just two years after her death in 1253.
LATE MEDIEVAL PIETY
A new intensity in lay spirituality was evident during the later Middle Ages, a time when shrines dedicated to the Virgin Mary and to Christ increased in numbers and popularity. The doctrines of the Assumption and Ascension taught that the bodies of the Savior and his mother had been removed to heav
en in their entirety, and since these shrines could therefore contain no fragments of bones the faithful had to content themselves with other objects. Chartres Cathedral became one of the great Marian centers of devotion since it claimed to possess the Virgin’s tunic. Many statues of the Virgin, some of them painted black, were endowed with miraculous properties, and the many paintings recording her Annunciation showed Mary as a devout contemporary aristocrat reading in her bedchamber. Images of Christ’s face became increasingly popular and the Eucharist (Christ’s body and blood) came to be treated as a particular kind of relic. The Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament may have been an innovation of Francis of Assisi, and this ceremonial adoration of the host (the consecrated bread) was one of late medieval piety’s most typical devotions.
ABOVE These richly decorated pages come from a book of hours printed in Paris by Phillipe Pigouchet for the French publisher Simon Vostre in 1498. Such works were kept at home for purposes of personal devotion and study.
The saints now lived on in many forms. Priests could commend them in sermons, and excerpts from hagiographies (collections of saints’ biographies written in the vernacular) were read out to the laity. Books of hours—containing information about saints’ lives—were consulted at home by the rich and literate. Images of saints were widespread on churches’ painted walls, and they were ubiquitous in the Greek empire once the iconoclastic fury had passed. Confraternities (organizations of lay people that promoted special works of Christian piety) were an important part of medieval social life, and the saints adopted as patrons by these groups’ members were honored in elaborate ceremonies.
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