These pale-skinned and probably tinted blonde northern European women, known generically to the Arabs and Byzantines as Franks, stood out dramatically among the dark-skinned and black-headed crowds of the Arab world, heightening their appeal and no doubt raising their prices.
Europe had not been free of trafficking in women either. Horse-dealers and other rough nomadic traders who lived on the fringes of organised society had long pursued a sideline during the early Middle Ages, arranging for the sale of young blonde women to eastern Europe and beyond. The blonder the hair the higher the prices paid. A Spanish Jew, Ibrahim ibn Jaqub, who had converted to Islam, left a report of his late-tenth-century travels through Bohemia, central Europe and the Baltic region, demonstrating that one of the objects of his journey was to purchase blonde prisoners who had been captured by the Baltic tribes in battle with the Germans. Such reports are difficult to verify, as non-believers were often accused by the Christian fathers of trafficking in women, and the finger was typically pointed at Arab merchants as the buyers at the end of the line.
The power and appeal of the blonde, both as spiritually immaculate beauty and as sexually attractive demon, had not merely survived throughout the Middle Ages. It had been positively augmented, on the one hand by the divine magnetism of the Virgin Mary and on the other by several hundred years of misogynistic ranting from the men of the Christian Church.
But one more monumental fantasy blonde emerged in the Middle Ages that would have a profound effect on the sensibilities of the educated, vividly and enduringly colouring the arts, literature and poetry of centuries to come. The cult of chivalry, which developed in the late twelfth century, celebrated, among other things, the worship of the aristocratic lady after generations of female suppression. Chivalry and courtly love made use of romance to cover up women’s assumed inferiority, and, for the first time in centuries, great ladies became the beneficiaries of romantic literature and art. Women were placed on a pedestal and celebrated for their beauty. The chivalric ideal codified the worship of a beautiful lady as being close to that of God, and upper-class ladies became the source of all romance and the object of all worship. For them all deeds of valour were performed. They had but to command to be obeyed.
Blonde hair became part of a standardised code for earthly feminine beauty and romance in literature. Gallant knights, poets and troubadours began celebrating their love of blondes with much eager serenading. Felicitious poems and romantic tales bursting with golden-haired heroines poured from the pens of passionate lovers. Blonde hair was soon, to the enduring fury of the Church, officially adored on temporal beauties.c
Meanwhile, bands of wandering troubadours roamed the countryside in quest of amorous adventures, initially in Provence and later, as the tradition spread, all across Europe. They worked in the households of powerful lords, whose wives and daughters they professed to love. Gallantly they served these ladies’ every wish. The troubadours were often the younger sons of aristocratic families who had been denied arranged marriages in order to avoid the carving-up of family landholdings. They pledged themselves to the beautiful ladies of their lords’ households, playing elaborate games of flirtation and coquetry and often indulging in semi-sanctioned affairs. And many of them set down their longings in sensual lyrical poetry, elaborately praising the objects of their passion, but usually gallantly obscuring their identities. Arnaud Daniel, a poet from Perigord, writing in the twelfth century, pined somewhat mournfully for the object of his idealised blonde passion.
Thousand masses I’ve attended
Lights of wax and oil I’m burning,
That God may to pity move
Her ‘gainst whom I can’t protect me,
When I see her golden tresses
And her figure fair and slim,
Nought on earth so much I treasure.29
And this German love song of the thirteenth century eulogises long pale-gold hair as an essential element of feminine beauty.
Where did ever mortal eye
See two lovelier cheeks displayed?
Lily-white, without a lie,
Sweetly, featly are they made.
Long and pale and gold’s her hair.
If hers and mine the whole realm were,
I would give no one else a share!30
Romance novels and long lyric poems of courtly love offered escapist fantasy to the upper classes (those noblemen and ladies who could not read heard public narrations) and often wove the seductively beautiful blonde into their pages as heroine. She appeared as Iseult in the twelfth-century tale of Tristan and Iseult, a blonde ‘Queen of the Hair of Gold’ whose appeal was so enduring that she reappeared centuries later as Isolde in Wagner’s opera. Iseult was an exemplary figure of femininity, the most beautiful woman ‘from here to the Spanish marches’. Her face was radiant, she had clear eyes and above all she was crowned with that key romantic asset, tumbling golden hair. Sewn into his jacket as a talisman, a lock of her hair inspired Tristan to undertake perilous voyages and do battle with terrible fiery dragons in order to reach her.
Chrétien de Troyes, one of the acknowledged masters of courtly love and romance tales, made regular use of blonde hair as an essential element in his Arthurian romances of the late twelfth century: Erec and Enide, Cligés, Yvain and Lancelot and Perceval. Naturally, Guinevere was a blonde whose hair was kept in lockets close to the hearts of her many admirers. In one of the stories, Lancelot on his travels comes across a comb of gilded ivory forgotten by the road. In it is tangled a handful of golden hair. When told that the comb and the hair belong to Queen Guinevere, Lancelot falls into a swoon. The text of de Troyes’ story descends likewise into a state of blonde dementia:
Never will the eye of man see anything (sic) receive such honour as when he begins to adore these tresses. A hundred thousand times he raises them to his eyes and mouth, to his forehead and face: he manifests his joy in every way, considering himself rich and happy now. He lays them in his bosom near his heart, between the shirt and the flesh. He would not exchange them for a cartload of emeralds and carbuncles, nor does he think that any sore or illness can afflict him now; he holds in contempt essence of pearl, treacle and the cure for pleurisy; even for St Martin and St James he has no need; for he has such confidence in this hair that he requires no other aid. But what was this hair like? If I tell the truth about it, you will think I am a mad teller of lies. When the mart is full at the yearly fair of St Denis, and when the goods are most abundantly displayed, even then the knight would not take all this wealth, unless he had found these tresses, too. And if you wish to know the truth, gold a hundred thousand times refined, and melted down as many times, would be darker than is night compared with the brightest summer day we have had this year, if one were to see the gold and set it beside this hair.31
Another of Chrétien’s Arthurian romances, Cligés, also glorifies the blonde hair of a sumptuously beautiful damsel by the name of Soredamors. She sews a few strands of her hair into the white silk shirt given to her manly hero, Alexander. When the queen reveals the truth about Soredamors and the shirt, he
can hardly restrain himself for joy from worshipping and adoring the golden hair. His companions and the Queen, who were with him, annoy him and embarrass him; for their presence prevents him from raising the hair to his eyes and mouth, as he would fain have done, had he not thought that it would be remarked. He is glad to have so much of his lady, but he does not hope or expect ever to receive more from her: his very desire makes him dubious. Yet, when he has left the Queen and is by himself, he kisses it more than a hundred thousand times, feeling how fortunate he is. All night long he makes much of it, but is careful that no one shall see him. As he lies upon his bed, he finds a vain delight and solace in what can give him no satisfaction. All night he presses the shirt in his arms, and when he looks at the golden hair, he feels like the lord of the whole wide world. Thus Love makes a fool of this sensible man, who finds his delight in a single hair and is in ecstasy over its poss
ession.32
The most famous romance of the Middle Ages was probably the Roman de la Rose, a long allegorical love poem written in the thirteenth century by two poets, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. For nearly three hundred years after its composition it was one of the most widely read works of the French language. As French was the language of the English court, it became important in England, too. The blondes in the Roman de la Rose were fantasy images of love and seduction, linked in carefully crafted symbolism to Venus or to Eve. In their day they were the last word in raw blonde power.
Early in the story, the hero meets a beautiful girl who guards a charming but inaccessible garden. She has ‘hair as blonde as a copper basin, flesh more tender than that of a baby chick, a gleaming forehead and arched eyebrows’.33 In more reams of ecstatic praise he attempts to do justice to her large grey-blue eyes, her straight nose, her sweet breath, dimpled chin, snowy bosom and so on. On her head she wears a chaplet of roses, an emblem of a follower of Venus. In her hand she holds a mirror and comb, the traditional attributes of luxuria’. ‘By the time she has combed her hair carefully and prepared and adorned herself well, she has finished her day’s work . . . ‘I am called Idleness,’ she said, ‘by people who know me. I am a rich and powerful lady, and I have a very good time, for I have no other purpose than to enjoy myself and make myself comfortable, to comb and braid my hair.’ Soon Idleness lets him into the garden. ‘Believe me, I thought that I was truly in the earthly paradise,’ he says. Later he meets Joy, another paragon of beauty. ‘Her forehead, white and gleaming, was free of wrinkles, her eyebrows brown and arched, her gay eyes so joyful that they always laughed regularly before her little mouth did . . . Her head was blonde and shining. Why should I go on telling you? She was beautiful and beautifully adorned.’34
By the end of the story, the hero is regretting his infatuation with blondes. ‘He who acquaints himself with Idleness is a fool; acquaintance with her is very dangerous, for she has betrayed and deceived you. Love would never have seen you if Idleness had not led you into the fair garden of Diversion.’ The end of this long poem poses the familiar theory that women use their beauty to trap men. If she does not possess seductive blonde hair, it says, she finds some false hair, either of blonde silk or ‘cheveus de quelque fame morte’ and with this she weaves her spells.35
These popular tales, poems and songs glorifying blondes – some of them innocent, some dangerous, all attractive – lingered on throughout the Middle Ages and became important reminders of what it meant to be human. The polished Virgin Mary and the tarnished Eve were the superstars at the two extremes of sacred myth. But the gorgeous objects of courtly love were often based on real figures of flesh and blood, worshippable – even imitable – women whose enchantment was to extend the boundaries of blonde influence into some surprising new territory.
b Being the most expensive colour available, it was the obvious choice to honour God and other heavenly figures.
c Some historians believe that the Church, unable to suppress this flourishing courtly love movement, eventually appropriated its imagery, including its worship of blonde hair, and incorporated it into the cult of the Virgin as a way of attracting and sustaining allegiance.
5
The Cardinal and the Blonde Borgia
In its heyday in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Venice was a city more splendid, more glamorous and more powerful than any other in Europe. It was the New York of its time, boiling with prosperity and immense cultural energy. By 1500 the Venetian Empire had sovereignty over Istria, most of the Dalmatian coast and its off shore islands, Cephalonia, Negroponte, the Aegean Islands, Crete and Cyprus, as well as the Italian mainland stretching from Friuli in the east to Cremona in the west. Venice’s powerful fleets sailed home with exotic cargoes of treasure, gold, precious stones and sacred relics. It had the most cosmopolitan population in Europe and a prolific bounty of trade: the Venetian lagoon had become the principal emporium linking East and West. In its cornucopia of stores the dedicated shopper could buy a dazzling selection of opulent silks, spices, jewels, porcelain, ebony and glassware of startling extravagance, as well as love potions, unusual cures for unusual conditions and everything required to fit out a ship. The Venetians’ passion for public pomp was indulged to the full with pageants and festivals more sumptuous than any other in Europe. They gloried in their aristocracy, rejoiced in their arts and revelled in their bargaining finesse – from source to consumer they shamelessly milked all parties. The place was electrified with gossip, vanities, peccadilloes and transactions. Naturally, this brilliant city was a magnet for visitors. Pilgrims came; traders and tourists came. Poets, painters and patrons flocked. Thomas Coryate, a seventeenth-century visitor from Somerset, went into raptures, declaring that he would deny himself four of the richest manors in his county rather than go through life without seeing the city.
Splendid as Venice was, with its foreign treasures, its gleaming domes, its staggering panache and pageantry, one of its most famous attractions, as compelling a lure as any of these, was its women. They were reputed to be the most gorgeous in all Europe, and Venetian men prided themselves on their highly developed appreciation of feminine beauty.
Handsome women were everywhere, vain birds of paradise parading beautifully in their finery and displaying their attributes as glorious inspiration for Venice’s cultured men of arts and letters. And they were duly worshipped in paintings, evoked in music and caressed and adored in poetry. A feeling of confidence and hope pervaded the work of the artists of Italy and they referred constantly to the glories of art and scholarship achieved in ancient Rome as they set out to create a new art after the turmoil of the Middle Ages. Venice’s women provided artists with the raw material for a heady classical ideal of physical beauty. This beauty became a manifestation of divine perfection, its contemplation a route to a greater understanding of God.
In the Middle Ages, it was largely women of aristocratic houses who might have been worshipped for their beauty and wooed by chivalrous lovers with rarefied ballads. Now sensuality joined the cult of beauty and love, embracing even those women hitherto classed as outcasts by virtue of their wanton profession. By the late Renaissance Venice’s courtesans had joined high-bred pure beauties on pedestals to be openly worshipped like saints or goddesses.
Venus was the goddess in vogue and it was she, with her blonde hair and her expanses of creamy rose-tinted flesh, who most strongly influenced the canon of female perfection in paintings, in poetry – and in practice. Natural blonde hair was occasionally seen in Venice at this time, but it was rare and typically came matched with dark eyes, olive skin and dark eyebrows. Most prized was the blonde hair and pale complexion of the fantasy beauties of the mythical past. Its rarity, combined with its centuries-old erotic status, made it the most envied goal of aspiring beauties.
The Italian Renaissance poets too were well versed in a knowledge of antiquity and in the romantic writings of the troubadour poets. They developed a language and style which reinforced the standards of feminine beauty set in earlier times, constantly appraising Venetian beauties in relation to the ravishing blondes of ancient Greece and Rome. Petrarch, who lived in Padua in the fourteenth century, set a towering blonde standard in the Rime sparse, a series of exquisite love poems written to immortalise his adored lost Laura. Although Petrarch’s work was only one step removed from that of the troubadour poets, his ‘dolce stil nuovo’ – his sweet new style – was characterised as a harbinger of the Renaissance and it certainly set the tone for the period. Passionate eulogies to Laura’s blonde hair fill his poetry: lines like ‘Those tresses of gold, which ought to make the sun go filled with envy’,36 and ‘Amid the locks of gold Love hid the noose with which he bound me’.37
Pietro Bembo, a Renaissance cardinal born in Venice in 1470 who wrote one of the earliest Italian grammars, designed the typeface used in this book, and was widely known for his poetry, also paid amorous homage to the beauties of blonde hair. Gl
i Asolani, his treatise on the torments and joys of men’s love for women, was published in 1505 and dedicated to his mistress, the blonde Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara.
Never such a thief of love or one so fleet
Left her footprint in the grasses;
Never nymph so comely lifted leafy bough
Or spread along the wind such golden tresses;
Never decked her gracious limbs in airy vesture
Lady so resplendent and seductive as
This lovely foe of mine.38
Popular history has painted Lucrezia Borgia as a fantastically wicked operator, accusing her of colluding in many of the crimes and excesses of the unsavoury Borgia family. She was born in 1480, daughter of the Spanish cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, who later became Pope Alexander VI, and his mistress Vannozza Catanei. She was a beautiful girl, blonde and fair-skinned with a captivating smile and an ample share of the family’s love of display.
An image of Lucrezia aged about twelve, painted by Pinturicchio in his fresco Dispute of St Catherine, shows a ravishingly pretty girl with milky skin, large eyes, a rosebud mouth and streams of wavy golden hair. Some years later, a painting by Bartolomeo Veneto, thought by some art historians to be of Lucrezia, shows a delicate almost ethereal creature with the face of a madonna looking suggestively towards the viewer. Her white skin is like alabaster, her lips rosy, her eyes dark, her exposed breast as round and pert as an apple. In her slim fingers she holds a posy of daisies, anemones and ranunculi, and perched on top of her head is a white headdress crowned with a wreath of myrtle. But it is her hair that is the most striking feature of the image, tumbling down over her shoulders in tight snaky ringlets of metallic gold. To the modern viewer she looks as if she has just had a disastrous perm.
On Blondes Page 6