Did the system work? Well, consider the Alps.
In case you haven’t been keeping score, the center of the western Christian world was Rome. Separating Rome from the rest of the Christian world were the Alps. With the need for speedy messenger service from Rome to everywhere and the heavy merchant traffic to and from urban Italy, there was no getting around it: you weren’t going around them.
And it was the Alps. In 1480, intrepid German priest Felix Fabri described one section of a well-maintained alpine road as single-file, narrow, knee-deep mud covered in snow, with jagged rock cliffs on one side and sheer drop-offs on the other. (Admittedly, a worthy setting for your first dramatic rescue or tragic accident.)
When he made his second trip in 1483, however, Fabri got a most pleasant surprise. Well, first he was unpleasantly surprised when he had to shell out some major silver at a new toll castle. But after that, he was sharing a wide, only ankle-deep muddy road with carts and carriages! With occasional things resembling guardrails!
Duke Sigismund of Austria and Tirol, the road’s guardian, had calculated that he could turn a profit by attracting increased traffic, and he sure knew how to accomplish that. He was rich enough to blast through half a mountain’s worth of rock face—with gunpowder. No wonder Fabri had been so surprised to see a toll castle, since, after that much gunpowder, he’d probably thought the duke didn’t have very much to compensate for.
HOW to TRAVEL
When it comes to the fourteen miles of road and “road” between your village and the closest thing that resembles a town, you’re the expert. As for the rest of the medieval world? Time to turn to the real travel experts to learn what to do.
HOW TO TRAVEL AS A PAPAL MESSENGER
Pros: Horses supplied. Fast travel. Familiarity with routes. You’re getting paid.
Cons: The Alps. In winter.
Moving on now.
HOW TO TRAVEL AS A PILGRIM
From the Muslim hajj to Christians’ journeys to local shrines, pilgrimage was probably the most characteristically medieval reason to travel. In the earliest Middle Ages, long-distance pilgrims had tour groups and kept travel diaries. By 1500, pilgrims still had tour groups and kept travel diaries—and they had guidebooks, hotel discounts, legal protections, blessed swords, and souvenirs. For pilgrims, all of these were useless without the mindset of prayer and devotion that transformed a physical journey into a spiritual one. For you, they make it the perfect disguise.
Blend In by Blending In.
A pilgrimage could take the form of nearly any mode of travel. The ideal Christian pilgrim traveled alone, in prayer and meditation; the prudent pilgrim traveled in a group, to prevent bandit attacks. The exemplary pilgrim walked the whole way; the pragmatic pilgrim wore shoes they could afford to repair along that way; the lucky pilgrim had a horse. Most pilgrimages were short, usually a day’s travel from the city walls or less. But a truly ambitious Christian might walk from Poland to Rome, a Jew might travel from Aragon to Jerusalem, and a Muslim might even cross the Sahara. It would not be suspicious at all for someone to see the same pilgrim on the road for days on end.
Weapons had their place at a pilgrim’s side. By the twelfth century, priests offered blessings for the swords of travelers casting their pilgrimages as devotional Crusades. (The Church often cast the Crusades as militant pilgrimages.) One anonymous French pilgrim passing through Jaffa around 1420 grumbled about the additional fee he had to pay to carry his sword, while another remarked approvingly that Christian and Jewish foreigners were even allowed to carry weapons.
Blend In by Standing Out.
By the later Middle Ages, artwork and advice for pilgrims had developed a sort of uniform. Durable shoes, of course, but also a heavy cloak, a purse, a walking staff, and, most important, a wide-brimmed hat. The hat was practical, but it was also the place to display little badges from earlier trips. They weren’t just souvenirs; they were tangible remnants of the benefits of the saint or the site, a material connection to the divine. Someone looking at a pilgrim wouldn’t see the person, just a standard pilgrim. Someone looking closely at a pilgrim was likely just trying to see if they could out-badge them.
And when a pilgrim stood out because of their badges, it could help solve the biggest travel problem of all: funding.
We can’t all be Bishop Gunther of Bamberg, whose garments were so over-the-top and opulent that he was mistaken for a king in disguise during his 1064 stay in Constantinople. And we can’t all be the Jerusalem-bound pilgrims who rented feather beds in Venice for their voyage across the Mediterranean. (Shipwrecks and pirates? Bring it on. Uncomfortable nights? Never!) Ordinary pilgrims still had significant advantages over the business traveler.
Even local pilgrims in the earliest Middle Ages could take advantage of laws requiring shrines to offer overnight lodging. It was provided in exchange for a donation to the host monastery or chapel, of course, but that also brought with it hopes of a miraculous cure or early release from purgatory. And the spiritual benefits of pilgrimage didn’t have to wait until after death, either.
Late medieval Christians found the dangers and difficulties of pilgrimage a fitting way to do penance for their sins. They also served as a hope for miracles, and Christians could also satisfy their emotional yearning to be close to the remnants of God’s saints on earth. And they could expect a landscape of ever-proliferating shrines to help them out in this life and the next.
More pilgrims were advantageous for towns, because it meant more money spent by pilgrims. More shrines were equally advantageous to the pilgrims who were spending that money, because it meant more places competing for said money. The knowledgeable penitent could plan their journey through towns that offered pilgrims the medieval equivalent of hotel discounts and free parking. Tolls to cross that bridge controlled by the convent, or taxes to pass through the city gates? Those were easily waived by monks and magistrates. Within cities, inns undercut each other’s prices for a bed and beer.
Flirting with the barmaid was not included, so don’t even try.
This All Seems Too Good to Be True.
Often, yes. The existence of legal protections, like guaranteed lodging, did not mean that every shrine site cooperated with said decrees. Even in a scrutinized city like Rome, the wealthiest pilgrims still found themselves reduced to camping in tents during the jubilee year of 1300. The growth of the pilgrimage industry necessarily paired with the growth of an industry to extort and scam pilgrims, not to mention eager pickpockets at all those free or discounted inns. And for long-distance pilgrims, there were still the Alps.
But worst of all, the creeping fear inside every pilgrim’s mind was the possibility of failure. Would-be mothers on the road to Conques cradled their stillborn infants to their chests, already praying to its patron St. Foy to return their children to life just long enough for them to be baptized. But sometimes, a saint looked the other way. In 1272, inseparable pair Nicole and Contesse made their painful way from the slums of Paris to the shrine of St. Louis at St.-Denis, hoping desperately for a cure to Nicole’s sudden paralysis of speech and body. They stayed and prayed for nine days—but Louis and his shrine remained silent.
Plenty of priests taught pilgrims how to act on the journey there. But who taught pilgrims how to journey home after that?
This Is Too True to Be Good.
Nicole and Contesse, desperately poor to begin with, gave up nine days of Contesse’s income to beg for a cure. People in the Middle Ages believed in the power of pilgrimage and its destinations.
Most of the time.
If “pilgrim” makes a good disguise for you, it makes a good disguise for anyone—and medieval people believed that, too. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), himself a miracle-working saint, groused about pilgrims interested in seeing everything in an exotic location except the shrine. By the fifteenth century, European nobles assigned to pilgrimage as penance for their sins got in the habit of paying others to travel in their places. German nun Hugeberc
recorded how Bishop Willibald of Eichstätt, heading to Jerusalem around 720, was just one person on a long list of pilgrims accused of espionage. Not much later, a thief named Adalbertus disguised himself as a pilgrim to case an abbey church, from which he intended to steal copiously. Beforehand, he used his disguise to obtain all the free lodging, food, and religious services he could want.
Which brings you to one final option for travel:
HOW TO TRAVEL AS A BANDIT
That’s cheating.
HOW to STAY CLEAN
Regardless of gender or skin color or possibility of being an elf, you and your traveling companions will definitely have two things in common. First, all of you are going to get terrifically dirty and sweaty on the road. Second, all of you have noses.
In 1638, English philosopher Francis Bacon proposed one way to reconcile those two characteristics in a book aptly titled The History of Life and Death. He advised his readers that it was better for one’s health to bathe in the blood of infants than to drink blood out of a young man’s arm. But he added that people (except kings, supposedly) tended to object to this. So perhaps you, gentle reader, might simply place something cold on your chest.
His advice did not mean Bacon was opposed to bathing in simple water. Just, as soon as you finish, you should immediately lather your body with liquid oil mixed with herbs.
Perhaps you shouldn’t heed the thoughts of a man named Bacon on the myriad health benefits of animal fat. So, it’s a good thing it’s not 1638! People in the Middle Ages were plenty interested in the connection between cleanliness and health. If you’re going to spend three months on a galley with 150 men who spend their days rowing, you’ll start to agree. And you’ll want directions for getting clean.
Immediately.
THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM
“Large hail, polluted rain, and snow pour down through the polluted air. The earth stinks when it receives this.” Sound like the days you spent in coal-burning London? No, that’s how Dante describes the third circle of hell.
Oops.
As for the entrance to the fourth circle? “And there, because of the excess of stink emitted by the wide and deep abyss, we took ourselves behind the cover of a large tomb.” And so the Inferno’s narrator, who later descends from the eighth to the ninth and lowest circle without pausing (except to be wrong about the identities of the damned), can handle all the sights and fear of hell—but tries to hide from the stench.
But hell was not to be out-smelled. In 1087, thieves attempted to carry off the body of St. Nicholas from Myra to their hometown of Bari on the Italian peninsula, in this case probably to bring their city prestige. However, they should have remembered that a pleasant-smelling corpse could be proof of sanctity. Once removed from its tomb, the saint’s body gave off such a wondrous aroma that the people of Myra equated it with the odor of heaven. The tale grew in the telling, and by the fourteenth century, the scent had been so strong that it wafted all the way to the ships in the harbor.
Unfortunately for the Bari gang, the people of Myra also figured out that the lovely smell was the result of the body of their precious saint being freed from his tomb. By thieves from Bari. Oops. The example of St. Nicholas proved that cleanliness wasn’t next to godliness, it was the weapon of godliness.
But how much you regret your failure to have soap isn’t a hazard only because of ickiness. Lacking germ theory, medieval medicine held that disease spread through bad air. So when you finish your quest and win a castle (and possibly a princess), follow the example of Constance’s Bishop Otto III von Hachenburg (who did not win a princess), and make sure at least one of your castles has a very isolated latrine tower.
And keep yourself clean, for heaven’s sake.
YOUR LAUNDRY
You dressed for fighting evil, yes. But did you prepare for fighting evil two—or three—days in a row in the same outfit?
Depending on how poor your village is (was), it might have been your only option. Tax exemptions show that half of all Londoners in 1338 probably owned two sets of clothing (or at least, it was considered realistic to claim so). Wealthier urbanites were not safe, either. Clothes were a popularly targeted item of home burglars, since people often sewed their money into their clothing for security.
So yes, you’ll have to take some time to wash your clothes. For the most part, the basics of doing laundry don’t change from era to era. You really only need a running body of water and so forth. The biggest issue for you is more that you need to do said laundry, and you need to find the time to do it. But whereas your village probably had a nice little creek, a productive well, or a surprisingly fancy irrigation system somewhere in the area, larger towns and cities faced additional problems.
In the 1410s, a small women’s convent upstream of the German town Reute housed a very special living saint. Elisabeth Achler’s miraculous, very visible stigmata bled—in abundance. So every day, her sisters carried her clothes and bedclothes down to the creek to wash. The bloody wounds might have been pleasing to God, but their result sure wasn’t pleasing to the residents of Reute—whose clothes were getting bloody instead of clean.
Still, if you’re worried about doing laundry, you’d do well to invite Achler along on your quest. She solved the town’s problem by identifying a spot in the convent courtyard where they could dig a well. That’s the kind of skill you need to conquer household chores.
And you could probably also use the help of those other sisters who kept doing her laundry.
Every day.
YOUR TEETH
You probably still have teeth.
Tooth rot and loss was less common than you might think in the Middle Ages. (Never mind that in the late Middle Ages, “honeycake-baker” was a recognized profession in Bavarian cities. Never mind that some medical texts advised cleansing your teeth with red wine.) However, the all-consuming agony of toothaches and abscesses were ever-present, meaning that medieval dentists were always in business, and they had more or less the one skill you’d expect.
But you do still have teeth that you’d like to keep, and you’re not helpless. Medieval medicine recognized a rudimentary concept of toothpaste. In the twelfth century, one Italian physician recommended rubbing your teeth with walnut shells three times a day—this, they (and yes, there’s a decent chance this author was a woman) added, would make or keep teeth white, not just clean.
This concept took on another purpose and vastly more urgency in the fifteenth century, when Portuguese doctor Gabriele Fonseca advised scraping your teeth with rough fabric, followed by a good dousing of pleasant aromatic spices, which was meant to fight the bad air in the mouth that caused sickness. The far more important result was fighting bad breath.
Too bad you can’t afford spices.
Too bad your traveling companions can’t, either.
YOU
Among medieval Christians, not bathing was reserved for saints. Body odor represented the ability to transcend the desires of the body (such as not stinking) to focus on heavenly goods. You, however, are not a saint. About which your traveling companions are very glad, I might add.
Because most Christians in medieval Europe were also not saints, the late Middle Ages witnessed a revival of the old Roman tradition of public baths. The Islamic world needed no such revival. With cleanliness woven into Islamic precepts, many Muslims considered the foundation of new baths or the support of existing ones to be charitable donations.
The extent to which baths qualified as religious institutions was questionable. In Iberia, Christians owned baths that were run according to Islamic regulations, and rabbinical writers constantly scolded Jews for sharing bathhouses with Christians and Muslims. Comic poetry snorted that people emerged dirtier than they entered, metaphorically because of gossip, as well as sweat and other people’s grime. Arab travel writers observed or invented exotically fanciful baths in faraway cities as entertainment and not a little bit of propaganda. In Baghdad, claimed one, there was a Moroccan bath wh
ere you would get three towels (how wasteful), but not a waist wrap (how nudist).
Wait! What about getting clean? Baths are about getting clean, about removing dirt and stench both symbolically and physically, although the physical ways probably mattered more to most people. Twelfth-century abbess and prophet Hildegard of Bingen went so far as to suggest that natural hot springs were heated by the underground fires of purgatory, cleansing bathers’ souls as well as their bodies.
Except, perhaps, for the baths that went coed. And not in the “separate rooms” sense.
As for that… we’ll just say that the increasingly shrill pressure on governments in the sixteenth century to close western European bathhouses coincided with the spread of syphilis.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING OF ALL
We’ve already observed that Arab (and all other) travel writers exaggerated or invented differences between their homes and destinations. However, your skepticism of their accuracy does not eliminate the fact that the writers had to be able to conceive of the foreign and exotic in the first place. Take ninth-century merchant Abu Zayd al-Sirafi (who was a real person, although he borrowed much of what he wrote from earlier authors). On the differences between Persia and China, he wrote, “The Chinese are unhygienic, and they do not wash their backsides with water after defecating but merely wipe themselves with paper.”
How to Slay a Dragon Page 7