LESSON #1: DON’T GET KILLED
LESSON #2: DON’T PANIC
Remember Beowulf?
The Old English poem features three monsters that Beowulf has to face and defeat. Grendel attacks the mead-hall of Heorot, Beowulf’s temporary home, because he is drawn to a world that had cast him out—which was not Beowulf’s fault. Grendel’s mother attacks because Beowulf killed her kid—technically Beowulf’s fault, yes, but he had slain Grendel in self-defense.
Much like the first two monsters in Beowulf, the dragon is happily minding its own business until someone invades its home and steals one of its most precious possessions. So unless you’re a greedy thief, the dragon probably isn’t attacking your village in the first place.
LESSON #3: PROTECT YOURSELF
The most important thing to know is that medieval dragons usually kill with venom, not fire. They breathe thick clouds of deadly smoke in all directions at once.
This is good news.
True, fighting fires has a more straightforward solution. Namely, buckets of water. But simple is not the same as easy—especially when those buckets of water needed to be filled and dumped by entire neighborhoods or even cities to have a hope of winning. If you have to deal with lizard halitosis instead, you’re going to need a parallel example to help you prepare. You know what else features thick clouds of smoke spreading in all directions? Air pollution.
For some reason, the coal industry has never liked to advertise the fact that it got its jump start in the 1200s, particularly in England—and by the end of the century, Londoners were complaining about air pollution.
London’s creative attempt to deal with the smog and soot from coal fires involved telling people to stop burning coal. This strategy was as ineffective for them as it would be for you if you tried yelling at the dragon to stop it.
So perhaps you could turn to the medieval experts on toxic smaug: blacksmiths! In 1473, a doctor named Ulrich Ellenbog offered smiths a foolproof four-point plan:
Cover your mouth with a piece of cloth.
Place good-smelling spices inside—medieval Europeans believed that diseases traveled in “bad air,” so the best way to fight them was good air.
Because you also breathe in through your mouth, place beneficial items on your tongue. Beneficial, like cabbage or emeralds.
If all else fails: garlic and wine, my friend, garlic and wine.
LESSON #4: HEAL YOURSELF
You might be out of emeralds, but you’re never out of options! Make sure that in every town you pass through, the local apothecary is stocked up on theriac, the borderline miraculous powder that counters the venom of any deadly reptile (with one exception). Of course, theriac is made with ground-up tyrus, the skin of a snake found only in Syria (the aforementioned exception), which means the theriac you can afford is probably counterfeit.
Fortunately, even an era whose primary medical treatments involved leeches had its alternative medicine. So pack your bags for Italy! You can’t miss the man standing by the city gates—a pitch-black serpent coiled around one arm, a viper curled around the other, a golden snake slithering around his shoulders. He is one of the “pauliani,” named after the apostle said to be immune to snakebite. You can share in that immunity, he promises. All you need is a jar of St. Paul’s grace… which you can buy from him. And only him. All the power of theriac for a much better price!
Did “St. Paul’s grace” actually work? Well, consider that there are two types of people who never give up: heroes and swindlers.
HOW to SLAY a DRAGON
Did you think you would learn how to slay a dragon from a book about etymology?
Because theologian and bishop Isidore of Seville’s (c. 560–636) Etymologies is not ambiguous on teaching the matter. A wizard sneaks into the dragon’s cave and sprinkles sleeping powder on the ground. Then they cut off the dragon’s head while it can’t fight back. Victory is achieved!
On the other hand… At this point, you know all about paying attention to the sources of what you’re learning. Isidore’s book is not about etymology in the sense of word origins. The Etymologies is an encyclopedia of everything in the universe, described by qualities supposedly derived from its name (but mostly derived from earlier authors). And Isidore’s dragon-slaying advice is not about dragons. It’s about rocks.
When discussing gemstones of fire, Isidore confronts dracontites: the glowing gem that is the pride of the kings of the east. Dracontites is found only inside the heads of dragons, but it will be nothing but an ordinary stone if you tear it from a dead dragon. The stroke that slays the serpent must reveal what is then a brilliant gem.
No matter how crushing it is, you’ve got to admit that there’s a pretty big chasm between instructions for slaying a dragon and wordplay about a rock that doesn’t exist.
When Isidore does get to dragons, he is more concerned with things like how dragons can slay you instead. (Be on the lookout for its tail suffocating you, like a boa. A boa that can fly.) The encyclopedia entry is not a total loss. Isidore’s additional use of the common dragon versus elephant theme might suggest you should set aside your horse and ride an elephant into battle. He also says that dragons can live only in the tropical heat of India and Ethiopia. Slight problem. You’ve been to (or grew up in) Ethiopia, and the only dragons you saw were being slain by St. George in art.
To Isidore, on the other hand, Ethiopia and India weren’t real places. They were half-mythical lands at the fringes of the known world, filled with marvels known and unknown. Half-mythical marvels like dragons.
No. That geography can’t be right. Dragons exist. Why else would they be everywhere in the Middle Ages? You’ve never smelled the smoke of a dragon’s breath. But you’ve seen plenty of them. They’ve glowed down at you from the stained glass windows of Cologne’s synagogue, defiantly rebuilt after the pogrom of 1096. Or your fingers have brushed against sculptures of coiled dragons biting their own tails as you pass through city gates in 1200s Turkey. In the 1400s, dragon statues launched the rainbow of fireworks that began to explode across the skies of Europe.
And you’ve heard all about dragon slayers, too! (You don’t even have to worry that Beowulf doesn’t count because he was not a real person. In the story, he died. Anyway, he didn’t slay the dragon. But nobody remembers that except the hero who actually did slay the dragon, in the end. And he can remember it because he did survive.)
No, recall when you dreamed yourself into the story of the greatest Persian hero, Rustam, who labored to slay a dragon with the help of his faithful horse Rakhsh. On a quest of his own, Rustam lay down for a nice little nap one day—right next to a dragon’s lair. Rakhsh whinnied and pawed his sleeping master until Rustam finally woke up—and witnessed the dragon’s angry, flaming arrival. The hero’s tools (your tools!) were armor, a sword, and witty comebacks. As the dragon’s tail began to coil around Rustam, he used his last moments of movement and breath to dart behind the dragon. Rustam stabbed and slashed at the dragon until the evil serpent lay dead before him.
Matters were somewhat easier in early medieval England. One medical charm suggested that it was the responsibility of the god Woden, or Odin, to slay the serpent by chopping it into nine pieces. Your responsibility was to neutralize its venom by mixing up a cure that included fennel, thyme, and crabapples. It’s not quite as heroic to let a god do the slaying, but at least you’ll get a snack along the way.
Dragons are everywhere; they must be. From India to Ireland, they’re the ultimate embodiment of the primordial chaos that could engulf the world again, the alpha and omega of evil. They are… Wait, dragons are also demons. Or rather, demons are dragons.
Fortunately for all parties, a truly heroic quest requires you to slay a demon that’s in dragon form. And you’ve got this one. If you’re a medieval Christian, you know the story of St. Margaret of Antioch almost as well as the life of Christ. St. Margaret, who slew a dragon at the very moment when all hope seemed lost.
Marg
aret was the daughter of a fourth-century pagan Syrian who was raised instead by humble Christians. (In other words: Margaret was not a real person.) She was nevertheless set up to marry the king. (Definitely not a real person.) She predictably refused to give up Christianity and was thrown in jail. There, her predictably beautiful, virginal body underwent brutal tortures, but her faith never wavered.
But in the Middle Ages, that part of the legend could (and did) happen to any old beautiful, virgin, and apocryphal woman saint. Margaret, however, was the only one who curled up in her prison cell one day, in the middle of weeks of agony, when a dragon crashed into her cell, its claws extended and its jaws open wide like the mouth of hell. Its tail snatched her up and threw her into the infernal jaws.
Being eaten is not how this story is supposed to go.
Margaret had no armor, no sword. But she had the supernatural. She made the ritual sign of the cross: from the belly of the beast, she touched her forehead, the middle of her chest, one shoulder, the other shoulder.
And burst the dragon’s stomach wide open in the world’s worst case of indigestion.
But somehow, Margaret did not become the patron saint of the gastrointestinal tract. Instead, she became one of the most popular and important saints all over western Europe for her healing powers in general—but especially for pregnant women and women in childbirth. Even the standard iconography of Margaret slaying the dragon resembled drawings of women undergoing cesarian sections.
Except—unlike for Margaret—C-sections were the absolute last resort in medieval childbirth. Almost without exception, they meant the death of the mother and probably her baby. The desperate hope was for the newborn to live long enough to be baptized.
So medieval mothers created a religious-magical ritual of their own. As they gave birth, surrounded by female relatives, they brought with them amulets with icons of Margaret or scraps of her biography. Margaret’s defeat of the dragon was a “rebirth” that defeated her death. A rebirth that defeated the death of the new mother and her child.
And you know what? Medieval childhood mortality statistics were horrific—50 percent of children dead by age sixteen. For mothers, though? With the help of St. Margaret the dragon slayer, a future mother had around a 98 percent chance of surviving giving birth. Her life and her child’s birth were Margaret’s new life. Every time a woman gave birth in the Middle Ages, a dragon was slain.
Although it’s probably easier to grab some armor and a sword.
HOW to TAME a DRAGON
Taming dragons is God’s will.
After all, as the Norse Christians insisted, how can you be a hero without it? Dragons are the most majestic creatures under the sky. Dragons can soar above the earth carrying a person in their claws or mouths gently enough to cause no harm. They can stop the attack of an enemy horde instantly, through emotion rather than slaughter. And when you inevitably end up in the villain’s dungeon, they will light the way out for you. Which goes to show that binding the magic and majesty of dragons to your will might be the greatest power of all.
So what if those examples do not, technically speaking, involve a deity. No less an authority than Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theologians and philosophers of all time, knew beyond all doubt that taming dragons was God’s will, and Christians had a duty to try. But how?
The story, as you might expect, starts with fan fiction.
Early and medieval Christians loved to write fanfic about their favorite biblical characters. Sometimes it even became canon. That process is how Simon and Jude, two of Jesus’s closest followers, went from the Last Supper in Jerusalem to a palace in Persia, standing in front of the king with their lives on the line. The two men were exhausted. They had converted the entire kingdom and most of the king’s court to Christianity. What more did God want?
The court sorcerers were in a foul mood of their own. They had just lost a debate with a team of lawyers about the supernatural, supposedly their field of expertise. As sore losers are wont to do, they unleashed the snakes. One hundred slithering, deadly, serpentes.
Simon and Jude recognized this ploy. When God told Aaron back in the time of Exodus to throw down his staff, the staff turned into a bigger serpent and ate the others. But that day in Persia, God was silent, and the wooden staffs of Simon and Jude stubbornly remained wooden staffs.
If you can’t make a snake, just take a snake. The two saints pulled off their coats, set them down on the floor, and allowed a mess of killer snakes to slither onto them. Simon and Jude flung their coats at the sorcerers and called on God to make the sorcerers stand still so they could be torn to pieces.
God listened and agreed, but apparently also reminded Simon and Jude that their actions were rather unsaintly. The pair took that to heart—listening to God is usually a good idea. Still, they waited a good while as the sorcerers begged for the mercy of death.
Finally satisfied, Simon and Jude commanded the serpents to slither their way out into the desert. No attempt to kill the snakes. No waiting for God to turn the snakes into wooden staffs. The saints sent the serpentes away, and the serpentes obeyed.
Centuries later (this time in real life) came Thomas Aquinas. Ensconced safely in a Paris university room, he read everything having to do with Christianity—the original Bible, the expanded universe, fan analysis after fan analysis. If there was anyone who should write the entire wiki, it was going to be him, and he called it the Summa theologica.
At one point in his writing, Thomas arrived at the part where he had to prove that people hoping to send away demons may call on God to give them the power of exorcism. A key intermediate step in this proof: proving that humans can command irrational creatures. Which is to say, animals. And of all the evidence he could provide to support his argument, Thomas picked the story of Simon, Jude, and the serpents.
Except for Thomas they were only serpents in the broad, “lizard” sense of the word. He read the story, memorized it, and in the Summa theologica offered his own spin: dracones. Which is to say, possibly the most important Christian theology book from the Middle Ages tells readers, unambiguously, that humans can, may, and should tame dragons.
There’s just one small, almost trivial detail missing: how to actually do it. You might find something about training a wild beast in some codex or other, but the book was probably copied by a monk who has never seen anything more exotic than a mouse. Don’t expect much help in dragon-taming methods from Christian writers outside the Church, either. Far too many noblemen wanted to prove their manliness by informing the world how they trained their hunting animals, but they meant dogs and falcons. Oh, but then leopards! Those same noblemen wanted to prove their nobility by showing off a pet leopard… leopards who were purchased as pets in Alexandria, where they had been trained by Muslim keepers. The elephant whose tricks so entertained fifteenth-century Venice, Germany, and France had sailed across the Mediterranean from its original trainer, too.
Fortunately, medieval Muslims did know how to bind dangerous, unruly creatures to their will. They were also willing to provide directions.
It’s true that Muslim veterinarians’ instructions focus on cheetahs, not dragons. But consider this: after Simon and Jude had mastered the taming of serpentes, they had to perform the same trick at another king’s court—this time with tigers. If the story holds, God had already linked taming dragons with taming big cats. And why not? Taming cats takes patience and cheese. Taming dragons takes patience, cheese, and not stealing their hoards of gold.
Fourteenth-century veterinary expert Ibn Mankali, a name generally associated with naval warfare, offers a two-pronged program for building a friendship with your cheetah. A list of instructions is not proof that the instructions work (when I think of naval warfare, I always think of cheetahs). On the other hand, Ibn Mankali’s instructions do list patience and food:
Restrain your newly captive cheetah completely while she is lying on her side, so the only thing she can move is her mouth.
; Set down a bowl of cheese next to her head. First, she will lick the cheese, then eat it. (The existence of an intermediate stage seems… less than realistic.)
Once she has eaten her fill of cheese, you step in: serve her small pieces of meat, one at a time, so she associates your presence with good food.
Bit by bit, allow her more freedom to move: to lift her head, to move her paws, to sit up, to stand up. But at each stage, only feed her each time she completes the newly allowed action.
It’s kind of like positive-reinforcement dog training, except for the part where Ibn Mankali’s end goal for cheetah-taming is to teach it to ride a horse.
Not sure you’re up for the challenge? Maybe you just have a problem cheetah? The twelfth-century Syrian court is here to offer you some better ideas. Namely, bring in a woman to train her.
Such was the case with one sultan’s favorite cheetah. The woman’s name is lost to history, but her extraordinary friendship with this big cat is not. The trainer made a collar and leash to take the cheetah on walks. The cheetah even let her pet and groom it.
As if that wasn’t enough, the trainer went further. She and the sultan cared enough for this cheetah to give her a velvet-covered straw bed. As the story goes, one day the trainer grew furious with her cheetah when the cat urinated on the velvet instead of off to the side. In short: she had litterbox trained a cheetah.
Litterboxes are surely not on anyone’s mind when taming their first wild dragon. No, you likely envision yourself soaring across the sky, safely in its claws, or ordering it to light your way free of a cave. That’s what heroes do. They don’t make dragon bathrooms.
On the other hand, litterbox training is what will make you a hero to the people on the ground beneath the dragon, which can fly.
HOW to SURVIVE a SEA MONSTER ATTACK
How to Slay a Dragon Page 10