High Middle Ages DiscussionDue November 1, 2012 by 9pm Pacific Time

Move the cursor down a couple of lines and start writing. Start by identifying the object. I need (1) the name of the object, (2) the date of its creation [must be between 1000 and 1300 AD, not earlier or later], (3) the name of the artist if known, and (4) a few words that say what it is (a reliquary, a crucifix, an illustration from a manuscript, etc.). Then, explain how this object relates to or expresses themes from the material covered in this study unit. I would prefer that you not pick an object that someone else has already posted. If you do, your explanation of how this object expresses the spirit of the times must be completely different from what the other person wrote about the same object.

As always, your post must contain more than 200 words and at least five of the red vocabulary terms from this unit's study guide. And by the way, no picture, no points.

These are the vocabulary words for this assignment:

1. Boudicca2. William of Normandy3. Bayeux Tapestry4. Battle of Hastings5. Domesday Book6. Henry II7. King John8. Magna Carta9. habeas corpus10. Hadrian’s Wall11. the Norman invasion of England12. Lay Investiture13. simony14. Peter Abelard15. Realists16. Nominalists17. Averroes18. Thomas Aquinas19. Thomas Becket20. Al-Hakim21. Kingdom of Jerusalem22. Abbot Suger23. Beauvais Cathedral24. flying buttress25. rib vault26. St. Denis27. Cathedral of Chartres

1. tympanumlay

2. chanson de geste3. Chrétien de Troyes4. Thomas Malory5. Dante Aligheri6. The Divine Comedy

This is the reading material for this assignment:

IntroductionBeginning with a history of England from the time of the Romans, we follow the growth of European civilization between the years 1000 and 1300 AD. We look briefly at the workings of the feudal system and manorialism. We chronicle the struggles of the Church during this period, with an emphasis on the struggle over Lay Investiture, and we identify the main characteristics of the Gothic style of church building. We also survey developments in Medieval literature and music, and we conclude with a history of the Crusades and their effect on the development of the Church and the evolving European monarchies that eventually replaced the feudal system.

The Narration: Part One Humanities 250: Ideas and Values in the Humanities. Hi, this is Richard Felnagle speaking, and this program is the overview to the unit titled “The High Middle Ages.”

Most early civilizations evolved according to a fairly predictable pattern. They began near rivers, which facilitated agriculture, which lead to population growth. Settlements evolved into villages, which evolved into towns, and they, in turn, evolved into cities. And that’s the point at which every society becomes complex—with a division of labor, a diversity of beliefs, and—inevitably—a class system, usually involving slavery in one form or another. There’s accumulation of wealth, which requires a system of laws administered by a strong central government. And with

stability and a little luck, the aesthetic imperative kicks in, and a rich culture develops with distinctive architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, and even music.

In this unit, we are exactly at that point in the history of Western Europe. Between the years 1000 and 1300, a European civilization evolved.

The Early Middle Ages were dominated by two groups: On the one hand, the tribes and invaders—often as not, one and the same—and on the other, the Church, which expanded its authority in the vacuum left by the disappearance of the Romans.

But the High Middle Ages are dominated by feudal kingdoms with a relatively stable succession of leadership. Now, early Medieval Europe had plenty of kings—Clovis, Charlemagne, Pepin, all those guys—but their kingdoms did not survive them, and to qualify as a civilization, society can’t fall apart every time there’s a new king. During this period, we have that continuity.

As a result, the High Middle Ages are the point at which we stop talking about tribes—the Goths and Saxons, the Franks and beans—and we start talking about nations: the French, the Germans, the Italians, and the British.

And I need to point out here, too, that up to this point, there haven’t been any real European cities either.

Between the years 500 and 1000, the great cities belonged to other civilizations: Constantinople, Baghdad, Córdoba, and in China, the city of Chang’an, known as Xi’an today. But in this period emerge the cities of Paris, London, Vienna, and in Italy, Florence and Venice.

Now. Nowhere is this pattern of emerging civilization more apparent than in England, so that’s where we’re going to focus a lot of attention in this unit. And I want to point out a little irony here. Beginning around the end of the 16th century and continuing through to the early twentieth century, Great Britain became the dominant political and military power in Europe. But if you’d told anybody in the year 1000 that was going to happen, they’d have laughed in your face.

Since the time of the Romans, England had been the equivalent of the American Wild West. Julius Caesar had been there in 55 BC, but he took one look and turned around and went back to Gaul. The Celts were too primitive and too savage, and Britain had nothing he wanted.

A hundred years later, the Roman Emperor Claudius came back and did establish a Roman presence in England, but the Romans very nearly got their butts kicked during a revolt led by the warrior queen Boudicca. Tacitus says that she and her forces managed to kill over 70,000 Roman soldiers and colonists before the Roman legions finally managed to take her down.

Having settled into southern England, the Romans then pushed on to the north, but ultimately, the Scots and the other northern tribes were just too much of a challenge, so the mighty Romans

were reduced to building a wall—just as the Chinese had done several centuries earlier to try to keep out the Mongols. And even with Hadrian’s Wall, fully a tenth of the Roman army was required to hold on to this rather small part of the empire.

In early fifth century, the western Roman empire was crumbling, and the Romans pulled up stakes and left, abandoning their villas and their towns and their public baths, such as the one that still stands today in the city known as Bath.

Soon after, England was invaded by the Angles and the Saxons, and between the years 500 and 1000, Britain was ruled chaotically by warlords—some of them Christian—and in the late eighth century, the Vikings and the Danes added themselves to the mix.

So by the year 1000, where this unit begins, Britain was not a very promising place. The Anglo-Saxons and the Danes were battling each other, and by 1016, the Danes had won. England then had a Danish king by the name of Canute, and England was a sort of province of Denmark and Norway. And things might have stayed that way, but!

In the year 1066, a real charmer named William, known to history as William the Conqueror, and known to his friends as William the Bastard, led an invasion of England that established him as England’s first king in the modern sense.

William was from Normandy, so this event is known as the Norman Conquest, and the details were duly recorded in a most extraordinary sort of comic strip history book on cloth known as the Bayeux Tapestry, and that’s something else we cover in this unit.

William began the hereditary monarchy in England. He ruled with a very firm hand, and when he died, he was succeeded by his son, Henry, and when Henry’s time came to depart this earth, he wanted to be succeeded by his daughter Matilda. Well, as you might imagine, that didn’t work out, and there was a brief period of civil war, but eventually, Matilda’s son gained the throne, ruling as Henry II, the first of the so-called Plantagenet rulers. Thus, the succession was interrupted but not broken.

Henry’s greatest achievement was the implementation of the English common law, enforced by a system of royal courts. They had the force of royal power behind them, but under Henry, they were not subject to the king’s whimsy, and a tradition of rule by law began to be established in England.

For nurturing the English legal system, Henry II would probably be remembered today as a pretty good king, but instead, he is remembered as a villain, and I’ll explain why in a moment, but I want to keep going with the succession.

Henry was succeeded by his son Richard—nice name, don’t you think? As a king, Richard wasn’t around very much—he was off to the Crusades—and in his absence, his younger brother John pretty much ran the country, and he nearly ran it into the ground.

After Richard’s death, John got the throne for real, but apparently, John had become too used to doing things in an underhanded and highhanded way, and in 1215, the feudal lords turned on him and forced him to sign a little contract we know as the Magna Carta, or Great Charter, a set of laws that limited the English king’s power from then onward and set England sailing on a course toward parliamentary rule.

Why is the Magna Carta such a big deal? Because it established two very important principles.

First, equal justice for all under the common law. In other words, no one—not even in the king—is above the law. The law applies to everyone. Second, everyone is entitled to due process and trial by jury. The king could not just toss someone into prison and throw away the key, and apparently, John liked to do that to his political enemies.

But before we get all dewy-eyed here, the fact is that as soon as John was able, he got the Pope to annul the Magna Carta. Nice to know whose side the Pope was on. The English feudal lords then revolted, and while the revolt was in progress, John died in 1216.

The lords then recognized John’s nine-year-old son as the next king, Henry III—thus maintaining the succession. The Magna Carta was then reaffirmed, and a version created in 1225 became the final draft.

In time, other rights evolved from the Magna Carta. One is the principle of no taxation without representation, and the other is the principle of habeas corpus, a Latin phrase meaning roughly “show us the body.”

Why is that a big deal? Well, let’s say you’ve been arrested and you’re being held as a prisoner. Your friends or your family or your representatives may then apply to a court to issue a writ of habeas corpus, which is an order to produce you in court to determine if you are being legally detained. Habeas corpus thus grew out of the Magna Carta principle that everyone is entitled to due process, and it is your fundamental protection against arbitrary imprisonment. Back to Medieval England.

Not surprisingly, the feudal lords dominated Henry III, but his son, Edward I, brought things back into balance and did a lot to establish the authority of the English Parliament. Another important principle affirmed during his reign was the idea that taxes had to be collected by consent of the realm, which for all practical purposes meant the Parliament.

However, Edward was primarily concerned with conquering Scotland, and he devoted a good part of his life to that project, but he never succeeded, and neither did his son, Edward II. And that brings us to end of the period we are studying in this unit.

But the point is that starting from diddly in the year 1000, England established a set of laws that applied to king and commoner and maintained a stable line of succession for almost three hundred years. And I think this power-sharing arrangement involving Parliament and the

common law has a lot to do with England’s evolution into a world power. This same arrangement was not duplicated elsewhere in Europe at this time.

In France, the dynasty begun by Hugh Capet lasted from 987 to 1328, but the Capetian kings were never as strong as their counterparts in England or Germany—largely because the feudal system was so strongly established in France.

In Germany, the big story was the continuing struggle with the Church over who had the authority to appoint bishops. After all, the Church had anointed the king as the Holy Roman Emperor, so he figured he ought to have some say in how the holy part of his empire was run. But the Church disagreed, and that struggle kept the Holy Roman Empire fragmented so it never achieved the national unity that the French and the English achieved.

It was this same struggle over appointing Church officials that got Henry II into trouble. The full story is in the study guide, but the short version is that in 1154, Henry picked a promising young man named Thomas Becket for his chancellor—kinda like his Prime Minister, the guy who actually ran the government.

Henry and Thom worked well together, but in 1161, the archbishop of Canterbury died, and Henry appointed Becket to take that job, too. But Beckett then resigned as chancellor and devoted himself to defending the interests of the church.

Pretty soon, Henry and Thom were locking horns, and one day Henry said something he shouldn’t have. Within the hearing of some of his henchmen, he reportedly cried out in frustration, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Well, a couple of his men with very small brains took that as an order, and they marched off to Canterbury and murdered Becket right in his own cathedral.

Big mistake.

End of Part One

The Narration: Part Two Becket then became a major martyr, and Canterbury became one of the most popular pilgrim shrines in all of Europe. Henry had to do penance and even endure a public flogging at the hands of the priests. And after that, nobody particularly cared about his legal reforms.

Now, the growth of European civilization is the main theme of this unit, but it’s not the only theme. For example, some historians estimate that the population of Europe effectively doubled during this period.

At the same time, advances in agriculture meant that fewer serfs were needed on the farms, and they moved to the cities, where they joined guilds and trade associations, and pretty soon, Europe had a thriving middle class. Europe enjoyed pretty good times between the years 1000 and 1300,

and that new middle class acquired the money to finance the next great development in church building.

The Gothic style, which originated in France in the middle of the twelfth century, was the brainchild of Abbott Suger, who created the first Gothic church, the royal abbey church of St. Denis, near Paris. Suger didn’t particularly like Romanesque churches because they were brutish, thick-walled, plain, dark affairs. If you like metaphors, I’d say they were built as fortresses intended to stand against the chaos of the world outside.

Bishop Suger wanted higher ceilings, thinner walls, and lots of windows filled with colored glass. Of course, pushing up the ceiling poses some interesting engineering problems. The taller the walls, the more likely they are to bulge out and collapse under the strain.

Suger solved that problem by using ribbed vaults to lighten the weight of the ceiling. The ribs then channeled the downward stress into great stone piers. To stabilize the piers, he added buttresses on the outside of the building. Thus, the walls could be thinner because they were no longer bearing the full weight of the roof, and they could then be opened up with windows.

To help create more height, Suger also discarded the rounded arch in favor of the pointed arch, which was widely used in mosques in Córdoba and elsewhere. These helped to push everything up and rechannel stress to the piers.

And the result was a spectacular new kind of building, larger than any of the churches that had been built previously. Furthermore, they were full of colored light that streamed down from on high, suggesting God’s love streaming down from heaven above. At the Church of St. Denis, Suger also opened up the apse with bays, which became small chapels all connected by an ambulatory—kind of like a freeway to speed up the traffic flow.

Of course, higher ceilings and chapels and stained glass windows cost—big time. But wealthy middle class parishioners and the medieval guilds gladly paid to outfit the chapels and to provide the stained glass. After all, the nicer the church, the more people would be attracted to the town. The more people in town, the more profit to be made, so it was a win-win situation for everyone.

Two Gothic cathedrals are usually cited as the finest examples of this style, the cathedrals of Chartres and of Notre Dame in Paris, and they are both covered in this unit.

The Gothic cathedrals are the dominant art form of this period, but not the only art form. Music continued to develop during this period—and surprisingly enough, theatre reappeared, too. At first, liturgical plays were actually performed inside the cathedrals, but later, they were moved outside, where a secular theatre began to develop. Also, some important works of literature begin to appear.

The most important literary figure of the era was Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), a Florentine born in to an aristocratic family. A large part of his life was spent in exile because of politics, and during those years, he wrote the Comedia, known in English as The Divine Comedy.

A long work in three large parts, it tells the story of Dante’s descent into the afterlife to meet up with his girlfriend Beatrice. During the first part, he is led through hell and part of purgatory by the ghost of the poet Virgil, but about halfway through purgatory, Virgil is replaced by Beatrice, who sees him through the rest of Purgatory and into the divine world of heaven.

Also, a kind of chivalric literature developed. The Song of Roland romanticized Charlemagne, and the legends of King Arthur inspired other writers, and all of this was part of an understandable desire to glorify the noble knights of the feudal system.

You may be surprised that we don’t spend a lot of time here on the feudal system, and I’ll be honest with you about the reason why. To tell you the truth, the feudal system bores me to tears. If you want to learn about the feudal system, you really ought to go watch a couple episodes of The Sopranos or go out and rent the Godfather movies. Because that’s the modern equivalent of the feudal system.

It’s all based on warlords who divide up territory for their lieutenants to do with as they please. Profits are then kicked back to the warlord, and when needed, the lieutenants form the basis of a private army. As a result, the feudal warlords, like their modern counterparts, were a law unto themselves.

They did have their codes of honor, but the fact is that private armies are never a good idea. They are what really brought down the Roman empire, if you ask me. The feudal system was really a destabilizing force, one that did more to retard the development of civilization in Europe than to help it along. And it might have slowed things down even more if it hadn’t been for a completely unrelated development in the Middle East.

In the early 11th century, Jerusalem was ruled by an Egyptian caliph named Al-Hakim. For 200 years, the Christian holy places in Jerusalem had been respected and protected by Muslim rulers, but in the year 1009, Al-Hakim sort of short-circuited and burned down the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Now, that was the church that Emperor Constantine had ordered to be built on the spot believed to be the tomb of Jesus, so you can guess that was probably not smart. Al-Hakim’s successor was a little brighter, and he rebuilt the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but . . . too late. Anti-Muslim sentiment dating back to the Moorish invasion of Spain in the eighth century had never gone away, and this was like throwing gasoline on the embers.

In the year 1095, Pope Urban II lobbied for the feudal lords to take Jerusalem back from the heathens. By then, the armored knights were tired of just jousting with each other. They wanted to spill some blood, and this was just the opportunity they had been looking for. An army of

about 100,000 men formed in no time, and eventually, they started marching east for what we now call the First Crusade. Along the way, they freely pillaged whatever they needed from anyone in their path and sent innocent civilians feeling for fear of their lives.

On July 15, 1099, the Christian crusaders invaded Jerusalem and just went nuts. They proceeded to slaughter everyone who got in their way. The bloodbath shocked the Muslim world, particularly because of their history of respecting other religions, with the notorious exception of Al-Hakim.

About 20,000 crusaders then established the Kingdom of Jerusalem and hunkered down for the expected Muslim retaliation. That took a while, but in 1187, the Muslim general Saladin lured the crusaders out of Jerusalem and into a massacre. Saladin’s forces then reoccupied Jerusalem but staged no retaliation against the Christian residents. Mass continued to be celebrated in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Several more Crusades followed, and the whole affair dragged on for about 200 years. The most notorious crusade was the so-called Children’s Crusade, in which an army of 30,000 boys and girls—almost all of them under the age of twelve—were virtually all wiped out.

And then there was the fourth crusade, which the Venetians manipulated to their advantage by persuading the crusaders to sack Constantinople. And what did that have to do with taking the Holy Lands back from the heathens? Nothing, but the Venetians were jealous of the wealth of the Byzantines and wanted to eliminate the competition in trade.

So, the Crusades are generally considered a bloody failure and a real embarrassment, but one of my favorite expressions is, “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.” What was bad for the Holy Lands was actually good for Europe. The Crusades let off a lot of steam that the feudal system had built up. For two centuries, a lot of testosterone engorged Crusader knights raped and pillaged in the Holy Lands—instead of raping and pillaging in Europe. Ironically, that contributed greatly to the stability that was necessary for the emergence of European civilization.

And with that, we arrive back where we started, and it’s time for you to get to work, and I’ll see you next time.

Section One: EnglandAs I mentioned in the overview, the three hundred years covered by this unit see the emergence of European civilization. Monarchies become stable, cities emerge, and feudalism declines. As a result, we also see the emergence of some enduring and important contributions to art, literature, architecture, and even music. Those are the big trends. In addition, two major historical events occur. The first one is the emergence of England as a European power.The other event is the Crusades. We'll start with England.

Up to this point, we haven't had much reason to talk about the British Isles. We did note the Vikings sent one of their first raiding parties to sack the Lindisfarne monastery, but otherwise,

little happened in Britain that required our notice. Until the latter part of the eleventh century, the British isles had been somewhat on the periphery of the action. Various tribes and their rulers had claimed dominance from time to time, but in 1066, that all came to an end.

To fully understand what happened in 1066, we need to go back a bit—all the way back to the Romans.

Roman EnglandPrehistoric evidence suggests that people first appeared in Britain about the same time they appeared everywhere else in Europe. That fact may seem surprising because Britain is an island, but during the Ice Age, the sea was actually lower, and Britain was still connected to the rest of Europe. As the Ice Age ended, around 8000 BC, the level of the sea rose and Britain became an island.

Britain’s Stone Age residents pretty much then had the place to themselves until somewhere around the year 1000 BC when Britain—and the rest of Europe—was overrun by a people known as the Celts (pronounced with a hard "K," like "kelts"). They were accomplished ironworkers, and apparently, they traded their iron objects (decorative pins, farm implements, decorated shields, etc.) all over the Mediterranean. Simon Schama, who took us on a tour of Skara Brae in the unit on Prehistory, points out that the British Celts had no homegrown olives or grapes, so they exported ironworks and imported a lot of wine and olive oil.

Celts? Gauls?

Most historians argue that the Celts and Gauls are more or less the same people. The confusion starts with Herodotus—the 5th century BC Greek writer—who started calling these people Keltoi. The Romans, however, preferred to call these people Galli, or Gauls. In the unit on Pagan Rome, we saw how a group of Gauls invaded Rome in 386. The Romans called them "Gauls," but historians recognize that Brennus and his other buddies were really Celts.

So why do we talk about the Celts in Britain and not the Gauls?

Well, look at it this way: Before the American Revolutionary War, the "colonies" were British, and the residents thought of themselves as being British. Two-hundred-plus years later, we call ourselves Americans and have different ways of speaking English and different attitudes from our British cousins. Same difference here. What counts is that the people who arrived in England retained their Celtic identity and their distinct Celtic languages while the Gauls on the other side of the English Channel went their own ways.

Some of that imported olive oil and wine seems to have been imported from Italy because the Romans knew all about the "Britanni," as they called them, long before Julius Caesar arrived in Britain in 55BC. Caesar had heard reports of gold and pearls and other treasure, but he quickly determined that those reports were false and the English climate didn't agree with him, so he returned to Gaul to continue his conquests there.

Almost a century later, the Romans came back. The Emperor Claudius lead the expedition, and this time, the Romans were determined to settle in. To guarantee the success of his mission, Claudius brought with him some 40,000 Roman troops. At this time, the Romans were still offering to make conquered people part of the empire, and many Iron Age chieftains quickly saw the advantage of becoming allies of the Romans rather than opponents. However, not all Britanni were that eager to cave in to Roman rule. The most notable exception is Queen Boudicca, and nobody tells the story of Britain better than British historian Simon Schama.

After Boudicca, the Romans managed to subdue most of the remaining Celts, but not entirely. For the next 150 year so so, the Celts continued to be a drag on Roman ambitions.

In 117 AD, Emperor Hadrian came to power. Hadrian was an effective administrator, as well as a fine architect. His best known work in the latter area is the Pantheon in Rome. In the year 122 AD, Hadrian came to Britain for a sort of inspection tour, and he wasn't particularly pleased by what he found. The Empire was relatively peaceful at this time, and discipline among the troops had deteriorated because the troops simply didn't have enough to do. Hadrian's solution to the problem was to give them a little job to do, namely constructing a little wall.

In its final form, Hadrian's Wall followed an old trade route that ran between the Solway Firth and the mouth of the River Tyne, one of Britain's narrowest places. The exact length of the wall is a matter of debate, but it appears to have extended between seventy-five and eighty miles. Hadrian, the architect and engineer, set the basic design specs and then returned to Rome. He never came back to Britain to see the finished product.

Once the location of the wall had been surveyed, construction began, and to keep as many people busy as possible, the wall was built in several sections that were ultimately linked up. Openings in the wall were planned at regular intervals where fortified gates, known as milecastles, were set up with turrets on either side. Here, traffic would be allowed through the wall in either direction, and the Romans could monitor who was coming and going and collect taxes on imports and exports.

Naturally, you can visit what remains of the wall. Click here to visit the website for the Hadrian's Wall Trust. If you're into hiking or biking as a way to vacation, this is your kind of place. For information specifically related to hiking trips in this part of Britain, click here to see the National Trails website for maps and other details of importance to hikers.

Hadrian's Wall is actually only one of many souvenirs that the Romans left behind as proof of their three-hundred year occupation of Britain. The following video excerpt from Simon Schama's A History of Britain, part one, "Beginnings," talks more about the Roman baths in the

city today called Bath (which I mentioned in the unit on Pagan Rome) and Roman shoreline fortifications dating from the last period of the Roman occupation.

As Schama mentions, the end of Roman rule in Britain began when Roman troops were recalled from their posts in northern and western Britain in 383. Over a period of the next twenty years or so, the Roman presence in Britain just disappeared, although some very unhappy Romans had nowhere else to go, so they remained.

The Norman ConquestShortly after the departure of the Romans from England in the early fifth century, new conquerors arrived. Some were Angles, a Germanic tribe from a region still called Angelin in the area we now know as Schleswig-Holstein in modern Germany. They were quickly joined by other German tribes called Saxons and Jutes. Eventually, they replaced the Romans as the dominant people in Britain, and that’s why the Brits come to be called Anglo-Saxons, or Anglos for short.

Beginning in the late eighth century, more invaders arrived. These were Danes and Vikings who seemed more interested in colonizing than plundering. From this period onward, England was ruled by a series of Danish kings. In 1035, the last of these, Canute II, died, and—this should hardly be a surprise—a nasty, bloody struggle ensued to determine who would be his successor.

The last man standing was Edward, the son of King Ethelred the Unready. He was crowned on Easter Day, 1043. He is also known as Edward the Confessor, a sort of honorific title given to him by the Church about a hundred years after his death. He is pictured on the left.

Whether he was a good king or not is disputed, but his one enduring legacy was that the construction of Westminster Abbey, the first English Church to be built in the Norman Romanesque style. There had been a Benedictine abbey there for about a hundred years before; hence, it was an abbey church. The present Westminster Abbey dates from 1245, but English tradition is that its monarchs have all been crowned there.

A brief pause for a little geography lesson. Edward the Confessor was a Norman, and he had been raised in Normandy. As the map on the left shows you, Normandy is a region of France. (Today there are two administrative districts known as Upper Normandy and Lower Normandy.) The map on the left shows you roughly where Normandy is. The map also shows where the Allied forces landed on D-Day in World War II. The point is that Normandy is very close to the southern coast of England. At the strait of Dover, which is in the upper right corner of the map (where it says "Calais"), Britain and France are only twenty-one miles apart. At its widest, the distance between the two countries is as much as 150 miles.

Previously, Britain had been ruled by kings of mostly Danish descent, and the Angles and Saxons had accepted them, so Edward represented something of a sea change form what the Brits had been used to. He wasn't exactly French the way we think of the French today, but Danish he was not, and he retained strong family ties to nearby Normandy.

That fact shouldn't have been a problem, but Edward's marriage produced no children. (You can see where this is going!) Across the channel, Edward had a sort of Norman cousin, William II, Duke of of Normandy. He was a powerful, take-no-prisoners type of guy, and he was also known as William the Bastard because he was the illegitimate son of the previous Duke of Normandy, but the title fit him, nonetheless. At some point—when, where, and how are disputed by historians—Edward seems to have given assurances that he would eventually name cousin William as his successor to the British throne, thus beginning a Norman dynasty.

That choice was not received well by many nobles. They wanted the throne to go to a guy named Harold Godwinson (pictured sort of in the illustration on the right). Harold's family came from Danish roots and had acquired a lot of English real estate. In fact, Harold had become the most powerful figure in England next to the king. Furthermore, Harold had become a thorn in Edward's side by leading growing resistance to Norman influence. (In other words, many of the Brits didn't want any more Norman kings.) As time passed, Edward seems to have been persuaded by these arguments, and he announced that Harold should be his successor.

What a mess!

The ensuing events are the subject of a remarkable and virtually unprecedented twenty inch high, 230 foot long piece of embroidered cloth known as the Bayeux Tapestry. This tapestry tells the history in pictures of the Norman Conquest, the event that established the British monarchy. William's brother, Odo, the Bishop of Bayeux, had the thing made around 1070, so the people who made the cloth would probably have had access to eyewitnesses to the events portrayed. Unlike Homer's version of the siege of Ilium (or, if you prefer, Troy), this document was roughly contemporary with the events. (More about this remarkable object later in this unit.)

The story in the tapestry begins shortly before Edward's death. For reasons that historians are still scratching their heads over, Harold set sail on what should have been a nice little boat ride across the channel. Some historians suggest he may have wanted to meet with William II, his apparent rival for the throne of Britain, to try to try to explain that whatever Edward might have promised him before, Edward had changed his mind. Whatever Harold's intentions, the trip across the channel did not go well for Harold, and he ended up having to swear an oath not to contest William's claim to the throne. In the following excerpt from A History of Britain, part two, "Conquest," Simon Schama visits the Bayeux tapestry and discusses the circumstances and consequences of Harold's oath.

Back home from his unfortunate visit to Normandy, Harold began arming his forces for the inevitable struggle that always followed a king's death. William, as it turned out, wasn't the only pretender to the throne, so Harold was expecting trouble no matter what. He had at his command a force of 3000 “housecarls,” professional soldiers who were very adept at wielding a double-sided ax that required two hands to work. In addition to the housecarls, Harold could raise about 13,000 part-time soldiers, or “fyrds.” These were a sort of early feudal National Guard, soldiers who owed the king two months of service per year.

On January 5, 1066, Edward went to his reward, and the next day, he was buried in Westminster Abbey. Harold became the new king of England. On the other side of the Channel, William

began to prepare an invasion force to assert what he believed to be his rightful claim to the throne, but Harold was ready, and by August 10, Harold's army was in place along England’s south coast and ready to greet William if and when he came calling. William was ready to sail, but the weather was lousy, and so he waited for favorable winds.

But just at that moment, Harold got a nasty surprise. Totally unexpected, an invasion force led by Harold's own brother (assisted by the King of Norway) arrived to join he party way to the north. Previously, Harold had betrayed his brother and banished him so that he wouldn't stand in the way of Harold's succession, but now he was back for revenge. Harold swiftly moved his army north to deal with this threat, and he did so, but just as that problem was solved, the wind in the English Channel shifted, and William's forces set sail. Simon Schama picks up the story there.

Harold's forces were weakened from the previous fighting with Harold's brother, and possibly they were a bit over-confident because of their success, but one way or another, they were not well prepared to meet William. Simon Schama continues the story with his vivid descriptions of one of the Middle Ages' most famous battles.

Simon Schama adds that "[ . . . ] around half the nobility of England perished on that battlefield."

William went on mowing down Anglo-Saxon resistance until he reached London, where he had himself crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, 1066. (His coronation in Westminster is the first documented such event.) In the following months, Saxon resistance remained strong, and William the Conqueror, as he is known to history, tried to suppress that resistance by turning England into a kind of police state to secure his throne. According to Schama:

William's response was to mount a campaign of oppression in the north that was not just punitive, but an exercise in mass murder—thousands upon thousands of men and boys gruesomely butchered, their bodies left to rot and fester in the highways. And all across England, William built at least 90 castles, dominating areas of potential revolt—engines of terror that helped William control over two million Saxons with just 25,000 Normans.

This was an occupation force, and the Normans spoke a different language and had a different culture. They were not exactly welcome. (By the way, one of those castles is now known as the Tower of London.

I don't suppose we should be surprised, but there is an entire site devoted solely to the topic of the Norman Conquest. In includes various interactive features and lots of details on the Bayeux Tapestry. Click here to access this site and learn more about the Normans than you could possibly ever want to know.

Having conquered England, William then did one other noteworthy thing. He ordered a kind of census be taken. He wanted a list of absolutely everything and everyone in the land that he had conquered. The result is known as the Domesday book, completed in 1086. According to

Encarta, “Domesday is a corruption of Doomsday (the day of the final judgment); the work was so named because its judgments in terms of levies and assessments were irrevocable.”

I doubt that you'd want to read the entire book—it's about as much fun as reading the phone book. However, for a taste, click here to visit a short page with brief extracts from the Online Medieval Source Book.

According to Simon Schama, the Domesday Book was more than just an inventory, and the ceremony in which the book was formally presented to William represented a turning point in British history. The following excerpt from Simon Schama’s A History of Britain, part two, "Conquest," explains the significance of the Domesday Book for the future of the English monarchy.

William continued to reign as king until his death in 1087. For the record, he was England's first Norman king, and those ties to Normandy would be the catalyst for a lot of bad blood between England and France. However, William's heirs would remain on the British throne for a while, thus providing England with a stable monarchy, and that fact would help England quickly to catch up with with the rest of European civilization, such as it was.

Westminster AbbeyAs noted above, Westminster Abbey is the place where all English monarchs are crowned. Also, it is the place everybody of any significance or merit has been buried. Therefore, it is one of London's premiere tourist attractions. Although the present building is substantially different from what Edward the Confessor built, the building is loaded with history. Click here to see the Abbey's official tourist site.

What makes the place so interesting to tourists is that the abbey is the final resting place for a lot of celebrities of British history. In one place, you can visit the tombs of Sir Isaac Newton, Geoffrey Chaucer (in the next unit), Rudyard Kipling, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Laurence Olivier, and on and on. Click here to visit the Westminster Abbey site's interactive list. Click on any name on the list for more information.

William the Conqueror's son, William II (also known as William Rufus because he had a florid complexion), who ruled England from 1087 to 1100, did a bit of building, too, namely the Palace of Westminster, the meeting place for the Houses of Parliament. Actually, William built what is now called the Old Palace, which burned down in 1512.

For a look at both of these buildings and the Old London Bridge, too, we turn to the following Films on Demand video clip from a lively and somewhat irreverent 1975 two-part series London: The Making of a City, the segment called "Kings and Merchants: 1066-1500," produced by the now defunct Thames Television service. The presenter is Benny Green.

I know, you thought London Bridge was in Lake Havasu. No. The Old London Bridge in the video dates from 1136, when an older wooden bridge at roughly the same location was destroyed

by fire in 1136. The stone bridge (what you see as a model in the video) stayed in place for about 600 years before being replaced by a new bridge that opened for traffic in 1831. That bridge is in Lake Havasu. It was sold to American Robert McCulloch in 1968. (The story goes he actually thought he was buying the iconic Tower Bridge, but he was mistaken.) The reassembled bridge was opened as a tourist attraction in Lake Havasu, Arizona, in 1971. Click here for more information about the Lake Havasu bridge.�

The Rule of Law

William's eventual successor was Henry II, and his most significant achievement was building up the court system in England. According to Simon Schama:

Before Henry, justice was 'Do what I want; I'm the king.' By the end of Henry's reign, [he] had established permanent, professional courts sitting at Westminster or touring the counties, acting reliably in his name. Now, law became: 'Listen to what my judges have to say.' And by 1180, those judges could consult England's first legal textbook, full of precedents on which to base their decisions.

That emphasis on law turned out to be very ironic because Henry had two sons. The older son, Richard, became king after the death of his father, but he was soon gone off to fight in the Crusades, and in his absence, his younger brother, John, ruled the country. After Richard’s death, John became king of England in 1199. However, John soon found himself in various difficulties. Immediately after becoming king, opposition developed by those who preferred Arthur of Brittany, the son of one of John’s then deceased brothers. Eventually, Arthur’s forces were defeated, but in 1202, Arthur died, and the popular consensus was that John had had him murdered. The king of France then, Philip II, kept up the war until John was forced to give up all of his family’s possessions in France.

In the year 1215, the English nobles confronted John at Runnymeade, depicted on the left, and forced him to sign a contract limiting the powers of the king. The following video excerpt from Simon Schama’s A History of Britain explains the details of the contract, which know today as the Magna Carta.

As soon as the nobles had left town, John denounced the Magna Carta, and he managed to get Pope Innocent III to annul it. The big problem for John was clause 61, which set up a council of twenty-five nobles who could overrule the king if he failed to live up to his end of the bargain, and John had no intention of letting anyone have that kind of power over him. England was thrown into a nasty civil war. The struggle might have torn England to pieces, but John had the good taste to die of natural causes a year later. John’s nine-year-old son became the king, and the Magna Carta was reinstated.

The two most important clauses of the Magna Carta are among the legal clauses. Clause 40 promises, “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.” This clause establishes the principle of equal access to the courts for all citizens without exorbitant fees. In clause 39, the king promises, “No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised [to have property taken away] or outlawed or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” This clause

establishes that the king would follow legal procedure before he punished someone. Historians have debated at length the meaning in 1215 of “by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land,” and who exactly was covered by the term “free man.” By the later 14th century, however, statutes interpreting the Magna Carta equated “judgment of peers” with trial by jury (which did not exist in criminal cases in 1215).

The importance of the Magna Carta lies more in its symbolism than in its words. As a result, many modern rights have been based on the Magna Carta that were unknown in the 13th century, including habeas corpus and the principle of no taxation without representation. Neither of these concepts existed in the original Magna Carta of 1215 but both became accepted as English law during the early 17th century.

Habeas Corpus (Latin, “[that] you have the body”), a writ or order issued by a court to a person having custody of another, commanding him or her to produce the detained person in order to determine the legality of the detention. The writ of habeas corpus is of English origin; its original purpose was to liberate illegally detained persons, and it is still a protection against arbitrary imprisonment.

Protection against arbitrary imprisonment by the right of habeas corpus is not found in continental Europe. In the democratic countries of Western Europe, however, the codes of criminal procedure require that an arrested person be informed with reasonable promptness of the charges and be allowed to seek legal counsel. In many other countries, persons are subjected at times to lengthy periods of imprisonment without being informed of the charges.

The British Library maintains an excellent site that includes a picture of a copy of the 1215 version and a complete English translation. Click here to visit this site. I suggest you click on the link that takes you to the complete text in translation, and I recommend you read clauses 39 and 40.

By the way, an original copy of the Magna Carta remains on permanent load to the United States and is on exhibit in the National Archives building, where the United States Declaration of Independence, are also displayed. Click here to visit the National Archives site. Look for the link to the Magna Carta in the navigation bar on the left.

Now, we leave England and turn our focus back onto the European continent, where feudalism was thriving.

Section Two: The Church's Dilemmas During the period from 1000 to 1300, the Catholic Church continued to prosper, but at the same time, the Church found itself facing a number of dilemmas. The most important of these was the problem of sharing power with the growing power of the feudal lords. Also, as the monasteries became centers of learning, the Church faced the problems of what could be taught and what could be learned.

Lay Investiture Officially, the Church had no quarrel with the feudal system. Actually, the Church didn't have any choice, but at no time did the Church directly oppose or try to overthrow the feudal system. The Church claimed spiritual authority over all temporal rulers, but otherwise tried to stay out of their business—and for a very practical reason. In Medieval Europe, power shifted constantly. By not specifically tying its fortunes to specific warlords or their kingdoms, the Church never risked being dragged down with them. Of course, the Church did appoint a Holy Roman Emperor, but unlike the way things worked in the Byzantine world, Churcha nd state were never one and the same.

However, the Church's endorsement of the feudal system was not entirely passive because the feudal system mirrored and reinforced the authority of the Church itself, as illustrated in the chart on the right. God was over everyone, of course, but the Pope was to be revered and respected in the spiritual realm just as the King was to be obeyed in the temporal realm. Next in the chain of temporal command were the Bishops, just as the barons and vassals were subject to the authority of the king. The knights occupied the same place in the chain of command as did the priests, and the common people were in the same position no matter which side of the pyramid you looked at. The one hand washed the other in reaffirming and maintaining the power structure.

In time, though, the feudal lords ecame concerned about the power of the monasteries and the temporal influence of various lower-level Church officials. While the warrior lords were out of town—fighting and pillaging and stealing each other's lands—the local priests and the monastery monks were more involved in the day-to-day lives of the people who were doing all the work required to keep the feudal system humming (manorialism). From time to time, a certain priest or bishop might get a wild hair and urge the serfs to stand up for their rights or otherwise to misbehave. Therefore, the big landowners became very anxious whenever a new abbot or bishop or other Church official within their territory had to be appointed.

To try to discourage uppity priests or abbots from stirring up trouble, a practice that came to be called Lay Investiture began to evolve. "Investiture" is the formal ceremony in which the Church confers duties and responsibilities on its new officials. The feudal lords (who are part of the "laity," which means everyone not holding a Church office of some kind) began to muscle into these ceremonies to present new abbots and priests with a ring and staff symbolizing their spiritual authority. The purpose was to remind the newbies that they were also vassals of their local lord or king.

The Church didn't like the practice, but the Church was dependent on the good will of the big landowners. Thus, the Church faced a true dilemma.

The matter came to a head in the eleventh century. Pope Leo IX (who served as Pope from 1049-1054) became an early opponent of lay investiture, but the pope most associated with reform is Pope Gregory VII (who served as Pope from 1073-85). Gregory convened a Roman Synod in 1075 to consider a whole slew of similar problems, and the outcome was a formal condemnation of such practices as lay investiture and simony, the even more troublesome sale of Church offices. (Hey, Cardinal Bob, I want you to make my idiot son a bishop. What will that cost me?)

The current Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, thought the synod was, in effect, thrwoing down the gauntlet to him. He who was a loyal Catholic, but he had never been entirely comfortable with the idea that the Church was above the power of the state in all things. To show his contempt for the Roman Synod of 1075, Henry went ahead and appointed several prelates. The Pope protested, of course, but in 1076, Henry began a movement to depose Gregory, who then retaliated by excommunicating Henry. Not only did excommunication toss Henry's immortal soul into the firey pit of hell, but, more practically, had the effect of releasing all of Henry's subjects from allegiance to him.

Excommunication was the Church's trump card for every dispute, and people in the Middle Ages took that threat very seriously, as the following video clip indicates.

After Henry's reinstatement, his position was still not secure, and a group of nobles led a revolt against him. The Pope sided with Henry's opponents, and in 1080, Gregory officially recognized Henry's rival, Rudolph, as the new Holy Roman Emperor. Henry, then, announced that Gregory was no longer pope and forced the election of Guibert, the archbishop of Ravenna, as the new pope. Eventually, Rudolph was killed, and Henry became the victor in the civil war. In 1084, he then led his troops into Italy and forced Gregory to flee, and he died in exile the next year.

In time, many of Gregory's reforms were accepted by the Church, but Henry's troubles continued, and the aftermath of the wars left Germany generally unstable well into the fourteenth century. Strangely enough, the Church never completely gained control of the process of appointing bishops throughout the Middle Ages.

Thomas BecketThe most notorious example of the church-state conflict occurred in 1170, during the reign of England’s Henry II, who had sought to maintain a good working relationship with the church. However, fate was to deal him a cruel blow in the person of Thomas Becket (also sometimes “Thomas à Becket”).

Becket was born in 1118 of relatively wealthy Norman parents, who decided early on that their son would have a career in the church. At the age of twenty-five, he entered the employ of the archbishop of Canterbury (a distant relative), and he quickly achieved success. In 1154, the archbishop recommended Becket to the new king, Henry II, who was then looking for a chancellor. From then on, Becket worked for the king, who was actually about ten years younger, and the two seemed to become friends.

When the archbishop died, Henry appointed Becket to that job also. Henry believed that Becket would continue to be his subordinate, but once becoming archbishop, Becket resigned the position of chancellor and then made clear to the king that Becket’s first allegiance was going to be to the church. The problem came to a head when Henry announced his desire for a new tax on the churches, and Becket made clear that he would oppose any such initiatives.

In 1164, Henry tried to bring the church under his direct control by insisting that the king had control over the clergy. Under Becket’s leadership, the bishops refused to acknowledge the

king’s authority over them. Henry then accused Becket of misappropriating funds as chancellor. Becket was put on trial, which quickly degenerated into a circus. In the end, Becket was convicted and had to flee for his life.

Eventually, Becket and his supporters fled to the continent and took refuge at the Cistercian Abbey of Pontigny. Even from exile, Becket continued to use his influence in England to thwart the king’s attempts to take control of the church. In 1170, Henry came to France to meet with Becket and to try to effect a reconciliation. The king agreed to pardon Becket’s followers and allow all of them to return to England unharmed. When the king asked Becket to pardon those members of the church who had remained faithful to the king, Becket refused. They parted on very bad terms, but Becket and his followers returned to England anyway.

The martyrdom of Becket in 1170 is today generally regarded as a tragic misunderstanding, but a decisive moment in the struggle between church and state, and the Church won this round big time. Henry only succeeded in proving once again the lesson that the Romans had learned, namely that if you think a live Christian is a problem, a martyred Christian is your worst nightmare.

Abelard and Heloise

Another dilemma that was beginning to trouble the Church was the problem of reason and faith. This problem emerged as an unfortunate byproduct of the need for the Church to provide expanded opportunities for education. The increase in population required more churches and more literate officials. In the twelfth century, students from various parts of Europe would convene in cities where there were cathedral schools. Because they were often strangers, they banded together and formed associations, and these associations led to the formation of the first European universities.

Learning communities began to call themselves "colleges" after the Latin word collegium, which means "society." By the end of the twelfth century, the University of Paris had emerged as a major center for the study of theology and philosophy. The University of Bologna in Italy became a major center for the study of law, and the University of Salerno became a major center for the study of medicine. Universities in other major cities followed.

During this period, universities emphasized a curriculum in two parts: the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (music, astronomy, geometry, and mathematics). These were known as the liberal arts, and students were expected to master these subjects before going on to specialize in theology, law, or medicine.

These universities, as might be expected, often produced brilliant thinkers whose ideas were not always considered to be orthodox. A prime example is Peter Abelard (1079-1142), an independent thinker associated with the University of Paris.

In Abelard's day, the supreme intellectual controversy was the matter of what were known as universals. And what, I hear you ask, are "universals"? Okay, well, I'll try to make this simple. Medieval students liked Aristotle, and you will recall (I hope) that Aristotle trusted the human senses. In other words, you could observe things, and using the evidence of your senses (sight,

smell, touch, sound, etc.), you could figure out how things worked. Now, we observe grass and leaves and frogs are green. So, what is "green"? People who believed in universals would say, more or less after Plato, that "green" was an abstract thing that is a part of the grass, the leaves, and the frogs. However, others argued that universals don't exist, that "green" is a particular quality of particular things.

Abelard tried to resolve this dilemma by arguing for the existence of a middle ground, that universals existed but only as mental words of use purely for the sake of convenience to express abstract concepts. Thus, Abelard's chief claim to fame is that he proclaimed a clear division between reason and faith. In other words, there's what you know because you can see it with your own eyes and there's what you believe. That kind of speculation made some people uneasy.

However—and this is a bit off the subject—Abelard is chiefly remembered today for a reason that had nothing to do with his studies. Abelard, had the bad fortune to fall head over heels in love with one of his students, a female student, named Heloise, who just happened to be the niece of Canon Fulbert of Notre Dame, who was more or less Abelard's boss. The story of Abelard and Heloise is generally considered one of the great tragic love stories of history.

Dr. Bartlett references "courtly love" and the "troubadours." We'll talk more about these in a later section of this unit.

As you may gather, Abelard and Heloise continued to send each other really drippy letters for the rest of their lives. The letters have all been collected and published, and you really have to be made of stone not to be moved by these. Several sites on the Internet provide samples, but I suggest you click here for a generous sampling. It's okay to cry as you read this stuff. Sniff!

By the way, she outlived him by twenty-two years, and eventually, their bodies were placed in the same tomb, which was moved in 1817 to the Pere Lachaise cemetery, which you can visit when you go to Paris.

The Pere Lachaise Cemetery

One of the most popular tourist attractions in Paris (and one that is not particularly easy to get to) is the Pere Lachaise Cemetery. This place was deliberately created to be a celebrity cemetery, and a huge number of very famous writers, artists, musicians, and other celebrities are buried here. The cemetery is also a huge outdoor sculpture garden, and several sites on the web celebrate this place.

The official site for this place is great! This is a virtual tour with QuickTime VR images. Click here and choose English or French. Almost like being there! Only problem is that things are not well marked.

For a more conventional web visit, I suggest this site. Click on the index of graves and pick a famous person. You'll see the location and a thumbnail image of the grave itself. Click on the thumbnail to enlarge.

Averroës and Aquinas Aristotle continued to fascinate Medieval thinkers for the next several centuries, and early in the thirteenth century, a new controversy developed from a seemingly unlikely source. In Córdoba, a philosopher and physician known (in the West) as Averroës had gained some recognition for his commentaries on the works of Aristotle, many of which were just then becoming available in new Latin translations. According to Encarta,

Averroës held that metaphysical truths can be expressed in two ways: through philosophy, as represented by the views of Aristotle, and through religion, which is truth presented in a form that the ordinary person can understand. Although Averroës did not actually propound the existence of two kinds of truth, philosophical and religious, his views were interpreted in that way by Christian thinkers, who called it the theory of “double truth.”

Averroës acquired followers who were known as Averroists. They wanted to separate theology from philosophy, a somewhat radical idea for the time.

Another major Christian teacher, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), found a sort of middle path, which gave Aristotle a central role while honoring traditional Christian beliefs. His Summa Theologica is his masterpiece; he argued that God had given human beings two great paths: reason and faith. Reason, which was based on actual experience, could prove some things, but faith was needed for the rest.

The Church would have preferred that everyone accept everything on faith, so this kind of argument continued to make the Church uncomfortable. For a little more personal look at Aquinas, we turn again to Dr. Robert Bartlett. The following video clip also comes from the 2008 BBC series Inside the Medieval Mind, but this segments is from the episode titled "Knowledge."

Even so, in the Averroist controversy and in the response of Aquinas, we can see the beginning of a new rationalist tradition being established, a tradition that existed in a straight line from ancient Greece. This rationalist tradition would be the seed from which the Medieval Renaissance would eventually take root and blossom.

In the meantime, the Church inadvertently set off a little firestorm that would have a significant impact on Europe and have lasting consequences for us to this day.

Section Three: The CrusadesWith the passing of time, feudalism came to be an increasingly destabilizing force in Western Europe. The reason was the growing number of highly trained, mounted warriors who were eager to prove themselves in battle. The presence of so many armed men who were only stoppable by other similarly armed men created a growing threat to the social order.

Furthermore, feudalism had become a closed shop. If you didn't have the land and, therefore, the financial support, you couldn't be a knight. And since all the land in Western Europe was pretty well spoken for by the beginning of the eleventh century, you were either born into a noble—or landed—family or you were out of luck. Or you had to kill off somebody and take away their lands to make a place for yourself. Thus, feudalism strongly perpetuated a class system in Europe and left a lot of hungry people standing outside the system and wanting to get in.

Then, out of the blue, that all changed.

Origins of the Crusades In the meantime, the expanding empire of Islam had conquered Palestine, and in the early 11th century, Jerusalem was ruled by an Egyptian caliph named Al-Hakim. From the point of view of European Christians, some bad feelings remained from the Moorish incursions that had been turned back several centuries earlier by Charles Martel, but the Holy Land was far away, and the Church had more pressing problems closer to home. As long as Christian pilgrims were allowed to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre unmolested, the Church seemed to be okay with the change of ownership of the Holy Lands.

However, in 1009, Al-Hakim seemed to have had a nervous breakdown or something. He just went bonkers and ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to be knocked down!

From PBS' Empires series Islam: Empire of Faith, the program entitled "The Awakening."

Historians are still wondering what on earth Al-Hakim was thinking. Some sources dismiss Al-Hakim as simply a screwball or a madman, and apparently, he was somewhat eccentric. Other sources suggest that Al-Hakim was worried about the increasing numbers of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem. Perhaps he was also worried that the Byzantines may have been planning to try to reclaim Jerusalem (although I would have thought that knocking down the C of the HS would just have made the Byzantines more resolved). Whatever his reasons (or lack of them), workmen began pulling down the structure on Oct. 17, 1009. Later, Al-Hakim got on a camel and just rode out into the desert, never to be heard from again. At that point, more rational types apologized to the Byzantines for Al-Hakim's indiscretion, and the C of the HS was reconstructed, and the doors were thrown open to Christian pilgrims once again. But the harm had already been done, and anti-Muslim sentiment began to intensify throughout Europe.

Then, in the middle of the eleventh century, a tribe of people known as the Seljuks left their homelands in Central Asia and moved west, quickly overwhelming what was left of the Persian empire. In 1055, they captured Baghdad and began taking over almost all of Anatolia (Turkey)—which was territory that the Byzantine Empire had claimed. In 1095, the Seljuk Turks had pushed back the Byzantines almost all the way to Constantinople's front door, at which point Byzantine Emperor Alexius was forced to do something that he really didn't want to do: He sent a letter to the Pope to ask for help.

By that time, of course, the Western Church and the Eastern Church weren't exactly on speaking terms, but apparently Alexius had nowhere else to turn. What he wanted was for the Pope to muster a few soldiers and send them to Byzantium’s rescue.

What he got was something else entirely.

The Call to Save the Holy Lands The Pope then was Urban II, and he was busy trying to enforce all the reforms of Gregory VII (which, you recall, included stomping out lay investiture), and he had been looking for some way to reinforce the authority of the Church (and, perhaps, to do something about all those armed men who were so eager to fight someone). Exploiting the simmering resentment against the Muslims caused by the destruction of the C of the HS (and conveniently ignoring the fact that it had already been restored), Urban advertised Alexius' call for a little military assistance into a rallying cry for all the knights in Christendom to rescue the Holy Lands from the Heathens.

Unfortunately, Urban didn't know his own strength. He did entirely too good a job, and the whole affair quickly got out of hand.

The bloodbath in Jerusalem was a shocking act of barbarism. It appears that the Crusaders simply went crazy and slaughtered everyone they met—Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever. The astonishing thing is that the whole event did not immediately inspire a horrible reprisal. But, the Muslim rulers were not that well organized, and resistance took almost a hundred years to build.

Meanwhile, the victorious Crusaders washed all the blood off their tunics and then established the Kingdom of Jerusalem, under the leadership of Godfrey, the Duke of Lorraine, as pictured triumphantly on the left. About 20,000 crusaders remained in the area and built a network of castles, military strongholds to serve as defense posts against the expected Muslim retaliation.

As a side note, the Kingdom of Jerusalem was a whole network of feudal kingdoms which various knights claimed for themselves. If you're interested in more details, the Historical Atlas of the Mediterranean site has a clever interactive map that succinctly provides all the details of the various crusades and the various crusader states that were established. Click here to go to this page. As the instructions state, you'll want to hover your mouse pointer over labels on the maps to see more information, and click on the links for the various time periods to make the maps change. Well worth your time!

In time, the Muslim world became organized, and it found a leader, a legendary general named (in the West) Saladin. In 1187, he got revenge for the slaughter at Jerusalem.

As Ben Kingsley notes, the Mass was still being celebrated in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre after Saladin's victory. This fact illustrates a very important point:. At this point, the Muslims were eager for revenge on the Crusaders, not on all Christians—at least not yet.

Several more Crusades followed, the whole affair really being one long, continuous war which lasted about 200 years. Richard the Lionhearted was a major figure in the third Crusade from 1189-1192. His absence from England allowed his brother John to get into trouble, a situation which resulted in John’s being forced to sign the Magna Carta.

The fourth crusade never got to Jerusalem at all. Instead, the Crusaders got side-tracked by the Doge of Venice, who convinced the Crusaders to sack the city of Constantinople, and much of the wealth of Constantinople was then brought back to enrich the treasury at Venice. Supposedly some of the booty ended up decorating the glittering interior of St. Mark's Basilica.

The most notorious Crusade was the so-called Children’s Crusade, in which an army of 30,000 boys and girls—almost all of them under the age of twelve years of age—were virtually all wiped out.

In 1995, the BBC presented an excellent four-part video history called simply The Crusades, and the program was co-authored and narrated by Terry Jones, one of the members of the infamous Monty Python troupe.

If you'd like to know more, there are several web sites devoted to the history of the Crusades, but in my opinion, most of them aren't very good. For further reading, I would recommend Steven Kreis' lecture on his own History Guide site. Click here to read Steven Kreis' "Lecture 25: The Holy Crusades."

The Legacy of the CrusadesSo, let's do a little plus/delta analysis of the Crusades.

For the Church, the Crusades scored two in the plus column:

First, the Crusades helped to enhance the power of the Church in Western Europe. In the previous six hundred years or so, the Catholic Church had prospered because of the absence of any stable central authority in Europe. As a result, the monopoly of the Church had become the glue that held Medieval Europe together. But after the tenth century or so, many of the feudal warlords were enlarging their power bases and were starting to interfere in Church business, the problem of lay investiture being only one example. The Church needed some dramatic event to re-establish its authority, and the Crusades provided the perfect opportunity. Hey, nothing makes a people rally around their leadership—popular or not—like convincing the faithful that they need to pull together to defeat a common enemy.

Second, the sack of Constantinople had also weakened the Eastern Church, which was inextricably bound up with the fortunes of the Byzantine Empire. As the Byzantine Church declined, the Catholic Church's authority expanded. You can just see everyone in Rome smiling when they head that news!

For Western Europe, two more in the plus column:

First, the Crusades hastened the decline of feudalism. Bleeding off all those armed men to the Holy Lands—from which many of them never returned—only increased the power of the rising medieval monarchies. If your rivals have fewer armed vassals sitting around and spoiling for a fight, then you have less to worry about. The result is stability, an atmosphere in which towns and cities grow, trade increases, the population expands, and everyone is better off—except the serfs, but who cares about them?

Second, those Crusaders who managed to find their way back home brought back with them some Muslim innovations—not the least of which were soap and paper. Also, the returning Crusaders had been introduced to new products, such as spices that would improve the taste of European food.

However, there was one big score in the delta column for everyone. As Terry Jones pointed out, the Crusaders had forever changed the attitude of the Muslim world toward the Christian world.

Previously, when the Moors had moved into Spain and then tried to move into central Europe, they were just doing what the Medieval warlords had been doing to each other—trying to take over more land. It wasn't personal. Besides, from their point of view, Christians, Jews, and Muslims were and still are all "People of the the Book." Muslims freely acknowledge Jesus as one of God's prophets. Of course, Christians don't return the favor and recognize Muhammad as a prophet, but—from the Muslim perspective—that's their loss.

Sadly, the savage slaughter at Jerusalem changed all that. From that time forward, the bad feelings that the Christians had developed towards the Muslims began to be reciprocated, and a thousand years later, as Terry Jones said, "The world still lives in the long shadow of the Crusades."

And I remind you that program was made in 1995, which makes Jones' final statement all the more prophetic.

Next we look at how Church architecture underwent a revolution during this period and how the Romanesque gave way to a radical new style: Gothic.

Section Four: Gothic ArchitectureDuring the three hundred years covered by this study unit, many of the feudal warlords consolidated their holdings, and as a result, fighting over who was going to succeed whom became less frequent. At the same time, there were improvements in agricultural methods, and fewer serfs were needed on the lands, so some serfs moved to the new towns and cities, which were beginning to see an emerging middle class consisting of merchants, craftspeople, bakers, and the like. Also, the population of Medieval Europe was expanding. For example, the population of England is thought to have been around a million people at the time William had the population surveyed for the Domesday Book, but by the beginning of the fourteenth century, the population of England is thought to have increased to somewhere between five to seven million people. All total, the population of Europe at the same time is estimated at somewhere around eighty million people.

In the growing cities and towns, a new trend in church-building was taking place. Previously, the focus had been primarily on building isolated abbey churches for monasteries and priories, but in the growing towns and citites, new churches were needed to serve the expanding communities. The old, heavy Romanesque churches seemed like fortresses, and indeed they had served that purpose in the days of the Viking and Magyar invaders. But in the cities, fortresses were no longer needed.

Enter the Steve Jobs of church architecture: Abbot Suger.

The Birth of Gothic

While England was achieving stability under its Norman kings, France was evolving into one of the strongest of the Medieval monarchies. Things started looking up particularly when Hugh Capet became king in 987. He made Paris the center of his government, and his descendents continued to rule France in a virtually unbroken line until 1328, after which all subsequent monarchs of France could supposedly trace their lineage back to Hugh Capet somehow.

Significantly, Capet was buried in the abbey church of St. Denis (pronounced "SAN-duh-NEE") in Paris. That abbey had been founded in the seventh century, and the church was in the Romanesque style. With Hugh Capet's internment therein, the abbey church of St. Denis began to assume the same significance for the French as Westminster Abbey had for the English.

In 1122, an enterprising young monk named Suger (pronounced "soo-ZHAY") became the Abbot of St. Denis. [If he had a first name, I've never been able to find it. I guess he was like Madonna and Beyonce—in that respect.] Politically astute, Suger was already BFFs with King Louis VI and soon began to assume some of the functions of a prime minister.

St. Denis: The Saint Who Lost His Head

From the Online Medieval Source Book comes this summary of the life and death of St. Denis:

According to legend, he entered Gaul as a missionary in A.D. 250 and was executed in Paris eight years later. It was not all that easy. The Romans unsuccessfully tried roasting him on a gridiron, throwing him to the beasts, and baking him in an oven before they hit upon the idea of beheading him. That worked, but not immediately, for the decapitated saint picked up his head and walked two miles to the future site of the abbey before giving up the ghost.

One day, Suger decided that the old church needed a makeover —it simply wasn't grand enough to serve as the royal abbey of France. Furthermore, Suger had been giving some serious thought to the way Romanesque churches were typically designed, and he had some improvements in mind.

As we have discussed before, the fundamental problem of all buildings intended to create a large enclosed space is the roof. All the weight from the roof pushing down can make the walls buckle or topple over. The Romanesque solution was to make the walls thick enough to support the weight and provide stability. That strategy worked but made the interior spaces dark because you couldn't put a lot of windows into the walls without weakening them. To keep the walls from falling over, the Romans had used the apse at one end. Later churches typically used the device of the transept in part to achieve the same effect. In other words, the churches were built in the shape of a cross, as shown in the diagram above.

For that reason, the clerestory—the high windows above the nave—are so imporant in a Romanesque church. The high walls above the nave can be thinner because they support less roof, and therefore windows can be larger. (When you visit some of these places yourself, you may be surprised at how dark they tend to be inside. The interior photos you typically see are almost always brightened by the photographer's artificial lighting.)

But Suger wanted more light. A lot more light. He gave the matter some thought and suddenly realized how all the walls could be made thinner and the building made even more stable so he could have all the windows he wanted. Instead of using the walls to support the roof, thin columns could handle the downward force if the structure could be stabilized on the outside through the use of massive piers and buttresses that would hold everything in place and keep the structure locked in a vertical position. The diagram on the left explains Suger's inspiration. Notice how the walls could be reduced to mere skeletons when held in place by piers and buttresses, which are said to be "flying" when there is space under them.

Suger also decided to use pointed arches instead of the rounded arches the typify Romasque buildings. Europeans had seen pointed arches in Moorish buildings, but probably because they were associated with Moorish buildings, Western architects had not used them. But Suger realized that vaulted ceilings could be made from pointed arches arranged in groups to cover odd-shaped spaces. If you go back to the Early Medieval Europe study unit and look at the video on St. Michael's in Hildesheim, you'll see that the round arches in the interior tend to create regular, square spaces underneath. Also, notice St. Michael's flat wooden ceiling. Using stone ribs to create pointed arches, the width of the nave could be expanded and the ceiling could be vaulted, instead of flat. Stone ribs are very strong, and the space between the ribs could then be filled in with wood or masonry. (See the diagram above.)

Suger's first improvement on the old church of St. Deni was to open the west entrance, where he added a huge round (or "rose") window filled with stained glass, illustrated on the right. Remember that Romasques churches were typically drab on the inside. The people of Western Europe had shunned the dazzling mosaics of the Eastern Orthodox churches. The use of colored glass in the windows was a welcome innovation.

Then, Suger completely rebuilt the eastern end (the choir and apse), where he first demonstrated his new ideas about thin walls. On June 11, 1144, the new section was officially dedicated, and reportedly, the invited guests were astonished.

(I hope you realize that what you saw in that clip was the interior of St. Denis lit for television! Still, though, the space was much brighter and more colorful than what people were used to seeing inRomanesque churches.)

One of the reasons why we know so much about the renovation of St. Denis is that Suger left us a remarkable written record of the job.

Church? Cathedral? Chapel? Basilica? Hunh?

Okay, time we straighened this out. While these terms are sometimes used in other ways, these words are commonly used as follows: A Chapel is a small interior space set aside for prayer or certain activities such as christenings or weddings. Chapels can be located inside a Church or other building (such as a chapel in a hospital or mortuary), or they can be freestanding. A Church is any house of worship where religious services are conducted for large groups of people on a regular basis. A Basilica is a large Catholic church, usually cruciform (in the shape of a cross) with a nave, aisles, transepts, apse, etc. A Cathedral is a basilica that has been designated as the home base of a Catholic Bishop.

By the way, St. Denis is technically an abbey church (it's connected to an abbey and it's a house of worship where services are regularly held), but by size and shape, it's also a basilica (it's big and cruciform). In 1966, St. Denis became a cathedral because it was designated as the home base ("seat") of the Bishop of St. Denis.

Well, now that we've cleared that up . . .

Chartres

Suger’s innovations at St. Denis attracted a steady parade of visitors who liked what they saw and carried the ideas back to their own towns. As a result, Gothic churches and cathedrals began to be built everywhere in Europe. Within 150 years or so, virtually every sizable town and city in Europe(outside of Italy (I'll explain why at the end of this page) had a church in the Gothic style. The incredible speed at which this style was adopted throughout Europe is a testament to the way in which this style clearly embodied the values of the people of this era.

How Do You Pronounce "Chartres"?

Didn't take French in high school? Not to worry. Just remember that the French tend to ignore the final consonants on most words. As I am sure you know from the song "Lady Marmalade," the words "voulez-vous" are pronounced "voo-lay voo," not "voo-layz voos." Same principle applies here. You will hear some people pronounce "Chartres" as "SHART-rez," but you should ignore them. Pronounce the word "SHART" and everyone

will think you're exceedingly sophisticated.

So, then, why do we say, "No-truh Dahm"? We just do, okay?

In 1194, the people of Chartres, a city near the Loire River in Northern France, decided to replace the smoking ashes of their previous Romanesque cathedral with a new building in the exuberant Gothic style. The resulting structure is widely considered to be one of the very finest examples of this style. Wood's last point in that video clip is very important. These large churches became the real center of the life of their towns and cities. For that reason, the people supported and maintained them and took great pride in them.

The important part of any Gothic church is really the interior, which has a clearly symbolic function. Inside the building, medieval worshippers were treated to a vision of heaven.

Rivalries inevitably developed between Medieval towns, and the focus of the rivalry was often on the height of the cathedral. The larger, higher, and more grandiose the building, the more the people of the town were showing the intensity of their devotion to God. And it didn’t hurt that bigger cathedrals attracted larger crowds to the town as well. According to Michael Wood, “In that time, it has been estimated that more stone was quarried in France alone than in the entire history of ancient Egypt.”

Height was measured in two ways. The spires on the western façade (always the main entrance) were pushed up and up. At Chartres, the higher spire is actually taller than a thirty-story building. At Strasbourg, the spire was pushed up to surpass the height of a forty-story building.

The other way height was measured was in the height of the vaulted ceiling. The interior of Chartres was 121 feet above the floor. The cathedral at Rheims pushed the ceiling up to 125 feet. Sometimes, though, the builders overreached their abilities. The cathedral at Beauvais tried for 158 feet, but the engineers were not able to sustain that height, and the walls of the choir collapsed.

Virtual Chartres

Like to explore Chartres on your own? Many sites on the Web are devoted to Chartres, but one of the best is the "Virtual Chartres," which is maintained by San Jose State University.

Notre DameAnother prime example of the Gothic style is the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.

In spite of the popularity of the new Gothic style, some people did have reservations about the money involved in creating these barns. While a lot of the support did come from the laity, considerable Church money was also involved.

From the Church’s point of view, one of the most important functions of any Gothic church was to provide instruction to the faithful. Even though literacy was spreading through the rising middle class, the majority of the people of Europe at this time could not read or write. Consequently, the sculpture and other decoration of the Church was intended to serve as a kind of living Bible, telling the stories in pictures and symbols.

The most popular and best known of all the ornamental sculpture of Notre Dame is not the images of the saints or the colorful Biblical scenes in the stained glass windows. The most popular sculptures are the gargoyles that look down from the upper railings on the outside.

The word “gargoyle” actually comes from a Latin word meaning, roughly, a “gullet” or drain, and the word is also related to the French word “gorge” for throat. Originally intended as the openings for drain pipes that expelled the rain water from the roof, the gargoyles of Notre Dame seem to have acquired a life of their own in the mind of the building’s various architects. They represent the presence of demons in everyday life, and—like all other ornament on the building—they serve a teaching purpose.

Although Notre Dame is greatly prized as a masterpiece of the Gothic style today, the building began to be neglected in the eighteenth century, and during the period of the French Revolution—which opposed the Church—the building was vandalized. By the time of the nineteenth century, the building was in danger of falling down. However, interest in historical preservation was kindled by an unlikely source: the novelist Victor Hugo and the book known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Want more? Click here to visit Columbia University's site devoted to Notre Dame de Paris. The site is elaborate, and you will definitely need a high speed connection or you will have to want a while for things to load, but it's an interesting site and worth your time. If history is more your thing, I recommend you visit this site: click here to see an excellent history of the building and a useful timeline of important events in the history of France and of Notre Dame.

Postscript: "Gothic" Is an Insult You may have wondered why or how this style came to be called "Gothic," a term which suggests some kind of connection to the Gauls, or the Germans. The answer is that the term “Gothic” was not used at the time to describe this style. In fact, what we call "Gothic" architecture now was usually referred to then as "the French style" because it had originated in Paris.

However, during the Italian Renaissance, the artists of the time thought the great Gothic churches were ugly because they lacked classical symmetry, so they started calling these buildings "Gothic" as a term of derision. (By "Gothic," they meant "barbaric.") Still the name stuck.

We need to understand, though, that the Renaissance naysayers were reacting to the outside of the Gothic buildings, which—with their tentacle-like flying buttresses and uneven towers and disproportional features—are really architectural monstrosities (as you can see in the photo of Notre Dame above and to the left). Frankly, I agree. I have walked around the grounds outside of Notre Dame and Chatres, and I found the exterior of those buildings anything but attractive.

Italian architects would subsequently design churches that were far prettier on the outside, and we see some of them in HUM251, but we need to keep in mind that for the people who built these things, they were far more concerned about the interior space than what stone tentacles were holding up the walls. They didn't care if the spires were of uneven height or if buttresses on the apse looked like an exploding alien creature. Inside, the soaring vaults and the colored light from the windows reminded them of the place they expected to go after they died. Inside, world of the Gothic Church was profoundly beautiful. Inside, world of the Church was a heluva lot nicer than the world outside.

To end this unit, we now look at developments in literature . . . and also in Medieval music.

Section Five: Medieval Literature (and Music) The printing press would not appear in Europe until the middle of the fifteenth century, so books during this period still had to be copied by hand. Even so, the first stirrings of a middle class in Europe meant an expansion of the part of the population that could read, although the primary patrons for literature were literate aristocrats. As a result, literature began to appear in this period, Also, music becomes more important to the same groups.

Medieval Literature Medieval literature began when epic poems that existed in the oral tradition began to be written down. We have already looked at a prime example, The Song of Roland, which we encountered in the previous unit. Roland is only one example of this type of literary creation, a genre known as the chanson de geste (French for "song of heroic deeds"). These poems represent the first time that literary works were composed in a language other than Latin for a purely secular audience.

The chansons de geste are almost exclusively stories about the heroic (sometimes tragic) deeds of men in battle. Women figure in these stories only tangentially if at all. In part, the genre evolved as a way of putting some good "spin" on the escapades of the Medieval mounted thugs . . . er, knights. (Exxon sponsors Masterpiece Theater on PBS for the same reasons.)

In addition to Roland, another well known example is a long poem in Middle English called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which dates from the end of the 14th century (a bit beyond the time frame of this unit but still relevant, as you will see). From Wikipedia comes this summary of the premise: "In the poem, Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from a mysterious warrior who is completely green, from his clothes and hair to his beard and skin, save for his red eyes. The 'Green Knight' offers to allow anyone to strike him with his axe if the challenger will take a return blow in a year and a day. Gawain accepts, and beheads him in one blow, only to have the Green Knight stand up, pick up his head, and remind Gawain to meet him at the appointed time."

As that the time approaches, Gawain sets off to make good on his promise. After an arduous journey to find the "Green Chapel," he ends up as a guest of a certain Lord Bertilak, whose castle is supposedly near Gawain's ultimate destination. Gawain remains at this place for a few days to rest up for his destined meeting with the Green Knight, and while he is killing time, Lady Bertilak—who turns out to be a real hussy—does her darndest to seduce Gawain, who manages to resist her advances (except for a little kissing).

When Gawain later keeps his rendezvous with the Green Knight, he learns the whole affair has been a test of his mettle. The Green Knight is actually Bertilak transformed by magic. Gawain is told he has kinda passed the test, but the fact that he was tempted by Lady Bertilak is a source of great shame to Gawain. In the poem, Gawain then lets loose with a speech about how all women are temptresses: "But it is no wonder that a fool should rave, and through wiles of women be won to sorrow. For so was Adam beguiled by one, and Solomon by many, indeed; and Samson also, Delilah dealt him his weird; and David thereafter was deceived by Bathsheba, who suffered much sorrow. Since these men were plagued by their wiles, it were a huge gain to love them well and believe them not—if a person but could; for these men were of old the best, and the most fortunate, excellent above all others under the heavens; and all they were beguiled by women whom they had to do with." (The quotation is from a translation by W. A. Neilson, and you can read the whole text here.)

This work only confirms how women were held in rather low esteem by the Catholic Church.

But during the period we are studying, that attitude began to change. One explanation may be that during the twelfth century, the Catholic church saw a significant upswing in the worship of Mary, the Mother of God. (You will recall that the most prized relic of the Cathedral of Chartres was Mary's veil. You will recall, too, that Paris's major cathedral is "Notre Dame," i.e., "Our Lady.") Supposedly, this focus started with the Cistercians, who named Jesus' mom as their patron saint. She was merciful, long-suffering, and a virgin, and a fact that must have appealed to ascetics, who are supposed to abstain from all pleasure of the flesh. Writer Timothy Sexton comments in a web article "The Cult of the Virgin Mary During the 12th Century":

Mary began to take on new responsibilities in the world of Catholic dogma that went far beyond merely being the mother of Christ. [ . . . ] In addition, just as Eve had once been held as the mother of us all, now Mary had taken over that role. The reason should be quite obvious; it was a very difficult sale trying to juxtapose Eve as the world's mother while also castigating her as the temptress of the entirely pure Adam. (It's good to be a guy!) With the assumption of Mary that process became much easier. The sin of Eve now could be more than balanced by introduction of Mary. Mary represented the triumphant victory over Eve's sin by being the vessel through which salvation was delivered in the form of Christ. In addition, since Mary was no naked vamp, her placement alongside Jesus and God also meant that femininity could finally be worshipped in the figure of Mary's strangely eternal virginity.

Some of that change of attitude toward women is reflected in the compositions of itinerant entertainers—minstrels and troubadours—who began to popularize a new genre, the lay (a love poem, often a narrative tale, set to music). In these poems, the adoration of God is replaced by the worship of women.

For a discussion of this change, we turn again to the 2008 BBC series Inside the Medieval Mind and the episode titled "Sex." This time, Dr. Robert Bartlett describes how the concept of "courtly love" evolved and began to affect the development of the chanson de geste.

Soon, the chansons de geste began to be superseded in popularity by these courtly romances—and by the way, you should understand that "romance" here is not a reference to gooey, sticky love but to the idea that the form was Roman in origin. (Remember Ovid?) These narratives, usually of a sentimental rather than a heroic nature, dealt with mythical subjects and often involved knights in armor.

A whole sub-genre of these works centered around the adventures of the mythical English King Arthur, who was largely the invention of a twelfth-century writer known as Geoffrey of Monmouth, .

Chrétien de Troyes was a twelfth century French poet about whom little is known. He is thought to have been in the employ of Eleanor of Aquitaine at least at some point in his career. He authored several courtly romances, including Perceval, the Story of the Grail and Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart, the latter of which focuses on Lancelot's adulterous affair with Guinevere The story describes the suffering of Lancelot, who has to be humbled to make himself worthy of Guinevere.

Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart

If you'd like to read this story, click here to read an excerpt in English from the Online Medieval Source Book. In this excerpt, Lancelot is propositioned by a very forward damsel, but he resists. That’s how you know this is fiction.

If you'd prefer just to read a very good and very detailed summary, click here to read Michael Wild's Summary of the plot of the Knight of the Cart by Chrétien de Troyes.

In the 15th century, English writer Thomas Malory addressed the same topic in his Le Morte d’Arthur, published in 1485, but he shifted the emphasis a bit to blame Lancelot and Guinevere's shenanigans for tearing about the Arthurian world.

The Lady of the Lake

Thomas Malory gave his work a French title, but he wrote in Middle English, and many versions of this work in modern English have been created. If you like this sort of thing, you may even have read some of Malory before. Click here to visit a site with Le Morte d’Arthur in its entirety online. The link takes you to chapter twenty-five, the story of the Lady of the Lake, who is responsible for giving Arthur his famous sword, Excalibur.

If you want more, click on the link “Table of Contents for this work” at the top of the page.

Dante's Divine Comedy At the same time, a lot of literary focus remained on religious topics in various forms, and one of the most important literary figures of the era wrote in this vein. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), a Florentine born in to an aristocratic family, spent a large part of his life in exile outside of Florence because of politics, and during those years, he wrote his great work known as the Comedia, better known in English as The Divine Comedy.

An epic poem (in every sense of the term) in three large parts, the story concerns Dante’s descent into the afterlife. (He doesn't die; he just gets lost in the woods one night. Happens all the time, I guess.) During the first half, he is led by the ghost of the poet Virgil, who guides him through hell and part of purgatory. Then, Virgil is replaced by Dante's vision of the ideal woman, Beatrice, who sees him through the Purgatory and into the divine world of heaven.

The Divine Comedy is a long, difficult work for contemporary readers because it is filled with references to Dante’s contemporaries, so students trying to read Dante often spent hours reading footnotes for three or four lines of poetry. Sadly, the experience for many students is thus negative, and they often miss the fact that Dante was a good writer, and the work is often very funny—if you know the in-jokes.

Click here to access American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's translation. Read through the first canto, which describes how Dante begins his journey. (Read more, if you like, but please read at least that far.)

Although the work is really a kind of extended religious allegory, the work also fits squarely into the tradition of the courtly romance because of the way that Beatrice is idealized. In the next (and final) unit of this course, we will see how the courtly romance led to the evolution of a purely secular literature which did not idealize women, or anybody else for that matter.

Medieval MusicJust as the expanding middle class wanted something to read, the same people were also interested in hearing some tunes. At this time, though, music and musical instruments were largely of the homegrown variety. The rules for musical notation were still evolving, but some of this early music does survive and is regularly performed by scholars dedicated to this sort of thing.

To sample a bit of this evolving music, the following links are to a program presented on National Public Radio's Morning Edition program on May 3, 2001. The host was Bob Edwards, and the occasion for the program was described on the NPR site:

Scholars and fans of the Middle Ages are gathering Thursday for the world's largest conference on medieval studies. Thousands of medievalists will converge on Western Michigan University to gorge themselves on talks about Vikings and Celts, Dante and Chaucer, and Sir Gawain and Guinevere.

One of the biggest problems facing medieval professors is how teach a slow era in the speedy times of the 21st century. During a talk called Music History at 10 Years a Minute, Ithaca College music professor Arthur Samplaski will explain how to collapse 600 years of music history into one hour. Morning Edition asked Samplaski if it was possible to cover 600 years in 6 minutes. He said yes. Hear his six-minute medieval music marathon from Morning Edition.

On the NPR site appears a discography of the examples presented in the previous lecture, and they have been assembled for your further study if you are interested.

Note: The timings below in parenthesis may be accessed directly from the slider bar at the bottom of the media player.

1. (0:00) Plainchant (Gregorian chant) "Alma redemptoris mater," performed by the Cambridge Singers, John Rutter, dir. From the CD Ave gracia plena: Music in honour of the Virgin Mary. Collegium Records, 1992, cat. #COLCD 116.

2. (1:19) Troubadour song by Jaufre Rudel, ca. mid-12th c. "Non sap chanter," performed by the Martin Best Medieval Ensemble. From the CD Songs of Chivalry. Nimbus Records, 1983, cat. # NI 5006.

3. (2:19) Anonymous 13th c. conductus (processional song): "Alle Psallite Cum Luya," performed by the Early Music Consort of London, the late David Munrow, dir. from Music of the Gothic Era, reissued on CD by the Musical Heritage Society, 1997, cat. # 524643F (2

CDs).

4. (3:26) Late 14th c. rhythmically-complex song by Anthonello de Caserta: "Amour m'a le cuer mis en tel martire," performed by Gothic Voices, Christopher Page, dir. From the CD The Garden of Zephirus: Courtly Songs of the Early Fifteenth Century. Hyperion Records, 1996, cat. #CDA66144.

5. (5:14) Late Renaissance motet by William Byrd: "Alleluia, Ave Maria," from the same CD as item #1.

6. (6:50) Late Renaissance madrigal by Adriano Banchieri: "Danza di pastorelle" (Dance of the Shepherdesses), performed by the Choir of Radio Svizzera, Lugano, and the Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca, Treviso, Diego Fasolis, dir. From the CD Il Zabaione musicale, Naxos, 1995, cat. # 8.553785.

In conclusion, the increasing stability of the High Middle Ages provided a climate in which cultural and political advances laid the foundation for the Medieval Renaissance that was to come. But the stable period was about to end, and the Medieval Renaissance would be somewhat delayed by all of the coming upset that would shake Europe to its foundations.

PHOTO: http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/170004577

The attached photo shows a reliquary, dated 1175 to 1200 AD. It was made, more than

likely, in France, of rock crystal, gilded copper, glass, and crystal. Although the artist is

unknown, this reliquary is said to have held relics from Saints Margaret, Philip the Apostle, and

Catherine (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-2012). This is an object representative of the

time period in that relics, the physical remains of a holy site or personage, held a powerful place

in the convictions of Christians. They were believed to have healing powers, and were thus far

more than mere mementos. From Charlemagne’s time, it in fact became obligatory that every

altar have a relic (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-2012).

Relics associated with Christ and his mother was considered to be the holiest of relics

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-2012). Although women had been held in somewhat low value

by the Church, one of the most prized relics was that of Mary’s veil at the Cathedral of

Chartres. This was indicative of an increasing trend toward Mary-worship, which began

changing attitudes toward women in general. A new genre, the lay, developed, in which the

adoration of God became replaced by the worship of women. The concept of courtly love began

to develop as a result, and the chanson de geste, or songs of deeds, were affected as a result,

being surpassed in attractiveness by courtly romances such as those composed by Chretien de

Troyes and Sir Thomas Malory, both of whom wrote tales of the mythical King Arthur and his

knights.

This reliquary was a sign of the times in that it would have been housed in a cathedral,

and given over to the function of making the presence of God or the saint felt. This particular

reliquary is significant because it housed relics of female saints, and changing attitudes toward

women is one that can be evidenced historically during this time period.

References

Metropolitan Museum of Art. (2000-2012). Relics and reliquaries in medieval christianity.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Retrieved from

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/relc/hd_relc.htm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (2000-2012). Reliquary. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Retrieved from

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/170004577