Mysteries of the Middle Ages Read online

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2008

  Copyright © 2006 by Thomas Cahill

  Excerpt from Heretics and Heroes copyright © 2013 by Thomas Cahill.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese edition as follows:

  Cahill, Thomas.

  Mysteries of the Middle Ages : the rise of feminism, science, and art from the cults of Catholic Europe/Thomas Cahill.—1st ed.

  p. cm.—(The hinges of history ; v. 5)

  Includes index.

  1. Civilization, Medieval. 2. Women—Europe—History—Middle Ages, 500– 1500. 3. Science, Medieval. 4. Art, Medieval. I. Title. II. Series: Cahill, Thomas. Hinges of history ; v. 5.

  CB.351.C22 2006

  909.07—dc22 2006044545

  eISBN: 978-0-307-75514-8

  Book design by Terry Karydes (from the original series concept by Marysarah Quinn)

  Map art by Virginia Norey

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1_r1

  Ceiling of Scrovegni Chapel, Padua Bridgeman Art Library

  To Nan Ahearn Talese

  e là m’apparve, sì com’ elli appare

  subitamente cosa che disvia

  per maraviglia tutto altro pensare,

  una donna soletta che si gìa

  e cantando e scegliendo fior da fiore

  ond’ era pinta tutta la sua via.

  and there appeared to me—as can befall

  so suddenly a thing that drives away

  all other thought by wonder magical—

  a lady alone who went along her way

  singing and plucking flower upon flower,

  which painted all the path that before her lay.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  A CHAUCERIAN INVITATION

  PRELUDE: ALEXANDRIA, CITY OF REASON

  The Great Confluence

  INTRODUCTION: ROME, CROSSROADS OF THE WORLD

  How the Romans Became the Italians

  ONE: BINGEN AND CHARTRES, GARDENS ENCLOSED

  The Cult of the Virgin and Its Consequences

  TWO: AQUITAINE AND ASSISI, COURTS OF LOVE

  The Pursuit of Love and Its Consequences

  INTERMEZZO: ENTRANCES TO OTHER WORLDS

  The Mediterranean, the Orient, and the Atlantic

  THREE: PARIS, UNIVERSITY OF HEAVENLY THINGS

  The Exaltation of Reason and Its Consequences

  FOUR: OXFORD, UNIVERSITY OF EARTHLY THINGS

  The Alchemist’s Quest and Its Consequences

  FIVE: PADUA, CHAPEL OF FLESH

  The Artist’s Experiment and Its Consequences

  SIX: FLORENCE, DOME OF LIGHT

  The Poet’s Dream and Its Consequences

  SEVEN: RAVENNA, CITY OF DEATH

  The Politician’s Emptiness and Its Consequences

  POSTLUDE: LOVE IN THE RUINS

  A Dantesque Reflection

  Notes and Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Photography Credits

  Index

  Additional Images

  Excerpt from Heretics and Heroes

  About the Author

  The Hinges of History

  Other Books by This Author

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  map.1 Europe and the Middle East in the time of Constantine the Great

  map.2 German Rhineland in the time of Hildegard

  map.3 England and France in the time of Henry II

  map.4 Religious divisions of Europe and the Middle East in the time of Francis of Assisi

  Charts

  chart.1 Alumni of Alexandria

  chart.2 Dating the Middle Ages

  chart.3 Relevant Romans

  chart.4 System of Dante’s Hell

  chart.5 Some Major Medievals

  Illustrative Art

  Ill.1 Hildegard inspired by fire from above

  Ill.2 Hildegard’s First Vision

  Ill.3 Man at center of cosmos with Hildegard as observer

  Ill.4 Viriditas, or the abundance of nature

  Ill.5 Town houses of wealthy merchants, Trier

  Ill.6 Bernard of Clairvaux

  Ill.7 Dom of Trier and Liebfrauenkirche

  Ill.8 Madonna and Child, Roman Catacomb of Santa Priscilla

  Ill.9 Apse of Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome

  Ill.10 Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Chartres

  Ill.11 Prophetic figures, Chartres

  Ill.12 God fashioning Adam from clay, Chartres

  Ill.13 Triptych of stained-glass windows, Chartres

  Ill.14 Noah’s Ark, Chartres

  Ill.15 Notre-Dame de la Belle-Verrière, Chartres

  Ill.16 Eleanor’s palace and Maubergeonne Tower, Poitiers

  Ill.17 Detail of Eleanor’s tomb

  Ill.18 Tombs of Eleanor and Henry II, Fontevraud Abbey

  Ill.19 Crucifix of San Damiano

  Ill.20 Francis of Assisi by Cimabue

  Ill.21 Unicorn in tapestry

  Ill.22 Apse of San Clemente, Rome

  Ill.23 Detail of San Clemente apse: woman feeding hens

  Ill.24 Detail of San Clemente apse: stag drinking from stream

  Ill.25 Detail of San Clemente apse: people at their labors

  Ill.26 Smiling angel, Rheims

  Ill.27 Jesus as Pantocrator, Daphni

  Ill.28 Francis of Assisi’s first crèche by Giotto

  Ill.29 Byzantine Virgin and Child, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna

  Ill.30 Madonna and Child by Cimabue

  Ill.31 Madonna of Borgo San Lorenzo by Giotto

  Ill.32 Ognissanti Madonna by Giotto

  Ill.33 Crucifixion by Cimabue

  Ill.34 Greek Crucifixion

  Ill.35 Crucifixion by Giotto, Scrovegni

  Ill.36 Renunciation of Worldly Goods by Giotto, Assisi

  Ill.37 Dream of Innocent III by Giotto, Assisi

  Ill.38 Exorcism of the Demons of Arezzo by Giotto, Assisi

  Ill.39 Saint Francis Mourned by Saint Clare by Giotto, Assisi

  Ill.40 Scrovegni Chapel interior, Padua, by Giotto

  Ill.41 Angel Gabriel appears to Mary, Scrovegni

  Ill.42 Mary receives Gabriel’s message, Scrovegni

  Ill.43 Nativity of Jesus, Scrovegni

  Ill.44 Last Supper, Scrovegni

  Ill.45 Marriage Feast at Cana, Scrovegni

  Ill.46 Lamentation over Jesus, Scrovegni

  Ill.47 Betrayal of Jesus by Judas, Scrovegni

  Ill.48 Giotto at Last Judgment, Scrovegni

  Ill.49 Campanile di Giotto, Florence

  Ill.50 Giotto’s Carraia Bridge, Florence

  Ill.51 Florence’s Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and Campanile

  Ill.52 Baptistery of San Giovanni, Florence

  Ill.53 Mosaic of Satan, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Florence

  Ill.54 Pope Boniface VIII

  Ill.55 Dante Alighieri, Bargello, Florence

  Ill.56 Mosaic frieze of the emperor Justinian and his court, San Vitale, Ravenna

  Ill.57 Mosaic frieze of the empress Theodora and her cour
t, San Vitale, Ravenna

  A Chaucerian Invitation

  At night was come in-to

  that hostelrye

  Wel nyne and twenty in a companye,

  Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle

  In felawshipe, and pilgrims were

  they alle …

  SO DOES GEOFFREY CHAUCER describe the convening—at the Tabard Inn in Southwark on the southern bank of the River Thames—of twenty-nine pilgrims. The next day they would ride southeast from London to Canterbury, “the holy blisful martir for to seke [seek].” For in the year 1170, Canterbury had been the scene of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, the unbending archbishop of Canterbury, slain by four knights in service to King Henry II. The martyr’s bones were kept in a jewel-encrusted shrine in the cathedral where he had been murdered, and from them was believed to emanate miraculous healing power. All over England people prayed to Becket, invoking his intercession with God “whan that they were seke [sick],” as Chaucer tells us. Those who were cured of their maladies would then make their promised pilgrimage to Becket’s bones.

  All across Europe, a pilgrimage in company with others was a life-defining event and one of the principal satisfactions of a well-tuned life. A man or woman went on pilgrimage in thanksgiving for a favor granted or to ask a member of the court of Heaven for something greatly desired or as penance for sins committed. But even a penitential pilgrimage was full of incidental pleasures. The pilgrim joined with other pilgrims for safety and companionship, and each pilgrimage offered its promise of adventure. One was, after all, traveling farther into the world than one had ever ventured before. Most medieval wayfarers had never gone beyond the nearest market town, so every pilgrim could look forward to marvelous sights and strange encounters. Whether you journeyed to a national shrine like Canterbury, to an international destination like Santiago de Compostela in Spain, or to the most exotic goal of all, the Holy Land itself, you would have enough stories to tell on your return to fill what remained of your span of days.

  Especially from your fellow pilgrims, mostly people previously unknown to you, you could expect to receive an unparalleled learning experience. For these were people from other places, places you had never seen, who had life stories quite unlike the ones you were familiar with. “A crowd is as exciting as champagne to these lonely people, who live in long glens among the mountains,” John Millington Synge once wrote of rural Irish folk, who had managed even in his day to maintain many medieval customs and who still bore a medieval mind-set. Not all medievals lived in long mountain glens, but most lived among what would seem to us but a handful of other humans. So though pilgrimage was a religious duty, it also became a glorious—and sometimes picaresque—experience.

  I invite you on a pilgrimage, dear Reader. Come along with me (and many others) to places we have never seen before and to people we could otherwise never have expected to know. We are surely sundry folk, as Chaucer would have called us, and we shall meet sundry folk even more exotic than ourselves. “By aventure”—by happenstance—we have fallen into fellowship.

  In the Prelude that follows we must spend a little time in late antique Alexandria, for it was a place of cultural percolation that would have untold influence on the making of the Middle Ages. Then in the Introduction, we shall quickly navigate the intervening centuries from the death of antiquity to the budding of the high Middle Ages. Do not be troubled if all this seems far removed from our principal quest. By starting in late antiquity and then by turning, however briefly, to the uncertain beginnings of the medieval period, we learn by contrast: how different are the seeds from the soil that nourished them, how splendid will be the flowers compared with the seeds. And like a hearty breakfast taken at the Tabard, these early courses will stand us in good stead as we venture forth in Chapter One to the solemn and merry mysteries that will constitute our chief employment.

  PRELUDE

  Alexandria, City of Reason

  The Great Confluence

  The soul takes nothing with

  her into the other world

  but her education and culture.

  —PLATO

  ALEXANDRIA WAS THE MOST Greek of cities. Situated in the alluvial delta where the life-giving Nile meets the dolphin-torn Mediterranean, it had been commissioned by Alexander the Great as his very own civic apotheosis. And though the young world-beater did not live long enough to see even one of its buildings rise from the mud of the delta, his corpse was transported here—shunned by the obscurantist priests of Egyptian Memphis, who feared his restless spirit would bring them bad luck—and here did the body, at least, of Alexander find rest in the late fourth century B.C. within the massive mausoleum called to sōma, Greek for “the Body.”

  The city that materialized around the tomb was almost impossibly grand. It had not grown like most cities as an unplanned thicket of huddled quartiers, dense with fetid air and insalubrious shadows. Rather, it was laid out in a reasonable pattern, not unlike such later cities as Paris and Washington, and it seemed to classical eyes to embody the principle of rationality. “The first thing one noticed on entering Alexandria by the Gate of the Sun,” exclaimed one tourist of late antiquity, “was the beauty of the city. A line of columns processed from one end of it to the other. Advancing along them, I came to the place that bears the name of Alexander, and there I could see the other half of the town [divided from the first half by the broad Canopic Way], which was equally beautiful. For just as the colonnades stretched out ahead of me, so did other colonnades now appear at right angles to them.” Grids, right angles, generously proportioned boulevards radiating from dignified monuments, punctuating colonnades at regular intervals—expansive, mathematical, open to the bright sun, and all assuring the ancient visitor that here at last he had reached the harbor of balance and tranquility, the architectural and social expression of Logos, of Thought Itself.

  For the ancients, Alexandria, cultural successor to war-devastated Athens, became in the third century B.C. the great City of the Mind; and for all the untroubled urbanity of its polished surfaces, it buzzed noon and night with theory, disputation, and intellectual engagement. Its first ruler, Alexander’s companion-in-arms Ptolemy—Soter (or Savior), as he styled himself—had not particularly meant to create such a cerebral center. He meant only to consolidate and extend the power of his realm of Greek Africa, the rough third of Alexander’s empire that had fallen to him (just as Greek Asia and Greek Europe had fallen to others among Alexander’s generals). Ptolemy was of course hardly unaware of the status that accrued to him on account of his ownership of Alexander’s body, as sainted a relic as the ancient world possessed. (He had in fact kidnapped it during its funeral procession.) And he knew perfectly well how much his power would be enhanced by the creation of a great urban stage set.

  Ptolemy Soter founded the Mouseion, parent of all subsequent museums, nerve center of philosophy, mathematics, literature, and a dozen other scholarly pursuits. Within its vast domain was the multilingual Library containing, it was said, all the books that had ever been written.a Among the varied enterprises housed in the Mouseion was a faculty of engineering that made possible the Pharos, the Lighthouse, which stood in the harbor on a limestone island and was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It rose more than four hundred feet into the sky, and its ground floor alone was divided into three hundred separate workrooms and offices. “To the imagination of contemporaries,” wrote E. M. Forster, “the Pharos became Alexandria and Alexandria became the Pharos. Never, in the history of architecture, has a secular building been thus worshipped and taken on a spiritual life of its own. It beaconed to the imagination, not only to ships at sea, and long after its light was extinguished memories of it glowed in the minds of men.”

  There is even tantalizing, if fragmentary, evidence that the Pharos may have been topped by a telescope. (If so, lenses were a Greek invention, lost well before the Pharos fell to ruin under the Arabs and rediscovered in the thirteenth century of our era.) The Ptolemys would r
ule safely and ruthlessly till Cleopatra VII, unable to secure the throne for Ptolemy XV, her son by Julius Caesar, died with an asp at her breast, her only way of avoiding the humiliation of submitting to Caesar’s conquering successor, Octavian, who would style himself Caesar Augustus and take the title Imperator, Rome’s first emperor.

  Would that we could spend a little time with Cleopatra, a woman as unafraid to play power politics as the boldest of men. She was an exemplary Alexandrian, devoted to the pleasures of Eros, the Greek god of Love, whose lissome image stood in every verdant courtyard and was reflected in every glistening pool. (“Who sculpted Love and set him by the pool, / thinking with water such fire to cool?” went a popular song that had been penned in his spare moments by the head librarian.) Nor was this last queen of Greco-Egyptian Africa ever less than realistic about the things she must do to retain her throne. But she knew that in Octavian she was up against an opponent who, unlike the avuncular Julius Caesar or the besotted Mark Antony, would accord her no mercy, for he was, in Forster’s words, “one of the most odious of the world’s successful men.” Knowing exactly when all was lost, she departed as gracefully as she had reigned; and Egypt was absorbed into the Roman Empire.

  Fascinating Cleopatra has little to do, however, with our story, a story of cultural evolution that will take us from one age to another. Indeed, the political dramas of the high and mighty made scant impact on Alexandria’s intellectual life, which proceeded uninterrupted under each of the many Ptolemys, then under each of the many Caesars. Scholars and sages were drawn to the city from all over the civilized world: first Greeks; then Greek-educated Romans; then provincial philosophers and mystagogues of several varieties—Persians, Indians, Jews, and last of all Christians. The imperial safety, the effortless wealth, the stately pace, the clarity of light, the geometric symmetry, the characteristic Greek ambience of inquiry all acted as correlative inspiration to their own enterprises: the labeling of reality and the calm, dispassionate ascent to truth.

  About 300 B.C. a man named Euclid landed in the harbor, as if from nowhere, and became the founding father of Alexandrian (and world) geometry, without which the city could never have been built in the monumental manner for which it became famous. Euclid’s thirteen books of Elements would serve as the basis for all ancient building programs; and even though the books were lost to non-Arabic Europe till the twelfth century, thereafter Euclid’s proofs would sustain European geometry right through the nineteenth century. At the end of each neat proof, superlogical Euclid carefully added the Greek “hoper edei deixai” (which was to be proven). This tag, especially in its Latin abbreviation—Q.E.D., for quod erat demonstrandum—has ever after been the conventional conclusion to demonstrations of logical reasoning.