Mozarabic exports

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Ruth

Spanish Andalusia got involved in Europe’s international markets in completely new ways. In the early Middle Ages, trade operated mostly through fairs. Near to major highways, rivers and harbors, certain places had a traditional time during the year when people could expect to find international merchants set up. Fairs generally lasted three days, but could last up to three weeks. An international trader just needed to know which Catholic saints’ days were reserved by which fairgrounds in order to plan an itinerary. The big fairs were wholesale markets; local traders bought in bulk and sold locally, perhaps reselling at smaller fairs or taking things by donkey pack into the rural areas.

Andalusia shipped a lot of dried fruit such as plums, figs, and dates. As possible without spoilage, they also shipped citrus fruit: lemons, limes, and oranges. They also traded preserved olives and oil, probably in jars: as noted before, the simple English word “jar” is actually the clay pot al-jarrah.

But the first major Arabic influence on international markets was with the exportation of al-qutun: cotton. The cotton plant itself was from northern India, but it grew well in Egypt and other parts of the Islamic empire, including Spain. Cotton was first exported in raw form, unspun.

Its early use was in quilting, but not usually blankets as we may imagine. Cotton quilting was for winter coats and for armor. It was especially important in the time of mail armor, or chain mail as we usually call it. Plate armor was late medieval; for most of the period, armor meant mail. A mail shirt minimized sword and spear cuts in battle, but it was heavy and it chafed the skin badly. Wool or linen cloth with cotton padding helped a lot. Early horse armor, too, was mainly quilted cloth.

Our word “mattress” seems to come from Arabic al-matrah, a sleeping mat. This suggests the next use of cotton: stuffing sleeping mats. Arabic culture generally used mats and carpets more than northern Europeans did, perhaps from Bedouin tent culture in which carpets covered sand and rock. Cotton was an expensive import at first, and it’s not likely that many mattresses were stuffed with it when straw would do just as well. Carpets, as covering for floors, didn’t make it to England until the 1200s when King Edward I married a Spanish princess who brought her own set of carpets to cover wood and tile floors, astonishing the court. (Carpets didn’t become normal until much later, after the Middle Ages.)

Arabic traders mostly carried fabric and things related to it: leather, dyes, decorations. Sometimes the names tell us the history: Cordovan leather was from Cordoba; muslin was woven cotton from Mosul; thickly woven silk from Damascus was known as damask. A woven-stripe cloth called tabby also took its name from Arabic, as did taffeta (Persian originally) and mohair; and it’s possible that “gauze” was a French adaptation of al-qazz, Arabic for silk. The words “sequin” and “sash” are also Arabic.

English got a few color words from the Mozarabic dye trade. Arab conquerors of Persia traded lapis lazuli, the bright blue stone found only in Iran. Its place of origin became its name in Arabic: lazaward. Coming to fairs in France, its name eventually became the color of bright blue, but the L was treated like a definite article in French. So the word became l’azure and then azure in English. The best red dye came from insects that fed on the kermes oak tree in Spain, and from this came the English word crimson.

Eventually, by the late Middle Ages, Spain traded in merino wool too. Northern Europe had plenty of wool, but Spanish breeders had created a very hardy sheep that needed little water and could walk long distances. The merino’s skin and wool were distinctly different, providing an extremely fine, soft yarn.

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Mozarabic culture

Posted on January 3, 2014 by Ruth

Spanish natives who converted to Islam were known as Muladi; those who remained Christians or Jews but just dressed and talked in an Arabic manner were Mozarabs. Mozarabic culture left a huge imprint on Spain; it was the majority culture for about 500 years.

In the last entry, I talked about irrigation and imported plants, like artichokes, spinach, and oranges. Arabic words were in everyday use for all of these things; their word for a water-mill is still at root an Arabic word: Noria. (The noria is particularly a wheel that lifts and moves water, instead of using water for power.) Many more Arabic words were adopted for plants, and some have come into English: jasmine, sandalwood, and camphor.

Many Spanish words for parts of government and the legal system are also Arabic. This isn’t surprising; the same thing happened in English when the Normans ruled as foreign invaders. A lot of our words relating to law and prison are of not only Latin, but specifically French origin. (“Prison” refers to being “taken,” from the French verb prendre.) So the same thing happened in Spanish: words for notary, will, invoice, judge and jailor were all Arabic. One of the words, tariff, came into English. They also kept some terms of abuse and insult, and a few of these came into English via Spanish: loco, mulatto and marrano. (There are lots more, mostly curses shouted at lazy workers.) It’s possible that the famous cry of “Olé!” came from Arabic “Wallah!” If a Spaniard says, “oh, I wish!” with the term “Ojalá,” it may be a relic of Inshallah.

Arabic gave Spanish most of its words for horses. Spain had some Latin words, but the Arabic rulers were horse specialists who needed particular words for parts of horse anatomy, gear, and stabling. Two Spanish color words, used only for horses and cows, came from Arabic.

As we’ll see in a soon-coming entry on the city of Cordoba, the Arabic rulers were ambitious builders. Spain until this time had been more of a farming society with fishing and shipping towns on the coast. The Umayyad line established by Abd al-Rahman was intent on creating an Andalusia that was not only independent of Damascus and Baghdad, but just as splendid or better. Nearly all Spanish words for construction methods, architecture and urban planning (neighborhood, sewer) are from Arabic.

A few of these words came into English, for example “alcove,” which came from Arabic al-qubba, an arch. Adobe is not only from Arabic, it’s originally Coptic (true Egyptian): al-tobe, clay. Al-makhzan, a storage area, came to us as French magasin (a store) and English magazine (storage of weapons, then storage of literary items). Arsenal meant in Arabic a factory; its name came into European use first as the name of the shipbuilding yard in Venice. Most of the Arabic borrowings start with “a,” because their word for “the” was “al,” and it often got blended into the word itself when borrowed. But some of the city and building words don’t start with A. We have both divan and sofa from Arabic, although divan came later and via Turkish. It’s actually a Persian word for a book; the divans sold by Turkey were like the padded benches used in reading rooms in Baghdad.

Some other ordinary daily words came from Mozarab culture. Lacquer is from al-lacca, a resin they imported from India. Kohl, a word for early eyeshadow, is Arabic. So is talc, and the rook in chess. Most surprising to me was Jar. Yes, the ordinary jar. Most of our stubby little words are from Anglo-Saxon or Danish, but this one was borrowed from al-jarrah, a clay container. Spanish also used al-tazzah, a cup, which we see (via French) in the word “demitasse.”

More Mozarab culture and words in the next entry!

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Spain’s water problem

Posted on January 2, 2014 by Ruth

Spain and Portugal share a peninsula that is mostly a high, arid plateau. Portugal’s western coast receives most of the rain. The capital cities of Muslim Andalusia were clustered on the arid plateau; Cordoba gets about 7 inches of rain annually, compared to 28 inches for Lisbon and much higher rainfalls for other Portuguese towns. Northern Spain gets snow, as well; the Christian kingdoms and the city of Barcelona were blessed with rain averages in the range of 40 to 60 inches. Toledo and Madrid? about 15 inches. (documentation for rainfall in our time linked here)

Farming technology was limited before the Muslim period. The new rulers based in Damascus could import water engineers who were used to dealing with scarcity. They also imported new plants that were well-adapted to the climate.

Portugal’s much higher rainfall made it the obvious place to grow tropical plants, so they planted groves of oranges, lemons and limes. These words are from Arabic, though “lemon” in Arabic was probably borrowed from Chinese “limung.” “Orange” came from a Persian root, naranja, via Arabic. Portugal became the tropical-fruit garden of Europe, exporting apricots, plums, and citrus fruits. “Apricot” too is from Arabic, though curiously its original source is a Latin word that meant “early ripening.” English received these fruit names from Spanish and Portuguese importers; apricot trees were able to grow farther north, in the south of England, but the citrus remained a southern export.

Abd al-Rahman particularly missed the date palms of Damascus. He may not have had to send messengers far to find date palm seeds; perhaps they went to Tunis or Carthage. Palm trees were planted in all of the Arab-dominated places; dates became an exported fruit of the arid Spanish plateau.

Spain’s landscape grew much greener under Umayyad rule. Many of the Arabic words that came into Spanish are about irrigation technology. Syrian and Egyptian engineers created a system of canals in Spain to make the most of the water they had. In the ancient world, they had long since created water-lifting mechanisms, but these were new to Spain. The main canal brought water into a place central to various farms, and water-lifting mechanisms poured water into farmers’ personal canals. Spanish water use became sophisticated, including timed canal-gates that opened and closed to permit each farmer a fair share. Spanish words for all of these things came directly from Arabic.

Several other new crops came from the Middle East. “Spinach” is an Arabic word; all of the chard plants, those dark green bitter leaves, were from the East. “Artichoke” comes from Arabic al-kharshoof, via Spanish. They also imported melons, though the word “melon” is not Arabic. “Sandia” is the Spanish for “watermelon,” an Arabic word that just didn’t make it into English. They began to plant rice in Spain, too.

Many of these crops moved out of Andalusia and into the rest of the Mediterranean world. Italy, in particular, had a record of taking whatever it received from Spain and turning it into an industry. Rice only became common in Europe when Italy took over its cultivation. During the Middle Ages, rice was an exotic food that the wealthy used as sustenance for sick people.

A number of herbs came from Al-Andalus: tarragon, carraway and carob are all Arabic words. The Arabic word for yellow gave us both saffron and safflower; saffron, an Arabic import, was soon grown all over Europe. Most importantly, sugar cultivation, learned from Muslim India, came to Spain and Portugal. It was named in Arabic “al-sukkar.” The word had already come into English but the product was very uncommon until the Portuguese became to grow it. Arab rulers had a definite sweet tooth and set up sugar refineries on some of the islands in the Mediterranean. Our word “candy” comes straight from Arabic. Two other sweets, syrup and sherbet/sorbet, come from Arabic “sharab.”

 

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Happy Medieval New Year!

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Ruth

The medieval calendar was based on the Roman tradition of the Julian calendar. The Julian calendar used 12 lunar months to track one solar year, with irregular days spread out to keep it as even as possible. Medieval calendars tended to use modified Latin spellings: Januarius, Martius, Maius, Julius, Augustus, October, and December had 31 days. April, Junius, September, and November had 30 days, while Februarius had 28. Februarius had an extra day in leap years, as in modern times.

Charlemagne tried to introduce a new calendar of months using the Franks’ native language. His year began with renaming January as Wintarmanoth, and next was Hornung. The months then used the significant events and farm occupations of each stage in the seasons: Lentzinmanoth, Ostermanoth, Winnemanoth, Brachmanoth, Heuvimanoth, Aranmanoth, Witumanoth, Windumemanoth, Herbistmanoth, and Heilagmanoth (Holy Month, because of Christmas). The calendar reform did not last beyond Charlemagne’s time and was never widespread. The church, centered in Rome, used the Roman calendar, so the Franks adopted it.

Traditionally, people tracked significant dates by the liturgical calendar. A baby was born just before Martinmas; a fair was held on Saint John’s Day; pilgrims would set out on Whitsun or Midsummer Day. Knowing these saints’ days in order was a daily-life skill. The best-known ones were as well-known as modern Thanksgiving, but lesser saints’ days could be memorized in a poem designed to put them in order in a catchy way.

The modern system of counting numbered days through each month developed during the Middle Ages for business and record keeping. Bede used simple numbers in his history of the English people. By the 14th century, notaries simply wrote down the numbered day of the month. However, in the books of hours, and officially, Europe followed the old Roman system of numbering days. It was a complicated method, but it had the virtue of tracking the phases of the moon, which helped in calculating lunar-determined feasts.

Romans divided their months into periods based on the phase of the moon. There were 3 key days. Calends (or kalends) was the 1st day of the month, the new moon. It was called calends because a Roman official had called out (Latin calere) the start of a new month and time to pay interest on debts. Ides meant the middle of the month, the time of the full moon, usually the 13th or 15th day. Nones was 9 days before the full moon. Only these 3 dates were distinguished, and all other days were named in relation to them. If the ides of a month was the 15th day, then the 14th day was the “pridie idus”—the day before the ides. Each day was named by working backward to the next key day.

The medieval calendar used the Roman system. The month’s first day was Calends, and the next day, depending on the month, either IV or VI before Nones, and on with a countdown to the Pridie Nonus and Nones itself. There was then a countdown to the Ides: VIII, VII, VI, V, IV, III, Pridie Idus, and Ides. The second half of the month counted down to the Calends of the next month. Holy Innocents’ Day, which we call December 28, was “ante diem IV Januariis.” On the chart in a book of hours, one column tracked these countdowns.

Although there was an understanding that the first of January began a Roman new year, most medieval societies regarded a date in spring as the beginning of the new year. In England and some other European countries, the year began on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25. In France, the year began on Easter, although the date moved. Some people considered the year to begin at Christmas. Only in the 14th century, as international banking required standardization of dates, was the first of January firmly established as the start of a year. Traditional celebrations continued to be held in spring until the 18th century.

One of the most contentious issues in the early Middle Ages was how to calculate the day of Easter. In England, the Irish tradition of Saint Patrick was not the same as the Roman tradition of the later-converted Anglo-Saxons. Some English monasteries had been founded by Irish monks and continued to calculate Easter the Irish way. In 664, there was a national conference, the Synod of Whitby, on how to decide when Easter would fall. They voted to adopt the Easter tables drawn up by Dionysius Exiguus in 525 in Rome.

Dionysius (or Dennis) tackled the difficult problem of how to name years, as well as how to calculate Easter. The Roman Empire had named years for the emperor or consul, a system that ceased to work well after the fall of the empire in the West. Dionysius, a monk who lived in Rome in the sixth century, drew up a table showing the dates of Easter in many years. He identified that he was writing it 525 years after the birth of Christ, or Anno Domini—“in the year of our lord.” He used this approximation to rename the years that had been named for Emperor Diocletian, who persecuted Christians. There was no way to check Dionysius’s statement of when Jesus had been born, but it was based on church traditions and calendar systems. Although he did not recognize the need to name the year of Christ’s birth the Year Zero, his tables made the first use of the concept of zero in a Latin work. Calculation of Easter was based on a cycle of 19 years, and he designated the beginning of each period as nulla, the Year Zero for each cycle.

The English monk Bede studied Dionysius’s tables and extended them into the eighth century following the Synod of Whitby. He wrote several books on how to calculate time, and he also wrote The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He dated his work 731, according to the new Anno Domini system of Dionysius. Bede’s book was more influential than he might have imagined. It was copied many times and came to the continent when Charlemagne recruited the Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin to found his school and library. Through Bede’s history and Dionysius’s Easter tables, the Anno Domini dating system spread.

During the Middle Ages, scholars began to notice that the Julian calendar was not precise enough. Over the years, the new and full moons no longer matched the Calends and Ides as they were supposed to. Every year there were about 11 minutes unaccounted for. By the ninth century, astronomers were noticing the discrepancy. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon could see the problem clearly and criticized the Julian calendar. Pope Clement VI received a report suggesting that four days should be dropped in 1349, but the chaos of the plague of 1347–1348 buried this recommendation. In 1436, a Council at Basle received a report by Nicholas of Cusa that recommended that they drop out one week between Easter and Pentecost. The council felt it would be too confusing and that it would interfere with merchants’ calculations of interest on loans. The corrected Gregorian calendar was not adopted until 1582, and it was not until 1752 that days were deleted to correct the growing inaccuracy.

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Christians in early Muslim Spain

Posted on December 31, 2013 by Ruth

One of the big questions people ask about the medieval years when Islam was ascendant is, “Is it true that they were much more tolerant of Christians and Jews? Was it a “golden age” of co-existence?”

Part of the answer to this question lies in the way Abd al-Rahman I chose to structure Andalusia. Before his arrival at the head of a Berber army, Muslim Spain was governed on the same principles as anywhere: Arabs were at the top of the social pyramid, and anyone similar to Arabs came next. Arabs were the biggest threat to every sitting government and had to be pacified. One of the cheapest ways to pacify even unsuccessful Arabs (or Yemenis, or Muslim Syrians) was to make sure they felt better than their non-Muslim neighbors. “Unfunded mandates” that restricted what Christians and Jews could do, build, wear and buy were the easiest way to make sure Arabs always felt superior.

But Abd al-Rahman changed that dynamic. He came into a territory that was seething with potential revolts; each city governor was setting up on his own and striking deals with Christian neighbors. He moved quickly to replace as many governors as possible with his own surviving relatives. It was soon apparent to him that the baseline cause of division was that units of the Muslim army were loyal to their own tribes: Yemenis, Berbers, Syrians, Arabs, Persians and many others. Pacifying them was impossible and wearying. So he raised his own standing army out of tax receipts. They were all imported from Yugoslavia or black Africa. Captured as young men and trained rigorously as fighting units, they were loyal only to him. They successfully put down an Abbasid-inspired rebellion in a major battle, and from then, al-Rahman’s power grew more secure.

During his reign, the old regional nobles lost much power and some of them went home. Many Berbers disliked farming and also went home. Additionally, Abd al-Rahman only permitted one school of thought on Islamic law to become established. Andalusia was the only Muslim territory that was not torn by sectarian strife.

Some Christian Visigoths had converted to Islam immediately and had now spent several generations working their way into government. The majority of the farmers and townsfolk were still Christians, and with more of the foreign invaders drifting back to their homelands, land again opened up to the native Christian farmers. While the dhimmi laws remained on the books, they don’t appear to have been enforced as much as in other places. The jizya non-Muslim tax had to be paid, but churches were not forced into dilapidation and Christians often served in the Emir’s army. Abd al-Rahman and his descendants were simply pragmatic, not dogmatic. They wanted maximum tax revenues. Cooperation clearly worked better.

It’s during this time that the term “Mozarab” described Christians who dressed and talked like Muslims but worshiped in churches. There were many mixed marriages and children grew up exposed to both religions, as well as to Latin-Spanish and Arabic in a bilingual way. Christians and Jews wrote Arabic poetry and scientific treatises. The general movement was toward Muslim conversion; to most people in all times, religion is not about personal belief as much as about group identity. It was easy to convert during this easygoing time, and for those who didn’t convert, the Christian and Jewish hierarchy tried to support the al-Rahman dynasty’s policies.

Several generations after Abd al-Rahman I, the first major Christian revolt occurred. It may have been spurred by seeing more and more of their children growing up Muslim. It was a civil disobedience movement: walk into public and denounce Mohammed. Capital punishment was the official law, but at first the Qadi (Islamic judge) was reluctant to impose it; that’s not really what Andalusia was all about. Then martyr after martyr was beheaded, his body disgustingly displayed for birds to pick at. First it was a few men, then some women, then more men and more women. We don’t know the total; it was more than ten but probably less than fifty. It was enough to keep the city in an uproar during the 850s. Full Christian rebellion seemed possible; identity became a sharper-focused issue with corpses on display.

The Islamic judges refused to change the law of death for blasphemy. The government began to enforce the dhimmi laws more harshly. Christians serving in the army were fired; so were Christian officials. Churches couldn’t be remodeled or rebuilt. Christian businesses began to fail. There was widespread concern that the whole arrangement might fall apart. The official Church condemned deliberate martyrdom, both by turning suspected leaders in and by an official ruling.

Things were never quite the same after that. Andalusia continued to be a place where dhimmis did not need to be sacrificed to pacify Yemeni pride. It was still probably a much better place to be a religious dissenter than anywhere else. But Christians were never again trusted in the same naive way. During the rest of the (over 200) Umayyad years, it was a bit harder to be a Christian. Jews had not participated in the martyrdom movement and did not lose status as much. While nominal Christians continued to convert to Islam in each younger generation, a hardened core of the Church began to dream of someday not being ruled by foreigners, and the seeds of the eventual Reconquista were planted.

 

 

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Europe’s first great mosque

Posted on December 30, 2013 by Ruth

Abd Al-Rahman, the half-Berber Umayyad prince, was firmly in control of the Iberian peninsula by the time Charlemagne became King of the Franks. He ruled until his death at age 58, which was long past the average life-expectancy of the time. The previously loosely-administered territory of Andalusia became a tightly-controlled kingdom where rebellion was not tolerated.

Abd al-Rahman’s last act to establish a legacy began to make Cordoba into a city of wonders in the time of his sons and grandsons. The mosque of Cordoba had been a primitive cathedral divided in two, for the use of Christians and Muslims. The emir bought out the Christian half and leveled the building site in 785.

There’s no question that Abd al-Rahman was openly competing with the new Abbasid capital, Baghdad. Baghdad was built in a few years by a massive workforce; the remodeling of Cordoba was on the same scale and speed. In one year, the mosque was complete. It’s still standing; it is the oldest Muslim structure in Europe.

The mosque’s building plan was simple. It traced a square with an open courtyard full of orange trees on one side, and a great hall for prayer on the other. The square was as nearly perfect as measurement of that time permitted. The hall was very large and open; its roof was supported by rows and rows of columns and arches.

D. L. Lewis, in God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, says that the mosque was made entirely of stones cut for other purposes during Roman and Visigothic times. Marble and granite were mixed with some rare imported porphyry, probably brought from Egypt in Roman times. The pillars were all of Roman regulation height, topped with Roman capitals that didn’t always match each other.  But the Muslim architects made the roof much higher by placing a second tier of arches on top of the first, doubling the possible height. It’s an amazing feat to take columns and blocks cut for other buildings and use them with such precision.

The horseshoe-shaped arches were not much for load-bearing, but they were pretty. The arches were made of alternating slabs of sandstone and brick: red and white. The inner great prayer hall was a dizzying display of red and white arches in a forest of columns that mounted forty feet high. Over the next centuries, the original square expanded in all directions with rebuilding and remodeling. (Wikimedia Commons has a cute graphic showing each stage of remodeling.)

Arabic script (probably the newly reformed kind coming out of Baghdad) was carved into the stonework all around the mosque. Arabic’s flowing letters are not the easiest script to learn to read, but they are undeniably artistic. By the time Abd al-Rahman built the Great Mosque, Arabic had been ascendant for a hundred years. The translation project in Baghdad was soon copied in Cordoba. Arabic became an international academic language simply because it was the target into which everything was translated. Without a long written tradition of its own, it became the medium of everyone else’s written traditions. Anyone who mastered spoken and written Arabic could learn anything he wanted: Greek philosophy, Indian mathematics, Persian poetry, or Hebrew theology.

Arabic had no effect on the northern kingdoms of England, France and Germany, but it was the dominant language of the Mediterranean. It was spoken as a native language in Sicily and Malta, in addition to nearly all of Iberia. The language still spoken in Malta is a patois of Arabic blended with Latin and Italian. In medieval times, all serious scholars learned Arabic and even Christians and Jews wrote some treatises in Arabic. The Roman Catholic Church, far from being all-powerful, was seriously threatened as a cultural institution. Both Cordoba and Baghdad, on the other hand, were competitively ascendant.

 

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Special days after Christmas

Posted on December 28, 2013 by Ruth

Medieval people generally believed that feasts were the way to honor saints, and the week after Christmas was particularly thick with saints to honor. That’s one reason that Christmas seemed like a feast that just went on and on.

St. Stephen’s Day was the day after Christmas. It was generally just a feast in honor of the first Christian martyr, but in some places, there was a gruesome custom as well. Legend told that Stephen was hiding from his would-be killers (no evidence for this in the original story), and would have escaped, but for a wren who gave away the hiding place by chirping to draw attention. Medieval boys had a penchant for targeting small animals anyway. With the excuse of St. Stephen’s legend, they tried to catch and kill wrens, perhaps by tying them to the foot and throwing rocks. It’s hard to believe this was truly widespread; it seems more likely that even medieval adults thought it was a bit sick or wrong and made note of the custom, which is why we have heard of it. On the other hand, cruelty to animals was routine.

Farmers traditionally bled their horses and cows on St. Stephen’s Day. Of course, they considered it good health care, not cruelty. In many monasteries, monks were preventatively bled at intervals, too. It will be very interesting if new medical theories ever start to show that bleeding does have a healing purpose, which right now is pretty contrary to our views of the role of blood.

December 28 was the Fast of the Holy Innocents, another group of early martyrs. The story in the Gospels is that when the Magi (Zoroastrians from Persia) met with Roman-appointed King Herod, they explained that they had read in the stars that a great king was born. Herod called in experts in Jewish scriptures to compare notes, and they outlined a time period during which this king ought to have been born, based on prophecies and the Magi’s observations.

The Magi were following diplomatic protocol by informing Herod of their presence in the area and may have been surprised to pick up that his reaction to their news was negative. They broke diplomatic protocol by leaving Judea without checking back in, which probably spared them arrest and interrogation as to where they’d been and who they’d met.

Joseph and Mary took the child into Egyptian territory, warned in a dream that King Herod was hunting for this “great king.” Herod set up a dragnet to capture all male babies born within a certain time frame in that region, and had them all executed. The timeline on these events is murky because Herod killed all infants under the age of two, whereas the story implies that Jesus was only 3 days old.

The Fast of the Holy Innocents brought to an end a sort of “children’s zone” that began with St. Nicholas Day. In places where the cathedral school boys were running around parodying the bishop, Holy Innocents Day was the end. Some boy bishops may have been permitted to close out the season with a sermon at the Mass of the Holy Innocents. It seems there’s no human tradition without its perverse, unexpected side, too. In some places, children were expected to honor the Holy Innocents by being whipped unfairly. In other places, they offered special prayers for children or even gave children some extra privileges to honor the day.

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Putting “Christ” back in Christmas, 13th cent.

Posted on December 26, 2013 by Ruth

Christmas was always a somewhat troubling holiday for really devout believers. It was a holiday for feasting and getting drunk, and many of the games veered quickly into lewdness (surely Blind Man’s Buff and Pin the Tail on the Donkey had their moments). Some of the later customs became openly sacrilegious, even enacting insults to the church in the sanctuary itself, and there was always the problem of Mummery getting out of hand (and turning into housebreaking). So the struggle by the devout to “keep Christ in Christmas” has been going on for a long time. The first rounds were during the Middle Ages.

St. Francis lived in the 1200s. Instead of joining an established religious order, he chose to live an idiosyncratic monastic life that became a new kind of order. Monasteries tended to become wealthy and corrupt over a century or two, although each one began with an ideal of poverty and devotion. People left property to them in their wills, and although no single monk or abbot owned the land, some found themselves administering a pretty generous budget. Monasteries had a second problem: they had always been for withdrawing from secular life and living apart in contemplation instead of helping people. Monasteries helped some sick people, but they weren’t charitable organizations like Doctors Without Borders or the United Way. They ran some small schools, but they did not attempt to instruct the general population.

So Francis left his parents’ home and began to wander the countryside preaching to Italian peasants. A musician by training, he decided to use music to reach people’s hearts. He set some devotional poems to music, the first modern folk hymns. He paid special attention to Christmas. St. Francis is credited with creating the first educational Nativity Scene program for the locals. He used live animals and people posed as the figures, as he told the story in an outdoor setting. As far as we can tell, all of the Nativity Scene traditions began with Francis in Italy. And because Francis’s chief concern was to inspire and educate the people, he used spoken Latin, i.e. Italian, not the classical language. All Franciscan-inspired folk hymns followed this tradition, using Italian, German, French and English.

By the 15th century, music was changing rapidly. Within the church, trained musicians had gradually developed harmony and music notation. Just as it was becoming modern harmony with several voices moving at once (rather than one sustained bass note with melody above it), and just as the musical notation became able to convey timing as well as pitch, the official church became worried that the music was distracting attention from the religious meaning of the Mass. In 1324, the Pope forbade use of complex motets and forced monastic and cathedral choirs to dial back about a century or two to much simpler early polyphony and plainchant.

During the 1400s, music theory came out into the secular world. Minstrels began to play more than one musical instrument at the same time, and motets were written for secular lyrics. Christmas music began to change. Christmas season had always been a time for dancing, and now dance music began to pick up where church music had left off. The earliest Christmas songs still in use today might trace back to the 15th century. “The Holly and the Ivy” might go back this far.

The cult of the Virgin Mary was extremely important by the time of the new Christmas hymns (still called “carols” after the dance form). Our oldest Christmas songs are often written from Mary’s point of view, or call attention to Mary’s personal story. Perhaps the best example of a Marian Christmas hymn from this early period is “Lo, How a Rose.”

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Christmas drama

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Ruth

The castle Hall at Christmas always had some theater productions. Traveling players may have been engaged to put on shows (Christmas was a time when any and all jongleurs and singers could count on picking up work if they didn’t mind sleeping in the corner of the hall or perhaps the dog kennels). But there was a long tradition in England for amateur local drama at this season. It seems clear that the winter/spring drama tradition went back well before conversion to Christianity and probably had its roots in some kind of death/rebirth metaphor for winter and spring. Its themes had ceased to make any sense to anyone; they were traditional, that was enough.

Local amateur holiday actors were called Mummers because they “kept mum” about their real identities, always wearing masks or other costumes. We know from medieval paintings that they often wore animal heads, like deer and foxes. At the same time, we know that the traditional story they told wasn’t about wearing animal heads–so it’s not clear how they put it together. The traditional story began with a presenter who might be a Fool, the Devil, or Old Man Winter. An anti-hero showed up with a ranting versified challenge, and the presenter called for a champion, who duly versified. Then they fought with swords, and the anti-hero died. Next, a doctor came out and had some method to bring the anti-hero back to life.

By the time we have clear records of the Mummers, the story was clearly influenced by the Crusades, which neatly provided a Muslim anti-hero. By the 18th century, the Muslim was specifically a Turk, though in the Middle Ages proper this was pretty unlikely since the Turks did not become part of European consciousness until the fall of Constantinople and, later, their attack on Vienna. The hero was nearly always St. George the Dragon-Slayer, and the presenter became Father Christmas. Local groups could put their own satirical patter into the story, and they could plan their own variations of staging. Bit parts could be added for comic relief.

During Christmas season, Mummers went from house to tavern to house, and eventually to the castle or bishop’s palace. At each place, their lead character walked in and commanded attention with his first speech. The audience knew what to expect, but waited to see if there were any fresh twists put into the familiar narrative (they also didn’t hesitate to heckle and call out their own punchlines). By the time show was over, all characters had entered the room to play their parts, and the “fight scene” was often a choreographed dance. Some characters might sing additional songs, and they closed with a dance while one or more of them circulated among the crowd with a donations box. Mummers were fundraisers; sometimes they were guild members, and later they were members of a club raising money for a charitable or public project.

There’s a record of mummers playing before Richard II during the post-plague years, around the time of the Peasants’ Rebellion. Christmas Day had passed and it was the Feast of the Epiphany, the traditional day to remember the visitation of the Magi. The players who entertained the king were elaborately costumed to represent the Pope, cardinals and African princes. They played out a game of dice with the king (with loaded dice to make sure he won) and then presented him with gifts. Another late medieval mummery that left records was in London; the goldsmiths’ guild put on a show dressed as King David and the 12 Tribes of Israel.

Mummery became a problem for law enforcement because during Christmas season, nobody asked questions of a man in an antlers or Devil mask wandering the town at night. It was too easy to get drunk and start trouble, or to pose as a Mummer and rob houses while they danced. The church kept up an official attitude of disapproval for Mummery and town officials did their best to keep it restricted to approved groups.

Modern mummery examples here and here and here. The last one has a Turkish knight and adds bit parts like a “King of Egypt,” a cross-dressing “Princess,” and a Dragon.

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Medieval Christmas games

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Ruth

After a feast, when the food scraps and dishes were cleared away, it was time for games and dancing.

Here’s where we have to admit that medieval games were a bit lame. It’s much nicer to explain that while we may think some time period was primitive, in fact it had this rich sophistication that we can’t appreciate. That’s true in many other things, but not in their games. In fact, the traditional games you recall from childhood birthday parties are basically holdovers from medieval Christmas.

By the 13th century, a Christmas-season party generally elected a master of ceremonies known as the Lord of Misrule. If the Boy Bishop was still strutting his stuff, he was very likely to be Lord of Misrule, but at many courts, it was just an adult elected for a few hours. The Lord of Misrule announced which games or dances would be next.

The invention of fireplaces had made the hall much more fun for games, now without fire pits to avoid. Even when tables were not taken down at this stage, the central area where the fire pits used to be remained open. Tables formed a U shape facing the dais, the raised platform where the head table stood. It was in this open area that showpiece foods (like a swan with outstretched wings) were paraded around, and where games now took place.

Blindman’s Buff was popular. It’s a perfect indoor game for adults at court, because there’s really no point to it except that someone who’s normally important gets blindfolded and stands there like an idiot, while everyone else gets to make distracting noises or dart past, entertaining all those who can still see. There were probably other variants of tagging games. I like to imagine a medieval court playing Freeze Tag. It’s also very likely that they had other variants of blindfolding games, such as guessing who someone was or pinning the tail on the donkey.

They played Tug of War, though I envision a fairly demure version without things like mud pits to drag the losing side through. Nobody really wanted to fall down; their feast clothing was expensive and the floor, though clean enough by their standards, was covered with straw and probably some bits of food that the dogs had missed.

A feast of this sort always had hired minstrels to stand by and entertain when needed. They may have juggled or done acts with trained bears; they sang or played instruments for dances.

Indoor dancing was usually in a ring. The dancers held hands and went through repetitive steps very similar to the Israeli “hora.” When dancing was not in a ring, it was in a line that snaked around the room, sometimes looping back on itself as in the traditional children’s song-game “London Bridge.” Two dancers held up their arms like a bridge and the rest of the line had to duck under, measure by measure. A song leader, probably one of the minstrels, sang out verses while the dancers joined in with a simple chorus. It was that style, with varying verses and a simple repetitive chorus, that made a song a “carol,” though the word “carol” itself refers to the ring dance.

Some of our oldest Christmas songs (still called carols) are examples of this style: “Fum, Fum, Fum” and “Fa La La La La” are about what the dancers were expected to contribute. We have no evidence that any of our existing carols really date back to the Middle Ages. The custom and style persisted in many small towns for several centuries, and later times wrote songs in the same style.

 

 

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