What is Medieval History?

John H. Arnold

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509532582
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa medievale

Since its first publication in 2007, John H. Arnold's What is Medieval History? has established itself as the leading introduction to the craft of the medieval historian. What is it that medieval historians do? How – and why – do they do it? Arnold discusses the creation of medieval history as a field, the nature of its sources, the intellectual tools used by medievalists, and some key areas of thematic importance from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Reformation. The fascinating case studies include a magical plot against a medieval pope, a fourteenth-century insurrection, and the importance of a kiss exchanged between two tenth-century noblemen. Throughout the book, readers are shown not only what medieval history is, but the cultural and political contexts in which it has been written. This anticipated second edition includes further exploration of the interdisciplinary techniques that can aid medieval historians, such as dialogue with scientists and archaeologists, and addresses some of the challenges – both medieval and modern – of the idea of a 'global middle ages'. What is Medieval History? continues to demonstrate why the pursuit of medieval history is important not only to the present, but to the future. It is an invaluable guide for students, teachers, researchers and interested general readers.

1
Framing the Middle Ages

A Medieval Tale

The first time Bartolomeo the priest talked to them was on 9 February 1320, in the papal palace at Avignon, and his interrogation probably took up most of one day. A notary, Gerard, wrote down his words; thus they survive for us today. Three very powerful men – a cardinal, an abbot from Toulouse and the pope’s legate for northern Italy – questioned, listened and re-questioned.

Matters had begun, Bartolomeo explained, the previous year, in October. A letter had arrived from Matteo Visconti, duke of Milan, summoning the priest to his presence. And so Bartolomeo had obeyed.

He met with the Visconti conspirators (he explained to his interrogators) in a room in Matteo’s palace. Scoto de San Gemignano, a judge, was there, as was a physician, Antonio Pelacane. Initially, Matteo drew him to one side. He told the priest that ‘he wished to do Bartolomeo a great service, benefit and honour, and that he wished that Bartolomeo would do Matteo a great service, indeed the greatest, namely the greatest that anyone living could do for him; and Matteo added that he knew for certain that Bartolomeo knew well how to do the aforesaid service of which Matteo was thinking.’ He would do whatever he could, Bartolomeo protested.

Immediately Matteo called to Scoto, the judge, telling him to show Bartolomeo what he had with him. ‘Then the said lord Scoto drew out from his robe and held out and showed to Bartholomeo and Matteo a certain silver image, longer than the palm of a hand, in the figure of a man: members, head, face, arms, hands, belly, thighs, legs, feet and natural organs.’ Written on the front of the statue were these words: Jacobus papa Johannes, ‘Jacques pope John’. The present pope, John XXII, had been called Jacques d’Euze before taking the pontifical title.

This was not the only thing written on the image. There was a sign, like a reversed ‘N’, and a name: Amaymo. The name of a demon.

‘Bartolomeo, behold this image,’ said Matteo, ‘which I have made to bring destruction to the pope who persecutes me.’ What Matteo wanted of Bartolomeo was for the priest to help finish the magical object, by suffusing the image with incense from zuccum de mapello (‘What is zuccum de mapello?’ asked Bartolomeo’s interrogators in Avignon, some months later. A kind of poison, he explained. But, he emphasized, he did not want to go along with Matteo’s plan).¹

Bartolomeo told Matteo that he had no zuccum de mapello, and was unable to help. He then left, threatened by the duke to keep silent. But some time later Scoto came to see him, to ask his advice on the details of some books of sorcery. Prompted by Bartolomeo, Scoto again showed him the statue. It had been finished by a different sorceror from Verona, and was inscribed with a new word, Meruyn. All that now need happen, Scoto explained, was to hang the statue up for seventy-two nights, placing it night after night in a fire. As, little by little, the fire consumed the image, so would its target, little by little, be destroyed.

And that was all he knew, Bartolomeo explained to the cardinal, the abbot, the legate and the scribe. He had come to Avignon to warn Pope John XXII that his life was in danger.

But that was not the end of it, because some months later, on 11 September 1320, Bartolomeo was once again before this gathering of interrogators, explaining what had happened to him in the intervening period. When he had returned to Milan the previous March, he said, he had immediately been arrested and brought before Scoto. The Milanese knew that he had been to Avignon, and suspected that he had revealed the plot concerning the statue. He was imprisoned, in chains, for weeks. Scoto came to interrogate him many times. Bartolomeo told him that he’d gone to Avignon to treat a sick man, a knight who was under a magical curse. Scoto did not believe him. Matteo was very angry with him, Scoto explained; it would be better to confess now. ‘Come, Bartolomeo, tell the truth, why you went to the Curia’, Scoto said at one time. ‘Because you know absolutely that in the end it will happen that you tell the truth; and if you will not speak courteously, you will end up speaking under torture. Although I want you to know that I do not want to place you in torment, however in the end it will have to be, that you are tortured, unless you spontaneously wish to say the truth.’ Bartolomeo stuck with his story.

And he was tortured. Stripped, his hands tied behind him to a stick, a heavy stone was placed on his legs, while Scoto’s assistants yanked his arms back. They pulled him up, then released him, pulled him up, then released him. He was then untied, and led back to his cell. Look, said Scoto, we can do this to you every night. Every night until you die. Just confess.

But Bartolomeo did not confess. What saved him eventually was the intervention of another powerful northern duke, Galeazzo Visconti, Matteo’s son. Galeazzo had him freed, apologized for what had happened, hoped that he was all right. But Galeazzo was also in on the plot, and inveigled Bartolomeo into helping once again: the statue must be freshly suffused, and Bartolomeo was the man to do it – by implication, a proof of Bartolomeo’s loyalties. And by implication, prison, torture and death the alternative. Let me think about it, Bartolomeo pleaded. Very well, said Galeazzo; but ‘you should know that I have had Master Dante Alighieri come to me regarding this matter that I’m asking of you.’ Good, said Bartolomeo: I would be very pleased if he did what you are asking. But no: Galeazzo really doesn’t want to ask Dante to do it – because he knows that Bartolomeo can do it, will do it.

Two days later Bartolomeo agreed, set about finding more zuccum de mapello, and retrieved the statue from Galeazzo. He returned with it to his home town – and then he fled to Avignon once more.

And where is the statue?, asked his interrogators. I brought it with me, Bartolomeo replied. He produced a bundle tied with twine, unwrapped it, and drew out a silver figure in the shape of a man. And it was just exactly as he had described it, as the interrogators attested for the written record.²

There the story ends, Bartolomeo’s story at any rate. The struggles between John XXII and the Visconti continued for some time, and other witnesses raised against them describe their impiety, their heresy, their usury and other crimes. The pope believed himself subject to further magical attacks, and encouraged inquisitors to be on the lookout for sorcery. The Visconti themselves survived as a family for a long time, ruling Milan late into the fifteenth century without break. But of Bartolomeo the priest we know nothing more.

At first sight this is what one might call a very medieval tale. It involves tyrants, a pope, intrigue, torture and magical practices of a kind now usually described as ‘superstitious’. We may have a fairly vivid mental image of some of the more lurid parts of the story, not least because this kind of middle ages has inspired (directly or indirectly) various aspects of modern culture. Film, television, novels and comics have pictured a dark, grubby, bloody middle ages: The Name of the Rose, Braveheart or the various films about Joan of Arc, for example. There is a similar template for future barbarism: Mad Max, Robocop and The Hunger Games (Katniss Everdeen having distant kinship with Robin Hood) all bear the imprint of a certain kind of medievalism. ‘I’m gonna get medieval on yo’ ass’, as Marcellus Wallace threatens his erstwhile torturers in Pulp Fiction. George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones famously replays the horrors of late medieval politics with added sex and dragons. So, in one sense, Bartolomeo’s experiences are familiar.

But there is more here than immediately meets the eye. Matteo Visconti’s plot against the pope may look typically ‘medieval’, but it contains elements that, on reflection, may surprise us. And it sits at an intersection of themes, lives, geographies and forces that are far more complex – and interesting – than those stereotyped depictions, which Umberto Eco once called ‘the shaggy middle ages’, would suggest.³ Take magic. Everyone ‘knows’ that the middle ages was a superstitious age, full of witches, demons, spells and the suppression of the same by the Inquisition. But the magic in this story is located not where we might expect to find it: not in the simple hut stuck at the end of the village, inhabited by a poor widow and her cat, but in learned Latin books, read and owned by clerics, right at the heart of the city and intellectual culture. This was not in fact unusual: while healers and soothsayers were found in rural medieval parishes, the kind of magic described here was very much a clerical subculture, available only to those with a Latin education. The roots of this magic were not ‘pagan’ in the sense of pre-Christian primitivism; nor was it, within medieval terms, a set of irrational ideas. Learned magic derived in part from classical scholarship, in part from ideas about hidden (‘occult’) natural forces and in part from a long tradition of Christian theology, which saw demons as constantly present – and, in certain circumstances, harnessable to good or bad ends. Learned magic and science were intimately connected, and would continue to be for several centuries to come.

Nor were ecclesiastical attitudes to this magic always quite what one might expect. The Inquisition did not automatically pursue its practitioners, not least because there was no such thing as the ‘Inquisition’ in the sense of a permanent and central tribunal until the mid-sixteenth century (with the exception of Spain, where the Spanish Inquisition began under secular direction in 1480). While inquisitors into heretical depravity were appointed directly by the papacy, their practical powers were largely dependent upon the cooperation of secular authorities in any particular area. Furthermore, local bishops, parochial priests and monastic orders could have different ideas from inquisitors and the papacy about desirable orthodox practice and the demands of the faith. The ‘Church’ was a complex and in some ways wildly heterogeneous edifice. The procedures that were used when interrogating Bartolomeo were inquisitorial in the sense of being a legal technique, and one could describe the cardinal, abbot and legate as ‘inquisitors’ only while they were engaged in interviewing the priest. Torture was involved in our story, but although it had indeed been permitted since 1252 in heresy trials, in this case, as we saw, it was the secular authorities in Milan that tortured poor Bartolomeo.

In any case, Bartolomeo’s tale is not a story about magic at all. It is really about politics and communication. Despite all the evidence alleged against them, nothing happened to Matteo or Galeazzo Visconti, because the pope simply didn’t have the power to touch them. The very reason that John XXII was in Avignon rather than Rome was that northern Italy had become too politically fraught for him to stay there (the papacy had moved to Avignon in 1309, through a combination of pressure from the French monarchy and factional political fighting in Rome; there it remained until 1377). If the Visconti were attempting to assassinate the pope, it was because of political matters: a few years before Bartolomeo’s reports, John XXII had been attempting to stop conflict between Milan, Brescia and Sicily. Matteo Visconti had agreed to the terms of a peace treaty, but the pope had then, in March 1317, declared that Ludwig of Bavaria held the title of Holy Roman Emperor illegally. Since the Visconti based their right to rule Milan on claims of a past imperial appointment, this threw them back into conflict with the papacy and Milan’s neighbours; and in 1318 Matteo was excommunicated. In theory, excommunication was a very serious matter: one was removed from the community of the Christian faithful, denied the sacraments and, unless reconciled before death, denied entry into heaven. But John XXII had been a little too lavish in his use of excommunication as a political weapon, and contemporary commentators were quite clear that the political struggles going on were nothing to do with matters of faith.

So much for the politics (the complexities of which, if further explicated, could easily fill this entire book and a shelf full more). What of communication? Several forms and facets were apparent in Bartolomeo’s tale, not least the very document in which it was recorded. Inquisition was a highly textual form of inquiry, and the rich details given above – all of which are drawn directly from the evidence – demonstrate in themselves the development of a particular kind of written technology. The magic being discussed was written magic, and although this was innately arcane and specialized, the existence of books and written documents in general was far from rare. A northern Italian city such as Milan was by this period a highly literate society: some estimates suggest that the majority of adults in this kind of milieu could read and write in the vernacular. This was admittedly the likely pinnacle of medieval literacy; in other countries, in rural areas and in earlier centuries, access to texts would sometimes have been much more limited. But mechanisms of communication were always more complex than a stereotyped picture of the middle ages would suggest. As...