Backman Clifford R. The Worlds of Medieval Europe
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334 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
for themselves; they traded the security of steady rental income for the higher risk
but greater potential of marketing their own produce. This new style of commer-
cialized farming did not carry the components of private justice and local admin-
istration that the earlier manifestations of manorialism had possessed, since those
functions were now performed by the developed and professionalized govern-
ment. This shift clearly hurt the peasants, who were thus driven back into classical
serfdom, but there was little they could do about it short of abandoning the land
and heading for the city. In this way, English manors became rather more economic
institutions than the essentially social institutions they had earlier been. Not all
manors underwent such a change, of course, but enough did so to create a decid-
edly different atmosphere in the countryside. The strong development within En-
gland of royal government, of shire courts, and of the corps of royal officials
administering more and more aspects of social life meant that the traditional ad-
ministrative and judicial roles earlier played by landed nobles were eroded; these
changes also left them with only their economic function of managing farmland.
This shift in the nobles’ role is illustrated by the sudden proliferation of handbooks
on estate management—self-help books on how to turn an old social institution
into a profitable new professional business. The most famous of these works was
the treatise On Husbandry by Walter of Henley written in the 1270s; the works are
enlightening in the way they show how little most rural lords actually knew about
farming. Some of Walter’s suggestions on how to manage a profitable farm
include:
You should pay no more than a penny in order to have three acres of crop-
land plowed, and four pennies for one acre of meadow....Itshould take no
more than five men to harvest and bundle two acres of wheat in a single day.
. . . Since many workers do not measure their productivity by the number of
acres they have worked, you should always organize field-workers into bands
of five men—if you use women workers, you should count each as half a
man—and know that five bands (that is, twenty-five men in total) should be
able to harvest and bundle ten acres in a full day’s work, a hundred acres in
ten days, and two hundred acres in twenty days....Therefore, determine the
number of acres you need to have harvested and inform [your field-workers]
of the number of days they have to work, and pay them the appropriate
number of day-wages. If they take longer than the set number of days to
complete the harvesting, do not pay them for extra days, for it is their fault
if they have not gathered the whole harvest or worked as hard as they should
have done.
Walter goes on to educate landlords about dairymaids:
A good dairymaid should always be loyal and of good reputation, personally
clean, knowledgeable of her craft and of everything that pertains to it. She
should never allow an underling to steal any milk, butter, or cream, on ac-
count of which the amount of cheese produced [for market] will be lessened
and the dairy farm’s profits decreased. And she should be adept at making
cheese and knowing how to preserve the dairy’s various vessels, so that new
ones need not be purchased every year.
and about swineherds:
A swineherd should be kept on all manors that maintain herds of swine, and
those swine should always be kept in forests, woods, wastelands or marshes—
any place where they will not feed on the grainfields. But if the winter frost
DAILY LIFE AT THE MEDIEVAL ZENITH 335
is harsh and the swine must have some food from the grainfield, then the
swineherd must build a pigsty in a marsh or wood, so that the food may be
brought to them day and night [rather than letting the herd roam through the
grainfield]....Anylandlord who maintains a herd of swine for a year on the
food of his grainfield alone...will suffer a net loss for the year of one hun-
dred percent.
4
On the Continent in general, but especially in France, the Low Countries and
eastern Germany, peasants not only continued to be rent-payers instead of service-
providers but the practice of commuting services into rents actually expanded over
the thirteenth century. In the Low Countries and in eastern Germany this was
probably due to a shortage of farm laborers: Landlords who wanted to have their
lands worked at all had to offer the best terms available—and peasants almost
always preferred to pay a set rent and sell their surpluses on the markets by
themselves. Within France, however, the explanation is a bit more complicated.
French nobles, despite the centralizing efforts of the Capetians, never lost their
jurisdictional roles in the countryside and valued greatly their roles as social lead-
ers and wielders of power; they preferred to retain that position. Moreover, the
cult of chivalry ran strongest in France, and it taught that a true nobleman—a
chivalrous lord whose sense of honor represented the backbone of aristocratic
society—should never sully his hands with commerce; to do so would be unspeak-
ably “common.” Far better to retain one’s honor by fulfilling one’s duty as a ruler
of men than to enter the commonplace world of the market, even if that meant
missing out on some of the enormous profits available there. In Spain the advance
of the Reconquista both created a need for new farmers to settle the frontier lands—
they generally insisted on freeholdings—and created an opportunity for former
service-owing peasants to renegotiate the terms of their tenure in return for agree-
ing to stay on the land and commute their services into rents. So a higher
preponderance of freeman farmers became the norm on most of the Continent.
The physical appearance of peasant villages and homes had changed little
from the eleventh century. Homes were still one- or two-room hovels built on
rubble foundations, with thatched roofs and timber frameworks plastered with
mud and straw. A good insulator, thatch kept rain from entering the house and
kept the warmth of the central hearth from escaping, but it is also highly flam-
mable and susceptible to infestation by vermin.
5
Floors were usually nothing but
packed earth covered with straw. Furniture was sparse and simple, the two es-
sential items being a bed and a table. The beds were usually quite large, since
families tended to sleep together for warmth. Perhaps the most important inno-
vation in peasant homes by the thirteenth century was the introduction of chim-
neys, which reduced the intense smokiness of houses in earlier centuries and also
provided a check against flames. Peasants still housed their animals in their homes
during foul weather, with the expected results abounding everywhere. The straw
strewn on the floors had to be changed regularly.
The peasant diet remained limited—mostly grains, root vegetables, and fruit—
but it had improved considerably from the eleventh century thanks to the intro-
duction of beans and peas that provided protein and, more importantly, iron; most
medieval peasants suffered from chronic iron deficiency (although they did not
know it), which left them weak with anemia. This was especially true of women,
4. That is, the swine will consume twice as much in grain as they themselves will provide in capital
on the market.
5. Peasant homes in Mediterranean Europe tended to have tile roofs instead.
336 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
since menstruation, pregnancy, and breast-feeding drain iron from women’s bodies
(and they need more iron than men do in the first place). By the thirteenth century,
peasants were able to add a fair amount of inexpensive meat to their diets, chiefly
pork and rabbit. Ale and wine remained the principal beverages, even for children.
Peasants typically drank a gallon of (rather weak) ale a day in northern Europe;
southern peasants preferred wine and drank it in comparable quantities. Ironically,
peasant diets were probably healthier than the ostentatious meat-orgies of their
landlords; nobles shunned grains and vegetables as “common” food and ate meat
(fowl, red meats of all kinds, and fish), white bread, and wine almost exclusively—
although fruits remained a popular after-dinner treat. Heart disease, digestive
trouble, scurvy, intestinal infections from decomposed proteins, gout, and tooth
rot were consequences that most peasants were spared.
6
Daily work remained segregated by gender. Men worked the land, tended the
draught animals and herds, repaired tools and fences; women generally milked
the cows, made butter and cheese, spun yarn and wove cloth, cooked, and tended
to the children. Men and women tended to share certain tasks and worked to-
gether at haymaking, sowing, threshing, sheep-shearing, and roof-thatching. The
work was hard and dangerous. Coroners’ rolls from thirteenth-century England,
for example, give grim evidence of the often daily occurrence of serious wound-
ings on peasant farms: digits or limbs severed by farm implements, bones crushed
by draft animals or falling stones, legs burned when cloaks brushed against hearth
fires, children drowned after falling down wells. Crime was also common.
....On 2 October 1270 Amice, daughter of Robert Belamy of Staploe, and
Sibyl Bonchevaler were carrying a tub full of grout between them in the brew-
house of Lady Juliana de Beauchamp in the hamlet of Staploe in East Socon,
intending to empty it into a boiling leaden vat, when Amice slipped and fell
into the vat and the tub [capsized] upon her. Sibyl immediately jumped to-
wards her, dragged her from the vat and shouted; the household came and
found her scalded almost to death. A chaplain came and Amice had the rites
of the church and died by misadventure [early] the next day....
....On24May1270 Emma, daughter of Richard Toky of South-hill, went to
Houleden in South-hill to gather wood. Walter Garglof of Stanford came,
carrying a bow and a small sheaf of arrows, took hold of Emma and tried to
throw her to the ground and deflower her, but she immediately shouted and
her father came. Walter immediately shot an arrow at him [Richard], striking
him on the right side of the forehead and giving him a mortal wound. He
struck him again with another arrow under the right side and so into the
stomach. Simon of South-hill immediately came and asked him why he
wanted to kill Richard, and Walter immediately shot an arrow at him, striking
him in the back, so that his life was despaired of. Walter then immediately
6. Peter of Blois, a well-traveled writer of the twelfth century, memorably bemoaned the food in aris-
tocratic courts in a letter to a friend: “I am amazed that anyone accustomed to a scholar’s life in places
of quiet repose can ever endure the annoyances of life at court....The bread is like lead, full of bran
and only half-baked, un-kneaded and un-leavened, and made from the dregs of a beer barrel. The wine
is spoiled, sour, and full of mould, thick, greasy, rancid, and tasting of tar. I myself have seen wine
served to noblemen that was so full of dregs that they had to filter it through their teeth in order to
drink it....The beer at court is wretched to drink and disgusting to look at. Meat, since everyone
demands it, is purchased whether or not it is fresh. They buy fish that are four days old—and the fact
that it reeks doesn’t lessen its price one bit. As for the servants, they care nothing whatsoever whether
a guest lives or dies; their only concern is to pile meat on their masters’ tables. Those tables, in fact, are
usually so heaped with putrid meat that if it were not for the fact that those who eat it exercise regularly,
most of them would die even sooner than they already do.”
DAILY LIFE AT THE MEDIEVAL ZENITH 337
fled. Later Emma, Richard’s wife, came and found her husband wounded to
the point of death and shouted. The neighbors came and took him to his
house. He had the rites of the church, made his will, and died at twilight on
the same day.
7
Among the factors that made peasant life difficult was a shortage—or rather,
an uneven distribution—of metals for farm tools and domestic vessels. Western
Europe has sprawled pockets of mineral ores that were accessible with medieval
technology, but the cost of mining the ore, refining the metals, producing the
worked tools, and distributing them on the rural market, made them prohibitively
expensive for peasants in many parts of Europe. One such region was southern
France, where some peasants had to rely on wooden spades and pitchforks until
the start of the fourteenth century. Even the relatively wealthy Templar estate at
Sainte-Eulalie-du-Larzac had only a single metal cauldron and hook and a few
simple drills and files; most of its other tools were made wholly of wood. A metal
scythe was something only to be dreamed of. Nevertheless, other areas in the west
had an abundance of metal goods at affordable prices, especially after the rich
coalfields in Flanders began to be worked in the twelfth century and the coal
shipped by river barges, making available an inexpensive and potent fuel to refine
iron ore.
Peasant life had its pleasures and entertainments, too, as discussed in the last
chapter. The day-in, day-out schedule of grinding labor was punctuated with times
of rest, spiritual nourishment, or just a few hours of extra sleep. Village life was
hardly filled with rollicking fun, but it was not unremittingly grim. The most
common forms of entertainment were dances and bonfires, cockfights, wrestling
matches, and simply drinking and conversing in taverns.
T
OWNSFOLKS
’L
IVES
Urban life at the medieval zenith is difficult to summarize since the character of
cities varied so much and since most cities were themselves remarkably complex
and diverse. Naples was quite a different place from Hamburg; Vienna was not
like Montpellier or Lisbon; citizens of Milan would hardly have recognized people
from Edinburgh or Copenhagen as fellow urbanites. These attitudes may have
been more a matter of parochialism than anything else; people tend to identify
themselves rather fiercely with their home cities.
8
Townsfolk in the Middle Ages
took great pride in their cities, as evidenced by their passionate commitment to
cathedral building and vast public projects like bridges, aqueducts and sewers,
ever-expanding town walls, bell towers, harbors, hospitals, and private endeavors
like urban palaces, guild halls, and commercial warehouses. But civic pride shone
through in other ways as well. The mid-twelfth to mid-fourteenth centuries were
a great age for the writing of municipal documents: Earnest citizens wrote long,
detailed histories of their cities; government officials commissioned reports on
demographic changes, public works projects, crime levels, and popular religious
movements within the town walls; artists made cities themselves the subjects of
paintings; poets sang the praises of their urban settings. Cities, as legal “persons”
possessing the right of self-governance, had their own seals made and strove to
outdo one another in the splendor and beauty of their designs.
7. Quoted from Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook, ed. Emilie Amt (New York, 1993), p. 189.
8. I myself will forever defend Minneapolis against the criticisms leveled at it by bigoted fools. Salve
magna parens.
338 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
On a social level the dominant feature of urban Europe was the development
of a new class: the burghers or bourgeoisie. (The words derive from the German
term burg, meaning “town.” German cities established in the Middle Ages can
usually be identified by the suffix -burg appended to their place name: Hamburg,
Strassburg, Regensburg, etc.) The bourgeoisie were the free artisans and merchants
who controlled the economic life of the community and usually its political life as
well. The middle class was broad and fluid, with a wide range of income levels
and social or legal privileges. As cities grew and prospered, town dwellers took
considerable pride in themselves and their labors; they clung tightly to the legal
privileges accorded to them—a Barcelonan traveling through Clermont retained
the rights given him by Barcelonan law—and came to develop prickly, and some-
times outright hostile, attitudes toward the rural society that surrounded them.
Merchants generally regarded feudal aristocrats as lazy dullards who drew their
living off a society that they no longer served in a meaningful way; to the nobles,
urban merchants were uncultivated nouveaux riches who thought they could buy
their way into proper society. Tensions between town and countryside were gen-
erally less virulent in England and Italy than they were in Spain, France, and
Germany, but even in Italy municipal records frequently itemized special expla-
nations of legal clauses for individual aristocrats with a dismissive comment that
the explanation was being done “because he is a knight and is therefore presumed
to be ignorant of the law.”
Prior to the “great change” of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, most people
in Europe seem to have assumed there was a great degree of immutability in the
world; political systems and social structures were ordained by God, they felt, and
were therefore not expected to change fundamentally. Since the bonds that held
feudal society together were sacred oaths and since sacred oaths could not, by
definition, be altered, it came as an unexpected shock to feudal kings that the
reliefs owed them by their vassals in 1066 were not the same thing, in absolute
cash terms, in 1266. Such nonnegotiable oaths were one reason why kings were
always short of money and therefore worked so hard to encourage the growth of
towns, where the culture was based on the idea of change. A serf could flee his
landlord and become a free citizen. A simple laborer could rise to become a master
craftsman or (rarely) a great merchant. An educated boy of low birth could become
a civic official or even enter the royal government. A simple shop girl could end
up as the owner of her own business. Change was the order of the day, and change
allowed people to prosper.
But townsfolk did not endorse every type of change. The main functions of
the guild system were to control all aspects of industrial production, prices, costs,
and wages. Cities were quick to zone themselves into discrete neighborhoods:
Slaughterhouses and butcher shops, for example, tended to be concentrated in a
single area of each city; textile weavers had neighborhoods of their own; most
Mediterranean cities had their own “Genoese Street” where the residing merchants
from Genoa lived; Jews in every city had their own segregated district. German
cities like Cologne passed laws defining what sort of clothes one could wear, de-
pending on one’s income level and not just on the basis of what one’s trade or
profession was. Much of this sort of clustering and tagging came from the natural
desire of people to be around people like themselves, but some resulted from civic
action. The forced concentration of butcheries into certain areas of a city, for ex-
ample, helped to contain animal smell and waste. Establishing discrete zones or
streets for the shops of spice merchants made it easier for buyers to compare prices
and quality and for tax collectors to gather their revenues. Laws set standard days
DAILY LIFE AT THE MEDIEVAL ZENITH 339
and times for different types of activities. Social codes regulated the interaction of
ethnic and religious groups. Cities, in sum, were not oases of free movement and
action, but they did possess a significantly higher degree of fluidity than the
countryside.
Since they lived and died by trade, cities jealously guarded their commercial
rights and property. Especially in the Mediterranean, cities were willing to go to
war with one another in order to protect their trade networks—consider Venice’s
redirection of the Fourth Crusade to Zara, for example. Milan, Florence, Bologna,
Siena, Pisa, and Genoa seem almost always to have been in conflict with one
another or else engaged in vicious factional struggles. Merchants and merchants’
companies in England, along the Seine and Rhine river valleys, and across the
Baltic coast regularly fought with one another in the courts and in the streets to
secure their access to markets. The importance of property can be seen in the
number of municipal laws that detailed property rights. Crimes against property
were not taken lightly. In some Flemish towns, for example, thieves were punished
by having their ears nailed to the wheel of a cart, which was then rolled through
the streets. In Strasbourg thieves were occasionally thrown into the sewer.
German cities were unique. Most of the larger towns became established as
self-governing bodies in the twelfth century, and especially in the eastern reaches,
they were often built from a plan, unlike the helter-skelter accumulation of build-
ings in most cities elsewhere; they were laid out with streets on a gridiron pattern
that made the movement of goods easier. German cities also cooperated with one
another to an unusual degree. They organized themselves into leagues and their
merchants worked together as a kind of super-corporation. The most famous of
these were the Hanse and the Swabian League. The Hanse was a cooperative venture
centered on the Baltic city of Lu¨beck; its merchants operated as a cartel, owning
commercial rights and trade routes throughout the Baltic Sea and beyond. By the
end of the thirteenth century the Hanse had offices and warehouses in over one
hundred and fifty cities—from London in the west to Novgorod in the east.
Most medieval cities were formed, from a bird’s-eye perspective, of an ex-
panding series of concentric circles, with each walled section representing a phase
in a city’s growth. At the center of each city lay the cathedral and the main market
square. The city hall, clock tower, and main guild halls stood nearby. Narrow,
twisting streets angled off from the city center in no organized way and were lined
with shops. Shops tended to be clustered together by type, as mentioned above,
and one can still find in European cities streets named for the commodity sold
along it in the Middle Ages. Grouping businesses in this way made a certain sense.
One always knew where to find a bakery, for example, in a strange city—one
simply asked for directions to Baker Street.
9
Shops were marked by street signs
whose image identified the type of shop: An apothecary shop, for example, usually
bore a sign with a mortar and pestle. There was no point in writing “Apothecary
Shop” on a sign: Too many people were illiterate and would not be able to read
it. One frequently had to step down from street level in order to enter a shop,
since town roads were usually kept in repair simply by adding a new surface on
top of the old one. Urban homes were built above shops. These were usually of
two or three rooms; as in the countryside, people slept together for warmth. In
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, the main character—a miller from Trumpington,
9. The city of Montpellier, for example, was divided into a handful of trade neighborhoods: Some of
these were the neighborhoods of Corraterie, Draperie, Flocaria, Fustaria, Herberie, representing respectively
the leatherworkers’, drapers’, wool-weavers’, wood-carvers’, and produce merchants’ districts.
340 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
near Cambridge—slept in bed with his wife, grown daughter, baby granddaughter,
and two university undergraduates who rented from him. (You can probably sup-
ply the rest of the plot yourself.)
Medieval cities could be foul places. The only way to get rid of human waste
was to dump it into the street.
10
Refuse from the shops was thrown there, too:
spoiled vegetables, fish entrails, chicken feathers, sawdust from carpenters’ shops,
dyes from textile shops, ashes from metalworkers’ furnaces. Street sweepers
worked at night, sweeping all the waste into a channel cut into the center of the
street, through which a stream of water ran. Only the largest of cities had sewer
systems which emptied into rivers. In England, charcoal dust was often scattered
in the streets, then swept up; it absorbed some of the ever-present odors. Without
modern streetlights, and with houses stretching out over the confines of the shops
underneath them, cities were pitch dark at night and therefore unsafe. Most cities
had organized night patrols by the thirteenth century—the precursors of modern
police forces—but they supplied only the slightest check on crime. Most towns
therefore imposed strict curfews and forbade people to be out after nine o’clock;
anyone caught violating the curfew was usually assumed to be a thief or, if a
woman, a prostitute, and was subject to arrest.
11
Although they were increasingly crowded, most medieval cities still had am-
ple open space, either in the form of public squares and parks or bits of garden
behind individual shops and houses. The gardens had practical as well as aesthetic
value: A city besieged by an enemy army had to be able to produce at least a
modicum of food to help it survive. Some cropland therefore existed within most
city walls, and animals were pastured in the open areas behind homes. As pork
became more common to medieval diets, most cities had substantial pig popula-
tions.
12
(Pigs were also useful as primitive sanitation workers, since they ate much
of the food scraps and refuse otherwise hurled into the streets.) Open spaces also
provided areas for children to play. It is true that under the apprentice system,
childhood ended sooner in the Middle Ages than it does today, but medieval
children did indeed have childhoods filled with games, toys, silly songs, and all
the traumas of playground power politics. By the start of the thirteenth century,
urban Europe even has access to popular books on child care written for worried
parents. The homes these children lived in were simple and noisy, placed as they
were immediately above shops and busy streets, but they could be rather grand
in the case of a successful merchant. In 1308 a carpenter in London contracted to
build a house for a fur merchant to the following specifications:
a hall and a room with a chimney, with a pantry between them; also a sun-
room above the said room and pantry. A window [will be installed] at one
10. Louis IX of France once had the contents of a chamberpot poured on his head as he strolled through
Paris early one morning. He stormed to the door of the house and demanded to know who had done
it. It turned out that the guilty person was a university student who had risen early in order to study.
Louis was so impressed by the young man’s dedication that he gave him a scholarship. (This is not
recommended as a way of financing a college education.)
11. The curfew itself was a medieval invention. The word is of Old French origin (coevure fu) and means
“to cover a fire.” It signaled the hour, usually between eight and nine o’clock, at which all home fires
were to be extinguished. Cities were thus thrown into a complete, almost eerie, darkness until sunrise,
and it made them dangerous places indeed.
12. Pork meat was usually salt-cured or smoked to preserve it, or ground into sausages. Suspicions
about the quality of sausages were rampant. Jacques de Vitry, a Dominican preacher of the thirteenth
century, writing in his handbook on how to deliver a successful sermon, recommended the use of a joke
as a surefire way to win an audience. His example: A certain Parisian was talking to his butcher one
day and tried to persuade him that, as a good and loyal customer for the last seven years, he should be
entitled to pay less for the shop’s sausages. The butcher replied: “Seven years? And you’re still alive?”
DAILY LIFE AT THE MEDIEVAL ZENITH 341
end of the hall, above the sitting-bench, as will a set of steps and porch leading
from ground level to the floor level of the said hall. [Also to be built are:] two
enclosed cellar rooms underneath the hall and situated at either end of it; an
additional cellar space to be used as a sewer, which will contain two pipes
connecting it to the city sewer; a stable twelve feet in width between the hall
and the kitchen, with a sunroom above, and with an attic built atop that room.
At the end of this sunroom another kitchen with a chimney [is to be built],
and there will be a windowed sitting room at least eight feet in length adjacent
to the hall.
Parish churches were everywhere. In Paris alone there were over one hundred
and sixty by the 1270s; London had approximately the same number.
13
In most
towns, churches were often only a few streets apart. Most were small neighbor-
hood churches, and not all were permanently staffed; but the buildings were there
for people to use. Local residents could stop in for a moment of prayer while
going about their daily business. These churches were mostly unadorned except
for wall paintings, since portable items were vulnerable to theft. Neighborhoods
tended to take their names from their churches. Thus St. Mary’s in Munich referred
both to a specific church and the section of the city it served. Urban sports teams
frequently organized themselves along the same lines. Cemeteries were initially
placed well outside the walls, but urban expansion by 1300 had progressed to
such an extent that most of the largest cities in Europe had at least one, and usually
more than one, cemetery within their confines, and they raised serious public
health concerns.
The fluidity of their populations and the constant arrival of new immigrants
gave medieval cities much of their lively strength and resilience, but during times
of economic downturn the same features could create an atmosphere of hostility
and suspicion. In most cases this atmosphere resolved itself in localized alterca-
tions of shopkeepers and tenants against particular individuals or groups sus-
pected of causing trouble or of profiting from the temporary bad times. Exorbitant
interest rates or a run of defaulted loans, for example, could trigger outbursts of
violence against foreign moneylenders: Flemings, northern Italians, and Jews of
any provenance were the most likely targets of this sort of attack since they were
the groups most commonly associated with commercial finance. But as cities grew
beyond their means with immigrants from the countryside, urban society began
to dissociate the established urbanites from the parvenus. Many cities began to
redivide by social class and economic distinction, with wealthy enclaves being
established (often with protective walls, gates, and armed guards) to separate the
merchant elite and urban patriciate from the toiling masses. In times of particular
crisis, charismatic opportunists and fiery ideologues could rise up from the crowd
and vow to lead them in revolt against the foreigners and elites who were living
off their labor. Here is one example of a populist tyrant from Forli, a small town
in the Papal State, who seized power by appealing to the urban crowd to over-
throw their traditional rulers (in this case, members of the Church) and to seize
the government for themselves:
In the Romagna district at this time [the early fourteenth century] there was
an impious dog of a Patarine who rebelled against the Holy Mother Church
[which held overlordship over the town]....Hisname was Francesco Orde-
laffi and he was a despicable character, a mortal enemy of all priests....He
was a faithless and stubborn tyrant who, when he heard the church bells
13. For comparison, London had approximately ten times as many drinking establishments.
342 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
ringing on the occasion of his excommunication [by the priests of Forli], or-
dered other bells to be rung while he pronounced his own excommunication
upon the Pope Himself and all His cardinals. Worse still, he set afire straw
effigies of them in the marketsquare....
Here is how he treated the priests: The bishop, once he had pronounced
Francesco’s excommunication and had been outrageously insulted in return,
stayed absolutely away from the city; but this freed Francesco to force most
of the remaining clergy to celebrate a Mass even despite the interdict that had
been placed on the town. No fewer than fourteen clerics—seven monks and
seven priests—were martyred, for Francesco ordered the first group hanged
by the neck and the second group flayed alive [once their Mass was
completed].
Nevertheless it must be said that he was absolutely devoted to the people
of Forli and was much loved by them. He made a show of tremendous phi-
lanthropy, found husbands for many orphaned girls and found employment
for countless others, and together with his friends provided for all the poor....
Such occurrences of tyranny were rare during the thirteenth century but became
all too frequent during the calamities of the fourteenth.
Most cities had their own distinct Jewries, or Jewish quarters. Jews lived and
had their shops in these districts, although they could move freely through the
city in order to conduct their business. Jewries were more than mere neighbor-
hoods; they were mostly autonomous legal entities that governed themselves, col-
lected their own taxes and fees, ran their own courts, and maintained their own
buildings. In some cities the Jewish quarters were actually encircled by their own
protective walls; the chief rabbi held the key to the gate. The quarters needed the
walls and locked gates, frankly, for anti-Semitic violence was common. The
Church’s position regarding the Jews had not changed from earlier centuries: Jews
were to be treated with fairness, it preached, and it was in fact the special re-
sponsibility of the Church to protect them against popular prejudice and violence.
As summarized by Pope Innocent III in 1199:
No Christian may use violence in order to force a Jew to receive baptism...
for no one who has not willingly sought baptism can be a true Christian.
Therefore let no Christian do a Jew any personal injury—except in the case
of carrying out the just sentence of a judge—or deprive him of his property,
or transgress the rights and privileges traditionally awarded to them. Let no
one disturb the celebration of their festivals by beating them with clubs and
hurling stones at them; let no one force from them any services which they
are not traditionally bound to render; and we expressly forbid anyone...to
deface or violate their cemeteries, or to extort money from them by threats of
doing so.
But such a declaration was itself a recognition that those things occurred. Nor
were Jewish sufferings always the spontaneous result of temporarily uncontrol-
lable popular Christian passions. Institutionalized anti-Semitism existed as well.
In the city of Toulouse, for example, a representative of the large Jewish commu-
nity was legally required to go to the cathedral every year on Good Friday in
order to be publicly slapped in the face by the bishop. In Be´ziers city dwellers
had the right—which they jealously guarded as long as they could—to stone Jew-
ish homes during Holy Week. Alfonso X of Castile (1252–1284) wrote in his vast
legal code called the Siete Partidas (“The Seven Categories”) that whereas “a syn-
agogue is a place where God’s name is praised” and therefore no Christian may
“deface one, steal anything from one...bring animals into one, loiter in one, or
in any way try to prevent the Jews from performing their devotions in one,” still
DAILY LIFE AT THE MEDIEVAL ZENITH 343
Jews were forbidden to speak against Christianity in any way or even to appear
in public on Good Friday. Moreover, Jews who had sexual relations with Christians
were to be put to death, as were Christians who converted to Judaism.
Within the constraints placed on them by Christian society and their own
Talmudic law, medieval Jews had exceptionally vital and cosmopolitan lives. A
twelfth-century Jewish traveler named Benjamin of Tudela wrote a memoir of a
journey he made from central Spain to the Holy Land and back again, in which
he celebrates the sprawl of thriving Jewish communities he encountered through-
out urban Christendom—while of course lamenting the agonies of anti-Semitism
he also discovered along the way. His book, called the Itinerary, is a remarkable
document that provides us with detailed information about Jewish communities
of all sizes and their rabbinical leadership. He records, for example, that the Jews
of Narbonne numbered approximately four hundred and were divided into three
synagogues. The chief local rabbi, Kalonymos, proudly owned heritable property
awarded to his family in perpetuity by the city rulers themselves in recognition
of the Jews’ importance to civic life. Long a center of learning, Jewish Narbonne
boasted of an organized network of schools that guided study for the devout from
childhood through advanced age; some classrooms were attached to the syna-
gogues themselves, others were found in the teachers’ own homes. One school,
dedicated especially to educating Jews from outside Narbonne proper, neighbored
the viscount’s own urban palace.
Benjamin’s Itinerary was not a unique book, however. Many Jewish travelers
composed memoirs or travelogues. These texts are not well known since they were
intended for Jewish audiences and were consequently written in Hebrew; they
were in other words cautionary texts warning merchants of the dangers lurking
throughout Christendom, and few of them have been translated into English.
14
But
they also extolled places and individuals of tolerance and peace.
One observation driven home by such travelogues and other texts is the cul-
tural rift that differentiated northern Ashkenazic Jews and southern Sephardic
Jews. This rift—really better described as separate lines of development—began
in the late Carolingian era but became pronounced in the late eleventh and early
twelfth centuries. The northern Jews, who had been invited into the Rhineland
and other areas by Carolingian promises of tax benefits and legal protections in
return for their financial expertise and commercial contacts, had been widely re-
sented by the locals from the moment of their arrival as privileged outsiders given
almost exclusive rights to earn comfortable livings off the labors of the Christian
poor. Surrounded by hostility and living at such a remove from the rest of the
Jewish world, Ashkenazic Jews in the twelfth and thirteenth century developed a
brilliant but inward intellectual culture based on biblical exegesis and legalistic
study. Their liturgical poetry, much of it staid and powerful, reveals a persistent
emphasis on exile and martyrdom that is understandable given their predicament,
but which heightened their isolation and their predilection for living apart from
the urban majority. Northern Jewish intellectual life focused strongly on the study
of the Talmud and showed little interest in secular topics or in developments from
non-Jewish society. Considering the cruelty visited upon them with the preaching
of every crusade, it is small wonder that they turned so energetically inward and
embraced conservative tradition.
The southern Jews, or Sephardim, had more liberal lives and were open to all
14. Petahiah of Regensburg, from twelfth-century Germany, would be another example. His Tour has
never been translated. For the original Hebrew, see Sibbuv R. Petachiah, ed. Ludwig Gru¨ nhut (Frankfurt
am Main, 1905).