Backman Clifford R. The Worlds of Medieval Europe
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354 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
genuine remorse for their wrongs. A change in the doctrine of penance clearly
had something to do with this shift. Until the late tenth century, penance, fre-
quently in the form of penitential pilgrimage, was a penalty that one paid for sins
already committed, but at some point around the turn of the millennium, the
notion caught on that one could in fact perform penances as a matter of everyday
devotion and spiritual discipline. These did not need to be dramatic actions like
mortification of the flesh but could be simple observances like reciting a hundred
Our Fathers while tending to one’s daily affairs or attending an extra Church ser-
vice. If one’s penitential regimen exceeded one’s sinfulness, a person could in effect
compile a “treasury of merits” that would earn favor in God’s eyes, softening His
heart and making it possible for one to receive His ultimate loving gift of salva-
tion.
1
This is one reason for the enormous increase in the popularity of pilgrimage
in the eleventh century—a development that led directly into the Crusade move-
ment. After the Early Middle Ages, penance and love became two sides of the
same coin. Christians repented their sins because they loved God and wished to
please Him; God loved His people and so redeemed those who were penitent.
Among the strongest advocates for penance and the promise of God’s for-
giveness were the Dominicans. Their order was popularly named after its founder,
the Castilian cleric Dominic de Guzma´n (1170–1221), but it is officially known as
the Order of Preachers.
2
(To this day a Dominican has the initials O.P. after his or
her name.) From early in his career, Dominic desired to be more than a neighbor-
hood priest; he wanted to be an evangelist at work in the world. In 1205 he trav-
eled to Rome to request that he be sent as a missionary to the Mongols then
advancing westward out of Asia. The pope at that time, Innocent III, had another
idea: He charged Dominic to preach to the Cathar heretics in southern France.
(The Albigensian Crusade did not begin until 1209.) Dominic took up the task
with great zeal. He organized a group of close associates and spent the next decade
living among the heretics, learning their beliefs and practices, preaching to them,
and trying to teach them the falseness of their doctrines. He viewed the problem
of Cathar heresy as an educational problem, not a crisis of Evil Incarnate at work
in the world. He was convinced that heresy arose not because human beings are
wicked but because they do not receive the religious instruction and pastoral guid-
ance they need, and that most clergy, tied to their heavy parish duties, simply
could not devote the time needed to keep the rustic faithful within the Church’s
fold. Dominic and his followers united a deep spiritual emotion with a highly
developed and confident rationalism, confident that the combination of warm
heart and engaged intellect would suffice to win back the heretics. As it happened,
the Dominicans’ earliest efforts earned the respect of some Cathars, but they re-
converted few to Catholic orthodoxy.
In 1215 Dominic attended the Fourth Lateran Council in order to have his
associates recognized as a formal order within the Church. The Council agreed,
and in late 1216 Pope Honorius III signed the charter of the Dominicans’ formal
establishment. From the start, they were a scholarly preaching and teaching order.
They stressed educational training for their members and the conviction that hu-
man error arose through ignorance rather than wickedness. Dominicans also em-
1. The belief in Purgatory, a sin-cleansing way-station where devout but imperfect souls might be
absolved of their guilt and prepared for God’s salvation, became a commonplace of Christian devotion
at just this time.
2. They were also informally known as the Black Friars, in reference to the identifying black cowls they
came to wear.
CHANGES IN RELIGIOUS LIFE 355
braced the imitatio Christi in the sense that they took vows of poverty, but this
practice never played as central a role in Dominican thinking or observance as it
did in other mendicant groups. As part of their training, all Dominicans were
required to master three texts: the Bible, Peter Lombard’s Sentences, and the Historia
Scholastica of Peter Comester, all three of which they carried at all times.
3
Ideally,
they were to produce these books by their own labor in the scriptorium, but as
Dominican schools became better established the provincial boards governing the
order began to supply them. These three books were the key works needed by an
itinerant preacher, they felt, to buttress any exposition of Church doctrine. Do-
minicans spent the first two years of their training studying the liberal arts, then
three years studying science (which they called natural philosophy), before moving
on to another three years of theological study at a Dominican-associated university
such as the University of Paris.
Dominicans usually worked in pairs or small groups as they traveled from
village to village. Since they were outside the usual clerical structure of the Church,
they were required to seek the permission of the local bishop before beginning
their work in a diocese. Once that permission was granted, they went to work
preaching to crowds, answering questions and relieving doubts, hearing confes-
sions, and especially debating those with differing or heretical views. Knowledge
and rational persuasion, they hoped, when coupled with a modest and pious life-
style, could do more to keep Christ’s flock in line than any number of crusades
and episcopal excommunications. Nevertheless, in time it was the Dominican fri-
ars who became especially associated with the inquisitions.
The order was popular from the start. Dominic died in 1221, only six years
after getting formal recognition for his order, but even by then there were well
over five hundred Dominican brethren. Those attracted to the order tended to be
people of a scholarly bent, and those with an interest in law were especially prom-
inent. One of these was Ramon de Penyafort, a Catalan canonist who wrote the
first constitution for the order and who was perhaps the greatest lawyer of the
thirteenth century. The constitution called for almost exclusive attention to study;
everything else in Dominican training was to take a backseat. The curricula were
carefully devised, with the books to be read, and those to be avoided, figured out
in detail. The list of prominent Dominican scholars in the thirteenth century is
impressive (Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas stand out especially), but
the list of their evangelical successes is not. This was not through lack of effort,
though. Dominicans marched far and wide, often into openly hostile territory, in
order to spread the Word of Christ: into the Baltic regions, the Holy Land, Russia,
central and southern Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, and China. They worked tirelessly
against both popular heresies like Catharism and against intellectual heresies that
popped up in the universities. But the number of their converts, or of reconverts
back to orthodoxy, remained small. To many of their critics, the Dominicans’
method was their message—cold, calm, intellectualizing, in an age that was pulsing
with emotion. In the thirteenth century, they had a widespread popular reputation
for academic dryness: great minds in bloodless bodies, theological bean counters.
What else could one expect from a group of lawyers? One of their most vocal
detractors, the Catalan physician and religious reformer Arnau de Vilanova
(d. 1311), published a series of blistering essays against what he regarded as the
3. Peter Comester (literally, “Peter the Eater”—in the sense of a devourer of books) was a twelfth-
century scholar whose Historia was essentially a survey of biblical history. He died in 1178.
356 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
incompetence of these “pseudo-religious pseudo-theologians.” His rhetoric was
over the top, but it reflected a widespread prejudice.
Women were part of the Dominican order almost from the very start. St. Dom-
inic established the first female chapter in 1213 at Prouille in southern France; it
was made up in part by noblewomen he had converted from Catharism. Before
he died, he had created three more houses in Bologna, Madrid, and Rome. Do-
minican nuns were not itinerant preachers like the Dominican friars; they re-
mained cloistered but participated in the preaching effort by helping to produce
books used by the brethren. By the 1340s, there were nearly 150 Dominican con-
vents across Latin Europe, and women comprised more than ten percent of the
overall order’s membership—which by the 1340s was nearly fifteen thousand.
There were a handful of attempts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to
dissociate the female Dominicans from the male wing of the order since the Do-
minican Constitution stipulated that every convent had to have a company of at
least six male brethren residents to supervise the nuns’ lives; as the Dominicans
rose in social status, and especially as they came to dominate the universities,
fewer brothers wanted to settle for the career-ending position of convent super-
visor. In the end, however, the authority of St. Dominic’s initial desire for the order
carried the day.
As the thirteenth century progressed, the Dominicans began to show a decided
preference for living in large communities; and since they were also increasingly
associated with the universities, this meant that by the 1270s and 1280s their con-
vents were almost exclusively to be found in Europe’s largest cities. Many teams
of friars continued to work in the countryside, especially as they became involved
in the inquisitions, but by 1300 they had become a decidedly urban—almost cos-
mopolitan—elite order.
T
HE
I
MPORTANCE OF
B
EING
P
OOR
A second popular passion of the age was for what its practitioners called evangelical
poverty. This differed from regular run-of-the-mill poverty in that it was chosen,
and was chosen for specifically religious reasons. Many Christians have always
had ambivalent feelings about money. Money, if one has it, adds comfort and
pleasure to life and enables one to do good works. Yet Jesus himself had shown
no personal interest in money and seems to have been content to beg for his food
and lodging. On the other hand, he did say a lot about money—and most of it
was not very sympathetic. The evil of money, in general, is that it binds one’s
interest to the things of this world, and Jesus preached that the next world, the
world of God’s kingdom, is the only one that matters. In his most telltale teaching,
Jesus instructed the rich young man who had come to him asking what he must
do to earn salvation, “Go and sell your possessions and give the money to the
poor.” When the young man turned dejectedly away, Jesus said to his disciples:
“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone rich
to enter the kingdom of Heaven” [Matthew 19:21–24].
4
“Get rid of all money,”
4. The image of a camel passing through the eye of a needle is a bizarre one and may have resulted
from a simple spelling error. The word for “camel” in biblical Greek is ka´melos, but the word for “rope”
is ka´milos. It certainly makes more sense to picture someone trying to push a rope through a needle eye
than to push a camel through one. The expression also appears in Mark 10:25. It is possible therefore
that the two Gospel writers—both of whom make frequent mistakes in Greek—just made a spelling
error.
CHANGES IN RELIGIOUS LIFE 357
lectured Peter Damian in the eleventh century, “for Christ and money do not go
well together in the same place.”
As the Church became the dominant institution in medieval life, many faithful
grew frustrated by its increasing involvement in and concern for money matters.
A Church that sought to govern everything needed the resources to do it, and so
the Church became increasingly attentive to the raising of clerical taxes, the man-
agement of ecclesiastical estates, the administration of parish finances, and the
collection of fees for its social services. A popular, yet unfairly easy, joking criticism
of the Church’s concern for money was a simple anagram that, in Latin, spelled
out the phrase “Avarice is the root of all evil.”
Radix Omnia Malorum [est] Avaritia.
The Church’s teachings about money and its own relationship with money formed
the basis of a whole series of crises in the medieval period. In the eleventh cen-
tury the issue of simony had taken center stage; in the twelfth clerical taxation
became the hot-button issue; and in the thirteenth the scholastics’ focus on usury
and theories of the “just price” were the focal points of thinking about money.
By the early thirteenth century, a passionate debate had arisen on the very
notion of ecclesiastical wealth. The issue, to some critics, was not the way in which
the Church’s money was accumulated or the use to which the Church’s money
was put, but the very existence of such money. If the ideal Christian life was the
imitatio Christi, how could the Church justify its own constant concern with raising
taxes, building cathedrals and palaces, employing armies, managing universities,
financing crusades, collecting fees, gathering rents, and running law courts? The
very success of the Church in achieving what it regarded as its appropriate role
in European life was the problem. This attitude, in part, lay behind the twelfth-
century heresies like Waldensianism and Catharism, the conviction that the estab-
lished Church, perhaps unintentionally but no less definitively, had vitiated its
spiritual authority by becoming one of the powers of this world. The Church in
the thirteenth century was wealthy and, according to non-heretic reformers, was
ipso facto spiritually lost, or at the very least in danger of becoming so. The only
solution was to revive the idea of Christ’s own personal poverty.
To renounce money when one has none is not exactly a great virtue. What
drove many of the people who emphasized the importance of poverty was a sense
of guilt, or maybe simple dissatisfaction, over their own relatively comfortable
position. Most champions of evangelical poverty in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries that we know anything about were all people who had been born into
a certain degree of material and financial comfort; in this sense they were analo-
gous to the middle-class figures who initiated the ascetic and monastic movement
in the fourth and fifth centuries. They found ample numbers of followers among
the poor who relished the idea that “no kings, no princes, no prelates of the Church
and none of the clergy or anyone who has wealth can be saved,” but the impetus
toward creating a theology of evangelical poverty came first and foremost from
those who renounced their own riches. Imitatio Christi, if it was to be genuine,
meant an absolute commitment to hardship, to poverty and want, that these peo-
ple of means desired for themselves and believed to be necessary.
The best known of these renouncers was St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), the
founder of the Franciscan Order—formally the Order of Friars Minor (O.F.M.). It is
difficult not to feel affection for Francis. He was the son of a well-to-do merchant,
and after a carefree youth (and a brief, unremarkable career as a crusader) he
experienced an intense religious transformation in his early twenties. He decided
358 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
to renounce his inheritance and dedicate his life to evangelical poverty and serving
the urban poor. His family was alarmed by his odd behavior: He dressed in rags,
lived in a rough shack, gave away whatever money or food was given him by
sympathetic passersby, tended to a local leper community, prayed and sang hymns
constantly. Worse still, he talked to animals: Passersby sometimes overheard him
telling flocks of birds in a tree how fortunate they were to be the creations of a
loving God and to inhabit His beautiful world. Perhaps Francis was simply prac-
ticing for his vocation to come. In 1209, after attending Mass at a small chapel in
Assisi, he decided to start preaching to people. Francis was not a priest, however,
and needed to get permission before he could deliver sermons, and so he went
with about a dozen followers to Rome and presented his case before Innocent III.
Innocent was a haughty theocrat and hard-nosed politician but he was also a
person of deep piety and he recognized a special quality in Francis. He granted
the license to preach and directed Francis to compose a Rule for his new order.
The Franciscan Order was formally established in 1210. Its members dedicated
themselves to living the imitatio Christi, preaching, and serving the poor. They
traveled in pairs, begged for their food, and worked with tireless devotion. Pop-
ular response was immediate and overwhelming. People rushed to join the order,
and the Franciscans were received with open arms everywhere. By Francis’ death
in 1226, the Friars Minor had established missions throughout all of Europe, across
North Africa, through the Holy Land, and had started to reach far into Asia. It
was a Franciscan mission led by Friar John of Pian (Giovanni Piano) that traveled
to the court of Ghenghis Khan. Francis himself preached to the ’Ayyubid sultan
in Egypt. Francis was as disorganized a person as one might ever imagine, and
for years he avoided writing a Rule for his group; when he did finally produce
one it was so vague and shapeless as to be effectively useless. He was not opposed
to the life of the mind, but he much preferred the gifts of the heart. His sermons
and various other writings—he excelled at poetry—do not dazzle one with ideas
and insights, but they reverberate in the heart. His most famous poem is his Can-
ticle of the Sun, which loses most of its magic in translation but is still worth a
reading.
Most High, All Powerful, and Good Lord,
We give You praise and glory, honor and blessing;
To You alone do these things belong.
Not one of us is fit to call on You.
Praise to you, my Lord, for all You have created,
Above all for Brother Sun
Who brightens the day and fills it with his light;
He is so beautiful, so radiant and splendid,
And speaks to us of you, O Most High.
Praise to you, my Lord, for Sister Moon and the stars;
You have set them in the heavens—shining, elegant, and lovely.
Praise to you, my Lord, for Brother Wind,
For air, clouds, fair weather and foul
Through which you give nourishment to all Creation.
Praise to you, my Lord, for Sister Water.
So healthful and simple, precious and pure.
Praise to you, my Lord, for Brother Fire
Through whom You light up the dark;
He is lovely and joyful, mighty and strong.
CHANGES IN RELIGIOUS LIFE 359
Praise to you, my Lord, for our sister, Mother Earth
Who sustains us and keeps us
And brings forth fruits, grasses, and bright flowers.
Praise to you, my Lord, for those people who out of love for You
Offer forgiveness, endure weakness and trouble;
Bless those who keep Your peace.
You, Most High, shall give them their crowns.
Praise to you, my Lord, for Sister Death,
From whom no man escapes.
Woe to those who die in sinfulness, but blessed are those
Who give themselves to Your Will.
Death can do them no harm.
Praise and bless the Lord, and give Him thanks, and serve Him with humility!
Even more than the Dominicans, the Franciscans pledged themselves to lives
of simplicity and service; they sought to promote Christ by example rather than
argument, to win converts by loving them rather than lecturing them. “Preach the
Gospel at all times,” wrote Francis in one of his most memorable dictums; “when
absolutely necessary, use words.” If the Dominicans had a collective reputation
for braininess, the Franciscans were generally regarded as kindhearted sweet
souls—or to their detractors (like the Dominicans themselves) as pious simple-
tons.
5
The reputations of both orders changed markedly in the fourteenth century.
To the Franciscans, evangelical poverty was their defining characteristic, the
emotional rallying post to which they clung for their identity. Francis’ Rule and
the will he left behind at his death emphasized the need to relinquish all wealth
as a spiritual necessity even more than as an institutional policy, for the order was
becoming wealthy in spite of itself. People of all walks of life who were in one
way or another moved by the good works of the Franciscans made pious bequests
to the order, offering them lump sums of money, buildings to use as chapter
houses, farmlands, and investment properties. Though they had nowhere near the
wealth of monastic orders like the Benedictines or Cistercians, the Franciscans soon
found themselves with uncomfortably comfortable incomes. Francis, in his last
years, distanced himself from his own order with the lament that he was “Francis,
but not a Franciscan.” In 1220 he formally resigned his leadership of the group
and went off to live once again as a hermit. After his death—which was mourned
throughout Europe—the new leaders of the order tried to establish a revised Rule
that moderated the anti-wealth austerity that Francis had desired. The new Rule
allowed for collective ownership of property by the order itself, but the friars
remained individually bound by vows of personal poverty. Many friars rejected
5. Episodes like the following contributed to the Franciscans’ reputation for simple-mindedness; it
comes from the Chronicle of Fr. Giordano Gianni: “In the year of Our Lord 1219...Brother Francis
convened a meeting of the [Order]...andcommissioned brothers to preach in France, Germany, Hun-
gary, Spain, and those regions of Italy into which the friars had not yet penetrated....The German
mission was comprised of some sixty friars, led by Brother Giovanni of Parma. When they arrived in
Germany, a place whose language they could not speak, they simply answered ‘Ja’ whenever anyone
asked them if they wanted a place to stay or something to eat or anything else....Since saying this
word procured them such kind treatment they decided to answer ‘Ja’ to every question put to them.
Thus when they were asked if they were heretics who had come to Germany in order to spread the
same evils with which they had already infected Lombardy, they answered ‘Ja.’ This resulted in [their
leaders’] being thrown into prison while the others were stripped of their clothing and forced to stand
on village greens while the locals made fun of them. This led the friars to conclude that their efforts in
Germany were in vain and so they returned to Italy, where they spread such horrible stories about the
Germans that no friars thereafter would travel there except for those who desired martyrdom.”
360 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
this compromise out of hand and insisted that to be a Franciscan meant to obey
Francis’ desire absolutely and to reject all money and all property, both individ-
ually and collectively. These dissenters were voted down, and many broke away
from the order and established rival groups that would carry on the mission of
evangelical poverty. The most famous of these splinter groups became known as
the Franciscan Spirituals or Spiritual Franciscans. By the turn of the fourteenth cen-
tury, they were outspoken critics not only of the main Franciscan order but of the
entire Church, mired as it was, they preached, in luxury and dead to spiritual
responsibility. Their virulent anticlericalism led to their condemnation as heretics
in 1323.
The Franciscan movement remained popular through the rest of the Middle
Ages, although it no longer enjoyed the near-exultant popularity of its early years.
Franciscans preached widely and effectively; they ran hostels and tended to the
poor and sick; they gathered alms to feed the starving. But they also began to
assume more staid and traditional roles within the Church: They studied and
taught at the universities; they pursued scientific research at aristocratic courts;
they built convents and chapter houses; they patronized the arts. They remained
a favorite of the town masses, but seldom rose to leadership positions in the
Church. It looked briefly as though their stature might change when Honorius IV
(1285–1287), the first Franciscan to become pope, ascended to the Holy See, but
his pontificate ended quickly.
Like Dominic, St. Francis established an affiliated order of female mendicants.
A young woman from Assisi named Clare, the daughter of a wealthy merchant
family, came under the spell of Francis’ preaching, and in 1212 she organized a
group of young women who wanted to devote themselves to pious works. Francis
established the women at the nearby church of San Damiani—and hence the
women became initially known as Damianites, although the sisters soon took the
name of Poor Clares. Like the male Franciscans, the Poor Clares followed the imi-
tatio Christi and advocated evangelical poverty. They did not work in the world,
however, and were cloistered like Dominican nuns. The Rule that Clare wrote for
her sisterhood was the first female-authored Rule in Christian history. It begins
with a recognition of the authorities to whom the sisters are bound.
The manner of life that Blessed Francis laid down for the Order of the Poor
Sisters is as follows: namely to observe the Holy Gospel of Our Lord Jesus
Christ by living in complete obedience, without any possessions of one’s own,
and in perfect chastity.
I, Clare, the unworthy servant of Christ and the spiritual seedling of
Blessed Francis, do swear obedience and reverence to the Lord Pope Innocent
[III], all his canonically elected successors, and to the entire Roman Church.
Just as I and my fellow Sisters promised to obey Blessed Francis from the
very moment of our conversion, so now do we swear the same inviolable
obedience to all his successors.
Moreover, all the Sisters who follow us shall forever be obliged to obey
the successors of Blessed Francis and of Sister Clare and all the canonically
elected abbesses who succeed her.
The order received formal approval from the papacy in 1258. The Poor Clares
were highly respected, and many women joined, but they were never as popular
as uncloistered groups like the beguines who continued to draw large numbers of
recruits. During Clare’s lifetime, the nuns at Sam Damiano refused all gifts and
endowments, but later convents received modest awards from benefactors. The
CHANGES IN RELIGIOUS LIFE 361
Poor Clares, however, did not suffer the painful split in their order that the male
branch endured.
T
HE
H
UMANIZATION OF
C
HRIST AND THE
C
ULT OF THE
V
IRGIN
In Chapter 12 we discussed the evolution of lay piety. Among its most interesting
developments were a sharp change in spiritual style and the popular attitude
toward the figures of Christ and his mother Mary. Christ as the stern Judge or the
awe-inspiring King of Heaven, the two images of Christ that predominated in
early medieval devotion, gradually gave way under lay influence to a kinder,
gentler Christ in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Increased focus was given
to his loving-kindness, his mercy for all believers. Medieval artists still portrayed
Christ as an enthroned king—a quick look at the portals of most Romanesque
churches will show that—but they began also to present a more humanized figure:
one who cared for his followers and healed the sick, one who preached a gospel
of love and forgiveness, a devoted son, an inspiring teacher, a suffering man on a
cross. These changes did not necessarily entail any new developments in the the-
ology of who Jesus was, but they did reflect a new style of devotion, a new em-
phasis on the ways in which he was like the rest of humanity.
Thus Christ became a more approachable figure. The straight and narrow road
to heaven was broadened by this new sort of Christ, and the possibility of salvation
was extended to more and more of his flock.
This change did not occur only in representations in art. Medieval sermons
also focused increasingly on Christ’s humanity; saints’ lives described more epi-
sodes of saints encountering the tender-hearted Jesus in mystical visions. New
devotional rites like the Stations of the Cross—a Lenten service during which
believers circulate past paintings and statuary depicting the events of Christ’s
Passion—focused attention on the human suffering he endured. Even the Mass
itself changed. Through the early centuries of the Church, parishioners themselves
seldom ate the bread or drank the wine of the Mass; they only witnessed their
elevation and transubstantiation into Jesus’ body and blood. Usually only the
priests conducting the ceremony partook of the sacraments. But by the thirteenth
century the common people themselves began to consume them, bringing home
the idea that Christ so loves mankind that he makes himself available to all in this
most intimate and tangible of ways.
These were not subtle changes, nor were they merely an attempt by theolo-
gians to make Jesus more likable. This refocusing of his personality was, like the
very Church Reform it was a late aspect of, a popular demand. Even when actively
developing its notions of papal absolutism and its own universal authority over
society, the Church here proved highly adaptive to popular concerns and ideals.
Behind the humanization of Christ was the same sort of religious enthusiasm, or
at least the same degree of enthusiasm, that lay at the root of the crusade move-
ment. In 1233 a mass revival movement known as the Great Alleluia arose in Italy,
and news of it traveled quickly around Europe. It resembled in some ways the
Peace of God gatherings of the tenth and eleventh centuries, but unlike them it
was a joyful, even raucous, event celebrating God’s love and the near certainty of
salvation for those who believe in Him. It was also directed, whether by design
or default, by Franciscan preachers. As recorded by the Franciscan chronicler Sal-
imbene de Adam (1221–1289), who witnessed the event when he was twelve:
362 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
1233 was the year of what later came to be called the “Great Alleluia,” a
celebration of happiness, joy, thanksgiving, rejoicing, praise, and merrymak-
ing—above all a time of peace and calm, when all weapons were cast aside
. . . even the knights and foot soldiers went about singing songs and sacred
hymns. This pious spirit ran throughout all the cities of Italy; I myself wit-
nessed [it] in my native city of Parma....Enormous crowds of men, women,
boys, and girls flocked to the city from the surrounding villages carrying
banners [depicting their local saints] in order to hear our preachers and sing
praises to God. They sang, in fact, with “the voice of a God, not of a man”
[Acts 12:22] and walked with the air of a man who has been saved....Ev-
eryone carried tree branches and lighted candles, and there was preaching
morning, noon, and night....The crowds stopped in every church and
square, where they lifted their hands to God in praise, and blessed His Name
for ever and ever. In fact, they were incapable of stopping their praises, since
they were so drunk on God’s love....They did everything without anger,
discord, quarrel, or bitterness.
What might have triggered such actions? No events of any unique drama or sig-
nificance that we know of occurred in that year or the one preceding it. It is highly
likely, though, that the Alleluia had something to do with the popular assimilation
of the great achievements of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and it was almost
certainly related to the fast developing canonization movement for St. Francis, who
had died in 1226. The Fourth Lateran represented to many the final step in the
Church’s long road to reform (even though it represented to others, as we have
seen, the first step in its decline), and it symbolized the Church Triumphant. In
Francis thousands of people had seen a reflection of Christ himself—a gentle,
loving, lovable, pious, and absolutely approachable person. The reputed miracle
of Francis’ receiving the stigmata (the sudden appearance on his body of marks
corresponding to the wounds that Christ received on the Cross) only added to the
connection. To many, Christ seemed almost to have come yet again, in the person
of Francis, to remind his people that he loved them and that heaven awaited them.
So they rejoiced.
Closely related to this humanization of Christ, and in fact preceding it by
several generations, was a dramatic new emphasis on the role of the Virgin Mary
in Christian life. She had been revered as the model of female piety and virginity
by the Church at large at least since the late fourth century.
6
But unlike the Greek
east, where she was revered as the God-bearer and the Queen of Heaven, Latin
Christians in the early medieval centuries did not place any special emphasis on
Mary. Local saints were of considerably more significance to them. But starting in
the late eleventh century, then picking up momentum throughout the twelfth, and
reaching fever pitch in the thirteenth, was a widespread popular cult focused on
Mary’s direct role in helping one earn salvation. Thousands of churches were
named in her honor; countless sermons emphasized her role as a mediator; miracle
stories proliferated about her continuing action in this world; sculptors, painters,
and mosaicists portrayed the story of her life in loving detail; sea-captains named
their ships after her; musicians wrote love songs to her; mystics claimed to have
had numberless visions of her and to have spoken directly with her. Not only did
6. It was St. Jerome, especially, who brought Mary permanently to the forefront. A rival writer of the
time, named Helvidius, had suggested that Mary, after giving miraculous birth to Jesus, had had a
normal (i.e., sexual) marriage with her husband Joseph. This sent Jerome into a ballistic rage and inspired
him to write a short but blistering book called Against Helvidius. It demolished Helvidius’ position, and
Mary’s perpetual virginity was never questioned thereafter.
CHANGES IN RELIGIOUS LIFE 363
Mary appear more frequently in Christian devotion, she appeared in new guises
or roles. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, she was no longer solely an ideal
image of virgin chastity; she was called upon as an intercessor, a healer, the Queen
of Heaven, the ideal mother, the steadfast friend, the supreme protector of the sick
(especially of women). Summarizing all these new roles, she became to Christians
everywhere simply and lovingly “Our Lady.” The connection between the rever-
ence for “Our Lady” and for the aristocratic courts’ chivalric dedication to the
“My ladies” of courtly love is obvious.
Signs of Mary’s new significance were everywhere: the new devotional prac-
tice of the rosary; the proliferation of images of the Pieta`;
7
feast days in her honor
added to the ecclesiastical calendar; the heightened number of references to her
in the liturgy. By far the most popular of hymns to Mary was the Salve Regina.
Hail, Queen and Mother of Mercy;
Hail, our Life, our Comfort, our Hope.
We, Eve’s exiled children, call to You;
With sobs and cries we call to You
From this valley of tears.
Come to us now, dear Advocate:
Turn Your loving eyes upon us now,
And when this, our earthly exile, is over,
Lead us to Jesus, the fruit of Your womb,
Oh kind, Oh pious, Oh sweet Virgin, Oh Mary.
In thirteenth-century Castile, Alfonso X spent thirty years supporting the produc-
tion of a magnificently illustrated work called the Cantigas de Santa Maria (“Songs
of Holy Mary”) that gathered, recorded, and illustrated over four hundred popular
songs in her praise. Many of these take the form of psalms and hymns; others are
versified miracle stories:
Let me tell you about a miracle, one that I heard that the Mother of the Most
High King performed for an abbess who was utterly devoted to Her. The
devil had led this woman into sin and caused her to become pregnant by a
man from Bologna....Thenuns [at that abbey] were overjoyed at the rumor,
for the abbess had always been strict with them, and they hated her. They
sent a complaint to the bishop of their diocese, who was in Cologne. He
summoned [the abbess] to his presence, and she went to him happily and
smiling....Then the bishop said to her: “My lady, I have heard of your sin
and have come to let you make amends before me.” But the abbess immedi-
ately ran away from him and went to pray to the Mother of God. Blessed
Mary came to the abbess like a spirit in a dream and lifted the child from
inside her; then She had it born and raised in Soissons....When the abbess
awoke and found herself childless she ran to the bishop. He looked at her
carefully, and asked her to disrobe. And as soon as he saw her [childless]
body he praised God and rebuked the nuns who had accused her.
This a curious story leaves one wanting to ask many questions. But the most
important aspect of Alonzo’s collection of songs is its representation of the enor-
mous outpouring of love that Christian heaped on Mary at the medieval zenith.
For a brief time, Mary seemed nearly to crowd Jesus himself off the stage in
popular devotion. He quickly moved backed into the spotlight, of course,
7. Literally the “Sorrowful Mother,” this is the portrayal of the mourning Mary holding the dead Jesus
on her lap. Michelangelo’s sculpture of this theme is probably the most familiar to most people.