Johnston R.A. All Things Medieval: An Encyclopedia of the Medieval World

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Church

120

unusually devout people claimed they could taste the blood. The common

people did not eat or drink the elements of the Mass, except for once a year

at Easter.

Easter Mass in medieval England was the high point of the Christian

year. On the Thursday before Easter, the priest consecrated (blessed) three

pieces of host. Two were for his own use at that Mass and the Friday Mass,

but the third was buried, with a cruciﬁ x, in a sepulcher on Friday. The sepul-

cher was a special box placed at the front of the church. The altar had been

stripped and washed with water, wine, and a broom of twigs to symbolize

the death of Jesus. On Saturday, the sepulcher was surrounded with candles,

and, on Easter morning, the cruciﬁ x and host were taken out to symbolize

the resurrection of Jesus. Each baptized person in the congregation then

received a piece of consecrated host. Leading up to this, they had all gone to

confession with a priest and had done penance for their sins.

The Mass was one of the sacraments—the rituals and acts that constituted

the way of salvation. Baptism, conﬁ rmation, confession and penance, extreme

unction (also known as last rites, the anointing of the sick), marriage, and

taking holy orders were the other sacraments. Without these rituals, there

was no salvation from sin and hell. When a person was excommunicated,

he was not permitted to participate in the Mass unless he repented. When a

bishop or the Pope laid an entire region under interdict, priests were not per-

mitted to celebrate Mass or carry out the other sacraments. Churches were

locked. To medieval Christians, this was the worst thing that could happen.

Anyone who died without confession and last rites would go to hell, and no

babies could be baptized during an interdiction.

Beliefs: Sin and the Afterlife

The church taught that sin condemned a person to hell in the afterlife.

While some sins were venial, meaning forgivable and minor, most sins were

mortal. A mortal sin separated the soul from God; there was a range of se-

riousness varying from skipping Mass to murder. The solution for a mor-

tal sin was to confess it to a priest and do penance. Penance was a penalty

set by the priest in exchange for absolution (the priest’s assurance of God’s

forgiveness). The church published penance guides that listed sins in great

detail and suggested appropriate penances. Historians can learn from these

penance books which factors were considered to make a sin worse.

Penance might consist of charitable giving or prayers to be repeated by

the sinner a set number of times. A knight ’s penance might be a pilgrimage

or joining a Crusade. “Taking up the Cross” was an assured way to heaven;

Crusaders were given a plenary indulgence that wiped out all remaining

guilt. Large amounts of confession and penance assured a soul’s salvation,

so a monk’s life—ﬁ lled with prayers, Mass, and charitable work—was con-

Church

121

sidered holier than a lay person’s. People believed a dedicated religious life

meant assurance of heaven.

The medieval Christian believed the afterlife had three places: heaven, hell,

and purgatory. Perfect souls who had confessed and done penance for all

of their sins, and who thus died in perfect harmony with God, went straight

to heaven. Heaven was a place of complete peace and happiness with God,

the saints, and angels. Wicked souls who had committed mortal sins and

did not confess or repent went straight to hell. Hell was a place of torment,

pain, and eternal regret where it was too late to repent. Medieval people

were very aware that most people were neither perfectly good nor com-

pletely wicked. Peasants and townspeople who had tried to live fairly good

lives, and who had not perhaps remembered every sin when they confessed

or who had died suddenly before a priest could hear their ﬁ nal confession,

were not good enough for heaven but did not seem to deserve hell. It stood

to reason that a third place existed for them: purgatory.

Purgatory was a place of sadness and discomfort, but not of torment or

hopelessness. The purpose of purgatory was to ﬁ nish the works of penance

begun on earth. When repentance was complete, the perfected soul would

be admitted into heaven. Most lay people assumed they would go to purga-

tory. They also believed that prayers for the dead would release them from

purgatory more quickly. Many people left money to a monastery or church

with the stipulation that the church offer eternal prayers for their soul, and

many people prayed regularly for the souls of their loved ones in purgatory.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the church began to teach that the

Pope could grant indulgences that reduced time in purgatory, usually by

40 days. Pardoners were traveling church ofﬁ cials who sold pardons on be-

half of the Pope. They often preached a public sermon, ﬁ rst, to motivate peo-

ple to buy these indulgences. Other indulgences could be purchased with

donations to the church, sometimes even for building or ﬁ xing a bridge

on church property. In medieval England, parish churches kept lists of all

the people who had made charitable donations in order to be remembered

in prayer. Once a year, this list—the bederoll—was read in public during a

prayer for the souls of the dead.

Everyday Religious Practice

Although cathedrals command our attention, most medieval people at-

tended small local churches. These buildings were designed with the entry

facing west and the altar at the opposite end, facing east. They had murals

painted on the walls that told Bible stories or stories of saints. Because most

people could not read and might never see a Bible, these murals were their

only book. Every church also had a large cross, displayed prominently, that

always included a carved ﬁ gure of Jesus nailed to the cross.

Church

122

Churches also had graveyards, which were important because the ground

had been blessed, or hallowed. Some nobles were buried inside churches,

in tombs under the ﬂ oor or in the cellar. Their stone efﬁ gies and memorial

brasses were placed along the walls or in special chapels. Cemeteries and

other means of burial were the most important services the church offered

since people believed burial in unholy ground kept the soul from going to

heaven.

Every church celebrated Mass on Sundays, but attendance was patchy and

varied widely. Parish priests lived in the village in a rectory. The house was

not as grand as a manor house, but it was usually nicer than a peasant’s cot-

tage. The property and income of a parish priest were comfortable by village

standards. Priests were supposed to be able to read and write, though not

all knew how. Until the Second Lateran Council of 1139, parish priests were

often married.

Besides attending Mass and confession at least once a year, the chief duty

of a medieval Christian was to observe the calendar of the church. When

the Christian religion spread into Europe, missionaries consciously adapted

Christian beliefs and stories to the existing pagan rituals of the seasons. If

the people were used to having a feast in a certain time, the priests found a

saint whose day could provide a reason for feasting.

Romanesque churches were often decorated with wall paintings that told Bible stories

to the illiterate congregation. Church frescoes were the only art that common people

ever saw, and the colorful pictures made the distant Bible lands seem more real to

them. (Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Church

123

Fasts and feasts alternated. Because the church’s ideal of holiness meant

denial of the body’s needs, there were more fast days than feast days. Fasting

meant either no food at all, one or two very small meals, or meatless meals.

The best-known fasting season was Lent, the 40 days before Easter. No

meat or eggs could be eaten during this time. Fish was always permitted; at

the tables of the wealthy, cooks served creative dishes with salted or fresh

ﬁ sh. The poor ate what they could, usually salted cod or herring.

Other fast days came into practice through the Middle Ages. Friday be-

came a meatless fast day. By the height of the Middle Ages, there were so

many fast days that for those who tried to observe them all, about three days

per week would be fasts, if not more. King Louis IX of France, also known

as Saint Louis, was observant of so many fasts that he ﬁ nally made fasting his

normal diet.

The best-known feast day was Christmas, and, following it, Twelfth Night.

Christmas was not celebrated with gifts, let alone with pine trees, in the

Middle Ages. It was a feast, which, for the nobility, meant minstrels and jug-

glers, music and dancing, and a very large meal. Other holiday feasts hon-

ored saints: Saint Crispin’s Day, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the Feast

of Saint Benedict, Michaelmas to honor the Archangel Michael, and Can-

dlemas, usually to honor Mary.

Another feast that has persisted into modern times is Carnival, the feast

of eating meat before the Lenten fast began. Although it was not a religious

feast, it became customary in many parts of medieval Europe. Carnival cel-

ebrations were rowdy and colorful. In Italy, a straw old woman was burned

to show the death of winter and the old year.

Church life in towns included many public rituals and drama. People

might act out the scene of Jesus’s birth or conduct public processions for

Palm Sunday and Easter. Traveling players put on scenes from Bible sto-

ries, telling illiterate villagers the stories of Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and Je-

sus. At York, England, the feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated with a

play that showed scenes representing the entire timeline of the Bible. These

mystery and miracle plays were sometimes comic, in spite of their religious

nature.

Between 1347 and 1405, waves of the plague now called the Black Death

swept across Europe. Among the many changes in society that the recurring

plague created, the ideal of holiness seems to have changed. Burial and prayer

societies started in many cities, sometimes in the craft guilds, and were of-

ten called guilds on their own. The members agreed to pray for each other’s

souls and the souls of the dead. Throughout the next centuries, these guilds

often sponsored general prayer meetings. The members were not priests or

monks, just townspeople with ordinary jobs. It was a new idea that their

lives could be dedicated to prayer although they had not withdrawn from

the world.

Church

124

Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox

The fall of the Roman Empire separated Rome from the Eastern centers

of the church. After Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria fell to Muslim in-

vaders, only Constantinople was left as an important church center. Its cul-

ture and government claimed continuity from Rome’s. Under Constantine,

the emperor had been the head of the church, which continued in Constan-

tinople. While the Western church adapted to deal with barbarian invasions

and kingdoms, the Eastern church remained centralized and traditional.

The cultures began to drift apart as their monastic traditions, worship

rituals, and theology grew independently. In 857, Emperor Michael III

deposed the patriarch of Constantinople and appointed a new one. Both

patriarchs, old and new, appealed to the Roman Pope to settle the matter.

The candidate who lost accused the Pope and the Roman Church of heresy,

and there was less communication with Rome after that.

The ﬁ nal break came when the Roman church gradually added a phrase to

their ofﬁ cial statement of beliefs. It was aimed at the kingdoms that had

adopted the Arian Christian faith. Arians did not believe Jesus was fully God,

so the Roman church began to state that the Spirit proceeded from both the

Father and the Son ( ﬁ lioque ) to emphasize the equality of Jesus. The Eastern

church did not face the same set of problems, and the decision to include

the phrase did not ring true with them.

The split was ofﬁ cial in 1054, when the patriarch accused the Roman

church of errors and closed Latin churches in Constantinople. Both sides

ended by excommunicating the other. Each church used a term that sug-

gested that it was the true, original church. In Constantinople, they were

the Orthodox, which means “correct teachings.” Rome’s church called it-

self Catholic, which means “universal.”

On the eve of the Turkish assault on Constantinople, there was a wide-

spread church conference in Florence, Italy. The attendees made a serious at-

tempt to negotiate the reuniﬁ cation of the church. Both sides, Catholic and

Orthodox, agreed to set aside their differences. But two months later, Con-

stantinople was in Turkish hands, and the agreement was never put into

practice.

See also: Cathedrals, Crusades, Drama, Fasts, Holidays, Monasteries, Pil-

grims, Saints.

Further Reading

Herrin, Judith. The Formation of Christendom. Trenton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1989.

Kelly, Joseph F. The Ecumenical Councils of the Catholic Church: A History. Colle-

geville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009.

Cities

125

Logan, Donald F. A History of the Church in the Middle Ages. New York: Rout-

ledge, 2002.

Mullins, Edwin. The Popes of Avignon: A Century in Exile. New York: Bluebridge,

2008.

Norman, Edward R. The Roman Catholic Church: An Illustrated History. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2007.

O’Malley, John. A History of the Popes: From Peter to the Present. Lanham, MD:

Sheed and Ward, 2006.

Rubin, Miri, ed. Medieval Christianity in Practice. Trenton, NJ: Princeton Univer-

sity Press, 2009.

Runciman, Steven. The Eastern Schism: A Study of the Papacy and the Eastern Churches

during the XIth and XIIth Centuries. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publish-

ers, 2005.

Russell, James C. The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistori-

cal Approach to Religious Transformation. New York: Oxford University Press,

1996.

Volz, Carl A. The Medieval Church. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1997.

Cities

Europe’s Middle Ages were a time of settlement and development; at the

start of this period, most of Europe was forested with few people, while by

the close of the Middle Ages, it was ﬁ lled with industries and great cities.

Most of these cities were built during the Middle Ages and were established

by 1300. Even so, by far most of Europe’s population still lived in the country.

While Rome and some Italian cities inherited their streets, plazas, build-

ings, and plumbing from the Roman Empire, other medieval cities had to

build and invent from scratch. At the beginning of the period, there were few

industrial goods, and most exports were raw materials such as wool. By

the end of the period, some northern cities were producing highly reﬁ ned

goods to trade with the rest of the world. Some cities were commercial hubs

with international banking and hundreds of foreign merchants and artisans.

The Growth of Towns

At the beginning of the Middle Ages, most people lived in the country on

small farms or estates. People in the country were nearly always attached to

the estate of a lord, owing service and needing permission to move. When a

town grew up on a lord’s land, he granted it a charter of freedom so the peo-

ple of the town did not owe service and were considered free. The citizens

of the town then could make their own laws and hold their own courts. A

new middle class grew in the towns, detached from the land and living by

their personal job skills.

Cities

126

Most cities grew up around a walled fortress that could offer merchants

and craftsmen a refuge against attack. Often, a marketplace developed out-

side the fortress’s walls, which attracted more settlement. Towns then be-

came centers of trade, with regional specialties. As types of trade shifted,

towns grew or stagnated. Some grew at a sea or river port, while others grew

at the crossing of two major roads. A place on a river that offered a ford or

a place to build a bridge usually became a major town. Some grew because

of raw materials that attracted industry. Still others were planned from the

start by ambitious rulers.

Towns that began outside a castle’s walls often built their own walls

when they had a town charter and the means to afford it. This was especially

true in a time of civil war or outside attacks. Sometimes walls were ditches

and wooden palisades, while other towns could afford full-scale stone walls

with crenellations. As the cities outgrew their walls, people built again out-

side the walls. These extramural villages grew until they functioned as an im-

portant part of the town’s economy. In many cases, towns could allow new

areas to grow without defenses, but other cities built larger walls to encircle

and protect the new settlements. Florence built three rings of walls as the

city grew during the Middle Ages. Defense was a serious matter in the war-

prone cities of Italy. Within the city of Florence, aristocratic families built

defense towers among their houses, and groups of commoners came to-

gether to build their own defense towers.

In the late Middle Ages, some areas in France and Italy began to develop

planned cities, laid out by an urban planner and built to speciﬁ cations.

These planned cities had public squares and wider streets and were carefully

laid out on a rectangular grid. The public squares were used for drama,

meetings, and festivals. Even in England, some towns were planned as mar-

ket centers and had streets laid out on a grid. The size of building plots was

usually controlled by the town government.

Medieval towns typically had very wide main streets, since these streets

also served as marketplaces. Although medieval sections of European cities

have narrow streets, this may be a feature of later overbuilding during the

Renaissance. Narrow alleys usually cut through the backs of building plots,

allowing foot and cart trafﬁ c. In addition to the street’s use as a market,

there was usually at least one dedicated market, often more. These open

areas were between 50 and 150 feet wide, allowing room for livestock and

carts. Over the 12th and 13th centuries, these market spaces were ﬁ lled with

guildhalls, chapels, and eventually houses and shops. New markets had to

be opened outside of towns.

Large towns developed a number of churches and marketplaces and

often became cathedral towns. By the 13th century, as their populations

grew into the tens of thousands, they could be considered cities. They usu-

ally minted coins and had a prison and courthouse. The problems faced in

Cities

127

administering a medieval town as it grew into a city passed what a council

could handle and required an administrative bureaucracy.

The governing rights of a city varied across Europe. After central govern-

ment fell apart in the 11th century, the cities of northern Italy were entirely

self-governing and could make their own currency, maintain armies, and go

to war against each other. Some even bought feudal rights to the surround-

ing countryside, enlarging their republic’s domain peacefully. The typical

Italian city was governed by a council and a podestà, a hired administrator

who came from another city commune and was not related to any of the

dominant extended families in the city. By the 14th century, this ofﬁ cial was

only a temporarily hired judge, but at times he had full governing or may-

oral power.

In France and England, central governments maintained control over cit-

ies but permitted them to establish their own courts and administrations.

London’s city government became powerful enough to threaten the king’s

The old city of Carcassonne, in France’s southern region of Provence, retains its

medieval form. The original medieval wall was a double concentric ring with

50 towers. After it was conquered during the Albigensian Crusade, the city fell out of

the mainstream of modernization. During the 19th century, enough of the original

wall remained, though in bad repair, that the city fathers chose to rebuild it as a

historical monument. Pictured here is the main town gate with its outer ramparts.

(iStockphoto)

Cities

128

power at times; the mayor was elected directly by the trade guilds. The guild-

hall was the center of London’s government. Louis IX of France chose

mayors out of a selection of candidates that the cities could propose, per-

mitting cities little independence. Barcelona, reconquered by the Christian

kings, became self-governing in its maritime commercial district so that in-

ternational commerce would be unaffected by local politics. German cities

were often largely autonomous within the German empire.

The appearance of medieval cities varied as widely as their individual his-

tories and regional building materials, but some generalities can be made.

Housing for the poor was nearly always made of wood and was very much

in danger of ﬁ re. Fires at times wiped out large sections of cities, from Con-

stantinople to the smallest northern market town. In places where stone

was plentiful or brick was easily made, towns encouraged building with

these materials where possible. The average Northern European city was

built mostly of timber framing with wattle and daub walls.

Chimneys were not included in urban planning until the late 14th cen-

tury, so houses in town had to cook with care. Kitchens were best planned

outside the main building, but, in a crowded city where the poor lived in

ﬂ ats, this was not possible. Heat came from wood or charcoal. The air in a

medieval city was ﬁ lled with smoke from home and business ﬁ res. In winter,

most rooms inside were either cold or smoky. Windows did not have glass

until after the Middle Ages, except in the most expensive urban homes. They

were open and shuttered or covered with oiled parchment or thin slices

of horn.

Many houses kept small gardens or even fruit trees in the small plot of

land attached to the house. The kitchen garden often grew cabbage, leeks,

chives, garlic, and herbs like sage, parsley, and fennel. Roses and violets were

not just ﬂ owers; they could be distilled into ﬂ ower syrups for ﬂ avoring. The

cesspit and well were also located in this small area behind the house.

Streets were mostly dirt. Rome’s streets were paved, as were the major

streets of many other Italian towns. Cordoba, Spain, paved its streets dur-

ing the period of Muslim rule in the ninth century. Paris paved its streets

during the 12th century, starting ﬁ rst with the principal streets of the Cité,

the original citadel on an island in the Seine River. Paved streets were cleaner

but required expensive upkeep when the stones broke under the heavy loads

carried through cities. Some large cities had sweeping services, while others

mandated that residents and shop owners take responsibility for their block.

Most city neighborhoods had a well that had been dug at the time of set-

tlement, and some houses had wells. Big cities had public wells and piped

water to neighborhoods without wells. Increasingly, they also had to carry

away garbage, as well as provide services such as a night watch and magis-

trates to keep the peace.

Cities

129

Towns and cities mixed businesses and residences closely, since people

nearly always lived in or near their businesses. Some businesses were moved

outside the walls because they created waste (butchers and tanners) or ﬁ re

hazards (blacksmiths). Many kinds of businesses became concentrated in

certain districts of a town, controlled by their guilds. Others, such as baker-

ies and cookshops, remained spread through city neighborhoods and par-

ishes.

Cities were also full of daily markets. There were shops and booths, and

criers went about selling wares in the streets. A town housewife could count

on having criers walk by all day, calling out for cabbage, onions, apples, im-

ported lemons, spices, bread, and ale. Many cities had vendors who sold hot

food and cried out things like “hot pies!” and “smoked eels!” Additionally,

there were other criers, such as beggars and lepers ringing bells or shaking

clappers. Some cities, such as 14th-century London, regulated the prices of

basic necessary foods such as bread and ale.

Trade fairs permitted local and foreign merchants to mingle. A fair last-

ing several weeks was held at a certain time every year so people could plan

for the display or travel. The fairs across Flanders were coordinated so mer-

chants would have time to travel between them. Some fairs grew so large

that towns grew just based on hosting the fair. In the 13th century, the count

of Champagne, in northern France, organized six fairs per year so the re-

gion became a trading hub. The towns and cities collected tolls, fees, and

taxes on all these activities.

One of the key traits separating a medieval town from a Renaissance

town was the presence of animals. Towns grew from villages, and people as-

sumed the right to keep all sorts of farm animals and to carry out all sorts

of animal-related trades, such as butchering and leather tanning. Dead ani-

mals, when not eaten, were buried on the owner’s lot, and animal waste

went into the street. A medieval town or city was ﬁ lled with crowing roost-

ers, squealing half-wild pigs, and dung everywhere. During the 15th cen-

tury, the growth of large towns forced city governments to sharply curtail

animal care. Streets had to be kept clean, and animals could not be buried

inside town walls. Many farm animals, such as pigs, were banned altogether.

Medieval cities and towns often had unique festivals, in addition to the

universal ones such as Christmas. Every parish had a patron saint of its

church, and every city claimed its own patron saint. The patron saint’s day

on the liturgical calendar was a day of feasting and civic pride. Businesses

and schools closed, and construction work stopped. Festival always had a

religious component, usually a procession of the church’s holy relics through

the town or around the basilica. There was always a special Mass in honor of

the patron saint. Secular activities always involved large amounts of food, in

some cases hosted by the town government and in others by guilds or the