Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 422

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe," by Matthew Gabriele and David Perry.

Beginnings and endings are arbitrary; they frame the story that the narrator wants to tell. Our story is one that escapes the myth of the “Dark Ages,” a centuries-old understanding of the medieval world that sees it cast in shadow, only hazily understood, fixed and unchanging, but ultimately the opposite of what we want our modern world to be. So, let’s for now forget those traditional transition points between the ancient and medieval worlds, the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, the sack of Rome in 410, or the deposition in 476 of Romulus Augustulus as the “last” Roman emperor in the West. If we as a culture decide that the Middle Ages existed and had a beginning and end, we don’t need to start with decline, darkness, or death. We can start in this shining, sacred, quiet space. This doesn’t, of course, erase the violence of the past to replace it with naive nostalgia. Instead, it shows us that paths taken were not foreordained. Shifting our perspective brings people, traditionally marginalized in other tellings, into focus. Starting somewhere else shows us possible worlds.

The Dominicans in particular also served the papal mission against heresy, earning their sobriquet “hounds of the Lord” (literally, from Domini canes) for their ruthless pursuit of those deemed of questionable orthodoxy.

So, with the Inquisition burning across Europe, it perhaps would come as no surprise that in 1239 Gregory IX asked rulers throughout Christendom to investigate a book for possible heresy, worrying that it deviated from biblical truth. Most ignored the papal request, but the young King Louis IX of France responded enthusiastically and commissioned a tribunal. The queen mother would preside. 

And so in 1240, the still-young king took Gregory’s call to investigate this book, the Talmud, seriously and literally. The prosecution would be led by the chancellor of the University of Paris, alongside the bishop of Paris, the archbishop of Sens, and several friars. The defendants in this case weren’t alleged Christian heretics, but instead were rabbis from Paris, facing the charge that Jews who used the Talmud were heretics within Judaism, that this collection of commentary on the law and tradition was a deviation from the Hebrew Bible. 

The disputation had a foreordained conclusion, of course; the Jews of Paris would never have been allowed to prevail. Although they enjoyed a theoretically protected status in Christian Europe, that status was still bounded by intellectual antagonism that could—and often did—quickly slip into physical violence. Our familiar face Augustine had argued long ago that that the Jews’ subservient status “proved” Christianity’s truth, that history had demonstrated by the destruction of the Israelite Temple and rise of Christianity that God’s plan for the world was “punishment” for the Jews’ failure to accept Jesus. For medieval Christians, Jews needed to be reminded of their subservience, often through violence—harassment, segregation, and sometimes assault and murder. So, in a trial requested by the papacy, supported by the king of France, staffed by Christian churchmen, the outcome of the trial was never in doubt. 

The majority of the Christian jurors agreed that the Talmud was blasphemous and should be banned, its copies burned. So in June 1241, hundreds, if not thousands, of manuscripts were brought to the Place de Grève, stacked in a pile, and set alight. The fire may have burned so high it reflected off the stained glass of Notre-Dame across the river. Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg, who himself witnessed the book burning in 1241, would lament later in the thirteenth century that “Moses shattered the tablets, and another one then repeated his folly / Burning the law in flames . . . / I witnessed how they gathered plunder from you / Into the center of a public square . . . and burned the spoils of God on high.” Rabbi Meir, in anguish, related that the fire that burned so high, so bright in the City of Lights paradoxically “leaves me and you in darkness.”

In the past, we used to blame rats for the plague’s spread—or more specifically rats and ships, the story being that the bacterium hitched a ride in the gut of a flea or tick, which in turn hitched a ride on the back of a rat, which in turn hitched a ride on European (mostly Italian) merchant ships traveling from the Black Sea back to Europe. The fleas, the rats, the people, all facilitated the spread of the disease. Some of that still holds. Rats were almost certainly a vector for carrying the ticks to their ultimate hosts, and a more interconnected commercial world surely helped spread the disease. Yet the jump from animal to human seems to have first come from the furry marmot, hunted for both its meat and pelt, somewhere in modern Kyrgyzstan or northwestern China sometime after 1200. From there, carried on the horses, clothes, cartloads of grain, and bodies of the Mongols, the plague radiated outward.

In the Catalan town of Tàrrega in 1348, shortly after the arrival of the Black Death in early July, the Christian citizens of the town marched against their neighbors and slaughtered them, calling the Jews “traitors.” Mass graves excavated in 2007 confirmed the accuracy of the events described, revealing in the skeletons the injuries the Jews suffered and that some of the murdered were children as young as three or four. The report of the Christians calling Jews “traitors” confirmed the motivation, as the only person or thing the Jews could have “betrayed” in this instance was Jesus, and that betrayal, that supposedly continuous sin, echoed into the medieval Christians’ present and resulted in scores of mass graves, filled with Jewish men, women, and children. When leaders either cannot halt a crisis or choose not to do so, or at times they intensify that crisis, the most vulnerable are too often left behind or slaughtered. In the middle of the fourteenth century, elites too often chose conspiracy theories and scapegoating, which cost thousands their lives.

But just as we cannot sever Renaissance humanism from medieval intellectual life, we also cannot sever Renaissance horrors from medieval practices. The famous works of Renaissance art, whether civic, devotional, or personal, all required vast sums of wealth from a world becoming more unequal, profiting from centuries-old practices in quite new ways. Recent scholars, for example, believe that Leonardo da Vinci’s model for the Mona Lisa was the wife of a slave trader. We can look on “la Gioconda” and admire her smile and Leonardo’s brilliance but we can’t do so and ignore that the wealth of her class came at least in part from the intensification of an economy fueled by mass human trafficking. As we have seen throughout our history, at least some people were unfree in every medieval society. Being unfree could and did mean different things, with a wide variety of rights, protections, obligations, and pathways—or not—to freedom. Nevertheless, although chattel slavery—the buying and selling of humans—was more common in the urbanized Mediterranean than elsewhere, a factor of easier access to markets, the principle of buying and selling humans was known to medieval people, just as to ancients, just as to moderns. In the later Middle Ages, access to Black Sea ports brought new waves of enslaved peoples to the medieval Mediterranean and Europe—a trading culture common to Christians and Muslims, Italians and Egyptians. Medieval people also formed the foundational ideas about racial difference and otherness that underpinned the transatlantic slave trade, which brought so much misery. As scholars such as Geraldine Heng, Dorothy Kim, Sierra Lomuto, Cord Whitaker, and others have shown, the roots of modern white supremacy emerge not from the fantasy of a racially pure Europe (one that never existed) but rather from intellectual foundations in the Christian encounter with Jews, Muslims, and Mongols.