Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 69 - Germany in 1200 Medieval Faith

Way back when, in Episode 30 we identified three drivers of the Investiture Controversy. These were: the conflict between the emperor and the princes, the conflict of the emperor with the popes and the rise and rise of piety amongst the lay people. These last 38 episodes we did talk at length about the how the princes established their own territorial lordships against the imperial central power and man did we talk about the conflict between popes and emperors.

But that third element we only touched in passing. We covered the Paterna uprising in Milan and later the emergence of the scholastic method, the role of Bernhard of Clairvaux and the crusading movement. But that did not mean at all that it had gone away. Absolutely not. It was the most crucial development in what Jacques le Goff called the “Birth of Europe”. Now is the time to talk about it in context.

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As you guys may have noticed, I am not a religious person and I struggle to believe spiritual phenomena appear solely from the revelations of prophets and divine beings. Economic, demographic and geographic conditions shape belief systems and in turn what people believe influences economic and demographic conditions. Only the true believers see geography as subject to prophetic demands.

Hence, let us take another look at the starting point in and around the year 1000. Economic conditions had begun to improve. The men and women of the early Middle Ages began climbing Mazlows pyramid. Basic physical needs were covered and, despite the ever-present violence, safety within the walled cities and under the cover of local castles had improved. Strong communities formed within the villages and cities giving people a sense of belonging and ways to gain the esteem of their neighbours. From there the road is open to seek self-actualisation, which we know in the Middle Ages does not involve Yoga, social activism or podcasting, but faith.

By 1000 most inhabitants of Western Europe and large parts of Eastern Europe were nominally Christians. But few knew what that actually meant. If you lived in a village or an outlying farmstead, you may hear mass maybe once a month when the itinerant priest came around. Some village priests were well educated at one of the monastic or episcopal schools, but not all. Books, even a basic bible were extraordinarily expensive and hence rare. They were written in Latin, the language of the elite.

The elites dominated religious life. The abbots and bishops had access to the all-important theological knowledge and what they said had to be taken as gospel. Emperors like Otto III and Henry II who had the same level of education put themselves at the head of the church. They were priest kings who presided over papal synods. Their Romanesque churches were monumental fortresses of the faith designed more to impress their power onto their surroundings than to invite the faithful.

By 1200 this world had changed. Not only had the emperor been thrown of his spiritual throne by the reform papacy, but even the church itself had to fight to keep control of its flock.

The spiritual life of the peasants had changed. Many villages now had their own priest, and they could hear mass at least on Sundays if not more often. The priest was expected to cater for the spiritual wellbeing of their parishioners, console them in grief, administer the sacraments and explain the key tenets of the faith.

Cities usually had more than one church. Rich merchants and successful artisans donate funds for mass to be said regularly. The interiors are painted with images showing stories from the bible or saint’s lives. The gothic churches being built now open up to the streets with wide and inviting gates, calling all and sundry to enter into the high and airy nave bathed in the light of coloured glass windows.Itinerant preachers travel from place to place and draw large crowds. Students travel to the newly founded universities in Paris, Bologna, Montpellier and on their return share what they have learned. Merchants and artisans move from town to town not just to sell their wares and services, but also to visit famous shrines and see venerated religious figures like Bernhard of Clairvaux or Hildegard von Bingen.

Even the otherwise uncouth knights become pilgrims. You remember the Norman fighters who had initially come to Puglia to pray at the shrine of St. Michael in Gargano and stayed picking up jobs with the quarrelling powers of Southern Italy. The crusades were first and foremost pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulchre and military conquests second.

Book production moves from monastic scriptoria to the cities giving the educated classes access to the actual text of the bible and the writings of the church fathers.

People, books and ideas move around from the 11th century onwards and information flows and flows.

And that quickly reveals that Christianity is a complicated religion. Take the holy trinity, one of which are father and son but all three have always been in existence – that is not easy to get your head around. The commands of the Old And the New Testament are even harder to reconcile. As the interpretations of the bible are now written down and shared, differences are becoming manifest that nobody noticed before.

The more the medieval mind craves certainty about the right way to live, the more the doubt grows.

The grand bishops and mighty abbots are not much use to alleviate the doubt. Men like Rainald von Dassel or Christian of Mainz are much more concerned with the worldly affairs of the empire than spiritual wellbeing. They are learned men and personally pious and Rainald had brought the relics of the three kings to the cathedral of Cologne, which is now rising up in the new gothic style, but they are also the leaders of Barbarossa’s armies that lay waste to cities and even try to apprehend the rightful pope.

A grand prelate in his gold and silk vestments is a long way away from Jesus’s followers who including St. Peter were simple fishermen, one was a wealthy tax collector and another one a Zealot, a professional revolutionary. Only the apostle Paul had been a Pharisee, I.e., a religious educator and political operator.

As we move into the 13th century people want to understand, to feel and to live their faith.

The urge to understand, structure and ultimately define Christianity had gone into the history books as scholasticism. Scholasticism is the attempt to derive truth by investigating all arguments, weighing them and arriving at a final conclusion. We have already encountered the early scholastics in episode 45 when we looked at the conflict between Abaelard and Bernhard of Clairvaux. Abaelard and the two archbishops of Canterbury, Lanfranc and Anselm had laid the foundation. Pietro Lombardo (1096-1160) produced the Four Books of Sentences, a first attempt at a comprehensive and structured summary of all theology. It is on that basis that Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinus were putting together their Summa Theologia, again an attempt to bring the texts of the bible, the church fathers and papal pronouncements into one all-encompassing summary of what was right and what was wrong.

Albertus Magnus (1200-1280) was Germany’s great contribution to the scholastic method. He lived a long and one has to admit extraordinarily productive life. In 1899 a compilation of all his writings were published in no fewer than 38 volumes. That simply boggles the mind. Remember, this is before the widespread availability of paper, I.e., most texts had to be written on parchment, which is made from leather in a costly and time-consuming process. Given how expensive writing was, people thought long and hard about whether something should be noted down for posterity. If you read the chronicles from the earlier Middle Ages, you can almost feel how deliberately they chose the events and thoughts they wanted to preserve. 38 volumes mean two things, one that production of writing material had increased dramatically over the previous centuries and that whatever Albertus Magnis wrote was considered worth preserving.

Albertus Magnus guiding light was Aristotle. Like his hero, he was interested and wrote about absolutely everything, logic, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, minerology, botany, zoology, geography, physiology, justice, law, economics, mathematics, ethics, love and friendship. His objective was to bring together not just all of theology, but all of the knowledge of the world. What made him more than just a great collector and systematiser of information was what he called, experiments. He said that “For it is [the task] of natural science not simply to accept what we are told but to inquire into the causes of natural things.” Albertus Magnus stands in many ways godparent to modern science and in 1941 he was made the patron saint of all those who work in the Natural Sciences.

Today Albertus Magnus is overshadowed by his disciple, Thomas Aquinus, the towering figure in scholastic theology. The two men met when Albertus Magnus was a magister at the university of Paris. They had a close relationship and Albertus Magnus at significant risk to himself, came to Thomas’s aid when the latter was accused of deviating from church doctrine.

Though he did receive a full professorship at the most prestigious university for theology, the university of Paris, he did leave the post to teach in Cologne. Germany did not have universities before Heidelberg was founded in 1386. That is often seen as another sign that intellectual life in Germany had fallen behind France and England in the High Middle Ages. The example of Albertus Magnus may help to correct that picture a little bit.

Whilst the scholastics were busy making sense of the bible and the world, for most people their complex theories and even more intellectual discussions held limited appeal. Many were looking for a more immediate, almost physical relationship to God. They wanted to feel what it is like to experience God’s love. And that is where the great medieval mystics fit into the picture.

We already encountered Bernhard of Clairvaux whose mad antics and venal power politics made him officially this podcast’s least popular saint. But these mystics weren’t all like this.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) is a great proponent of a more positive image of the medieval mystic. Having been born as the 10th child of a prosperous noble family, she was placed in a nunnery at very young age, she herself said when she was 8 years old. She joined the sister of her father’s liege lord, a nun named Jutta. Both women were what has been called, enclosed. That meant they were put into a cell which was then walled up. Their only communication with the outside world was through a small window in the wall where they would receive food and water.

Enclosure became a common practice for nunneries in the 12th centuries, mainly for financial reasons. Nunneries had become a burden to the monastic orders. Since nuns were not allowed to say mass or administer sacraments, they attracted less donations from patrons. On the other hand, they needed spiritual support from either monks or priests who would say mass for them, take confessions and provide spiritual guidance. Often that problem was solved by having monasteries and nunneries attached to each other, which solved some of the financial issues but caused other –entirely predictable problems for nuns and monks whose vows of celibacy had become fragile. And so, they arrived at a simple solution, wall the women in so the monks cannot get at them, but they can still hear mass and get their sacraments. Allow me to refrain from judgment here.

Hildegard it seems did not mind being enclosed. She and Jutta were admired for their piety and the pain they took on for their belief. That alone is not what she is famous for.

Hildegard experienced visions which she described as follows:quote

“From my early childhood, before my bones, nerves, and veins were fully strengthened, I have always seen this vision in my soul, even to the present time when I am more than seventy years old. In this vision my soul, as God would have it, rises up high into the vault of heaven and into the changing sky and spreads itself out among different peoples, although they are far away from me in distant lands and places. And because I see them this way in my soul, I observe them in accord with the shifting of clouds and other created things. I do not hear them with my outward ears, nor do I perceive them by the thoughts of my own heart or by any combination of my five senses, but in my soul alone, while my outward eyes are open.

So I have never fallen prey to ecstasy in the visions, but I see them wide awake, day and night. And I am constantly fettered by sickness, and often in the grip of pain so intense that it threatens to kill me, but God has sustained me until now. The light which I see thus is not spatial, but it is far, far brighter than a cloud which carries the sun. I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it "the reflection of the living Light." And as the sun, the moon, and the stars appear in water, so writings, sermons, virtues, and certain human actions take form for me and gleam.” Unquote

Her visions that she described in detail in her book, the Liber Scrivias for which she had illuminations made that look almost like abstract paintings of swirls and lights and shapes. I will put some on the webpage for this episode, historyofthegermans/69-2

She also composed some beautiful music which again I will try to put on to the webpage.

As her reputation as the Sybil of the Rhine grew, she became abbess of her own nunnery, by now no longer enclosed. Though she had not received any proper education in Latin, a collection of her letters to popes, kings and emperors was published even during her lifetime. Many argue that these letters were written by scribes, as was her book of visions. And others have declared them fakes. But I am pretty sure an emperor such as Barbarossa with a keen eye on public opinion would have very much wanted a communication with an important mystic. And if she remonstrates him for his behaviours and decisions, that was only to be expected. How much influence she had on him and whether she actually met him is unclear. And that is maybe a good thing, because if she had, she would only have been a female Bernhard of Clairvaux.

Understanding the tenets of the faith and hearing a mystic share what it feels like to believe was still not enough for many. Disappointed with the official church they wanted truly to follow in the footsteps of the Apostles. They gave away their worldly possessions and embarked on an itinerant lifestyle, preaching in the villages, towns and cities along the way, living of alms and never accepting more than food and drink.

In previous centuries individuals so inclined would have joined a strict monastic order like the Cistercians or Premonstratensians. But that is not what these religious men wanted. They did not want to pray in seclusion, set apart from their fellow men. They focused on Jesus' command to go forth and spread the word of the lord.

They would preach on street corners and piazzas, they would go to markets and bridges, wherever people gathered to talk to them. This made them very much a city phenomena.

It is in the cities where the curious, the adventurous, the intellectual and the restless gather. These are keen to incorporate some of the ways of the apostles into their lives. And supporting one of these preachers whose holiness is evident from the modesty of his lifestyle could be a way. Others go further and follow the preacher to the next town and again others join him for good.

Some of the itinerant preachers have been monks or had some form of religious education, but many had not. Some could read and explained the stories of the bible to their flock in the vernacular language. Others did make things up or cobbled them together from things they had heard elsewhere.

Peter Valdes was a rich and pious merchant from Lyon. Around 1170 he financed a translation of the bible into the local Provencal language. By 1176 he had an epiphany. He sold his business and left his family to live in apostolic poverty. He used his fortune to feed the poor during the drought that may have been the reason for his decision. After that he wondered around the diocese of Lyon and read his Provencal bible to the people.

That put him into conflict with the church. Preaching was the privilege of the priests and monks, not something and Tom, Dick or Harry could do. Valdes realised that and applied for a licence to preach for his community. Pope Alexander III did ultimately grant the licence but only as long as the local archbishop of Lyon considered them acceptable.

That system worked ok for a little while, but by 1182 a new archbishop clamped down on the Waldensians, which is what his community was now called. The bone of contention was that Valdes had allowed Women a more significant role during services. The archbishop threatened the removal of the licence to preach unless Valdes changed tack, which he refused quoting Apostles 5.29: “We must obey God rather than any human authority”. He and his followers were duly excommunicated and exiled from Lyon.

The Waldensians then spread across the main urban centres of Southern France and Northern Italy, in Bavaria, Swabia and up along the Rhine River. The rejection by the church meant they no longer had to care about the official doctrine. They developed their own theology based on a very literal reading of the bible. Their belief system is often seen as a forerunner of protestant beliefs, in particular the focus on individual study of the bible, the importance of confession, lay preaching and the rejection of saints.

From 1230 the Waldensians were persecuted by the inquisition as heretics and retired to alpine valleys in France and Piemont where there still are Waldensian communities.

For the church these developments were very disquieting. The scholastics and the mystics could be managed. They were easy to find, and they were part of the institutional church. If they strayed from the orthodoxy they could be made to recant or when that failed, could be locked up in some monastery to keep them quiet.

But these apostolic poor were outside church institutions. Their preaching was uncontrollable. They could not be shut up into a monastery because their followers would spring them from jail. Debating with them did not work because they would just throw bible quotes back at you whether they fit or not. And, as we have seen with the Waldensians, putting them under pressure only radicalised them.

In that situation the church went for a two-pronged approach – destruct and embrace.

To get rid of the most radical of these apostolic preachers was to physically eradicate them, whilst the more moderate are to be integrated into the church.

An element of the first strategy was the so-called Albigensian crusade against the Cathars. The Cathars are super popular amongst friends of the Middle Ages and I will hence not try to add much to their heavily disputed story. Maybe one thing, one of the earliest reported cases of Cathar beliefs comes from the city of Cologne in 1143. In 1163 5 adherents of Cathar beliefs were burned at the stake again in Cologne, well before they make a splash down in Southern France.

Cathars’ beliefs had moved even further from church doctrine than the Waldensians. They embraced dualist traditions that saw the world and everything in it as inherently evil. That led them to denying that Christ had become human, as that would have been an embrace of the evil world. Their spiritual leaders were called the perfects whose lifestyle involved a near complete rejection of the world, no money, no sex, no meat, no fun of any kind. Men and women were considered equal and both could become perfects.

The Cathars were a threat not just because of their radical beliefs, but mainly because they had begun to build institutions and infrastructure in particular in Southwest France. There were Cathar bishoprics and the Count of Toulouse had become their worldly protector.

Pope Innocent III called a crusade against the Cathars that offered full absolution of sins for anyone who would be willing to murder peasants in the Languedoc. The struggle lasted comparatively long, a first crusades from 1205 to 1215 and then 10 years of revolts. Only by 1244 could the Cathars finally be driven underground. The campaign

was exceptionally brutal. Its leader was SImon de Montfort, father of the other Simon de Montfort, the one who established the British parliament’s rights to control taxation.

In 1209 the crusaders attacked the city of Beziers. They offered the Catholics within the town free passage, which they refused. Once the city had fallen, they killed all of the its inhabitants. Asked how they should distinguish between good Catholics and heretics, they were told, “kill them all, god will know his own”. The great winner of the Albignesian crusade was the king of France who took over the County of Toulouse and ultimately all of Southern France.

Crusading against an institutionalised religion like the Cathars may be a viable strategy, but murdering all poor preachers and their followers in the cities was simply not feasible.

The church needed a way to channel this undercurrent of religious fervour and found it in the form of Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis’ backstory is almost identical to that of Peter Valdes. The son of a rich merchant he at some point rejects all worldly goods to follow in the footsteps of the apostles. He lives as a beggar and preaches all across his hometown and when there weren’t enough listeners, he would preach to the birds.

Like Valdes he seeks authorisation from the Pope and Innocent III, the same who ordered the Albigensian crusade, having learned from the disaster that was the rejection of Valdes, grants him the right to form a new monastic community.

The friars as he called them would live in the cities, they would preach to the people rather than pray in seclusion, they renounced all wealth and would move from town to town living as beggars. He quickly added a female version of his order, the poor Clares and the so-called “third order”. The third order would admit laymen who did not take monastic vows but would emulate some elements of Franciscan life whilst remaining in the world.

The Franciscan became the main way the church institutionalised the apostolic poverty movement. The other important order were the Dominicans, who were specifically founded to oppose the Cathars. The Dominicans would aim for a life of Apostolic poverty, but they would also embrace scholastic thought to be more convincing in debates with potential the heretics.

Did it work? Well, yes and no. The Cathars are no more, and the Waldensians are a small community. But the Franciscans as soon as their ascetic founder had passed, they threw half his rules overboard and built the most spectacular church in Assiss, decorated by all the greatest artists of the time. The Dominicans became the inquisitors, the Domini Canes, the hounds of the lord seeking out divergent thought.

But still there is a great legacy from this religious fervour. Doubt. The constant uncertainty whether what one is told is really the truth, the constant need to prove the accuracy of any statement, the scholastic idea of the experiment, all this feeds into what Jacques le Goff called “The Birth of Europe”.

That is it for today. Next week we will descend back to terra firma and talk a bit about the controversial word, the feudal system. I hope to see you then.

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