Lotharingia

by Simon Winder

  As so much of Maulbronn survives it remains as a complete guide to the austerity of the Cistercian vision. There was no room or corridor which in itself did not contribute to a life dedicated entirely to prayer. The monks viewed colour with suspicion (a ‘false value’ according to St Bernard), with all windows clear, or with a grey tint to reduce direct sunlight. The monks lived in almost total silence, communicating through a narrow range of hand signals and only then on approved occasions. If the abbot needed to talk to a monk then this would be done in a special room, the auditorium, in a quiet voice. This silence was all the more striking as it was broken only by prayers, said or sung, in a gruelling sequence beginning in summer at two in the morning and ending just at eight in the evening with sleep. Manual labour began each morning from 4.40. Every year was a relentless round of readings, songs and prayers which ended only with each monk’s death. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of this existence was that it was viewed merely as preparatory: an expiatory and crude limbering up, with the real work to be done by the monks in the Afterlife.

  The abbey at Maulbronn has even kept its original structure, with the central church once reserved for the monks, a separate section for the lay-brothers – themselves serious figures but who operated on a lower plane, doing much of the heavy work around the complex – and then the paradisium, a covered area outside the church, in itself an almost shockingly beautiful building, to house mere lay onlookers. Over three hundred such locations once formed a dense network covering Europe, each directly linked to a ‘mother’ monastery, with which there would be frequent contact, and all leading back to the great original Burgundian abbey at Cîteaux (Cistercium), now come a long way from its own ‘wilderness’ origins. Each abbey had to deal with the problem of how to maintain its Desert Fathers’ inspiration as its economic activities besieged it with worldly temptation. Members of royal families would join specific abbeys (sometimes through compulsion after some entirely secular fiasco, sometimes through genuine inspiration) and needed to be accommodated. In the later Middle Ages many side chapels were built and the monasteries became entangled in the prayers-for-money scandal of unending sequences of pleas to Heaven for specific rich families to reduce their time in Purgatory. Each monk’s lifetime was spent navigating through everything from small temptations (was having honey in the refectory a near-Satanic setback?) to wider disasters of sex, backstabbing and loss of vocation. A key part of the charge-sheet of the Reformation was that these abbeys were mere nests of venal hypocrisy, but there seems little genuine evidence for this – every generation was steeped in the same issues and it was always part of Cistercian practice to battle with the commitment to a near-inhuman level of asceticism and to sometimes fail. But these great institutions were for centuries the motor for Europe’s spiritual, cultural and economic hopes, places of pilgrimage, guardians of the past and guarantors of the future. Even the most sybaritic lay magnate understood that mere castles, towns and palaces were minor spin-offs. Indeed, it could be that the once-haughty crusading rulers of Berg would be thrilled to know that they have wound up abused as mere platforms for a Christmas crib.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Sibyl of the Rhine » Some nuts and bolts » Stories of Wolf Inngrim » Street scenes » Amiens Cathedral and its aftermath » Famine, plague and flood » The bold and the mad

  The Sibyl of the Rhine

  I used to make an annual pilgrimage to the Michigan town of Kalamazoo. Each year a large group of medieval historians would meet up at the state university and give papers on their research. I was there during the 1980s as a publisher, looking for interesting book ideas. It was always an enjoyable occasion. Michigan itself, for someone who grew up in England, was a magic place – I could never stop revelling in its sheer inlandness, its weird blackbirds with red feather epaulettes on their shoulders, its vast lakes. I once drove in a loop from Kalamazoo, round the Canadian side of Lake Huron, down through the Upper Peninsula, and back to Kalamazoo – ridiculously happy days with every town having some curious story, from the Finns of Sudbury to the Cornish of the Upper Peninsula, with their mutant, poorly evolved Cornish pasties. The conference itself brought together the most unusual people. There was a group from Toronto who had made a full-size trebuchet, which they gleefully demonstrated on a sports field, flinging objects vast distances and proving that medieval technology was indeed formidable. Every year, some Trappist monks from the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky would be there, brilliantly expressing their order’s suspicion of trivial speech by selling boxes of walnut bourbon fudge. Indeed, the little booths selling icons, rosaries, prayer books, posters and statues made twentieth-century Kalamazoo feel very much like thirteenth-century Bruges, albeit framed by a sports hall.

  The conference highlight was always the disco, a complex, deeply awkward event where poor sexual decision-making as a graduate student came back to haunt now-distinguished figures and was in turn renewed. It was always easy to get chatting to someone who could point out who had once grossly betrayed whom and savour the time when so-and-so threw a beaker of mead in so-and-so’s face. Once, when the B52s’ ‘Rock Lobster’ was playing (as usual), a whole group in the middle of the dance-floor got down on their hands and knees and were crawling along, bobbing their heads up and down, pretending funly – as I thought – to be rocking lobsters, but it turned out that one of them had just dropped a contact lens.

  There were all kinds of papers being given in the intervals between wolfing down monastic candy and frugging, but what was startling, new and exciting then was the sudden emergence of Hildegard von Bingen. This previously obscure mystic from the twelfth-century Rhineland was a dream figure for the 1980s. Hildegard’s extraordinary achievements crossed with almost every interesting wave, whether social, feminist, musical, gay or political. Indeed, sometimes she seemed made up, or at least wilfully projected on by her most fervent adherents. She would herself have probably seen the Kalamazoo conference as being emitted by the belching jaws of Hell.

  Hildegard was born in a small town near the west bank of the Rhine close to Worms. Her fate stemmed from being a tenth child. Following the universal requirement to ‘tithe’ – i.e. give a tenth of your goods (money, crops, wine) to the Church – her parents handed her when very young to a monastery. She was walled up as an anchorite with the slightly older Jutta von Sponheim. This ceremony and its consequence sound nightmarish – a religious service which literally treated the young women as in a secular sense no longer living and which culminated in the cell being blocked in. A small window allowed the transfer of necessary items of food and waste, but otherwise the task of the anchorite was simply to spend her entire life praying for human salvation, one cell in the vast hive of prayer across Christendom to redeem humanity. Occasional conversations with the outside world were allowed under strict supervision – but there were elaborate devices to ensure no eye-contact. Hildegard lived like this for over twenty years. Jutta mortified herself in horrific ways – she wrapped chains around her body so that over the years her flesh gradually grew round them; she refused food, cried out and had visions. The practical reality of this life is in some ways mysterious, as their isolation does not seem to have prevented Hildegard from learning to read or play music, but it was undeniably harsh.

  In Hildegard’s later years it all seems a bit hard lines on poor Jutta as Hildegard moved on, leaving behind the life of the anchorite, founding her own abbey, marching around flanked by an honour guard of young nuns with lavish veils and gold coronets. Hildegard lived to the age of eighty and everything she turned her hand to was remarkable. She was prostrated by searing visions, which she wrote down and which were drawn and illuminated by nuns in her convent at Rupertsberg. The visions are hard to read because they are nonsense, at least in the sense that they could only be valued in a society with values almost unrelated to our own. But as illustrations they are simply astonishing – a golden kite covered in eyes; the three-winged head of God; Lucifer and his followers as black
stars thrown into an abyss; the Cosmic Egg; the excrement-covered head of Antichrist emerging from the genitals of defiled Mother Church; an almost Sufic image of Jesus within the gold circle of the Holy Ghost. Everything about Hildegard plunges the unwary into a very peculiar world. She invented her own language with its own alphabet, the point of which remains absolutely mysterious. It includes some wonderful words: kulzphazur for great-great-great-grandfather, zuuenz for saint, limzkil for child. She wrote fascinatingly about medicine, and has become a heroine of New Age healing as a result, with attempts to make practical use of her sometimes outlandish recommendations. There are so many curiosities, but her cure for jaundice by carefully tying a stunned bat to your loins and waiting for it to die seems beyond improvement. She travelled around giving sermons in such cities as Metz, Mainz and Cologne, where she preached against the evils of the emerging Cathar movement. How a woman was able to do this, in a context where only men had any public religious role, is unknown.

  In many ways Hildegard’s greatness lies in our knowing about her – so many medieval manuscripts are anonymous, but Hildegard’s life is documented and her oeuvre is if not comprehensible then certainly finite and manageable. Hildegard is so omni-capable that it is impossible to know at this distance in time what she created herself and what with others. We cannot know, most importantly, if she painted her own visions or whether they were created for her by nuns – we only assume the latter because it just seems too much for one person to have such genius. The music is without doubt her own though and it has a special place both because it is great music, and also because it is possible to focus on it as a specific list of compositions, not (like much of the period’s music) as the work, yet again, of Anon. The music’s words are visions (towers, spices, jewels, clouds) but with the magical frame of the singing, and often rooted in the Rhineland world – her great songs to St Eucharius, the Bishop of Trier some nine hundred years before Hildegard lived, and to St Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, whose many bones were unearthed in Cologne during Hildegard’s childhood.

  Hildegard’s rediscovery in the twentieth century began appropriately with her embrace by a new generation of nuns, who republished her work and recopied the paintings of her visions. She has been embraced since by any number of almost unrelated factions – a fantastically more vivid figure than, say, her contemporary Conrad III, about whom even a tiny cabal of specialists can only claim to feel at best lukewarm. Even her recipes continue to be made. I was kindly passed a ‘calming cookie’ recipe from a north German convent, which had so much nutmeg in it that the cookies seemed to me inedible, but one of the children munched away on one, albeit no calmer as a result. In 2012 she was at last, after centuries of intermittent argument, made a saint, by Pope Benedict XVI, a German helping out another German, only a few years after her beloved St Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins got a very severe downgrade. It is impossible to escape the feeling though that she was in the end a harsh, vexed figure, living in a world crazily remote from our own. We might have taken up her enthusiasm for spelt grain and love her music (played at Ibiza clubs in the 1990s with additional percussion – and almost certainly since at the Kalamazoo disco) but we can at best glance anxiously at most of her output, with its demands for utter, total obedience and a life devoted purely to the life to come. Sometimes she seems to be a twelfth-century Dante in her imagery and vivid strangeness, but then she spins off into a spiritual Outer Space where most of us cannot follow.

  Some nuts and bolts

  Once Lotharingia had been absorbed into East Francia rather than West Francia, the border between the two sprawling entities became fundamental to the future of Europe – with the allegiance of the major dukes and counts feeding into the networks of what became either the French king or the German king. France was a much thinner, more westerly state than the boxy hexagon it has since become. It diverged from the ‘German’ lands in having the heavy focus of Paris and its extremely rich surrounding lands of the Île-de-France. The German ruler remained for centuries on the move, shifting from palace to palace, town to town, in a rather King Lear manner. This became a great source of shame to nineteenth-century German historians who saw itinerant monarchy as disgraceful and weak and the root of Germany’s misery. They came to focus on the ‘strong’ emperors, such as Otto the Great or Frederick Barbarossa, and treated the story as a tragedy whereby the failure of such imperially significant cities as Nuremberg, Aachen or Regensburg to become the German Paris doomed the Empire to enfeeblement and abasement. This rather spike-helmeted view of the world has for obvious reasons since been somewhat discredited.

  The differences between West and East Francia were substantially those of geography. Whatever setbacks the ruler in Paris had to deal with, he had the confidence of much of his realm being defined by oceans and high mountains while in the east the border with the Empire was also clear. France proved almost impossible to invade, with even the persistent English seen off in the end. East Francia on the other hand was a colonial state, pushing further into Europe against innumerable Slavic, Viking, Magyar and Latinate peoples. In the later Middle Ages, the Emperor then became responsible for an enormous and permanent fighting frontier with Islam which settled the ‘capital’ (really, just the home town of the Habsburg family) at Vienna as the best place from which to watch the Ottomans – a role it would keep until the eighteenth century. This meant that the Empire (I will now abandon the term East Francia) had a magnetic pull ever further eastwards, with many of the most distinguished soldiers fighting the Ottomans coming from the ‘back areas’ of Lorraine and the Rhineland. This complex mix of opportunity (the colonizing of ‘new’ lands in Silesia or Brandenburg) and danger (towns burned flat by Tatar raiders) gave the Empire a destiny almost unrelated to that of France. The Emperor was always obliged to shuttle around dealing with all kinds of emergencies at most points of the compass. He was also obliged to devolve responsibility permanently onto many regional leaders, generally called margraves or dukes, to organize their own regional defence.

  This structure became formalized in the fourteenth century, reflecting much earlier practice. The document known as the Golden Bull specified all the steps required to elect each new German king – the somewhat restricted electorate being just seven individuals: the three Rhineland ecclesiastical rulers (Mainz, Cologne, Trier) and four secular rulers (in the west, the Count Palatine; in the east, the King of Bohemia, the Margrave of Brandenburg and the Duke of Saxony). With extremely rare changes, these electors remained in place until Napoleon arrived to sweep the whole lot away. Each election was an exquisite dilemma. It was fun to vote for someone useless because then the electors could do as they wished, but that could also cause a miserable anarchy – so they needed to vote for someone from the tiny handful of families rich enough and with enough land to carry out the job successfully. As with the other major electoral job – the papacy – there was always the lurking danger that some basic disagreement might create kings and anti-kings, but in practice this was rare. Several families (most notably the Staufers and Luxembourgers) provided emperors before Frederick III of the Habsburg family began a sensational run in 1440 that continued, with one brief interruption, until 1806, when the Empire was abolished, and then continued in the reduced but by no means contemptible role of Austrian Emperor until 1918.

  The French monarchy was by contrast entirely hereditary. Once Hugh Capet in 987 had been elected King of the Franks his descendants, through some twists and turns, continued to rule France until Louis-Philippe fled into exile in 1848. Both monarchies – all monarchies – shared the usual problems of over-mighty subjects, madness, poor judgement, battlefield humiliation, personal acrimonies, senility, scheming wives and children, putting on weight, too much time spent hawking/fornicating/praying/buying tapestries, and so on. Both monarchies – all monarchies – suffered from ‘original sin’: in other words nobody coming to the throne ever had a clean slate and a clear head. Within moments of taking the co
ronation oath, the king may still just keep that glowing aura of religious sanction and secular muscle, but he still cannot get on with his mother and has a younger brother who is a better horseman and who, everyone agrees, is simply more likeable.

  The most fundamental inheritance for each monarch was their shifting, complex relationship with each of their major noblemen. In France this became extremely awkward in the twelfth century as the Angevin family, based originally in Anjou, became staggeringly powerful – becoming rulers of almost the entirety of western France and Kings of England. The unhappy Louis VII spent his long reign deluged in humiliations, not only messing up the Second Crusade but having his marriage with his first wife, Eleanor, the era’s greatest heiress, annulled. She then married the Angevin Count Henry (the future Henry II of England) and handed him the whole of south-west France, the sprawling Duchy of Aquitaine. This led to the French king holding a mere residual chunk of France, completely boxed in by Angevin holdings. Even at this low point, however, what is striking is that in the medium term the French monarchy always wins. I can imagine some future time when a horrible toy is invented, perhaps a robot teddy-bear, which can have chunks cut off it, which can be flattened, can be set alight, but which, even when reduced to a smouldering piece of scrap by its psychotic child owner, regenerates to the same shape and same warm smile as when it was back in the shop. France seems similar. Louis VII must have died thinking, ‘Well, that didn’t go brilliantly’ – but his son Philip Augustus, with remarkable speed, wrecked the Angevins and reflated the entire kingdom.