by Simon Winder
The crucial background in all this was the County of Flanders. In the original split between West Francia and Lotharingia, Flanders fell to the west, making the split between itself and its neighbour (the Imperial Duchy of Brabant) a fundamental one. On old maps there is a patch called the Waasland, just west of Antwerp, which is shown as part of Flanders, but which at some point in the eleventh century shifted into Brabant. Historians have given up trying to work out why – the probability was that it was a boggy marsh of so little value that nobody noticed when the Scheldt and Durme Rivers moved their banks. In any event, Waasland issues aside, Flanders became an exceptionally powerful and successful place. It had the immeasurable advantage of a long coast, which (like a mini-version of France) allowed it to focus on defending itself from land attack from only a limited number of compass points. Its cities – Ypres, Bruges and Ghent – became extremely prosperous and were the great conduits for English wool, with a large part of its population engaged in cloth-making. Down the road was the County of Boulogne – a smaller, but also prosperous territory with counts, as with Flanders, importantly involved in the crusades. But both of these were only counties and however much they might have behaved independently they could not pretend that they did not owe their allegiance to the King of France. Philip Augustus’s reshaping of the French monarchy led him to look north at Flanders. The major attempt to bring Philip down was a grand coalition of the Count of Flanders, the Count of Boulogne, the Emperor Otto IV and, every English schoolchild’s favourite, King John, to whose amazing, incompetent faithlessness we all owe so much – not least the wonderful Errol Flynn film The Adventures of Robin Hood, which we watch as a family at least twice a year. At the resulting Battle of Bouvines (1214), deep in Flemish territory, Philip Augustus destroyed the Allies. It is a curious example of how national history works that no English schoolchild has ever heard of the Battle of Bouvines, despite its effectively making England once more a separate island state and therefore being responsible for the resulting universal atmosphere of terminal cock-up and dismay leading to Magna Carta.
In his spare time Philip Augustus was busy building Notre-Dame de Paris, the Louvre and Les Halles, but his main achievement was that by the time of his death he could say that the years of French humiliation were over. But it would not be long before the French robot teddy-bear would take another terrible beating.
Stories of Wolf Inngrim
In the High Middle Ages, an era that devotes itself to conjuring up vast churches and palaces and excels at great intellectual and religious movements, it is good to focus first on a couple of small objects. The first is really tiny – a spherical lattice about the size of a Christmas-tree ornament, made in one of the Meuse towns, perhaps Dinant. Made from chiselled brass, it was designed to burn incense. The orb is made up of stylized creatures and foliage, but the note of genius is that there are three tiny people on top, showing eloquent surprise at their situation. These are (in a tumble of charismatic names) Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, the Jewish men whose faith was tested in the fiery furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar. It seems sad that these tiny characters should be trapped in a museum case in Lille and unable to continue to carry out their witty, nine-century-old role of having perfumed smoke pour upwards and round them. Perhaps somewhere in Lille there is a secret underground movement to liberate them and return them to their true function.
The other, only slightly larger object, that I have also kept coming back to just because it is so mysterious, lurks high on a pillar in Freiburg Minster. This must have once been part of a much larger decorative scheme, long since erased but with these figures kept as a reminder, or – more likely – just because they are so wonderful. The carving shows three human figures engaged with three massive, terrible-jawed animals, two of these wearing human clothing. An enormous ram’s head hovers in space, unrelated to the already confused action, and presumably part of a now missing piece of the frieze. Round the corner is a sadly worn – but fabulous – little fragment of Alexander the Great in a griffin-powered flying machine. I have returned to these monsters over the years, not least because of the strange way they echo the animal masks of the Kwakwaka’wakw of the American north-west. I don’t say this as some borderline insane piece of ethnographic showing off, but because my wife’s family live on the edge of the Salish Sea and most summers I rush off at the first chance to admire examples of this great artistic tradition. The Freiburg monsters also appear strangely Disney – the humans unperturbed by them, despite the way the sculptor has given them a terrible sense of muscular power. I had assumed they were just mysterious grotesques, but this turned out merely to be my own ignorance. When last in Freiburg somewhat to my dismay I was cheerfully informed by an official that the figure on the right, seemingly a woman on a monster, was in fact Samson (the long hair for strength) subduing a lion, while the two cowled men with the two clothed monsters were telling two different ‘frames’ from the story of Wolf Inngrim, in which a monk dresses a wolf up in human clothes and tries to educate him (there is a little book and pen) but he keeps being distracted by a nearby sheep. Unable to deny his wolfish nature, he turns from the monk and leaps on the sheep. A bit upset at this overturning of what I had lazily assumed was an ancient mystery, I quickly realized that it made no difference – these were creatures that conveyed brilliantly a universal human dismay and fascination.
The wolves were carved around 1200 in the opening phase of the building of Freiburg Minster. It was sponsored by Duke Berthold V, the last of the Zähringer dynasty, fresh from what would prove the equally lasting triumph of founding the city of Bern. These sorts of initiatives are characteristic of what was in many ways one of the most exciting, cheerful and entertaining periods in all European history. As usual we could tut-tut about life expectancy, poor hygiene and the relentless grind of agricultural labour, but this is just to buy into the patronizing and intellectually null idea that, in effect, the entire prior sum of human activity across the planet should be pitied and disregarded for not having had access to broadband.
The founding of Bern is a fine example of medieval mobility and ambition that, so close to old Roman cities such as Basle or Konstanz, could both build on earlier traditions and also start afresh. In 1191 Berthold ordered the clearing of a forested plateau, a previously unnoticed, brilliantly defendable peninsula looped by the River Aare. A series of highly unreliable but charming paintings in Bern, made many years later, show the discovery, the dense mass of trees and the climax – the killing of the bear which would become the heraldic symbol of Bern and would lead to many generations of unhappy animals living in the bear-pits. With Berthold’s death in 1218, the already thriving settlement was able to negotiate with the Emperor to become an Imperial Free City. Future generations of the Valois and Habsburg families would thoroughly regret this sequence of events, as well as another key breakthrough of the same decades: the opening up of the Saint Gotthard Pass.
Although the pass remained hair-raising for centuries (with a completely chilling bridge at one point, teetering over a chasm), horses could now travel from northern Europe to Bern to Italy – carrying either soldiers or merchants, but with a certain percentage adding themselves each year to the wind-dried piles already heaped down various gulches. While this would lead in due course to Bern’s wealth from long-distance trade, it also released into the wider world the tough, highly self-reliant and until then mercifully shut in mountain-men of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, who would form the nucleus of the future Switzerland. The sense of the Swiss as relentlessly capable, implacable and sitting in a sort of ice fortress has been appropriated by what is now the country’s ‘northern rim’: cheery commercial cities such as Basle, Schaffhausen, Zürich and indeed Bern, southern bits of the Holy Roman Empire, at best sited on steep slopes. It was the genuinely inaccessible Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden (the original three Forest Cantons) which really began the trouble as trade, men and concepts now fed up and down through Luzern and along the Saint Gotthard.
There is no way to pinpoint why too precisely, but unlike other regional protection associations which formed across the Empire, the Swiss one became serious and permanent. The murals of tough guys that festoon the walls of places like the Basle town hall were not on the whole the sort of softies who actually lived in that town. In later centuries, when the Habsburg family or the Dukes of Burgundy unwittingly took their armies just a little too far south towards the Alps they crossed a sort of Swiss tripwire. This activated the real giant, stone-muscled characters of few words who came down from the mountains and caused mayhem. I will return to the peculiar characteristics of Switzerland in relation to the Habsburgs later, but this shift began in the thirteenth century and had endless repercussions, not least through breaking the duopoly of what had been just West Francia and East Francia. Forms of independence became possible in the Alps even if the Imperial authorities responded to it by simply pretending the Swiss did not exist (the Habsburgs finally acknowledged them formally only in 1648).
Elsewhere in the Empire there was further awkwardness for Habsburgs. At the same time as Bern was first being built, at the far northern end of Lotharingia, in a near featureless wilderness of mud, sand, frogs and shifting rivers, an equally ghastly future adversary was coalescing as an enterprising group of fishermen built a dam on the River Amstel. This is a book only minimally about Amsterdam but some background is needed. If Bern became the controlling intelligence for messing up the Habsburgs in the south, Amsterdam formed its matching pair in the north, and it is odd that they were founded near simultaneously. Given the glutinous, marshy world from which it emerged, Amsterdam was sited in an area of little perceived worth or feudal structure and was ignored by its notional overlord in Utrecht. Its fortune came both from ever more elaborate management of sluices and from a bolt of religious good luck – a particularly absurd miracle involving fire-proof blessed bread turned Amsterdam into a major religious site. It then brought together fishing, shipping and soap-making in a harshly industrial combination (in contrast to all the weedy tapestries, fine gloves and folderol that fuelled the posh southern Low Countries) and became extremely rich.
Somehow, somebody worked out that mixing a little pouch in herrings’ stomachs into the barrel in which the fish were packed both preserved them and made them much tastier. In a world of frightening seasonal lurches from plenty to dearth, barrels of herring were a sort of miracle. Amsterdamers also invented special robust ships so the fish could be gutted and packed at sea, the vessels bobbing up and down on the Dogger Bank (a shallow remnant of Doggerland), home to an effective infinity of herring. At the height of the bonanza 200 million herring a year were being caught.
That is enough about Amsterdam, except to say that its origins and interests always lay north and east and in the outer world – in Germany, the Baltic, the North, the New World and the eastern spice islands. Its attitude towards the rest of the Netherlands was, from its own origins onwards, always somewhat aloof. It was part of the County of Holland, but felt a limited affinity for points south. Events, particularly religious and particularly Habsburg, meant that, like Bern, Amsterdam would become an implacable and awful enemy to external interferers, but almost despite itself – and neither city was ever captured by all those who ground their teeth with rage at their very mention, until they both fell at the end of the eighteenth century.
The political chaos of the first half of the thirteenth century turned out to be a boon not just for Bern and Amsterdam, but for many other individual princes and cities. Just as everyone should be grateful for King John’s total incompetence leading to Magna Carta, so the Emperor Frederick II’s reign waved goodbye to any chance that the Empire might become like France, whose kings spent the century successfully making their realm much warmer and more pleasant by massacring heretics in the south and taking over Provence. Frederick was an attractive figure of extraordinary talent, but his interests became so focused on Italy and the Mediterranean that his German nobles were able to wring concessions that meant individual princes had ever more active, practical independence over their fiefs. While Frederick was off on the Sixth Crusade – negotiating personally in Arabic for renewed Christian access to Jerusalem – or writing a treatise on falconry in Palermo, where his court was based for many years, or being accused of being the Antichrist, he was not helping his German subjects much. There had always been uneasiness between nobles, city councils and the Emperor, but now the result was definitively to make the German lands into a sort of geopolitical rubble, a highly creative one, with each ruler sponsoring state-of-the-art palaces, castles, churches and monasteries in the cheerful pattern that can still be seen today.
The century was marked by exciting news stories – such as the introduction of paper from the Arabic world, partly thanks to Frederick, and its rapid replacement of clumsy vellum. This would have an unfortunate archival effect because of paper’s easy destruction, but was in every other way a boon, making written books much cheaper and more widespread. Excitement was caused too by the Mongol invasions of the 1240s, which would be catastrophic for Eastern Europe, but which further west proved merely an exciting frisson when the invasions came to an end as mysteriously as they had begun, having spread the recipe for Chinese gunpowder, the vast implications of which were worked out over coming centuries. There were waves of religious innovation which would have as great an impact, albeit in a different sphere. The Dominicans, Franciscans, Minorites and the institution of beguinage would in their different fields reshape Christianity, all trying to drain what Pope Alexander III had called ‘the stinking slurry of heresy’. There were Dominican geniuses such as Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas and startling mystics such as Christine of Saint-Trond, in Brabant, a cowherd who could speak Latin and performed extraordinary feats, spinning like a dervish or clambering up church rafters or to the top of towers in a trance.
Street scenes
I know I am repeating myself in some ways, but it is impossible in many of these towns not to be almost overwhelmed by the sense of walking through an unbelievably ancient continuum of experience, of being merely the latest character to trot through a street-pattern and set of thoughts and needs effectively unchanged from before records exist. This is most palpable in Bruges because the choking-up of its route to the sea around 1500 gradually suffocated its prosperity, leaving a strikingly old-fashioned cityscape. But it is more dynamically felt in Ghent, where despite its becoming a major Victorian industrial city with the buildings updated, the locations have stayed the same, with the tram-tracks and discount shops merely emphasizing these continuities.
So if you walk south from the Castle of the Counts you go past the Fish Market, over the River Leie past the Meat Market and the Vegetable Market, down to the Corn Market. Just behind the western buildings on the Corn Market are the guild houses and just to the south, along the riverbank, the mighty bulk of Het Pand, the former Dominican monastery that still dominates the town centre. Walking east from the Corn Market, the massive Church of St Nicholas gives way to the Poultry Market,1 the Cloth Hall, the Belfry and St Bavo’s Cathedral – and to the north, by the Butter Market, is the much rebuilt City Hall.
The walk would not have been very different a thousand years ago. The location of some things would have moved around, and there would have been an earlier version of St Bavo’s – indeed the entire town of Ghent seems to have sprung from the original monastery dedicated to St Bavo, a Merovingian ne’er-do-well who became an ascetic and lived in a tree, whose relics were for centuries the principal focus for processional life in the city. An earlier version of St Nicholas was built in 1100. The Cloth Hall and Belfry are later. One of the advantages of having done this walk before the eighteenth century would be to avoid the freakish carving then put over the entrance to the city gaol in the basement of City Hall, which features the pointlessly seedy Roman story of Old Cimon, who is imprisoned with no food but stays alive because when his daughter visits him she secretly breastfeeds him. How anyone imagined thi
s was a good topic for a carving I have been unable to discover (I suspect some bewigged and very rich classical pedant) but it could be argued that one of the few benefits of being stuck in the Ghent gaol was no longer having to walk past a picture of Old Cimon slurping away.
This cityscape preserves the complex workings of ancient towns and the elaborate interplay between the secular authorities, the religious and the merchants. Before any surviving records existed, a place like Ghent was still extraordinarily complicated: who belonged, who didn’t belong; who had the right to sell chickens, who didn’t; who performed which religious function and in return for what. Issues which are modern to us around zoning, permits, hygiene, tax, timetabling, transport, qualifications, security, communication would have been no less heavily scripted and controlled in, say, 1200, or 1500. Each cart of vegetables would have been pinned down to a specific space at specific times, with payments scattered between various religious and secular characters. Weights and measures would have been crucial, a complex source of corruption and anger in any settled society. The belfry both dictated the religious sequence of the day and gave instructions during military emergencies to different troops. Anybody who was within the city walls was there only because they were permitted, and those with day passes had to get back outside before the curfew and the gates being locked. Those staying at an inn needed to be registered and sponsored. Specific levels of official, working for the Count or for the Empire, could have symbols of office which gave them rights of transit or hospitality. Monasteries (such as Het Pand) provided hospitality for everyone from private guests of the abbot to wandering pilgrims.
Ghent was particularly known for its gebuurten – neighbourhood associations usually based around a street and its associated alleys. They would organize the night watch, have fire drills (to escape from and to put out any fire) and contribute towards local and citywide festivals (floats, costumes) and the management of funerals, all paid from a central pot. They were key to the lives (now almost lost to official records) of the servants, small shopkeepers and artisans that made places like Ghent work. Many individuals wore uniforms of some kind, sometimes as simple as a ribbon to indicate a specific fraternity, but including of course the different-coloured outfits worn by different grades or types of churchmen, including the immediately distinctive monastic orders.
