Lotharingia

by Simon Winder

  Obviously, I just love this stuff. My ideal would be to have a bag of coins on my belt, particoloured tights, an Imperial pass and the opportunity to roister or even doister in one of these medieval towns, while at the same time keeping twenty-first-century life expectancy, and having a button to press so I could duck back to the present if things got too rough. Aside from the risk of being burned alive just out of envy and spite at my delirious leg-wear, I would probably have been safe enough. In as much as we can tell, these really were highly regulated places, kept in good order by the elaboration of major religious festivals and the day-in, day-out world of masses and private prayers. The major families, that of the Count of Flanders and all those linked with him, would have had a formidable stranglehold over secular and religious life, supplying key senior functionaries to both and imposing discipline on dependants and their families and associates.

  Very early on, Ghent, Bruges and Ypres developed close links to London – the towns are mentioned in the records of Aethelred the Unready in the late tenth century as trading there. England had become the great motor for Flemish prosperity by the twelfth century, with grain, hides, coal and cheese pouring in and the steady growth of what would become a colossal clothing industry, with flock after English flock converted into fabric. Sheep have seldom had such political weight: their numbers remorselessly growing, with countless humans living out their lives in their service: reshaping huge tracts of land to supply them with delicious grass, washing them to make their fleeces bright and curly. They built the great churches of the Cotswolds and East Anglia, an enduring, near-pharaonic reminder many centuries later of a vanished ovine glory. Flemish cloth was on sale in places as far off as Novgorod early in the same century and the whole England–Flanders relationship must have had a dynamism we would associate more with the nineteenth century.

  Flanders was much larger than its size in the modern Belgian state – including more coastal places such as the then insignificant Dunkirk, plus more southern towns such as Lille, Douai and Cassel (Rijsel, Dowaai and Kassel). The genius of cloth was that it created a trans-European industry in stuff which did not perish (unlike food) but which wore out from use and therefore needed replenishment. Sheep also paid for all the amazing buildings which still dot these Flemish towns – or their earlier incarnations. The enormous Ypres Cloth Hall of 1304, the interior packed with gallery upon gallery of fabrics, must have looked like a permanent festival of sumptuous clothing. The fabulous hall lasted until its total destruction in the First World War. Bruges revelled in an ever greater proliferation of ingenuity in its state-of-the-art buildings. Originally the halls beneath its huge belfry had been dedicated not just to cloth but to spices and dyestuffs, gloves and mercery. But then one of Europe’s great lost buildings was put up – the Water Hall, fully completed in 1366 after some eight decades of refinements. This amazing place was integrated into the canal network, so that barges could simply float under a house-covered bridge and into the building’s central space. The interior of the roof was a vast, extraordinarily ingenious cloth-storage area and everywhere there would have been piled fleeces, finished cloths, samples, exotica. Nearby was a massive crane, powered by ‘crane children’ who walked its circular treadmill and which could land bulk goods from the canal such as wine. All of this has gone – the canal filled in, the Water Hall demolished. Next to the magical Groeninge Museum – with its astounding collection of paintings by van Eyck, van der Weyden, Memling and others whose work was paid for by a later wave of Flemish cloth prosperity – there is a tiny park with two sad little columns standing in it: all that is left of the Water Hall.

  I am in a panic as I am running out of space: the entire book could easily just be about Flanders in this period. If I have to choose one last thing, it would be the hospital built in Lille at the orders of Joan, Countess of Flanders, in the 1240s. Joan’s dad, Baldwin IX, had a poor time in the Balkans, with his skull turned into a drinking cup. Joan’s husband (a luckless Portuguese prince) spent many years in French imprisonment after having fought at the disastrous Battle of Bouvines, freeing her up to rule in her own right. She was a remarkable figure, one of the classical sequence of Flanders counts who split their time between complex water-management and founding monasteries (particularly Cistercian ones) and beguinages. Her hospital in the heart of Lille is entirely made up of later buildings, alas, but still has an unbeatably strange, ancient atmosphere. Run by the Augustinians, it looked after the sick and poor as well as pilgrims passing through. As usual, it was swept away by the French Revolution, becoming a home for orphans and for elderly men until 1939. But, even so, it had a run – interrupted by occasional fires, riots and invasions – of five hundred and fifty years. I was very struck by the way that the hospital enshrined exactly the close links it was possible to feel walking through, say, Ghent today between the everyday and the spiritual – the feeling that the churches and the markets must have once been viewed as aspects of the same thing.

  The Hospital of the Countess has a sequence of rooms which make this explicit. The Augustinian nuns shaved their heads, owned nothing and ended their mission only with their own total infirmity or death. They took their meals in silence while one read passages from the Bible. They prepared all kinds of remedies, often based on plants they grew themselves and preserved in syrup or ointment jars. They also made the strange mixture known as thériaque (‘Venetian treacle’), a potion with an amazing number of ingredients based on a recipe by Galen and which on the face of it had no value whatsoever, except being fun to make, as various bits of fruit, animal, seed, leaf and gum were pounded together. What is so interesting and moving about the nuns was that their activities at the hospital saw no difference at all between nursing someone back to health and someone dying – these were both devotional, religious processes with neither preferred as a better outcome.

  Joan’s legacy was not to remain part of Flanders for much longer. Through many generations of sheep and fewer of counts, Flanders never shook off its dependency on France and in the thirteenth century factions formed between those within the cities who were pro-French (the Lilies, after the fleur-de-lys) and anti-French (the Claws, after the claws of the heraldic Lion of Flanders). As part of the general re-expansion of French royal power under Philip IV ‘the Fair’ – a disturbingly efficient figure – the Count was imprisoned and France put in garrisons across Flanders after a series of brutal, grinding battles. But on the extraordinary night of 18 May 1302, the Claws rose up and slaughtered the French and their sympathizers in Bruges, killing some two thousand people. Philip sent an army to restore order which the Flemish then devastated at the Battle of Kortrijk, using grimly focused infantry armed with pikes and short, heavy spears to destroy the flower of French chivalry. It became known as ‘the Battle of the Golden Spurs’ after the five hundred or so pairs taken from dead French noblemen and hung in the nearby church of Our Lady (sadly the spurs were not there for long – now there’s just a super-morose painting by van Dyck of the Raising of the Cross).

  Today Kortrijk has an entire museum devoted to the battle and it has become one of the key days in the Flemish nationalist calendar. At the time its impact was more muted. The initial shock was immense and it was a masterclass in why the hereditary principle was so important to medieval society, as a random cross-section of senior French noblemen were suddenly killed and dozens of dazed inheritors – younger brothers, regents and minors – totally unexpectedly stepped forward to take over a cascade of territories. Philip IV was, however, not lacking resources or determination and crushed the rebellion anyway, in battles which have been less well remembered locally. The epochal Treaty of Athys-sur-Orge of 1305 kept Flanders as a separate and privileged county, but detached the towns of Douai, Bouvines and Lille, making a French-speaking (‘gallicant’) Flanders which has been a further, tangled and complicating issue ever since.

  Lille, like Ghent, is somewhere I have spent a lot of time walking, in both cases with the same feeling of be
ing on streets which are, in the old areas, really just not changed much. They may be lined with newer buildings, but their width is still based on the horse-carriage-width which cars have inherited, still packed with shops with flats tucked above and alluring little signs sticking out into the street of a kind that would have been immediately recognizable centuries ago: boots, pretzels, beer. In many ways they seem to have been no more and no less commercial, busy and ‘modern’ eight hundred years ago. Now I have finished writing this book and no longer have the excuse to linger in these cities I feel I have myself already become yet another ghost wandering down from the Castle of the Counts to the Fish Market and so to the Butter Market.

  Amiens Cathedral and its aftermath

  While the vast church buildings of the Middle Ages exude an unbeatable power and longevity, in some moods I feel this is just a bluff: that they are painfully vulnerable to human whim and natural chance. Unable to move an inch in their own defence, these churches rely on our continuing concern and care as much as a cow does in its stall. Warfare, particularly a siege, is the most obvious source of terror, but just as frightening are the freak accidents that are bound to happen given enough time. Aachen’s stained glass was in good condition until in the early eighteenth century a monster hail-storm smashed it all in a few moments. In 1857 it was Mainz’s turn when, the cathedral having only just been rebuilt after years of use as a French barracks, a tower used to store weapons blew up and the cathedral’s glass was sprayed over the town centre. Worms was a victim of the terrible explosion at a factory outside Ludwigshafen in 1921 which killed some five hundred people and, ten miles away, blew out all its glass. The magnificent Great Church at Zwolle once had a high steeple; it was hit by lightning in 1669, was rebuilt and then was totally hammered by lightning in 1682, with one side of the tower collapsing. The same lucky local artist, Jan Grasdorp, was able to paint both disasters with concerned citizens looking on. The consistory mulled these events over and rightly worried that God might be pointing out a certain element of Pride in having such a big spire in such a flat area. It was decided not to rebuild it and to use the site to build a uniquely charming and elegant meeting room instead, with the result that Zwolle is now famous for having a church without a spire.

  I mention these as just a handful of examples of the sheer physical vulnerability of these seemingly eternal buildings – and that is to set to one side such arbitrary horrors as Louis XIV having the west front of Speyer Cathedral blown up simply from spite. Closely allied to natural disaster is the day-to-day importance for churches of staying engaged with the humans around them – to continue to be needed. For some reason I found myself thinking about this a lot while wandering around Amiens Cathedral, in its sheer charisma, scale and beauty probably one of the greatest buildings in Europe. It is as though an entire quarry had somehow been cut into a single rough cuboid, hauled to the top of a hill, carved into cathedral shape and then hollowed out by an infinite number of men with chisels.

  It was begun in 1220 and completed in about half a century and raises awkward questions about the nature of Western civilization: there have of course been many superb buildings created since, but I’m not sure there are any better. The idea that such a staggeringly complex, elegant, strange, vast object could have been made so long ago derides our sense of living onward-and-upward. But perhaps more importantly it has continued to be used because it has kept being useful. Amazing events have been held there, featuring the Kings of France, the Dukes of Burgundy and, most famously in the modern period, the huge Allied service of thanksgiving and commemoration at the end of the Great War. But the ideologies that seed and expand in and around the cathedral are a constant threat to the building itself and the thousands of little statues, objects and images it tries to protect. Again, conflict matters (in the Great War the unmovable cathedral treasures were covered in tons of clay-filled bags on steel frames – a single German shell came through the roof, bounced off the floor and failed to explode) but ideas matter more, with the great moments of danger from Protestant iconoclasm and Revolutionary secularism, the former cleaning out many churches, the latter cleaning them out again and then in some cases destroying them. Enormous, once very famous cathedrals in cities such as Arras and Liège disappeared completely, torn down for their stone over many years in the wake of the French Revolution. France and the areas of the Rhineland and southern Netherlands captured at the height of Revolutionary fervour saw enormous bonfires, disposing of centuries of religious art. Amiens is a spectacular building but much of the interior is filled with sorry, dank and neglected nineteenth-century replacement decorative filler.

  I always think about this in the context (moving geographically for a moment) of the spectacularly beautiful Quwwat al-Islam mosque outside Delhi. This was built just before Amiens Cathedral, and is actually made from crushed chunks of Hindu and Jain temples, their decoration patterns still visible. The mosque is now itself a ruin, in a region of India since ruled by Hindus again very briefly, then Muslims again, then Christians and now majority Hindus again. I mention this because the nature of the threat to the mosque’s continued existence has been at several points absolute. The battered remnants are all you could now expect. What is odd in much of Western Europe is that there has been a continuity of belief: even the most extreme threat of the Revolution proved in Amiens’ case superficial, and while church attendance has collapsed today there is no movement either in favour of the building’s destruction or one which picks on those who continue to use it. This makes Western Europe very unusual – there are only a handful of places in the rest of the world which have not seen a total turnover in religious and social practices. Whether it is the Mongols in Baghdad or the Spanish in Mexico or the British in Australia, or indeed the Tajiks in Delhi, it has been almost normal for one human culture to attempt to erase another. With the huge exception of terrible, periodic anti-Semitism this has generally not been the experience in Western Europe. Even differences in religious belief within Christianity have created symbolic martyrs on the whole rather than attempted eradication, and the fragmented nature of Western Europe has given most forms of dissent bolt-holes.

  The problem that has for many years futilely bugged me around places such as Amiens Cathedral is whether their breathtaking confidence and glamour come from a culture we have directly inherited or from a specifically earlier culture. This is an endlessly argued about and unresolvable issue, but it could certainly be claimed that the disasters that would unfold across much of Europe in the fourteenth century were so extreme that they do put a great ditch between ourselves and the supremely arrogant culture that produced Amiens. The thirteenth century saw a near hysterical impetus for societies to pour their resources into making cathedrals such as Metz, Strasbourg, Cologne – crazily ambitious structures that took centuries to complete and implied a culture which had stability, resources and time on its hands. But then, really everything went wrong.

  Famine, plague and flood

  Each century has its disasters – these are built into our relations with each other and our planet – but there was a sequence of about a century, from 1315 to 1420, which was peculiarly awful. It is in terms of narrative very strange as it has left no place to visit and no texts to read. It leaves an enormous mark but an invisible one – in the millions of people killed but also, as a result, in the millions not born. To have lived through these years must have been at different times to witness complete breakdowns in European society of a kind hardly experienced since. Of course there were pools of calm and particular generations might be lucky or the inhabitants of a specific village untouched, but there must have been a far wider awareness of cataclysm beyond the mere human agency of an approaching army.

  The first blow came in the form of famine across an enormous area of north-western Europe, affecting some thirty million people. Everywhere it was understood that grain needed to be stored against a bad harvest, but for many years harvests had been reasonable and generations had g
one by where anybody who had demanded longer-term planning would have been rightly viewed as silly and alarmist. There was also a penalty for storage as grain could so easily rot or be eaten by vermin. The thirteenth century had also seen booming populations fed by farmers converting ever more marginally fertile land. This is a totally needless detail, but in Gelderland a special confection of animal dung, heather roots, forest litter, grass sods and peat was mixed to create an artificial earth (‘plaggen soiling’) which could be laid down and would over many years ‘catch’ and convert barren land into farmland, though it required patience and good luck. Without realizing it people had become used to good weather and planned accordingly. In 1315 it seems to have never stopped raining – it was as though someone was wildly messing around with the control dial. Fields flooded, rivers broke their banks and most of the crops never even ripened. The dampness was a field-day for smuts, mould, mildew and rusts. Sheep and cattle murrain devastated herds. For liver flukes at least it was a golden age. Already, in what proved to be just the first year, Xanten was holding frantic processions of relics, town-wide prayer sessions and fasting. By 1316 the price of cereals had at some points multiplied by up to eight times. Some people made a fortune – but this only made it worse as speculators shifted scarce supplies to desperate coastal areas where prices had rocketed, ensuring worse dearth inland. Dikes collapsed, the oxen needed for heavy ploughing were dying. Some of the animal sicknesses were highly contagious and completely revolting – I simply cannot bring myself to describe the symptoms. Summer hail beat down the few crops which were close to ripening and the winters were so cold (with ice spreading out into the North Sea) that they killed surviving flocks.