by Ed West
Perhaps the most notorious incident at Paris University concerned the scholar Abelard, who had begun a relationship with a young woman, which he had tried to keep secret. Unfortunately, his lover, Heloise, gave birth to a baby, Astralabe, and she was sent to Brittany in shame, although Abelard did the honorable thing, and lamented “in marrying, I was destroying myself.”6 Alas this was not enough for her family, and her uncle Fulbert was so angry that he had Abelard castrated by some of his thugs. This Reek-like crime was shocking in western Europe, where castration was unusual and considered alien. Some people did voluntarily cut themselves in the early days of the Church, since removal of male lust was viewed as a liberation, although the Church disapproved of such excessive behaviour.
As well as education, the Church also ran what we’d now call the civil service, until around 1400, when increasingly secular officials, especially lawyers, took over. Churchmen were, after all, the only people who could read. Indeed, schools were once exclusively for those in training for the priesthood, and so the first schools open to anyone prepared to pay a fee became known as “public schools” (which is why some private schools in England are still called that, confusingly).
As in Westeros, Archbishops of Canterbury and popes often found themselves in conflict with rulers, and even ended up murdered. Among those who died in the job, Archbishop Ælfheah was pelted to death with chicken bones by Vikings in 1012, and Archbishop Simon Sudbury had his head hacked off in 1381 during the Peasant’s Revolt. But the most famous case involved Thomas Becket, who died at the hands of Henry II’s knights. Becket had not even been a priest when appointed as Archbishop; he was simply Henry’s crony, a very worldly merchant’s son famous for his ostentatious clothing. Yet once enthroned Becket became a genuine believer, like the High Sparrow, wearing hair shirts to emphasize his simplicity and holiness and condemning the seedy and squalid figures who lurked around the court. Most contentiously he refused to allow clerics to be tried in secular courts, a source of discontent not just for the king but the public who were outraged by a number of crimes committed by priests. This “Benefit of Clergy” clause allowed anyone literate employed by the Church to escape secular punishment—and only a very small proportion of criminals were caught in the first place.
Eventually Becket fled the country, but when he returned to Canterbury in 1170 and attacked the king from the pulpit on Christmas Day, Henry in Normandy erupted in fury with an expletive-laden outburst which four knights in attendance interpreted as a call to arrest the archbishop. The four men’s argument with Beckett ended with one slicing off the top of the archbishop’s head, and another blow slit his skull open, mixing brain and blood on to the cathedral floor. The murder was a great shock to Christendom, and Becket as a result won the argument over clerical freedom—although obviously at some cost. Spilling blood in church was considered especially evil, and even the worst kinds of criminals could not be forced out of particular churches as they were sanctuaries, just as embassies are today.
A true believer in simplicity and poverty, the archbishop had worn a hairshirt to the end, and when his body was stripped naked a chronicler reports that vermin “boiled over like water in a simmering cauldron” from his body.
LIGHT OUR FIRE AND PROTECT US FROM THE DARK
The Church itself could never live up to its own ideals, but then no human institution could be expected to. By the time of the crisis of the late middle ages, centuries of almost absolute power had inevitably left it more corrupt; this in turn would spur fanatical new groups, every bit as demented as the Sparrows.
In 1300, Pope Boniface had thrown a huge party where he turned up wearing Roman insignia, shouting “I am Caesar.” His successor Benedict XI survived only nine months, poison being suspected, and his replacement Clement V was notorious for nepotism, making five members of his family cardinals (many cardinals appointed their bastard sons into positions, referring to them as nephews, or nepos). John XXII, who succeed Clement in 1316, was estimated to have a personal fortune of florins weighing ninety-six tons; during his reign he bought forty pieces of gold cloth from Damascus for 1,276 gold florins and spent more still on furs. He also had an ermined trimmed pillow, and the clothes of his entourage cost eight thousand florins a year (it is hard to calculate but one florin would be worth around $7,200 today, so certainly tens of millions of dollars). By the fourteenth century, various bribes could be paid to the Church, whether to legitimize children, to permit nuns to keep maids, to marry relatives or trade with Muslims; some popes also took cuts from usurers, such high-interest lending officially prohibited, and sold Church positions. Life in Avignon, where the papacy had moved to from Rome for political reasons, was pleasant enough, with fresh fish in abundance, sheep and cattle from the foothills of the Alps, and the finest vegetables from this lush region of France available to the rich—not to mention some of the finest vineyards on earth. The papal palace also featured a steam room, a zoo which was home to a bear and a lion, and countless rooms home to the expensively dressed relatives of the pontiff.
Such was the corruption that a number of churchmen became rich by illegally holding numerous parishes. Bogo de Clare, younger son of an earl, in 1291 held twenty-four parishes or parts of parishes as well as other church sinecures, earning him £2,200 a year, a fortune. He spent more every year on ginger than he paid a man to run one of his parishes, and a monk visiting another of his parishes found only “some dirty old sticks spattered with cow-dung” where the high altar should have been.7
There was also sexual corruption. In Flaxley Abbey in Gloucestershire in 1397, it was found that nine monks were sleeping with women, and the abbot was “doing” three, as the report put it. In Norwich in 1373, ten priests were accused of “incontinence,” one involving two women, Beatrice and Juliana. He was fined five shillings. A priest in Devon in 1331 was found to be having affairs with three different women; at nearby Marychurch the priest was accused of embezzlement and going AWOL frequently. In the same period many priests were charged with drunkenness, others working as tradesman, usury, forging wills, selling the Sacrament, gossiping about what they heard in Confession and even black magic.8
People in the late medieval and early modern period began to take religion more seriously, whereas paradoxically in a previous, less-educated age it seemed to be worn lightly by many, some of whom might have maintained some traditional practices alongside Christianity. People used to regularly talk through church services, or even laugh and joke, while numerous chroniclers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries lament that many people don’t believe in anything. People also held numerous unorthodox beliefs, some of them relics from pagan times, while it took many centuries for the Church to enforce monogamy among aristocratic men. People now took religious discipline more seriously, whereas before it was just accepted that numerous clerics might have mistresses, drink heavily, or get into fights. The upside was a more restrained and less violent society; the downside was a more intolerant one.
In Westeros, Cersei reinstates the militant orders of the Faith, the Warrior’s Sons and the Poor Fellows, but she soon finds that religious fanaticism in the city is out of control and they turn against her. In real life the late medieval period was one of growing zealotry.
Heretics had always been persecuted—that western Europe was 99 percent Catholic on the eve of the Reformation is testimony to that—but the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 had ratcheted up intolerance toward deviant thinkers. There was also growing intolerance toward Jews, and numerous tracts written against them, in fact a whole literary genre called Adversus Judaeos (“Against the Jews”) was created—among the popular works of the time were An Answer to the Jews; On the Sabbath, against the Jews; Eight Orations Against the Jews; Demonstration Against the Jews; Homilies Against the Jews and the somewhat strange-sounding Rhythm Against the Jews.
Jews were now seen as not just wrong about the Messiah being only a man, but actually wicked. They were now forced to wear distinctive clothing
and suffered increasingly brutal laws passed against conversion, intermarriage, or even the employment by Jews of Christians.
THE SPARROW IS THE HUMBLEST AND MOST COMMON OF BIRDS.
In Westeros things change with the emergence of the Sparrows, who are outraged by the callousness of the war and the way the Small Folk are treated, in contrast to the luxury and corruption of the wealthy. According to the Barefoot septon: “the sparrow is the humblest and most common of birds, as we are the humblest and most common of men.”9 There are also the Begging Brothers, a mendicant order who reject materialism and wander from place to place. Eventually a Sparrow is appointed as High Septon, replacing a previous prelate murdered during rioting in the city, and they even take on the royal family.
There were movements toward poverty in the Church from the thirteenth century, most particularly the Franciscans, who became mendicant preachers, going from village to village speaking to crowds and living on what people gave them. Their founder, St Francis of Assisi, was an aristocrat’s son who gave away all his possessions so he could more simply live the faith. The Church authorities considered him dangerous and he came close to being labeled a heretic; instead they co-opted him.
By the fourteenth century, there was growing anger at the often-grotesque wealth of churchmen, many of whom had lost their Christian idea of poverty, but the Black Death led to a whole new level of religious insanity, including disillusionment with the Church authorities, and scenes of open hostility and violence.
In Game of Thrones, the religious authorities are alarmed by the arrival of a militant group, and real-life movements did arise after the Black Death, the worst being the Brethren of the Cross, also known as the Flagellants. Flagellation had begun in Italy around 1260, but it had been adopted by the Germans who took it much further and to greater extremes—as they have a historical tendency to do with Italian ideas. The Italian Flagellants were also incorporated into the Church, as was often the case with potentially dangerous groups, but the German version was much more anarchic and anti-authority and developed its own organization and rituals. And they were utterly demented.
Flagellants formed a circle in which worshippers would strip to the waist and would then drop to the ground in different positions to represent their various sins—adulterers with their face to the ground, perjurers lying on one side holding up three fingers. They would then start beating themselves, rhythmically, using whips with iron spikes and needles attached, and “this part of the performance concluded with the Flagellant master passing among the fallen, lashing the sea of bleeding, sweating flesh beneath him with a scourge,” a stick with three large spiky whips attached.10
“Each man tried to outdo his neighbor in pious suffering, literally whipping himself into a frenzy in which pain had no reality. Around them the townsfolk quaked, sobbed and groaned in sympathy, encouraging the Brethren to still greater excesses.”11 It was recorded that “as members walked in a circle around the churchyard two abreast, each man would lash himself violently on his naked torso until it became ‘swollen and blue.’”12
The movement soon became too crazed for its more moderate sympathizers, who began to drift away. Some of the Brethren claimed to have supernatural power and said they could heal the sick or raise the dead and that they had eaten and drunk with Christ or talked with the Virgin Mary. One believed that he used to be dead. The corpses of children were placed in the center of their circle, supposedly in the belief that they would rise again.
The Brethren would turn up in towns in huge numbers, and anyone who objected was accused of being a scorpion or antichrist; near Meissen two Dominican friars who tried to interrupt a meeting were attacked, and one killed. They were soon joined by bandits too, who saw an opportunity to rob or create havoc, and they almost certainly spread the plague wherever they went, and attacked Jews and priests.
Their popularity came amid a big rise in anticlerical hostility—in 1350 the cardinal-legate in Rome was booed by a crowd—and the authorities were so alarmed that Emperor Charles IV petitioned the pope to suppress them. The Flagellants were denounced by the Church leaders, and in 1350 many of the group were punished in Rome by being beaten publicly in front the High Altar of St Peter’s—which couldn’t have been a huge deterrent.
The movement spread across Germany and the Low Countries, although it fell flat in England. A group from Holland arrived in London in 1350 where their performance outside St Paul’s cathedral was met by embarrassed, awkward silence. The group were deported.
However, the Brethren of the Cross soon vanished almost as quickly as they’d risen, although they were not the only wacky group to emerge after the Plague. There was also the Beghards, or Brethren of the Free Spirit, who claimed to be in a state of grace without benefit of priest or sacrament, and “spread not only doctrinal but civil disorder.”13 These free spirits believed “God to be in themselves, not in the Church, and considered themselves in a state of perfection without sin,”14 which they argued allowed them to indulge in guilt-free sex with whoever they wanted and take anyone’s elses property.15 The Church, unsurprisingly, did not approve.
Other instances of mass hysteria reflected a society under strain. In 1374, the Rhineland was hit with the “dancing mania” following heavy spring floods. Circles were formed in streets and churches and people danced for hours, screaming and leaping and “crying that they saw visions of Christ or the Virgin or the heavens opening.”16 It would conclude with dancers falling to the ground and begging people to trample on them. St John’s Dance, as it was also known, led to people suffering from hallucinations and jumping uncontrollably until they collapsed.
It spread to Holland, Flanders, and Germany, and everywhere featured a large proportion of women, especially the unmarried. The dancing may have been a product of social stress following the plague and other disasters, although it is possible it was the result of ergotism, a fungus that grows in rye bread: “Joining hands, the victims dance in wild delirium until they fall exhausted, foaming at the mouth. This communal fit is treated either by swaddling the victims like babies, to prevent them from injuring themselves and others, or by exorcism.”17
The dancing plague returned, once more, in Alsace in July 1518. It all began in Strasbourg when a Mrs. Troffea began dancing and within a week, thirty-four others had joined in. In total some four hundred people took to dancing for days without rest, the mania going on for a month during which up to fifteen people a day were dying from exhaustion, strokes, or heart attacks.
For all the unattractiveness of this fanaticism, the main difference between Martin’s world and ours is that they have a far more pre-Christian attitude, so that there is little sympathy for the poor or suffering. In medieval Europe there were almost unbridgeable class differences and the peasantry were despised, yet there was the paradox that the official religion taught people to venerate and love the poor, even if they often fell short of this ideal. Cersei and her ilk would have been far more at home in Rome than medieval Christendom.
The Sparrow is an unsympathetic figure, and yet he is the only one with a Christian sympathy for the downtrodden. As Ross Douthat of the New York Times put it:
The High Sparrow is a ghost of Christendom in G.R.R. Martin’s otherwise more pagan/stoic vision of medieval Europe. On the show and the books, he’s an apparently sincere man of the people, one of the few commoners to play a political role in Westeros. He champions equality before law, redistribution of wealth—ideas far closer to liberal values than anything his antagonists support. His main foe is Cersei, a fascinating but objectively wicked character . . . The rest of his rivals, apart from (arguably) Daenerys, are largely indifferent to the common folk who die in their game of thrones.18
And yet audiences are moved to support Cersei in her battle with the fanatics.
The High Sparrow comes to a bloody end, during a scene that mirrors the Gunpowder Plot of 1605—had it been successful—when Catholic extremists attempted to blow up the Protestant James I in P
arliament, after years in which the followers of the old religion had faced growing persecution. Had Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators been successful the explosion would have destroyed almost everything within two-thirds of a mile, causing hundreds of fatalities at least.19 Before that, though, thousands would die as a result of increasing religious fanaticism.
18
THE DROWNED TOWN
The world is nothing but smoke and shadows.
—MOTTO OF A VENETIAN HOUSE IN CRETE
Crossing the English Channel was “a dreaded undertaking” and “those who completed the ordeal would claim that the effort had impaired their health.”1 At the mercy of the tides, people might be stuck on a vessel for days on end, even for relatively local journeys. The trip across the Channel could take a few hours but also four or more days if the weather was bad. King John once spent eleven days trying to cross this sea, while a knight called Sir Herve de Leon endured over two weeks between Harfleur and Southampton during a storm and, as well as his horse being lost overboard, was so traumatized by the event “that he never had health thereafter.”2
On the high seas, “the timbers grind against one another, as if the ship is trying to wrench itself apart,” and storms were especially terrifying.3 A Venetian captain called Peitro Casola recalled the occasion when his craft was hit by a tempest while taking pilgrims to the Middle East, where in the hold in the pitch black the passengers were thrown from side to side, feeling the ship “twisted by the fury of the sea,” creaking “as if she would break up,” after which water streamed through the hatches and the hold was overwhelmed by the sounds of screaming “as if all the souls tormented in hell were down there.”4 In comparison, Tyrion’s experience of sea travel is positively luxurious.
