Tag Archives: Europe

04/21/13

European Invasions

Throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, different groups moved from one location to another.  Sometimes, the purpose was conquest, sometimes raiding, and sometimes it involved a quest for a better life and the intent was to settle, rather than conquer, new lands.

But usually somebody was already there.  The map at right show the paths of various groups from Roman times to through the Middle Ages. After the sack of Rome in 410 (see my post here: http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/the-fall-of-rome/) tribes were on the move all through Europe:

Angles/Saxons/Jutes:  These three groups derived from Denmark and Germany.  “Following the departure of the Romans in A.D.410 and after the sacking of Rome, Britain was left unprotected. The distant dominions frantic call to Rome went unheard. Mutiny spread through the ranks of the British defenders remaining who were now descendants of Roman stock. Britain in desperation declared independence from Rome and defended itself the best way it could. Despite this sudden change in fortune for Britain, the Roman lifestyle continued, if on a downward path for the next fifty years. The departure of the Romans did not go un-noticed by the Picts, Scots and especially the Saxons, who saw Britain as a prosperous and plunderable asset.”  http://www.battle1066.com/saxons.shtml  The Saxons waves continued until the 800s, when they’d conquered all of England, pushing the Welsh and Scots to the edges of the map.

Franks:  The Franks originated in what is now Belgium, but spread post-Rome south to France.  “Clovis extends his power from the Somme down to the Loire by using an unscrupulous blend of warfare, intrigue and murder to assert his authority over other Frankish tribes in the region. He then sucessfuly demands tribute from the Burgundians in the southeast and, more significantly, drives the Visigoths from the southwest. By 507 the whole of France, except a narrow strip along the Mediterranean, is his acknowledged realm.”
Read more: http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab74#ixzz1ABfvBH4X

Goths/Visigoths/Ostragoths:  The Goths overall are a German people, with the Visigoths coming from Western Germany and the Ostrogoths from Eastern Germany.  “They originated in Scandinavia, but by the 2nd century of the Christian Era had moved into what is now Southern Russia. The Goths had adopted the habit of fighting on horseback. This arose from the fact that the first area the Goths invaded in the 2nd century AD were the vast plains of Eastern Europe and southern Russia.  . . .  The Goths first burst upon the scene of history in the 3rd Century, when they swarmed out of Southern Russia by both land and sea to beset the Roman Empire. After an heroic struggle, the Romans managed to drive them back to work on their military techniques a little more. In the mid-4th century the Goths were attacked by even wilder peoples, like the Huns. The Visigoths sought security within the boundries of the Roman Empire, offering to help defend the Balkans in return for land, but the Emperor Valens spurned their offer. So they invaded, and in 378 overwhelmed a Roman army at Adrianople, using cavalry in combination with a fortified camp. The victory seems to have surprised the Visigoths almost as much as it did the Romans, for they agreed to settle in the Balkans and help defend them against other tribes. Within a century, the Visigoths had drifted westwards, to settle in southern Gaul (modern France) and Spain, where they set up a kingdom of their own.”  http://www.hyw.com/books/history/goths.htm

Huns:   “Arriving on the fringes of the Roman Empire in the late fourth century, riding their war horses out of the great steppes of Asia, they struck fear into Germanic barbarians and Romans alike. Some scholars believe that they had earlier moved against the Chinese Empire but were turned away and swept to wards Rome instead. As they approached the Black Sea and conquered the Ostrogoths, they also drove the Visigoths across the Danube into the Roman Empire and caused the crisis that led to the astounding defeat of the Roman army under the Emperor Valens at Adrianople in 378 AD.

Those early Huns, using the traditional tactics of mounted archers, seemed like monsters from the darkness to their more civilized contemporaries. The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, writing at the end of the fourth century, described their savage customs and elaborated on their military tactics:

“The nation of the Huns…surpasses all other barbarians in wildness of life….And though [the Huns] do just bear the likeness of men (of a very ugly pattern), they are so little advanced in civilization that they make no use of fire, nor any kind of relish, in the preparation of their food, but feed upon the roots which they find in the fields, and the half-raw flesh of any sort of animal. I say half-raw, because they give it a kind of cooking by placing it between their own thighs and the backs of their horses….”  http://members.gcronline.com/attila/history.htm  He was probably biased.

Vandals:  “The Vandals first entered collapsing Roman Empire in the winter of 409 AD, when they crossed the frozen Rhine river with a group of Alans and Sueves. They were taking advantage of a rebellion within the Empire which kept the Romans from defending themselves well. The Vandals (with the Alans and Sueves) slowly travelled south through Gaul (France), looting and fighting as they went. When they reached the Pyrenees mountains that separate France from Spain, they were actually invited into Spain by one of the rebel leaders, in exchange for helping him with his rebellion.
After this rebellion failed, the Vandals were left on their own in Spain. They took over the southern part of Spain in about 411 AD. A Visigothic attack in 415 AD weakened them but did not destroy them.

By 429 AD the Vandals decided to move to Africa instead of Spain, and ferried all 80,000 of their people across the Straits of Gibraltar in boats. Under their king Gaiseric, the Vandals established a kingdom in Africa, which they used as a base for piracy around the Mediterranean for a hundred years. They set up an Arian church, minted their own coins, and had diplomatic relations with other Mediterranean kingdoms.
In 533, however, the Roman Emperor Justinian sent his general Belisarius to reconquer Africa for Rome. When Belisarius succeeded, that was the end of the Vandals.”  http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/medieval/history/earlymiddle/vandals.htm

01/3/13

Child Rearing in the Middle Ages

It’s hard to get a handle on what child care was like in the Middle Ages–or what exactly was the prevailing philosophy.  Certainly, the ideal childhood of today’s middle class in the US or Europe, did not exist during the Middle Ages.

Sources that describe what child rearing was like are all over the map, in terms of the degree of care, love, maternal obligations, and how long childhood lasted.  A child’s life was also circumscribed the class into which he was born.

Certainly infants were viewed as needing loving and attentive care:  ”Writing around 1250, Bartholomew the Englishman said that if it is too hot or too cold when a baby comes from the womb into the air, the baby becomes miserable and cries. Following the advice of medical writers, he suggested that to cleanse the infant’s limbs of their stickiness, they should be washed in rose petals pounded with salt and that the midwife should rub the child’s gums and the roof of its mouth with honey to cleanse and soothe its mouth and stimulate the baby’s appetite. He also advised that the infant should be bathed frequently and anointed all over with the soothing oil of myrtle or roses, and he warned that the newborn should lie in a dim room because too bright a light would hurt its young eyes.”  http://www.bookrags.com/history/medieval-europe-family-and-social-trends/sub26.html

Someone nursed a child (in the upper classes, this would be a wet nurse) until they were 18 months to 2 years old.  True childhood lasted until around the age of 7, at which point, depending upon the class and gender, a child went to school, was apprenticed in a craft, was sent away to be trained as a knight (upper class boys), was put to work for the family’s benefit, or continued under the tutelage of the mother for training in adult, household responsibilities (girls).  http://science.jrank.org/pages/8600/Childhood-Child-Rearing-Training-Education-Circulation-Children.html

“Childhood has become such a distinct period that it is hard to imagine that it was not always thought of in that way. However, in medieval times, laws generally did not distinguish between child and adult offenses. After analyzing samples of art along with available publications, historian Philippe Aries concluded that European societies did not accord any special status to children prior to 1600. In paintings, children were often dressed in smaller versions of adult-like clothing.

Some believe that children were actually treated as miniature adults with no special status in medieval Europe. Aries interpretation has been criticized, however. He primarily sampled aristocratic, idealized subjects, which led to the overdrawn conclusion that children were treated as miniature adults and not accorded any special status. In medieval times, children did often work, and their emotional bond with parents may not have been as strong as it is for many children today. However, in medieval times, childhood probably was recognized as a distinct phase of life more than Aries believed. Also, we know that in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome rich conceptions of children’s development were held.”  http://www.csupomona.edu/~plin/ls201/medieval3.html

Education for girls, though allowed in certain places and more common in some countries than others, was not the rule by any means:  “The subject of education for women, however, was a hotly debated issue throughout the Middle Ages. As education was directly connected with the church it was inevitable that the church’s views of women should have led predominated. St. Thomas of Aquinas,1225-1274, who was perhaps one of the great teachers of the period declared what was clearly a widely supported notion regarding women:

“The woman is subject to man on account of the weakness of her nature . . . Man is the beginning of woman and her end, just as God is the beginning and end of every creature. Children ought to love their Father more than they love their mother.”

Medieval society, and particularly the powerful domains of church and state, clearly had no place for well-educated women.”  http://www.csupomona.edu/~plin/ls201/medieval3.html

12/28/12

The Celts in Wales

The Irish, Welsh, and Scots all have a Celtic ancestry, but they settled their respective regions before the Roman conquest of Britain.  There is an amazing amount of debate as to the origin of the Celts:  were they Phoenician?  stocky and dark?  tall and blonde?  as culturally cohesive as the label suggests?   The standard theory is that the Celts were an Indo-European group that gradually migrated across Europe and Asia, with an identifiable, distinct culture by 750 BC.  As a group, they were well-known to the Greeks and Romans.  The map to the right shows the migrations of the celtic (or proto-celtic) groups around 1000 BC.   Note the expansion of the Celts in particular between 500 and 200 BC into the British Isles.  The Welsh tribes in particular consisted of the Ordovices, the Deceangli, the Gangani, the Demetae, and the Silures. http://archaeology.suite101.com/article.cfm/archaeology_and_the_celts

“History tells us that there were two main Celtic groups, one of which is referred to as the ‘lowland Celts’ who hailed from the region of the Danube. These people left their native pastures around 1200 BC and slowly made their way across Europe, founding the lake dwellings in Switzerland, the Danube valley and Ireland. They were skilled in the use of metals and worked in gold, tin and bronze. Unlike the more familiar Celtic strain these people were an agriculturally oriented race, being herdsmen, tillers and artificers who burned rather than buried their dead. They blended peacefully with the megalithic people among whom they settled, contributing powerfully to the religion, art, and customs they encountered as they slowly spread westwards. Their religious beliefs also differed from the next group, being predominately matriarchal.

The second group, often referred to as the ‘true’ Celts, followed closely behind their lowland cousins, making their first appearance on the left bank of the Rhine at the commencement of the sixth century BC. These people, who came from the mountainous regions of the Balkans and Carpathians, were a military aristocracy. Reputed to love fighting for the sake of it they were frequently to be found among the mercenaries of the great armies of those early times. They had a distinct class system, the observance of which constituted one of their major racial features. These were the warlike Celts of ancient history who sacked Rome and Delphi, eventually marching victoriously across much of Europe and the British Isles.”  http://www.joellessacredgrove.com/Celtic/history.html

The Celts had arrived in Britain and Ireland by 400 BC, super-imposing upon whatever native peoples were already there.  The Celts in these regions, then, were on the fringes of Celtic culture, not their heart, which was centered in Northern Europe, particularly in what is now Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

“Archaeological investigation of settlements shows that many people in the Iron Age lived in hilltop enclosures  or hillforts defended by one or more banks and ditches. The inner bank would have been topped by a wooden palisade or occasionally a stone wall.

Within the enclosure people lived in round houses often with porches over the single doorway. The houses were made usually with wattle and daub walls, wooden roofs thatched with straw or reeds and with clay or earth floors. In some areas where stone was plentiful the house walls were built of stone. This is true of north Wales at such hillforts as Moel-y-Gaer. Often the houses had a central fireplace and sometimes a clay oven for baking bread. The grain for the bread was ground on rotary querns. The smoke would have escaped through the thatch. A wooden loom might be found in some houses where people wove cloth from wool or flax.”  http://www.cpat.org.uk/educate/leaflets/celts/celts.htm

Hillforts to visit:

Caer Drewyn (near Corwen)
Moel Fenlli on the Clwydian Hills
Gaer Fawr (near Welshpool), Powys
Ffrydd Faldwyn (Montgomery), Powys
Roundton Hill (near Churchstoke), Powys
Castell Tinboeth, Radnor (also the site of a medieval castle)
Castell Dinas Bran (near Llangollen–also the site of a medieval castle)

12/16/11

Medieval Martial Arts

There is a fascinating documentary on the rediscovery of the European ‘martial art’ of sword fighting called Reclaiming the Blade, available on Netflix, if you subscribe:  http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Reclaiming_the_Blade/70111112?trkid=2361637

It begins by talking about sword fighting movies (Lord of the Rings was highlighted in particular), but once they stripped away the honor and righteous talk, it had a really good argument that sword fighting prior to the invention of gunpowder was just as legitimately a martial art as karate. In Europe, there are now European sword fighting academies which teach medieval sword fighting like my children learn karate. How cool is that?

A society now exists to promote it.  http://www.aemma.org/  with lots of resources to promote this lost art  (http://jwma.ejmas.com/php-bin/jwma_content.php?LLM=0&Tab=articles&MD=) is one example–the Journal of Western Martial Arts.

Two of my children are black belts in Shodukan Karate (a third has his brown belt and is working toward his black belt, and the fourth has just started and is a white belt). My eldest son, in particular, helps me choreograph many of the fights that I write into my books. He has always suggested (perhaps instinctively due to his training) that my characters employ the whole of the sword (hilt, crossguard, and blade), wrestling techniques, and moves which are more akin to karate than you might find in movie depictions of sword fighting. Interestingly, this documentary suggests that he is correct—that these techniques were actually common practice in the Middle Ages.

Our view of sword fighting has been colored by fencing, which has rules, or by movies whose sole purpose is to put on a good show, but not to kill an opponent. In battle, there were no rules. A man in battle was likely to use his sword as a bludgeon, swing his sword like a baseball bat with two hands on the blade and smash his opponent in the face with the hilt, or hold it with two hands, one on the hilt and one on the blade of his sword (with his gauntleted left hand) and thrust it into his opponent’s midsection like a pike. A fight was likely to last less than a minute, and as Viggo Mortensen pointed out, a man wouldn’t pull his sword from its sheath unless he intended to use it, and kill with it as quickly as possible.

Fiore dei Liberi (born c. 1350) was a master of Western martial arts.  His book, Flos Duellatorum (http://thearma.org/Manuals/Liberi.htm) or The Flower of Fencing is the oldest and most complete document of its type. The fighting system he recorded, apparently for the benefit of Niccolo III d’Este, is complex and beautiful in its efficiency and symmetry. The artwork is clear, the instructions direct, and the lessons valuable. While the fighting system itself is the subject of many dynamic projects, little has been uncovered about the author of this fascinating work.”  http://jwma.ejmas.com/php-bin/jwma_content.php?LLM=0&Tab=articles&MD=

As a side note for those writing about swords, when a man did draw his sword from its sheath, the sword did not make that distinctive scraping noise that you hear movies. Metal on leather is silent.

08/14/11

What happened to silence?

With more than 80% of Americans living in metropolitan areas (and only 2% living as I do in towns of fewer than 25,000 people), nobody knows what real silence is anymore.   http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Population/

Writing historical fiction requires that you project yourself into that long ago past.  As the modern world hurtles headlong into the future, this becomes more and more difficult.  Trying to find spaces where it’s possible to get a sense of that historic time is getting harder by the day.

Like light pollution, noise pollution is everywhere.  This winter in the Olympic National Forest and on the Quinnault Indian Reservation, my husband and I experienced the silence of the natural world, though it is presently threatened by the air routes over it into Sea-Tac airport south of Seattle.

In Eastern Oregon, the silence can be complete–and loud–to the point of ringing in the ears–except for the chirp of a bird in the scrub beside the road.  Then the silence is broken by the sound of a crop duster, that returns again and again over the course of the half an hour walk.

In the times before machines, in Wales and the rural spaces of the world, people only knew this kind of silence.  Did we think differently as a result?  What kind of repercussions beyond sound does the lack of silence have on us?

Audio ecologist Gordon Hempton’s research into the last quiet spaces in the world.  The article is here:   http://www.newsweek.com/id/232668

What he has found is that there are very few places left in the United States (fewer than a dozen) that are free from mechanical/artificial noises for more than fifteen minutes at a time.  There are none left in Europe.

07/10/11

Medieval Life Expectancy: Muslim World verses Christian World

It is taken as given in this day and age that people living in Europe in the Middle Ages didn’t bathe much, if at all, had no real knowledge of science or medicine, and their high mortality rates were a consequence of this general ignorance.  Neither of the these assertions are, in fact, true, but the average human life span in the Middle Ages was significantly lower than the modern one nonetheless.   I have discussed this in several places on this blog.

Here:  http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/life-expectancy-in-the-middle-ages/ I discuss the life span of the royal house of Wales and the Marche.  Eliminating individuals who died before adulthood completely from the equation, the mean life expectancy for women was 43.6 years, with a median of 42/43; for men, it was a mean of 48.7 and a median of 48/49.  That I elminiated those who died in childhood changes the equation and it’s hard to know in all these calculations if the statistician’s numbers indicate mean (the average number), median (the middle number), and what effect including infant deaths has on the statistics.

Furthermore, here http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/sick-kids/ I discuss the mortality rates among King Edward I’s own family.  Out of his 19 total children (3 by his second wife, Marguerite), 8 lived to grow up. However, only two lived what we would consider longish lives.   Of those who actually grew up, the mean for the adult women is 41.8 with a median of 35; the mean for adult men is 36.6 with a median of 38.  Combined, the mean is 39.8 and the median is 35/38.  To include all children in the mortality rate brings the mean down to 18.4 and the median to a hideous 6.

What, then, were the mortality rates in the Muslim world?  Muhammad promoted explorations in the sciences, including medicine.  Did this increase the general lifespan of the population?

It appears not.

From my reading, not only was their little difference in lifespan across Europe, from the UK to Italy and Spain (it wasn’t cold that killed people so much as density of population that spread disease.  Warfare and child birth killed people in equal measure in Italy as England–maybe more warfare in Europe, come to think on it), but into Asia as well.

This paper (http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/3/345.abstract) suggests that child mortality was equally high in the cities of the Middle East as in Europe.  This is further confirmed by other sources (Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World, by James Lindsay page 187).  If child mortality was high, then death in childbirth was probably also high, and thus the average death rate of women would likely match that of the rest of the medieval world.

The long citation at Wikipedia  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate  presents divergent views, with some texts suggesting that medieval Muslim clerics lived very long lives in comparison to the lifespan of Europeans–though some studies have shown comparable lifespans for monks/nuns in Europe, since that profession removes both childbirth and war as likely causes of death.

From that source:  “The demographics of medieval Islamic society varied in some significant aspects from other agricultural societies, including a decline in birth rates as well as a change in life expectancy. Other traditional agrarian societies are estimated to have had an average life
expectancy of 20 to 25 years, while ancient Rome and medieval Europe are estimated at 20 to 30
years. Conrad I. Lawrence estimates the average lifespan in the early Islamic Caliphate to be above 35 years for the general population, and several studies on the lifespans of Islamic scholars concluded that members of this occupational group had a life expectancy between 69 and 75
years, though this longevity was not representative of the general population.

http://www.enotes.com/topic/Islamic_Golden_Age

The Citations are all in Wikipedia so you can look them up.  Once again, it is unclear if the authors are talking about median or mean, and to what extent ‘average’ lifespan includes children who die in childbirth or before the age of five.

http://lib.colostate.edu/research/history/medievmid.html  has a nice list of books for further exploration of this issue.

10/19/10

Jews in Medieval England

Jews lived in England during the Roman and Anglo-Saxon periods, but not as an organized community. This page states:  “When William the Conqueror arrived in England in 1066, he encouraged Jewish merchants and artisans from northern France to move to England. The Jews came mostly from France with some from Germany, Italy and Spain, seeking prosperity and a haven from anti-Semitism. Serving as special representatives of the king, these Jews worked as moneylenders and coin dealers. Over the course of a generation, Jews established communities in London, York, Bristol, Canterbury and other major cities. They generally lived in segregated areas by themselves.”

From the charter by King John (1201), for which he received 4000 marks:  “John, by the grace of God, &c. Know that we have granted to all the Jews of England and Normandy to have freely and honourably residence in our land, and to hold all that from us, which they held from King Henry, our father’s grandfather, and all that now they reasonably hold in land and fees and mortgages and goods, and that they have all their liberties and customs just as they had them in the time of the aforesaid King Henry, our father’s grandfather, better and more quietly and more honourably.”  http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/kingjohn-jews.html

This goodwill, if it ever existed, had disintegrated by the time of Edward I of England (1239-1307).  As a king, he casts a long shadow over the thirteenth century and historians have generally viewed him favorably, in large part because they view his reign as good for England as a country (meaning he was stubborn, vibrant, and never backed down from a fight), if not anyone else.  But one of his most heinous acts, in addition to conquering Wales, was the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.

Edward, and his father before him, began with a series of pograms designed to reduce their ability to secure a livelihood. He and his predecessors encouraged the Jews to become physicians, merchants, bankers, and traders but they were not allowed to own land. Through apprenticeship and education, which was of supreme importance to the Jewish community, many Jews accumulated a great deal of wealth, in disproportion to their routinely uneducated gentile counterparts. Of course, this engendered animosity among gentiles, who saw only the wealth, and not the effort to attain it.

Map of Jewish expulsions and resettlement areas in Europe. 1100-1500: http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/gallery/expuls.htm.

This did not stop the gentiles from borrowing money from the Jews, however, and Edward allowed the Jews in England to charge interest on loans. In turn, Edward would exact huge taxes from them.  As the taxes became more burdensome, it forced them to both raise the interest rates which they charged their debtors, and to call in those loans when taxed to excess. If the Jews refused to pay Edward, they were punished. In 1278, Edward arrested 600 Jewish men upon charges of coin clipping and hanged 270 of them. Edward then claimed their wealth for himself, to the tune of over 16,000 pounds.

That equaled 10% of the annual income of the entire realm. The money Edward took from the Jews compensated for the huge expenses involved in defeating Prince Llywelyn of Wales (see how this is all interconnected?).

Once Edward had taken all their money, he had no more use for them, and began to pass more laws restricting their activities. They had to wear specific clothing and badges, could not own land, practice money lending, join any guild or business, or pass on their assets to their children. In 1290, Edward completed his pogrom against the Jews and expelled them from England (although a few paid bribes in order to be allowed to stay). England is the first country in Europe to do this, though France and Germany follow suit in short order.

Which is why Spain had so many to persecute 200 years later during the Spanish Inquisition. And why, by 1935, millions of Jews lived in Poland, which welcomed them after the Black Death.