By the middle of 1493 the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich III’s left foot had turned almost completely black. His doctors had begun to worry some weeks earlier, when it first started slowly shifting from a healthy pink towards a shade of darkened blue. The late medieval compendia to which they might have turned for guidance spent little time on this final extremity of the body, only really discussing what to do in the case of surface issues such as boils, blisters or swellings. So in the absence of further advice the doctors were left to think instinctively. Some declared Friedrich was lacking humoral warmth and should be prescribed fiery medicaments to remedy the situation. Others insisted that the malady was down to the Emperor’s near-constant consumption of melons, in which he apparently took excessive pleasure. Either way, something had to be done. A coterie of medics was assembled from far and wide to converge on the Austrian city of Linz, where the emperor was attempting to convalesce and shake the creeping blackening of his limb. Friedrich’s son, the future Emperor Maximilian, sent his Portuguese physician, Matteo Lupi. The monarch’s brother-in-law, Duke Albrecht IV of Bayern-München, sent the Jewish surgeon Hans Seyff to Friedrich’s bedside. And they were joined there by four more German physicians who had been summoned: Heinrich von Cologne, Heinz Pflaundorfer von Landshut, Erhard von Graz and Friedrich von Olmutz. After mulling over the Emperor, the learned group decided reluctantly that his worsening foot necessitated medieval medicine’s last resort: amputation.
What followed cannot have been pleasant. While some anaesthetic would probably have been made available to Friedrich – numbing plants and opiates, hemlock, poppy or meadowsweet, applied to a sponge or burned for inhalation – the repertoire of pain relief in the Middle Ages was minimal and not particularly effective. As the five physicians steadied the patient, Seyff and another surgeon, Larius von Passau, cut through the leg above the affected area, severing skin and soft flesh with sharp knives before sawing through what remained in order to remove the foot. They then applied powders to staunch the bleeding and bandages to keep the wound as clean as possible. One hopes for the patient’s sake that the procedure was at least quick. It is hard to believe he underwent it with quite the grace shown in an image of the operation preserved in a manuscript in Vienna. Friedrich appears blank-faced and in a mood of drooping calm, sitting relaxed and stretched wide in Christ-like repose as the surgeons work away at the coal-black foot. The attending physicians are shown behind him daintily supporting his arms, although they were far more likely to have been pinning the struggling Emperor down as the saw’s teeth worked its way through skin and muscle to the bone.
We know an unusual amount about this foot amputation because of an account written after the fact by the surgeon Seyff himself. Why exactly he felt compelled to put pen to paper is unclear. Perhaps it was the immense pressure of operating on an emperor in the presence of his personal doctors, as well as various lords, knights and barons of the court who, he anxiously notes, were also keenly observing. Perhaps the surgical narrative was intended as some sort of personal insurance for Seyff against his patient’s yo-yoing condition: the operation to remove the foot went exactly as planned (success), but Friedrich still died some weeks later (failure). Or perhaps the account was designed to immortalise Seyff’s encounter with the most revered body in the land. The personage of an emperor, like all other medieval rulers, was more impressive than any other in society. It was the head of the towering Body Politic, fed with distinct humoral diets and venerated after death even when split into different pieces in different places. But more than that, the blackened foot Seyff found himself holding was one of the emperor’s most pivotal parts, a vital point of contact between the sovereign and his people.
Feet had long been identified as a place for elaborate displays of loyalty to the Crown. Kneeling before a ruler to kiss their shoes or toes was thought the ultimate mark of fealty and respect, and while Muslim leaders at the time tended to swear off the practice as frivolous and vulgar, western leaders were extremely keen. Popes had reportedly required the custom ever since the eighth-century pontiff Adrian I had insisted his feet be ritually kissed as a symbol of allegiance by the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, the centuries-old predecessor of black-footed Friedrich. Certainly by the twelfth century kissing the pope’s foot was a regular part of the coronation ritual of the em perors, who were expected to genuflect before the pontiff and embrace his feet before the pope in turn placed the crown on their head. And in other cultures too the social dance of kissing feet could be equally complex, sometimes even laced with cunning political oneupmanship. The Gesta Normanorum, an eleventh-century history of the Normans, records that the Viking leader Rollo (c.846–930) was required to kiss the foot of the Frankish king Charles the Simple after losing to him in battle. When offered the foot, however, Rollo supposedly refused to stoop. He demanded that one of his kinsmen lift the limb up to his lips, rather than the other way around, toppling Charles from his throne in the process. Rollo had adroitly, and somewhat literally, turned the symbolic politics of the situation on its head.
More painstakingly elaborate than any other were the foot-kissing traditions of the Byzantine emperors, for whom the subtle gradations of the practice were even more finely tuned. Many long-standing and convoluted civic procedures had been slowly accruing in the court of Constantinople since the city’s foundation as the empire’s capital, and we are lucky to have several preserved in a unique fourteenth-century treatise entitled On Dignities and Offices. The book records various multifaceted acts of proskynesis (
), bowing to the emperor to kiss and venerate his person. Evidently there was a complicated social etiquette involved. Some courtiers are ordered to remove their headwear when they prostrate themselves before the ruler, while others may keep their hats on. Some more important figures might be allowed to kiss the emperor’s right cheek or hand, while others could hope for no higher than his foot. Take the subtle differentiation in the way the representatives of the city’s Italian communities were expected to venerate their imperial host on Easter Sunday:
If the leader of the Genoese also happens to be at the place where the Emperor is, he too enters and with his companions kisses the Emperor in the manner of the court title holders, as was indicated, namely his foot, his hand and his cheek … As for the Venetians, since the Emperor had wanted to make war with them … when their leader comes, on the first day and he is to perform proskynesis, both he and his companions kneel only, they do not kiss the Emperor’s foot at all.
Here we see that the Genoese, who appear particularly cordial and perhaps somewhat toadying to the emperor, are invited to show the fullest deference and kiss the foot. The Venetians, on the other hand, remain untrusted after recent political fractiousness and are only permitted to go as far as a neat curtsey.
Even if you were a simple layman, medieval authors and artists were on hand to make these deferential practices accessible through evocative prayers and paintings. The Netherlandish author and clergyman Willem Jordaens (c.1321–1372) was one of many writers who mused imaginatively on the nature of such interactions. In a series of instructions almost as laborious and detailed as the protocols of the Byzantine court, Willem advocated mentally throwing yourself on the floor in front of Christ, in order to access a deep spirituality:
Valt dan tot sijnen voeten. Dwaet met uwen tranen den slincken voet der waerheyt, ende claghet … Droeghet desen voet met uwen hare, dats met eenen leetsijn ende met eenen mishagen ws leuens. Custene met uwen monde, dat is: begeert met inneghen luste v leuen te regeren na die regelen der waerheyt … Hier-om moettij den rechten voet der ontfermicheyt gods dwaen met inneghen mynlijcken tranen, dat sij v gheue gracie ende sueten lust na die waerheyt te leuene … Siet mijn erme ziele, dese ij voeten ons heren moetij cussen met oetmoedeghen minlijcken luste, ende niet den eenen sonder den anderen.
Prostrate yourself at his feet. Moisten the left foot of truth with your tears and lament … Dry this foot with your hair, that is, with sorrow and dissatisfaction over your life. Kiss it with your mouth, that is, yearn with inner desire to lead your life in accordance with the rules of truth … You must then moisten the right foot of God’s mercy with inner, loving tears, so as to receive his grace and a sweet desire to live according to the truth … Look, my poor soul, you should kiss these two feet of our Lord with humble loving desire, and you should never kiss one without the other.
In Italy it was the visual arts that took up this charge. The Sienese artist Duccio di Buoninsegna shows just the same sort of podiatric longing in a small but intricate panel painting of the Virgin painted at some point in the 1280s, known as the Madonna dei francescani.
79. Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Madonna dei francescani, probably painted in the 1280s.
We see a long flowing image of Mary holding Christ, dressed in a robe of deepest blue and flanked either side by angels that waft a piece of continuous patterned fabric behind her broad throne. Small enough that you might miss them, in the painting’s lower left-hand corner there is a group of Franciscan monks, prostrating themselves before the Holy Mother. Fanned out as if the descending freeze-frames of a single stooping figure, the lowest is just about to bring his face to touch the Virgin’s slipper, his mouth puckering to kiss the holy foot, wide-eyed and smiling.
Talon Toes and Bared Soles
Were we able to mimic Duccio’s monks and take in our hands the type of soft slippers worn by the Virgin Mary, we would be holding an unusual survivor. Shoes fall into a long list of everyday objects that are understandably, if frustratingly, not the type of thing medieval people generally thought to preserve for posterity. Just like textiles, shoes have an obvious tendency to degrade and break in the wear and tear of daily use, and quite specific archaeological conditions are required for historical examples to make it to the present day. Made predominantly of leather, tawed using organic and mineral techniques rather than those of modern chemical tanning, shoes are particularly vulnerable to natural drying, shrinkage and break-up over time. Only those found in sufficiently wet environments – riverbanks, bogs, excavated latrines – have been able to stave off extensive decay, thereby giving us a glimpse of the fashionable footwear of the past.
From what survives, the majority of shoes from the Middle Ages appear to have been relatively simple in manufacture. Even Mary’s pair that so beguile the trio of monks with their aura of beautified sanctity are only simple, plain black moccasins. Earlier in the period, distinctions between men’s and women’s styles were slight, if they existed at all, and more commonly shoes were tailored to particular uses or climates. In the warmer landscapes of southern Europe, north Africa or the Middle East, simple flat leather or hemp-cord sandals might have sufficed for most activities, sometimes elaborated with gilding or decorated straps. In colder regions a more practically minded labourer working the field in rain and snow would have found a hardier, wooden-soled clog handy for protecting the feet. The most common technique among cobblers was the self-explanatory turnshoe method, where a soft piece of leather, known as the upper, was formed into the top of a shoe by placing it skin-side-down over a foot-shaped mould, known as a last. Stitched to an equally soft reversed sole, the whole affair was then turned inside out, presenting a sock-like shoe with a continuous neat seam. These delicate wares were often worn beneath pattens, a thicker wooden or sometimes hardened leather sole that strapped around the shoe itself to provide support when walking outdoors.
80. Three medieval leather shoes. The uppermost is a long-toed poulaine, considered particularly fashionable in fourteenth-century England.
By the middle of the twelfth century cobblers had developed the technology to incorporate further leather layers within sections of a shoe to make its sole waterproof, and through these sorts of inventive changes later medieval shoes started to become far more individualised and unique. They took on more consistent and complicated styles based on a flurry of regional fashions. Terminology alone suggests a widening in the range of uses, with people clad in buskins, ankle-shoes, boteaux, galoches, trippes, all with the possibility of decoration through scoring and patterning their leather, embellishing them with embroidery panels or detailing their drawstrings and buckles. Accounts of everyday life attest to this diversity too. The author John Garland, writing in thirteenth-century Paris, spoke of his neighbour selling shoes on the streets in a broad variety of laced styles with pointed toes, buckled shoes, boots with longer legs and what he tantalisingly describes only as styles exclusively ‘worn by women and monks’. Around the same time a specialist market for shoes was flourishing across the Mediterranean, with makers competing to work in increasingly exclusive materials. The London Company of Cordwainers, for instance, was founded in 1272 and took its name from a literary corruption of the Anglo-Norman cordewan, a particularly prized and expensive type of cordovan leather imported from southern Spain, which they transformed for their clients into the very latest fashions.
One shoe excavated from a dig at the site of Baynard’s Castle, a thirteenth-century palace that once stood in central London, shows just how outlandish these footwear styles could become. Formed of patterned leather, simply incised with thick stripes and thin cross-hatching, its most remarkable feature is an extremely exaggerated pointed toe, stretching out to almost double the length of the foot. These long shoes were a status symbol, particularly popular in aristocratic circles following the fashion of the wife of King Richard II, the young and stylish Anne of Bohemia (1366–1394). Her Polish origins gave these long pieces their nicknames, poulaines or crakowes, and some were even stuffed with clumps of hair or moss packing to maintain their remarkable and ever-lengthening shapes. The longest were wilfully impractical, prominently displaying that their wearer was of a class of person unlikely to have to work particularly hard or walk particularly far. And the low-slung bridge between their heels and their fronts also suggests they were designed to show off the bright colours of the wearer’s hose beneath, part of a growing move to coordinate one’s whole outfit into a snappy ensemble. Styles this extravagant were quick to catch the attention and derision of traditionalists, especially from those in the Church who saw fancy shoes as nothing more than a flagrant demonstration of wild morals. One chronicler writing in the early 1360s described these pointed toes as more like ‘the talons of a demon than the ornaments of men’, and opined that their pride-fuelled wearers were nothing short of waifish posers: ‘In the hall they are lions but in the field they are rabbits.’ Better to be rabbits on points, some argued back, than to wear the blunt kuhmhal or ‘cow’s mouth’ shoes that followed these poulaines in the fifteenth-century, bringing toe fashion flat-endedly full circle.
For all that a demon-talon toe was over the top and the cow’s mouth a bit bland, both would have been favourable to no shoes at all, especially given a common medieval association of bare-footedness with crime. Stripping prisoners of their shoes was a common tactic used by author ities to slow a runner down should they ever shed their chains and try to flee. And it also featured heavily in the performance of a criminal’s punishment. Men and women might be ordered to walk without shoes for vast distances across the countryside, sometimes carrying heavy objects and wearing their bared feet down to bloody stumps. Jews, in particular, were singled out for barefooted shaming, especially in northern Germany, where legal records testify to them being forced to stand without shoes on the stretched skin of a pig while swearing oaths in court. Such humiliation equated the Jews, in fact all barefoot condemned, with more general forms of unclean living. The Egyptian theologian and legal thinker Ibn al-Hajj (c.1250–1336) wrote with horror about the dirty feet of food sellers in his native Cairo. The streets of most large medieval cities were cleaned more regularly than we might expect, but could still at times become extremely unpleasant, filling with detritus and horse manure from passing wagons. Mamluk bakers, to al-Hajj’s dismay, were apparently perfectly happy to walk to and from work with no shoes at all, returning to their ovens without washing, their feet caked in grime and surely polluting their wares.
In other contexts the shameful potential in bare-footedness could actually be quite useful. It was the marker of a particularly penitential mindset. Just as the elongation of elaborate shoes to some critics exhibited a certain moral recklessness, so the removing of ones shoes could mark a particular moral seriousness. Should the same rulers who were so keen to have their feet kissed ever wish in return to perform public pious acts for their subjects, they could turn to a number of useful shoeless biblical narratives for ideas. Several European kings annually tried to recreate a Christological model of humility by following the Gospels’ description of Christ washing the feet of the Apostles at the Last Supper. In a ritual not dissimilar to their miraculous curing of the scrofulous sick through the touch of their royal hands, on the Thursday of Holy Week these sovereigns could take it upon themselves to wash the feet of beggars. For some this seems to have been a genuinely honest act of penitence, with the ruler divesting themselves of their royal garb and soaping up the feet of the poor. But, predictably, for others it was more gesture than gospel, choosing only the cleanest paupers for the ritual, their feet having been carefully pre-washed before meeting with the monarch’s semi-sacred hands.
Royal acts like this were matched in a more humble way in monasteries and convents, where groups of monks and nuns also undertook to wash the feet of the poor and each other, a gesture of spiritual equity among those cloistered together. The records of Syon Abbey, founded just west of London in 1415, suggest that the community there gathered at important moments in the religious calendar to sing prayers and watch their abbess wash her nuns’ feet, a performance that we are told was ‘kepte for a perpetual memory’ by the sisters. Christ himself had, after all, carried the cross to Calvary barefoot, and saintly models had long equated wearing no shoes with a divestment of material things in favour of divine truth. Franciscan monks, like those painted kneeling in front of Duccio’s Virgin, would traditionally have walked barefoot in imitation of their order’s founder, Saint Francis of Assisi (1181/2–1226), the group known colloquially in German lands as the Barfüsser, the ‘barefooted’. Even people not normally taken by regular shoeless penance could be convinced to swear it in return for holy help. Beuve de Hantone, the swashbuckling hero of a popular thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman romance poem, is at one point in his epic narrative captured by his ruthless enemies and clad in shackles. Appealing to God, he cries out in the hope of being miraculously cut loose from his chains, vowing that he will undertake a spiritual journey to the Holy Land in return for his freedom:
He dieus!… par la vostre bonté,
Glorious sire, et cor me delivrés!
Au saint sepulchre u vos fustes posés
Vous requerrai nus piés et san sollers.
Oh God! … through your goodness,
Glorious sir, and heart deliver me!
At the Holy Sepulchre where you were placed
I will seek you with bare feet and without shoes.
The chains, of course, break: physical proof of the sanctity that could be conjured up by something as simple as a barefoot promise.
By Foot, By Horse, By Sea
The poetic tale of Beuve de Hantone does not tell us whether our hero ever actually took a moment off from slaying giants, evading pirates and searching out his beloved horse Arondel to visit the Holy Sepulchre and enact his pilgrimage. In fairness, if the records of real medieval people are anything to go by, such a journey would have been a substantial and difficult undertaking. Reaching Jerusalem to see its miraculous sights was extremely time-consuming, expensive and treacherous. From a major western seaport such as Venice it could take anywhere between two weeks and several months to arrive at the Levantine coast, where a pilgrim might alight in the port cities of Acre, Caesarea or Jaffa. And from there Jerusalem was, as the twelfth-century Archbishop William of Tyre estimated, ‘still some twenty-four miles inland’, nestled high up in rolling hills.
Clearly, William thought this to be some stretch away from the sea, although exactly how far his ‘miles’ measured is hard to say now. Terms for distance, both big and small, were not standardised in the Middle Ages and could vary significantly from place to place. A Swiss toise was nearly but not quite the same as a Danish rode. An Arabian mil (
) was based on distance, but a Persian farsang (
) was based on time travelled. A Portuguese legoa was about half a kilometre either shorter or longer than a Spanish legua, depending on where in Spain you asked. Most measures at least tried to come back to the universal of the body, specifically the feet. Latin geometrical handbooks which emerged around the eleventh century list a ‘half-foot’ (demi-pes), ‘foot’ (pes), and ‘step’ or ‘pace’ (passus) as units, with many others derived from this bodily basis: a ‘mile’ was a thousand paces, while a ‘land league’ was theorised as the distance covered in an hour by a man walking consistently at an average speed. These helpfully tallied with some earlier classical names for measures, but, more importantly, they also mapped onto the most common mode of medieval travel. Finding a horse, keeping it fed and watered, purchasing a carriage, repairing it after a bumpy ride: these were expenses well beyond the means of all but the most wealthy. Instead, the vast majority of journeys would be undertaken by foot.
In the Roman world, the stability brought by having continuous lands under the same imperial rule had coupled with a strong civic infrastructure to ensure a network of well-kept, safe roads for walking and riding across the Mediterranean. With the break-up of this empire and a return to a more fractured and rural mode of living, it was not hard for grey spots to emerge in both the maintenance of highways and their protection under the rule of law. Travellers’ accounts from the Middle Ages warned of the ease with which a cart’s wheels or axels could crack in the divots of an unsuitable street. And they often lamented the perils of being held up by highwaymen when travelling by horse or on foot. Furious letters written to ruling kings and nobles report being robbed at knife-point of their possessions, and local laws sometimes even called for roadside trees and bushes to be kept pruned a distance back from thoroughfares to remove any convenient hiding places from which bandits might be able to ambush.
Travel by river or sea was often speedier over longer distances, but not necessarily any safer, especially given the potential for choppy waters, storms and shipwrecks. It is no coincidence that the Venetian Republic, a city-state that thrived on its cross-continental shipping trade, contained both Europe’s largest shipyards and some of its earliest banks, who innovated the first monetary mechanisms of insurance and credit to support the extreme risk of traders’ world-hopping ventures. Sailors were the travellers whose lives were at the whim of nature’s very fiercest elements. Consider the terrifying language used to describe a ferocious moment on the Irish Sea in one Old Gaelic poem, perhaps written by the eighth-century Ulster poet Ruman mac Colmáin:
Anbthine mór ar muig Lir
a dána dara a h-ardimlibh
at-racht gæth, ran-goin gem garg
cu tét dar muir mórgelgarb
dos-árraid ga garggemrid
Ó do-chuir an gæth atúaid
co dúthracair tuinn temen-crúaid
co m-bad fri domun an-des
fri fithnem ro ferad tres
ró ésted fri elechdúain
Ra lá tonn trén a trethan
dar cach inber íarlethan
da-rócht gáeth, ran-goin gem gel
im Cend Tíre, im Tír n-Alban
silid drib lán slíabdreman
Mac Dé athar, adblib scor
rom-ain ar gráin garg-anfod!
Fíadu fírén na Flede
acht rom-ain ar anside
ar h-iffirn co n-ardanfod!
A great tempest upon the plain of the sea,
Bold across its high borders.
Wind has arisen,
Fierce winter has slain us.
It has come across the sea.
When the wind sets from the north
It urges the dark fierce waves
Towards the southern world,
Surging in strife against the white sky
Listening to the song.
The wave has tumbled with mighty force
Across each dark broad river-mouth.
Wind has come, white winter has slain us,
Around Cantire, around the land of Scotland.
Sliab-Dremon Mountain pours forth a full stream.
Son of God the Father, with vast hosts,
Save me from the horror of fierce tempests!
Righteous Lord of the Feast,
Only save me from the horrid blast,
From Hell with high tempest!
Those who had to take the risk of long-distance travel were at least aided by several long-standing navigational technologies. The compass was reliably manufactured in Europe from the thirteenth century onwards, and a busy local knowledge of traditional routes of passage over land and sea would have been passed down by mountaineers and sailors from generation to generation. More archaic yet still accurate mechanical means had also been around for a millennium or so in the form of the classical astrolabe, a circular clinometer that enjoyed particularly widespread use on all sides of the medieval Mediterranean. It was constructed of a flat disc or tympan which had marked upon it concentric altitudinal measurements, on top of which sat a more elaborate moveable framework of pointers known as a rete. By hanging the small machine in front of the eye and aligning its constituent parts, travellers could measure their location with relative accuracy by calculating the positions of celestial bodies, triangulating themselves using local time and latitude. These useful instruments could be made simply out of paper or parchment: Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a short text addressed to a boy named Lewis, probably his son or godson, showing in detail how this might be done. But most astrolabes which survive attest to a far greater level of professional craft and skill. Made of carefully decorated metal, they were less travellers’ aids than technological statements in their own right. One surviving Persian piece, made around the year 1000, is particularly delicate. Formed of brass, it is covered in aesthetic flourishes from its shell-patterned handle to its intricate rete, while on its reverse an inscribed signature hints at a once thriving community of specialist instrument-makers: ‘Ahmad and Muhammad, sons of Ibrahim, maker of astrolabes from Isfahan’. These large and expensive objects flaunted the easy possibility of movement for the elite, while at the same time presenting the advanced cosmological and geographical knowledge of their age in the most elaborate way possible.
81. A Persian brass astrolabe, made around 1000 and inscribed on the reverse with the names of its makers, ‘Ahmad’ and ‘Muhammad’.
All this is not to say that medieval people without money permanently stayed put. True, an average man or woman might have only occasionally strayed beyond the immediate confines of their native towns and cities. But there were still certain opportunities that they could take to explore more of the world. Soldiers marched on foot over vast distances in the employ of the army, and perhaps the biggest motivator of long-distance travel was not privilege or politics but piety. Pilgrimages like those promised by Beuve de Hantone were a significant draw for rich and poor alike, and accounts survive which suggest that the Middle East attracted aspiring religious travellers from the very furthest extremes of the inhabited world. The Holy Land itinerary of the twelfth-century Christian pilgrim Sæwulf, whose Anglo-Saxon name suggests an English origin, tells of his journey to Jerusalem from the far north-west of Europe. And accounts by Muslim travellers such as the Moroccan explorer Muhammad ibn Battuta (1304–1368/9) or the Chinese diplomat Zheng He (
, 1371–1433) attest to even further travel from north-west Africa and the extreme Far East.
These few written accounts, though, are rare, and we are mostly forced to trace the droves of pilgrims descending on foot to the Levant through the material markers they chose to leave behind. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is one such example. This was one of the very earliest large-scale Christian basilicas to be built, constructed in 326, during the reign of the emperor Constantine, over the supposed site of Christ’s birth. Throughout the Middle Ages it was regularly reformatted, suggesting a busy pilgrimage presence: the emperor Justinian renovated the site around the year 530, it was redecorated again in the twelfth century, and fitted with a new roof in the fifteenth. Today, too, changes continue. The control of the building is split between a number of different Christian denominations – Roman Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox – each of whom practise their claims to administer, clean and worship in the space with subtle distinctions. Petty differences have sometimes erupted into outbreaks of serious aggression between the parties and even mass brawls involving scores of monks. But despite this daily tension, and what is getting on for two millennia of refurbishment and violence, the church still preserves a faded testament to the diversity of the medieval Holy Land’s visitors.
82. A photographic negative from the 1930s showing the interior of the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, including its columns with their fragmentary pilgrimage paintings.
It is hard to see them through the bright light streaming in from the high windows, and beneath its layers of accumulated grime, but at the top of around half of the building’s twenty-two columns is a network of paintings. Appropriately for their hallowed surroundings, each column boasts a frontal figure of a saint or the Virgin paid for by a different pilgrim visitor, probably all made at some point while Bethlehem was under Crusader rule. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, as this Crusader state was known, was founded after the successes of the First Crusade in 1099 but was only relatively short-lived, shrinking from a once substantial strip of territory across the eastern Mediterranean to just a few cities a century later, and to virtually nothing by 1300. Surviving remnants such as the Bethlehem columns, however, prove just how important this territory was to these western invaders. Some of these paintings are of figures closely identified with the Holy Land that the Crusaders had striven to recapture. Sketched in an imported western style we find John the Baptist who had blessed Christ in the nearby River Jordan, Saint Sabas, the founder of several fifth-century Levantine monasteries, and the hermit Saint Onuphrios, who had spent all of his spiritual life fasting in the nearby Egyptian desert. But we also find paintings that represent the far-off Byzantine world, iterations of Mary in various iconic guises, from the Virgin Glykophilousa (
, ‘of the Sweet Kiss’), showing the mother and child exchanging a tender embrace, to the more dramatic Virgin Hodegetria (
, ‘pointing the way’), where Mary gestures towards Christ, intimating with bittersweet irony his role as the saviour of mankind. On two more columns we even find Saint Olaf and Saint Knute, tenth- and eleventh-century Norwegian and Swedish kings, testimony to patrons who had travelled to Bethlehem from as far afield as Scandinavia. That these diverse peoples all came together to invest spiritually in the decoration of this building – commemorating their distant homelands in the process – tells a vivid a story of the church as a place of passionate remembrance for pilgrims from far-flung lands who had all thrown caution to the wind and braved the elements to congregate in a single sacred spot.
Opposite Feet
A pilgrimage across continents to imbibe the spiritual aura of sacred spaces would be a once-in-a-lifetime event for most people, the furthest their medieval feet would ever carry them. Some travellers, though, took up a sense of adventure as a professional obligation. These medieval explorers and authors preserved some of their more spectacular journeys in a series of remarkable travelogues which still survive today in various versions. They recorded with wonder the extraordinary cultures they came across and the strange architecture of cities they visited. Some even spoke of lands so distant that they described them as antipodes, literally ‘opposite feet’, a world of peoples who lived so dramatically far around the globe they stood on an earth completely inverted.
The work of someone like Benjamin of Tudela (c.1130–1173), a Jewish author born in northern Spain, gives a sense of the richness of these surviving stories. In his Travels of Benjamin (
) the author records a fantastically wide-ranging journey. Beginning in Spain, he travels north-east through southern France, down along the western coast of Italy via Rome and across Greece to Constantinople, all the while recording a snapshot of European peoples and places. We hear rich descriptions of the turreted houses of Pisa, the imperial palaces of Greece and the shining flagstones of the Byzantine capital. Geography is vividly brought to life too, from mountain ranges and rivers to islands and vast beaches. And he recounts an array of cultural events: vicious mule and bird fights in Rome, community enterprises to feed the sick in Montpellier, and meetings with hundreds of rabbis, lawyers, physicians and other intellectuals en route. But Benjamin did not stop at Constantinople. Continuing southwards through the Holy Land, he then turned east and journeyed to Mosul and Baghdad, travelled south again deeper into the desert and then north to Basra. He admired the fact that in Okbara, a city on the Tigris, there were some 10,000 Jews compared with only 300 in a western city like Marseilles. And after nearly eight years of wandering the globe, Benjamin chartered a ship around the entire Arabian Peninsula to tour Egypt, before finally sailing westwards to Sicily and returning to his native Iberia to publish his travels. Perhaps appropriately for such a well-voyaged man who had searched out Jewish communities across large stretches of the globe, he ends by reiterating a plea from Deuteronomy, asking God to ‘return and gather the People of Israel from all nations whither he has scattered thee. Amen. Amen. Amen.’
Other travellers, such as the thirteenth-century Venetians Niccolò and Marco Polo, or early Arabic explorers such as the adventurous Muhammad al-Muqaddasi (c.946–991), shed even greater light on the criss-crossing routes that could be taken across the medieval Mediterranean and even further afield. More than anything, they narrate a bewildering multitude of cultural exchanges. As these virtual strangers stumble into worlds previously completely unknown to them, they inevitably take on a distinct tone of wonder, marvelling at the distant fruits of the earthly antipodes. So vivid were these authentic accounts that they inspired a market for more fantastical books written somewhat closer to home. A text like the popular Travels of John Mandeville claims to offer an account of its eponymous fourteenth-century English knight who covers, in his own words, the ‘many diverse manners of folk, of diverse laws and shapes’ stretching from Europe and the Middle East across China and Africa. For all it is presented as fact, however, this piece is almost certainly a work of the imagination. For one, the historical figure of John Mandeville appears nowhere in contemporary records. And even more suspiciously he records both far-off cultures and fantastical beasts of a variety of shapes and sizes. In fact, the routes John takes and sights he comes across seem to have been cribbed exclusively and sometimes verbatim from both available accounts of earlier explorers and from classical writings. What we have here are two completely different medieval approaches to geographical knowledge. On the one hand, someone like Benjamin is presented as painstaking in his accuracy. A Hebrew preface to his narrative states clearly that ‘after strict inquiry, Benjamin’s words were found to be true and correct, for he was a true man’. Mandeville’s Travels, on the other hand, are tales spun by an armchair traveller. The medieval reader is left to decide whether to see him as duplicitous, working his creative brain and not his travelling feet, or simply playful, writing in inventive ways within a new genre of literary travel fiction.
Lying somewhere between these two registers of real and mythic travel is the complicated testimony of medieval maps. In the Middle Ages these were rarely documents that voyaging pilgrims or travel writers could have used to plan their routes, neatly plotting out future journeys in measures of feet and paces across their decorated surface. Instead, they were things far more concerned with principles than practice. Theories of cartography had thrived in the Arabic-speaking world from its earliest days, producing foundational works attributed to thinkers like the Central Asian writer Abu Zayd al-Balkhi (c.850–934) or the Persian geographer Muhammad al-Istakhri (d.957). Far from the much-propagated idea that people in the Middle Ages believed they inhabited a flat earth, ancient Greek geographers had long before proven not only that the globe was a complete sphere but that the regions of Europe, Africa and Asia – what they called the oikumene (
), the inhabited world – constituted only around a quarter of the planet’s total surface. Building on these theories, early Arabic thinkers like al-Balkhi and al-Istakhri wrote extensive treatises in a trad ition later known as the Kitab al-masalik wa-al-mamalik (
), ‘The Book of Routes and Realms’. These manuscripts both discussed the world’s size and shape, and offered abstract visualisations of vast areas of the globe through a series of up to twenty-one detailed maps. These included, among others, plans of the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian Ocean, north Africa, regions of Iran, and various seas and rivers, as well as a grand, richly coloured, totalising image of the entire known world shown as a complicated circular whole.
83. A colourful thirteenth-century rendering of Sharif al-Din al-Idrisi’s World Map.
Advanced geographical knowledge like this was soon being exported out from the Arabic world, sought by all sorts of medieval elites. It was an intellectual interest that could cross traditionally strict cultural and religious boundaries. The Muslim Moroccan geographer Sharif al-Din al-Idrisi (c.1100–1165) was commissioned in the 1150s to create a complete atlas of the known world by the Christian king of Sicily, Roger II. Copies of this book still survive, although at first glance the opening image from al-Idrisi’s text does not look like anything we would describe as a map. A version now in Cairo, painted in 1348, seems more of a constructivist jungle of abstract shapes and patterns: the circular world is enshrined by a band of blue water, the uncoloured lands punctuated by bright curved spots of mountain ranges, lakes and the thin lines of rivers. But the placement of these details is far from random. Unlike the modern decision that north should sit at the top of a map – an idea which, after all, comes from a totally arbitrary historical consensus – these early Islamic maps are instead oriented with south at the top of the page. It is as if they visually echo the antipodean wonder expressed in contemporary travellers accounts: flip the whole scheme 180 degrees and you soon begin to recognise the dots of the British Isles and western Europe, a broad Eurasian land mass and an enlarged Arabian Sea merging into the Indian Ocean, bounded by an unusually curved African coastline. Plotted by medieval theorists over a millennium before such images could actually be seen from space or verified by precise satellite mapping technologies, they present a geographical picture of the world at once staggeringly accurate and playfully colourful, familiar yet strange.
It is interesting to compare these Arabic images with another map made at almost precisely the same time as the colourful image from Cairo. The Catalan Atlas, as it is now known, was drawn and painted in 1375 by a mapmaker from Majorca named Abraham Cresques. Here cartography again had no trouble crossing cultural boundaries: Abraham was a Jew, commissioned by the king of Aragon, Pedro IV, to make the map for King Charles V of France, both Christian rulers. Yet, just like the contrasting styles of the travel accounts written by Benjamin of Tudela and John Mandeville, this map seems to be interested in something slightly different from al-Idrisi and his Arabic forebears. It is certainly accurate. Across its eight leaves, this time oriented with north at the top, we see the whole of Europe, north Africa and Asia, their precise coastlines derived from complicated compass points plotted onto the map in a web of thin black lines. But at the same time Abraham also insistently presents a far more fantastical view of the world. As well as geographical features – the Red Sea, literally rendered red, or the Atlas Mountains running across north Africa, realised as a thin band of humps drawn out like a giant chicken-leg – the map is populated by animals, peoples and historical events that float in both space and time. The Three Kings happily pass by an elephant en route to Christ’s nativity. Mansa Musa, the late medieval king of Mali, sits in the centre of Africa holding an enormous gold coin, a reference to the wild tales circulating of his almost inconceivable levels of wealth. And in the Far East a shimmering archipelago of red, green, blue and golden islands is interspersed with naked figures eating fish and a double-tailed mermaid, symbols at once of both the paradisiacal bounty and fearful monsters lurking at the world’s edge.
84. The eight map leaves of the Catalan Atlas, made by Abraham Cresques in 1375.
These distorted bodies included by Abraham bring us back to the very beginning of this book and the headless figure of the Blemmyae. They too parade their unnatural forms up and down the coast of Africa on these wild world maps alongside troops of other-worldly monstrous races, one of whom even seems to refer knowingly to the absurdity of living at the ‘antipodes’: as if to signify the upside-down ground on which they walked, the men of a mythic country named Abarimon are shown with feet growing in the wrong direction, protruding behind them from their calves so that they in effect walk backwards. But as well as revelling in the strangeness at the extremes of the medieval world, by reducing the glorious bounty of the globe so that it could be held in the hand, such maps were, at least in part, designed to inspire. Those lucky enough to see these rich documents might well have felt compelled to take to their feet: rulers to set aside the political pageantry of foot-kissing and voyage afar to conquer new lands, pilgrims to don their leather shoes and search out the promise of distant holy cities, or explorers to grab their pens and journey for years in search of never-before-seen wonders.
85. The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, depicted with a shimmering gold background in a sixteenth-century icon painted in Crete.