A World Lit Only by Fire (12 page)

There
was
such a thing as bad form, but it had nothing to do with manners. Any breach of rules established by the Church was a grave
offense. Except for the Jews, of whom there were perhaps a million in Europe, every European was expected to venerate, above
all others, the Virgin Mary—Queen of the Holy City, Lady of Heaven,
la Beata Vergine, die heilige Jungfrau, la Virgen María, la Dame débonnaire
—followed by her vassals, the Catholic saints, who did her liege homage. Parishioners were required to hear Mass at least
once a week (for knights it was daily); to hate the Saracens and, of course, the Jews; to honor holy places and sacred objects;
and to keep the major fasts.

Fasts were the greatest challenge faced by the faithful, and not all were equal to it. In one Breton village the devout affirmed
their Lenten piety by joining a procession led by a priest. Afterward one marching woman, who had worn a particularly saintly
expression during the parade, retired to her kitchen and elatedly broke Lent by heating, and eating, mutton and ham. The aroma
drifted out the window. It was identified by passersby. Seized, she was brought before the local bishop, who sentenced her
to walk the village streets until Easter, a month away, with the ham slung around her neck and the quarter of mutton, on its
spit, over her shoulder. Ineluctably—and another sign of the age—a jeering mob followed her every step.

T
HAT WAS
a relatively minor infraction. Greater crimes provoked awesome rites. A drunken, irreverent baron found himself in deep trouble
after stealing the chalice of a parish church. He had been seen galloping away with it. The local bishop ordered the church
bell tolled in the mournful cadence usually reserved for major funerals. The church itself was draped in black. The congregation
gathered in the nave. Amid a frightful hush the prelate, surrounded by his clergymen, each carrying a lighted candle, appeared
in the chancel and pronounced the name of the thief, shouting: “Let him be cursed in the city and cursed in the field; cursed
in his granary, his harvest, and his children; as Dathan and Abiram were swallowed up by the gaming earth, so may hell swallow
him. And even as today we quench these torches in our hands, so may the light of his life be quenched for all eternity, unless
he do repent!”

As the priests flung their candles down and stamped them out, the parishioners trembled for the knight’s soul, which, they
knew, had very little chance of surviving so awful an imprecation. The wayward baron was now an outlaw; every man’s hand was
against him; neither lepers nor Jews were so completely isolated. This social exile was a formidable weapon, and it brought
the sinner to his knees, for eventually he bought back his salvation—at a formidable price. First he donated his entire
fortune to the bishop. Then he appeared at the chancel barefoot, wearing a pilgrim’s robe. For twenty-four hours he lay prostrate
before the high altar, praying and fasting; then he knelt while sixty monks and priests clubbed him. As each blow fell he
yelled, “Just are thy judgments, O Lord!” At last, when he lay bleeding, bones broken and senses impaired, the bishop absolved
him and gave him the kiss of peace.

The punishment seems excessive. Such a chalice, not fashioned from precious metal, had little monetary value; its theft had
merely been an act of petty larceny. But the medieval Church was strong on law and order, and had this felony gone unpunished,
the aftermath could have led to laxity, backsliding, even mutiny. Besides, there were greater sinners than the scourged baron,
and crueler penances. For them the road to atonement was literally a series of roads, to be covered, over six, ten, or even
twelve years in that greatest of penances, the pilgrimage.

In instances in which pilgrims had offended God and man, their journeys were actually a substitute for prison terms. European
castles had dungeons—so did the Vatican—but they couldn’t begin to hold the miscreant population. The chief legal penalty
was execution. There were alternatives in lay courts—ears were cut off, tongues ripped out, eyes gouged from their sockets;
the genitalia of wives who had betrayed their husbands were cauterized with white-hot tongs—but these, although extremely
unpleasant, offered no hope for salvation. The violator still faced a writhing afterlife in Hades, and obviously everyone
who had violated the law did not deserve that. Therefore the Church, which had its own legal system, paralleling secular courts,
took over.

Offenders were ordered to shave their heads, abandon their families, fast constantly (meat only once a day), and set out barefoot
for a far destination. Journey’s end varied from offender to offender. Rome was a popular choice. Some were sent all the way
to Jerusalem. The general rule was the longer the distance, the greater the atonement. If of noble birth, the penitent had
to wear chains on his neck and wrists forged from his own armor, a sign of how far he had fallen. Frequently the felon carried
a passport, signed by a bishop, specifying his crimes in the grimmest possible detail and then asking good Christians to offer
him food and lodging. From the felon’s point of view this approach may have seemed flawed, but his opinion was unsolicited.
And ecclesiastical verdicts could seldom be appealed.

Some men, in their search for absolution, suffered almost unendurable ordeals. The notorious Count Fulk the Black of Anjou,
whose crimes were legendary, finally realized that his immortal soul was in peril and, while miserable in the throes of his
conscience, begged for divine mercy. Count Fulk had sinned for twenty years. Among other things he had murdered his wife,
though this charge had been dropped on the strength of his unsupported word that he had found her rutting behind a barn with
a goatherd. The court felt helpless here. Decapitation on the spot was the fate of an adulteress caught in the act; adulterers
usually went free, to be dealt with by the husbands they had wronged. In this case there had been no witnesses, and the goatherd
had vanished, but counts, even wicked counts, did not lie. However, quite apart from that, Fulk the Black’s catalog of crimes
was a long one. He expected a heavy sentence, and that is what he got. He is said to have fainted when it was passed. Shackled,
he was condemned to a triple Jerusalem pilgrimage: across most of France and Savoy, over the Alps, through the Papal States,
Carinthia, Hungary, Bosnia, mountainous Serbia, Bulgaria, Constantinople, and the length of mountainous Anatolia, then down
through modern Syria and Jordan to the holy city. In irons, his fleet bleeding, he made this round trip three times—15,300
miles—and the last time he was dragged through the streets on a hurdle while two well-muscled men lashed his naked back
with bullwhips.

T
HE COUNT
could have asked, though he didn’t, what all this misery had to do with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. In fact it had
nothing to do with them. The distinction between devotion and superstition has always been unclear, but there was little blurring
here. Although they called themselves Christians, medieval Europeans were ignorant of the Gospels. The Bible existed only
in a language they could not read. The mumbled incantations at Mass were meaningless to them. They believed in sorcery, witchcraft,
hobgoblins, werewolves, amulets, and black magic, and were thus indistinguishable from pagans. If a lady died, the instant
her breath stopped servants ran through the manor house, emptying every container of water to prevent her soul from drowning,
and before her funeral the corpse was carefully watched to prevent any dog or cat from running across the coffin, thus changing
her remains into a vampire. Meantime her lord, praying for her salvation, was lying prostrate, his head turned eastward and
his arms stretched out, forming a cross. Nothing in the New Testament supported such delusions and rituals; nevertheless the
precautions were taken—with the blessings of the clergy. In monastic manuscripts one repeatedly finds such entries as: “Common
report has it that Antichrist has been born at Babylon and that the Day of Judgment is nigh.” The alarm was spread so often
that the peasants ignored it; on the Sabbath, after an early Mass, they would gossip, dance, sing, wrestle, race, and compete
in archery contests until evening shadows deepened. There was hell enough on earth for them; they were too drained to ponder
the risks of another world.

Nevertheless in pensive moments they worried. Should the left eye of a corpse not close properly, they knew, the departed
would soon have company in purgatory. If a man donned a clean white shirt on a Friday, or saw a shooting star, or a will-o’-the-wisp
in the marshes, or a vulture hovering over his home, his death was very near. Similarly, a woman stupid enough to wash clothes
during Holy Week would soon be in her grave. Should thirteen people be so thoughtless as to sup at one table, one of those
present would not be there for tomorrow morning’s meal; if a wolf howled through the night, one who heard him would disappear
before dawn. Comets and eclipses were sinister. Everyone knew that an enormous comet had been sighted in July 1198 and Richard
the Lion-Hearted had died “very soon after.” (In fact he did not die until April 6, 1199.)

Everyone also knew—and every child was taught—that the air all around them was infested with invisible, soulless spirits,
some benign but most of them evil, dangerous, long-lived, and hard to kill; that among them were the souls of unbaptized infants,
ghouls who snuffled out cadavers in graveyards and chewed their bones, water nymphs skilled at luring knights to death by
drowning, dracs who carried little children off to their caves beneath the earth, wolfmen—the undead turned into ravenous
beasts—and vampires who rose from their tombs at dusk to suck the blood of men, women, or children who had strayed from
home. At any moment, under any circumstances, a person could be removed from the world of the senses to a realm of magic creatures
and occult powers. Every natural object possessed supernatural qualities. Books interpreting dreams were highly popular.

The stars were known to be guided by angels, and physicians were constantly consulting astrologers and theologians. Doctors
diagnosing illnesses were influenced by the constellation under which the patient had been born or taken sick; thus the eminent
surgeon Guy de Chauliac wrote: “If anyone is wounded in the neck when the moon is at Taurus, the affliction will be dangerous.”
Thousands of pitiful people disfigured by swollen lymph nodes in their necks mobbed the kings of England and France, believing
that their scrofula could be cured by the touch of a royal hand. One document from the period is a calendar, published at
Mainz, which designates the best astrological times for bloodletting. Epidemics were attributed to unfortunate configurations
of the stars. Now and then a quack was unmasked; in London one Roger Clerk, who had pretended to cure ailments with spurious
charms, was sentenced to ride through the city with urinals hanging from his neck. But others, equally bogus, lived out their
lives unchallenged.

Scholars as eminent as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More accepted the existence of witchcraft. Conspicuous fakes excepted, the Church
encouraged superstitions, recommended trust in faith healers, and spread tales of satyrs, incubi, sirens, cyclops, tritons,
and giants, explaining that all were manifestations of Satan. The Prince of Darkness, it taught, was as real as the Holy Trinity.
Certainly belief in him was useful; prelates agreed that when it came to keeping the masses on the straight and narrow, fear
of the devil was a stronger force than the love of God. Great shows were made of exorcisms. The story spread across the continent
of how the fiend entered a man’s body and croaked blasphemy through his mouth until a priest, following a magic rite, recited
an incantation. The devil, foiled, screamed horribly and fled.

The ecclesiastical hierarchy, through its priests and monks, repeatedly affirmed the legitimacy of specific miracles. Unshriven
sinners were not the only pilgrims on Europe’s roads. In fact, they were a minority. The majority were simple people, identifiable
by their brown wool robes, heavy staffs, and sacks slung from their belts. Their motivation was simple devotion, often concern
for a recently departed relative now in purgatory. Although filthy and untidy, they were rarely abused; few wanted to lose
the scriptural blessing reserved for those who, having shown kindness to a stranger, had “entertained angels unawares.”