Europe: A History (57 page)
BAUME
T
HE
Abbey of Baume, says the
Guide Michelin
, was founded in the sixth century by the Irish monk, St Colomban. Its name, of Celtic origin, means ‘grotto’, and it was set in one of Europe’s most dramatic locations—at the bottom of an immense limestone gorge, the Cirque de Baume, in the depths of the pine woods of the Jura. Like a convent of the same name, fifty miles away on the River Doubs, where the blind St Odile received her sight, it is said to date from the era when Gallo-Roman civilization had been overrun by the pagan Burgundians, and when Christianity was being rebuilt by anchorite communities in the wilderness. It grew into an institution of great wealth and power, possessing several hundred villages and benefices. Eventually, the chapter turned itself into a secularized community of aristocratic canons. It survived until 1790, when revolutionaries dissolved the abbey, smashed most of its monuments, and changed the name of the town from Baume-les-Moines to Baume-les-Messieurs.
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In the history of Christian monasticism, the Burgundian communities like Baume form an important link between the anchorite system of the ancient world, as preserved in Ireland, and the great medieval foundations which appear from the tenth century onwards. After all, it was from Baume that Berno and his companions set out in 910 to found the great abbey of Cluny (see p. 315).
For readers of the
Guide Michelin
, however, it is a disappointment to find that many of these details of Baume’s past are at best unauthenticated legends. There is no hard evidence to connect Baume with St Colomban, and there is no reason to suppose that it was founded in the sixth century. In fact, the first definite mention of a
Cellula
at Balma dates from 869—which makes it younger than St Odile’s convent at Baume-les-Dames. In all probability, the link with St Colomban was invented by the monks of Cluny, who thereby embellished the pedigree of their parent house.
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Similar doubts surround Baume’s most colourful personality—Jean, Seigneur de Watteville (1618–1702), abbot for forty years during the reign of Louis XIV. Soldier, murderer, and monk, de Watteville had once fled from justice to Constantinople, where he rose to the rank of pasha and governor of Morea, before obtaining a papal absolution. According to Saint-Simon, he was an example of a sinner redeemed by true repentance. According to the record, he was a habitual turncoat whose treachery facilitated the brutal French conquest of his native province of Franche-Comté. His tombstone reads thus:
ITALUS ET BURGUNDUS IN ARMIS
GALLUS IN ALBIS
IN CURIA RECTUS PRESBYTER
ABBAS ADEST.
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(‘Here lies an Italian and a Burgundian soldier, a Frenchman, when he took the cowl, an upright man in his office, a priest and abbot’).
Baume, therefore, provides the stuff of legend as well as history. People have always had a need to use the past for their own purposes. The writers of scientific monographs are playing a losing game. The past as transmitted to posterity will always be a confused mixture of facts, legends, and downright lies.
The emancipation of the papacy cannot be pinned on a particular date. The Bishops of Rome possessed a large measure of freedom long before they asserted their claims to supremacy. Growing differences between the Latin and the Greek parts of the Church led to frequent schisms of a temporary nature, but not to an irreparable breach. Oddly enough, in the first four centuries, when Rome was still the heart of the Empire, the Roman Church had often been dominated by Greeks and by Greek culture. Leo I (440–61) was the first to emphasize its Latinity. In the same period the Latin Patriarchs broke free from immediate political control, sheltering behind the city of Rome in its many affrays with the civil power. The resultant separation of ecclesiastical and secular authority, so typical for the West and so foreign to the East, was an established fact from then on. In the sixth century the Patriarchs of Rome had to face first the restoration of imperial power under Justinian, and then the Lombards. Two of their number, Silverius (536–7) and Vigilius (537–55), found themselves under imperial arrest. The latter was brutally bullied into submission by the imperial authorities on the Monophysite controversy.
Gregory I (540–604), the first monk to sit on St Peter’s throne, is often regarded as the architect of future papal power through both his administrative skills and his stand on principle. Self-styled ‘servant of the servants of God’, he ran the civil affairs of the city of Rome, negotiated a settlement with the Lombard kings, reorganized the Church’s lands and finances, and restored Roman contacts with Africa, Spain, Gaul, and Britain. His
Regula Pastoralis
(Pastoral Care) quickly became the handbook for medieval bishops. He repeatedly protested against his brother of Constantinople using the title of‘Oecumenical Patriarch’. By the time of his death, the balance was shifting in Rome’s favour. Preoccupied by the Muslim onslaught, the emperors lost almost all influence in Italy, though several desperate demonstrations of imperial claims were attempted. As a result of the Monothelite affair, Martin I (d. 655), the last papal martyr, died in exile in Crimea, having been kidnapped by the Exarch of Ravenna, flogged, and banished by a court in Constantinople, [
CANTUS
]
CANTUS
T
HE
plainsong of the Latin Church, or
cantus planus
, is often called Gregorian Chant in honour of the Pope who fixed its eight component modes and collected some 3,000 melodies. Together with the related idiom of Byzantium, it is thought to have derived from Greek and especially Jewish traditions of chanting. In turn, it became the foundation on which European music was built. It was used for the unaccompanied singing of psalms, hymns, and antiphons, customarily in unison and in free rhythm. It had four main ‘dialects’—Ambrosian, Roman, Gallican, and Mozarabic, though the Roman school gradually gained ascendancy. Initially, it was not written down; and the early forms cannot be reconstructed with certainty, [
MUSIKE
]
The notation developed for plainsong passed through several stages. The Byzantines, like the Greeks, used a literal system to designate notes, supplemented by neums or ‘accents’ to indicate the movement of the melodic line. The Slavic Orthodox preserved the system long after it was superseded elsewhere:
a
. 11th Century Kufisma Notation without stave,
b
. 12th-13th Century Russian notation using a Graeco-Byzantine literal system, c. 17th-20th Century: musical signs used in Russian Orthodox liturgical notation. (After Machabey.)
In the West, as expounded in the Frankish treatise
De harmonica institutione
by Hucbald of St Amand (c.840–930), a similar convention had been adopted whereby neums were placed over the syllables of the Latin text. Notker Balbulus of St Gall explored
tropes
or ‘melodies added to the main chant’. In the eleventh century, the musicologist Guido d’Arezzo (c.995–1050) invented a notational system which is the progenitor of the tonic sol-fa.
Taking the initial syllables of the lines of
Ut queant laxis
, the Hymn to St John the Baptist, he established the ascending hexachord of UT-RE-MI-FA-SOL-LA.
The seventh syllable SI, for (S)ancte (l)ohannis, was added later. He also devised a spatial stave of up to ten lines, forerunner of the modern five-line stave. It had a mobile key signature, and carried a ‘square notation’ of ‘points’ and ‘rods’. It is debatable whether the notes had fixed duration or accentuation:
(‘Let Thine example, Holy John, remind us | Ere we can meetly sing thy deeds of wonder, | Hearts must be chastened, and the bonds that bind us | Broken asunder.’)
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From the late twelfth century onwards, Gregorian chant was enriched by the art of polyphony, where two or more independent melodic lines were sung in parallel. The practice encouraged the growth of instrumental accompaniment. The medieval ear only recognized concordance in octaves, fourths, and fifths. But the introduction of fixed measures, perhaps from folksong and dance, and the need for counterpoint where the melodies crossed, encouraged the study of rhythm and harmony. These, together with melody, constitute the basic elements of modern musical
form. The art of canon began in the thirteenth century. From then on, a standard vocabulary of musical phrase could communicate a wide range of emotion and meaning. Europe’s ‘language of music’ has a continuous history, therefore, from plainsong to Stravinsky.
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In the nineteenth century, the so-called ‘Caecilian movement’ regarded Gregorian chant as the one true source of European music. The Benedictine monks of Solesmes, near Le Mans, undertook the task of reconstituting its theory and practices. Their work, which inspired among other things Liszt’s
Christus
, is regarded as the principal modern authority.
In the eighth century, the Emperor could no longer mount even a demonstration of power in the West. In 710 Emperor Justinian II summoned the Roman Patriarch to Constantinople, and Constantine (708–15), a Syrian, dutifully obeyed. At their meeting—the last, as it proved, between Roman bishop and reigning emperor—the emperor ceremonially kissed the Roman feet, receiving absolution and communion in return. But Constantine was murdered shortly afterwards; and their agreement over Ravenna came to nothing. In 732 Emperor Leo fitted out a fleet to recover Ravenna, which had been conquered by the Lombards, and to arrest Gregory III (731–41) who had defied the edict on Iconoclasm. But the fleet sank in the Adriatic. Thereafter, for all practical purposes, the Roman Patriarchs were totally independent. No subsequent bishop of Rome ever sought the imperial mandate for his election. No imperial officials from Constantinople could ever exert their authority in Rome.
In any case, the Patriarchate of Rome already possessed the means to support its independence. As guardian of the Roman pilgrimage, which grew greatly in importance once Islam sealed off the road to Jerusalem, it attracted huge prestige and a ready income. In the Decretals it had a body of legal decisions that would come to service its wide jurisdiction, especially after the codification of Canon Law (see p. 349). In the Patrimony of St Peter (the Church’s landed estates), which would soon be greatly expanded, it possessed a solid basis for temporal power. In its alliances with the Lombards, and then with the Lombards’ rivals, the Franks, it had the means to obtain international protection. The unity of the Christian Church still existed in theory, in reality it had gone. The title of
Papa
had once been affectionately applied to all bishops. Henceforth it was reserved exclusively for the bishop of Rome. This was the era when the papacy was born, [
REVERENTIA
]
The seventh General Council (787), the second at Nicaea, was devoted to Iconoclasm. It declared in favour of an opinion sent from Rome by Hadrian I. Images could be venerated, but not with the same adoration due to God. This was to be the last occasion on which Rome and Constantinople were to take common action in matters of faith.
REVERENTIA
O
NE
day in the sixth century, whilst travelling with his mother between Burgundy and Auvergne, the young Georgius Florentius (the future Gregory of Tours) was caught in a storm. His mother waved a bag of holy relics at the lowering sky, the clouds parted, and the travellers passed on unscathed. At first, the conceited boy took the miracle to be a reward for his own good behaviour, whereupon his horse stumbled and threw him to the ground. It was a lesson in the wages of vanity. On another occasion, whilst visiting the shrine of St Julien at Brioude, Gregory developed a splitting headache. Putting his head into the self-same fountain where the head of the decapitated martyr had once been washed, he found the headache was cured. It was a lesson in
reverentia
—in the precise observation due to hallowed things and places, and in their healing power.
Since the end of the era of persecution, the cult of martyrs and the collection of holy relics was moving into the centre-ground of Christian life. Primary relics were those directly connected with the main figures of the Gospels. Secondary relics, with less immediate links, also came to be accepted. Constantinople became the main collecting and distributing centre. Its prize possessions, apart from two fragments of the True Cross, included the Crown of Thorns, the Sacred Lance, the Virgin’s Girdle, and several heads of John the Baptist. After the second Council of Nicaea ruled that all new churches should be consecrated in the presence of relics, a brisk trade developed. The body of St Mark was snatched from Alexandria in 823, and brought to Venice. The body of St Nicholas reached Bari in 1087. Western crusaders were to be the greatest relic-mongers of all.
The reverence for relics, so evident in Gregory of Tours, has often been dismissed as mere credulity. Yet close examination shows that it provided the vehicle not only for an emerging code of personal ethics but also for the more subtle games of social politics and social status.
Reverentia
was the mark of a true believer. Its absence marked the pagan, the illiterate, or the complacent. Clerics who officiated at the translation of relics gained in stature, consolidating the consensus or approbation of the flock. Churches or cities in possession of high-grade relics gained in prestige, in divine protection, and no doubt in the revenue from pilgrims. It is a nice paradox that Christian belief in the soul’s departure for Paradise should have been surrounded by the paraphernalia of death, and by special veneration for bones and tombs. It was accompanied by an almost Baroque sensibility which stressed how the very special dead emitted the scent of lilies and roses, the aura of shining lights, and the sound of angelic choirs.
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With time, however, relics were necessarily devalued. When all the apostles, martyrs, and fathers of the Church had been claimed, there was
a danger that every dead bishop would be declared a saint. Bishop Priscus of Lyons, who was elevated to the see in 573, would have none of it. He buried his predecessor, Nicetius, in a standard tomb, and allowed his deacon to wear Nicetius’ chasuble as a dressing-gown. As it happened, both Priscus and Nicetius were canonized, but only in 1308.
The Protestant Reformation waged war on relics, and many shrines were then destroyed. But the Protestant rage affected neither the Orthodox nor the Catholic world. The mummies or skeletons of the Very Special Dead can still be viewed in many an Italian church as in the catacombs of the Pecharskaya Lavra, the ‘Monastery of the Caves’ in Kiev. One of the most extraordinary collections of relics, the twelfth-century Treasure of the Priory of Oignies, has survived intact at Namur. Twice buried to defy the treasure-hunters of the French Revolution and of the Nazi Occupation, its priceless items include St Peter’s Rib, St James’s Foot, and the Virgin’s Milk. All are encased in dazzling reliquaries, each gruesomely shaped to fit the anatomical form of the contents, and fashioned from gold and silver filigree, gemstones, and silver-on-black
niello
. Designated among ‘the Seven Wonders of Belgium’, they are kept by the Sisters of Our Lady at 17 rue Julie Billiart, Namur.
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