Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (12 page)

A dinner conversation in 1438 serves as a fitting summary of the story of medieval facial hair. Pero Tafur, a Spanish nobleman and adventurer, found himself conversing in Italy with the visiting Byzantine emperor John VIII. The subject was Tafur’s beard, or rather the beard he had recently removed upon returning to Western Europe after a long residence in Constantinople. The emperor insisted that Tafur had made a mistake, because a beard was “the greatest honor and dignity belonging to man.”
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Tafur, speaking for the entire Latin West, replied that “we hold the contrary, and except in the case of some serious injury we do not wear beards.” Tafur was reading from a script the Roman church had written. Even today, nearly seven hundred years later, the descendants of Western Europe instinctively see goodness, discipline, and honor in a clean-shaven man.

In the late Middle Ages, dignified men followed the church’s inward-looking example, presenting themselves with the smooth face of virtue. Renaissance men, by contrast, embraced the world more wholeheartedly. They focused less upon the corruption and sin of man, and more upon human skill and potential. A strongly secular ideal of manliness took root and found expression in Europe’s second great beard movement. According to the new thinking, the beard was natural, a proud emblem of the dignity of man. Not since the height of the Roman Empire had facial hair played so important a role in defining manliness. This shift did not happen overnight, or without controversy. Powerful men propelled this process of physical reformation, and great ambitions propelled these powerful men.

In 1520, three young, bright, and ambitious rulers dominated Europe. At the ripe age of twenty-eight, England’s Henry VIII was the senior member of the group, having ascended to the throne at the age of seventeen. Francis I of France was twenty-five and had ruled for five years. Charles V, scion of the powerful Habsburg dynasty, was only twenty. He had just been elected Holy Roman Emperor, sovereign of
German and Italian lands, having earlier become king of Spain and the Netherlands. As the greatest rulers on the continent, Francis and Charles were rivals, especially for control of Italy. Both had an interest in securing good relations with Henry of England, but it was Francis who acted first. Soon after Charles was elected emperor, Francis and Henry agreed to seal a new alliance by bringing their courts together in 1520 for a week of banquets, tournaments, and diplomatic talks on a field in English-occupied territory in northern France

Ambitious and well educated, Francis and Henry represented a new generation of royalty in northern Europe. They were Renaissance men, hale and athletic, well versed in classical poetry and modern music. One of Francis’s first acts as king was to establish a new college in Paris for the study of classical languages. For his part, Henry was fluent in Latin, French, and Italian, and took particular pride in his musical compositions. Each ruler looked forward to meeting, impressing, and perhaps intimidating the other with his intelligence, grace, and wit. Before he arrived on the continent for the festivities, Henry had a temporary palace of wood built and painted to look like stone. One observer remarked that even Leonardo da Vinci could not have created a more convincing illusion.
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In the field, Francis erected an immense and ornate royal tent supported by two massive ship’s masts lashed together. Along with the glittering show of other noblemen’s tents, it inspired the name given to this gathering: the Field of Cloth of Gold.

In their communications leading up to this momentous rendezvous, the young kings vowed not only to honor and entertain one another but to grow beards. From the moment the summit was agreed upon, Henry determined not to shave his beard until he had the satisfaction of meeting his French counterpart. Francis replied with a similar promise.
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At one level, these two men were engaging in a tradition at least as old as Homer and the ancient Hebrews, in which the beard becomes the token of a vow. It was more than that, however. The young rulers were determined to establish a sort of brotherhood of the beard, and like any pair of brothers, it was as much a rivalry as a partnership.

Each king hoped this beard pact would help him contravene the masculine standards of their day. Not surprisingly, both queens objected to their husbands’ plans, and neither man was able to keep his promise in the year before the summit. Henry’s case is best documented. His wife,
Catherine of Aragon, hectored him into abandoning his new beard.
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Francis also felt compelled to shave, but he renewed his determination in the months leading up to the appointed meeting with Henry. When Henry received word of Francis’s renewed effort, he decided to ignore his wife’s wishes (not for the last time) in order to meet his counterpart on equal terms.

In June 1520, when the men finally embraced each other, they appeared in full flower. One Englishman remarked that Francis was very tall, with a well-proportioned neck, long nose, hazel eyes, and “hair brown, smooth and neatly combed, his beard of three months’ growth darker in color.”
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Henry was more thickly set, with what another observer described as “a red beard large enough to be very becoming.”
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Together at last, the two rulers commenced their friendly rivalry. A central part of the festivities was a “feat of arms,” performed before the queens and assembled ladies and noblemen. The kings, each paired with a partner, jousted and fought on foot against other pairs of challengers. The two kings mostly avoided confronting each other directly, but according to French sources, they did finally tussle with one another during a drinking party, when dark-haired Francis bested
red-haired Henry in an impromptu wrestling match.
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Despite this slight embarrassment for Henry, the event went off well, and the two men genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. The Field of Cloth of Gold was serious diplomacy, but it was also an excuse for dancing, eating, drinking, and sporting, as well as a convenient excuse for the two men to try out a new look. From this point forward, there was no turning back. The bearded era in northern Europe had well and truly begun.

Why were these kings so eager to abandon long precedent in male deportment? For an answer we must look to Italy, because that is where Henry and Francis were themselves looking. Most Europeans viewed Italy as the fount of Renaissance sophistication and style, and both kings were raised with a fluent knowledge of Italian. Francis in particular was an enthusiast for Italian art and poetry, earning him a favorable mention in Baldassare Castiglione’s book
The Courtier,
an influential best-seller in which Italian noblemen discussed the knowledge and graces that courtiers ought to cultivate.
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As rulers eager to bring themselves and their kingdoms up to date, Francis and Henry borrowed and imitated ideas, tastes, and styles emanating from Florence, Milan, Venice, and Rome. Francis and his courtiers were familiar with Raphael’s 1515 portrait of a grandly bearded Castiglione, and this helped solidify in their minds an association of beards with Italian sophistication. Raphael also painted himself with full black beard in 1518. Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch of himself in 1512 shows him with long hair and a beard of biblical proportions. About the same time, Raphael honored his black-bearded rival Michelangelo by painting him into his famous fresco in the papal library,
The School of Athens
. If the great artists and writers of Italy were bearded, it was only a matter of time before the rest of Europe would follow.
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The precedent set by these rock stars of Italian art and letters was so infectious that even popes could not resist. Julius II, the patron of Michelangelo and Raphael, was a worldly man of politics and war, and while he was rallying his army at Bologna, he determined to grow a long white beard—the first papal facial hair in some 140 years. The clearest evidence of Julius’s motives comes from the report of one chronicler that the pope had sworn not to shave again until his French enemies had been expelled from Italy.
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His was a warrior’s vow, reflecting his fighting spirit. He was also inspired, no doubt, by the host of biblical
patriarchs and prophets Michelangelo had painted for him on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Julius did not, however, keep his beard for long. He shaved again in 1512, before the gathering of a church-wide council he had called to counter French efforts to undermine his papacy.
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As his battles shifted from military to theological grounds, the warrior pope returned to his older guise as a shaved man of the church.

The stories of Pope Julius and Kings Henry and Francis reveal the second decade of the sixteenth century as a transitional moment in the history of facial hair. The pope ended his life a shaved man, and his successor, Leo X, remained beardless throughout his life as well. But the young kings hewed to the new course. For more than a century, laymen had been beardless in imitation of clerical goodness. Now the tables were turned. A secular manhood shaped by a humanist spirit asserted itself, changing masculine style and rocking the church as well. Men of the cloth, still bound by canon law to shave themselves, were forced to reconsider their position. Should they affirm their unique, and supposedly superior, type of manliness, or should they to accede to more worldly ideals and embrace the natural authority of facial hair? The ensuing debate among churchmen, and the urgency many felt to abandon the razor, illustrates more clearly than anything else the fundamental logic of the beard renaissance.

The new beard movement of the early 1500s was promoted by proud humanists and ambitious kings, but also by the troubles of popes. The case of Pope Julius’s battle beard has been noted, but it was Pope Clement VII’s penitential beard, instigated by his misfortunes, that had the most enduring impact. This effect was greatly amplified when a priest and scholar in Clement’s papal court, Pierio Valeriano, wrote a book promoting beards for the Catholic clergy. Clement would not have grown his beard, nor Valeriano written his book, were it not for the sack of Rome in 1527, another turning point in beard history.

In 1527, the still-youthful Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, determined to punish Pope Clement for resisting his imperial authority, and dispatched an unruly army of twenty thousand Spanish and German
troops to take Rome. Poorly paid and provisioned, the soldiers were permitted to sack the city, devastate homes, loot libraries and churches, and subject its defenseless citizens to rape, torture, and death. In the course of this chaos, half of Rome’s population disappeared, either murdered or scattered. For many days, unburied bodies littered the hot summer streets.
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One victim was Cristoforo Marcello, a humanist scholar and archbishop of Corfu, who was taken hostage for ransom by Spanish soldiers after his home was ransacked. When the soldiers determined that Marcello could not pay the ransom they demanded, they “bound this distinguished man with chains and left him naked under the open air by the trunk of a tree. Every day they pulled out one of his fingernails, and at last they killed him amid these terrible torments.”
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These are the words of Pierio Valeriano, who chronicled this new fall of Rome and the lamentable suffering of humanist scholars like Marcello. Pope Clement and many other Romans interpreted their misfortune as God’s punishment for their sins, and as a sign of contrition and penance, Clement ceased shaving and encouraged others to follow his example.
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A few years later, in 1531, he granted official permission for priests to grow beards.
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The pope’s motive may have been penitential, but many churchmen embraced the new order for other reasons. They hoped that it would signify a reinvigorated clerical masculinity. That was certainly the idea Valeriano expressed in a small book entitled
Pro Sacerdotum Barbis
, or
In Support of Beards for the Clergy
, published the same year as Clement’s permissive edict. It was the original manifesto of the Renaissance beard movement.

Valeriano praised the pope’s penitential intentions, but his mind was not focused on humility. On the contrary, his central theme was the need for the clergy to fortify their manly natures and to recover their lost authority. The lesson of Rome’s destruction was that powerful Europeans no longer respected the church as they once had. To reverse this trend, the priesthood would need to replace the timidity, softness, and self-indulgence of shaven manhood with renewed dedication and firmness. Beards were the ideal signs of those qualities.

With this line of argument,
Pro Sacerdotum Barbis
upended the medieval logic of holy shaving, asserting a new Renaissance logic of natural manliness. Valeriano claimed to be at a loss to understand any reason for
priestly shaving, and betrayed no knowledge of the medieval theology of the “inner beard.” Like the good humanist that he was, he insisted that the laws of nature, the examples of the ancients, and the dictates of honest reason should guide men, not obscure medieval theory. His masterstroke was to expose the fraudulent corruption of canon law in respect to the shaving rule. Valeriano proved that the oldest laws of the church had not banned facial hair, but quite the reverse. The way was surely open for the church to adopt a new course.

The main thrust of Valeriano’s argument was an appeal to ancient history and natural law in favor of beards. Not only was facial hair natural, he insisted, it also served a useful purpose. It helped to expel the bad humors from the body, prevented tooth decay and other ailments, and protected the skin from extremes of hot and cold.
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The ancients had wisely taught that beards were connected with moral strength. Echoing the classical philosophers who had inspired the first beard movement, Valeriano contended that the greatest danger to moral worth lay in “excessive refinement and cowardice, easy living and effeminate ways.”
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The great minds of ancient Greece, as well as the heroes of both Old and New Testaments, including Christ himself, were bearded men.
Valeriano thought that priests should “avoid bitter criticisms, shameful outcomes, the suspicion of effeminacy and calumny, and finally appear as men rather than women. For why should we be ashamed of our beards, if it has been revealed to us what exactly the beard is, and how it adorns the dignified and honorable man, and how much it contributes to the status and reputation of the priest.”
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The problem, as the humanist scholar saw it, was not the excessive worldliness of priests but the reverse. If churchmen were to regain their lost prestige and power, they would have to recover their masculinity.

Valeriano’s arguments resonated in the courts and cathedrals of Europe, as the new style rapidly gained ground. In England, an anonymous translator published in 1533 an English version of Valeriano’s treatise, declaring himself to be a beard wearer who had suffered much abuse for his choice. Just two years later, in 1535, King Henry commanded his courtiers to grow their beards.
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This was, of course, not the only big change Henry was making in England. The previous year he had overthrown Roman authority and established himself as the new head of the English church. The beard order, while tied to this momentous event, was not simply a matter of Protestantism. Henry’s earlier behavior suggests it would have happened sooner or later, and this provided a convenient occasion. Protestants may have been more enthusiastic about beards than Catholics, but Valeriano’s book proves the issue transcended sectarian divisions.

The old ways did not die quickly or easily, however. In France in particular, universities, cities, and law courts attempted to stanch the wave of change by requiring professors, judges, and civic officials to shave. The University of Paris barred professors with long beards from its lecture halls in 1533.
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In 1540, the Parlement of Paris, the chief court of France, published an Edict on Beards, which forbade beards for judges and advocates appearing in its court.
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In this time of transition, facial hair became a battlefront in questions of moral order. Was it appropriate for responsible and refined men to allow their faces to become hairy? Gentien Hervet, a scholar in Orleans who was rising to prominence as a professor and orator, tackled this question in three successive lectures, which, upon their publication in 1536, amounted to the most erudite statement on the matter to date. With style and wit, Hervet examined the question from all points of view, presented the case
for and against, and offered finally a neutral position of tolerance. There were good arguments on both sides of the dispute, he concluded, and both choices could be seen as sensible.

On purely physical grounds, Hervet contended, the arguments for and against led to a draw, for “nature takes both sides of the argument, by both spontaneously producing the beard and being willing to allow it to be shaved.”
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It made practical sense for some men, such as workmen, to cut their beards short. On the other hand, some men he knew suffered from toothaches or other ailments when they shaved. Reviewing ancient writers, Hervet also found arguments for tolerance. In both Athens and Rome, he claimed, men were free to choose how they managed their hair. Though this was a serious overstatement, his intent was to cast the ancients as advocates of wisdom and moderation. He concluded by citing Plato’s argument that wisdom is the only thing that is good in and of itself; and if wisdom was the goal, he wrote, it did not matter whether men wore beards or not.
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Though Hervet was clearly not agitating for beards, he concurred with Valeriano’s conclusion that there was no reason for clergy to distinguish themselves physically from laymen. Manliness was of one substance, grounded in a common physical nature and partaking of the same virtues of wisdom and moral strength. Greek and Roman poets and philosophers were models of this manliness as much as Christ and the apostles. The fact that both philosophers and apostles were bearded seemed to Hervet to affirm this commonality. Under the weight of Valeriano and Hervet’s humanist arguments, the medieval logic of beardless virtue was rapidly crumbling.

This humanist turn alarmed many leaders of the church, particularly as it coincided with the menace of Protestant heresy. One of the most influential voices of the Catholic Reformation in the late 1500s, Cardinal Borromeo of Milan, was also a leader in the counterattack on priestly facial hair. Deploying well-established medieval justifications, including the imperative of abandoning worldly and sinful thoughts, he urged regional councils and diocesan synods around Europe to pass fresh injunctions against priests who failed to shave.
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For their part, Protestants, beginning with Martin Luther himself, gladly grew out their whiskers as an act of anti-Catholic defiance. Clergymen of the two camps were often identifiable by their faces, and at points during
the French civil wars between Protestants and Catholics, priests grew beards to avoid being targeted for Protestant attacks.
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Luther and his fellow Protestants argued that the priesthood did not constitute a spiritually privileged caste and should not be set apart as a different sort of men. Like Catholic humanists such as Valeriano and Hervet, they viewed manhood as a single and coherent natural state of being whose God-given virtues and dignity were evident in a noble display of hair.
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Valeriano had called for the remasculinization of the Catholic clergy, but it was Protestants who embraced the beard most fervently. Johan Eberlin von Günzburg, for example, an early convert to Lutheranism, included the following among his rules for an imaginary Protestant utopia: “All men are to wear long beards. Men with smooth faces like women shall be held an outrage.”
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