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(#litres_trial_promo) In the mid-960s, a prodigious new silver source had been found on the Rammelsberg, just above Goslar in the Harz mountains. Some thirty years later, the mines were in full production and would pay, among other things, for Goslar’s new cathedral, built in the 1040s, and for Henry III’s enormous Kaiserhaus in that city. Huge contemporary coin hoards, their principal constituent being Adelaide-Otto silver pfennigs from central Germany, have been found in Sweden. And it was the Rammelsberg mines again that furnished the silver for the locally-minted coinages of Russia and Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, which would play a major role in Christianization. Furs from the Baltic, wine from the Rhineland, wool and cloth from England and Flanders, were all to be bought with German ingots. But equally important for European rulers everywhere was their growing understanding of how a coinage worked, its symbolism as meaningful as bullion weight. It was Vladimir the Great, Prince of Kiev (977–1015), who brought Christianity to Russia in the late 980s. And a significant function of his new coinage on the remote Christian rim was to spread the propaganda of Church and State. On one face of Vladimir’s coins is the political legend ‘Vladimir on the throne’; on the reverse is an all-powerful Christ Pantocrator.
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On Swedish coins of this date, there is a cross on the reverse; on the coins of contemporary Poland, a church is shown. And Vladimir of Kiev, having set up pagan idols in his pre-conversion days, at once became a builder of Christian churches. He owed his baptism in 988 to an alliance with Byzantium, sealed by his marriage the following year to Anna, sister of the Greek Emperor Basil II (‘the Bulgarslayer’). And he dedicated his first Kievan church to the eponymous St Basil (d.379), monastic legislator and Bishop of Caesarea. Neither Vladimir’s Church of St Basil nor his Cathedral of the Dormition (Church of the Tithe) have survived. But both are thought to have been based directly on Byzantine originals, and it was Constantinople again which set the style for the new stone churches of Yaroslav, Vladimir’s son. Yaroslav the Wise (1019–55) ‘loved religious establishments and was devoted to priests, especially to monks. He applied himself to books, and read them continually day and night.’ During Yaroslav’s reign, the same chronicler adds, ‘the Christian faith was fruitful and multiplied, while the number of monks increased, and new monasteries came into being’. Of Yaroslav’s new churches, the most important was the huge multiaisled and cupola’d Cathedral of St Sophia at Kiev, described by Bishop Hilarion as ‘adorned with every beauty, with gold and silver and precious stones and sacred vessels … wondrous and glorious to all adjacent countries … another like it will not be found in all the land of the North from east to west.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And whereas the bishop’s praise was surely generous, for Prince Yaroslav himself was in the audience, Hilarion had already built a cathedral of his own at Rostov east of Novgorod, knew Kiev’s many churches (said to number more than 200 before Yaroslav’s accession), and could recognize superior quality when he saw it.
Novgorod’s Cathedral of St Sophia, built in the mid-century by Yaroslav’s son, again had a Byzantine model. Yet there are borrowings here also from Western Romanesque. And it was the contemporary development of long-distance trading systems – to the Baltic (and the West) from Novgorod, to the Black Sea (and Constantinople) from Kiev – that chiefly funded the construction of these great churches. Beneficial to all, such silent revolutions are much more likely to survive than military conquests. ‘Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight’ (Psalm 144) ran the legend on a Frankish sword-hilt found in Sweden.
(#litres_trial_promo) But it was Christian wealth rather than force of arms that defeated the Viking gods, and it was towns as much as churches that spread Christ’s message. Well before 1200, by which time Novgorod and Kiev were each as large as London, urban centres had multiplied across Russia. And although every new town of this period was market-based, none was just about money. Thus it would be said of Baltic Riga, founded in 1201, that ‘the city of Riga draws the faithful to settle there more because of its freedom than because of the fertility of its surroundings’.
(#litres_trial_promo) And while Riga’s situation as the crusading headquarters of the Livonian Knights of the Sword was necessarily unique, there was nothing exceptional about the liberties it shared with almost every market-town in Western Christendom. ‘Perhaps the greatest social achievement’, writes Susan Reynolds, ‘of towns in this period was that they offered a way of life that was attractive. People flocked into them and … went on coming.’
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It was the steady flow of immigrants, attracted by freedoms denied to them in rural hinterlands, which kept the towns intact through the famines and feuding of the late eleventh century. When Goslar’s silver ran out, as it had begun to do already in the 1050s, most towns survived the consequent recession. But aristocracies everywhere had learnt to love good living. And one result of the growing silver shortages of the second half of the eleventh century was to focus attention, both north and south of the Alps, on those regions which were still bullion-rich. It was not by chance alone that German interest in Italy revived sharply from the mid-eleventh century. And it was in Italy, south of Rome, that German knights first encountered Norman mercenaries. ‘Accustomed to war’, wrote William of Malmesbury (d.1143), half-Norman himself, the Normans ‘could hardly live without it’. They are ‘a warlike race … moved by fierce ambition … [and] always ready to make trouble’, was the verdict of another Anglo-Norman chronicler, Orderic Vitalis (d.1142), who, after spending most of his life among them at the abbey of Saint-Evroult, knew the Normans as ‘the most villainous’ of neighbours.
(#litres_trial_promo) Unable to tolerate another’s dominance and always spoiling for a fight, Norman adventurers carved up Southern Italy between them. They took Capua in 1058; drove the Byzantines out of Calabria by 1071; the Lombards out of Salerno by 1077; the Arabs out of Sicily by 1090. They became the masters of Malta and Corfu. Silver-rich England, always the North’s most tempting prize, made a kingdom for Duke William in 1066.
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Windfall fortunes, won and held by force, need legitimizing. And it was through the Church that the Normans laundered their new money. In the Conqueror’s England, there was hardly a major church which was not at once rebuilt by its first Norman abbot or reforming bishop. But whereas the scale of this new construction – as at Bishop Walkelin’s Winchester – was almost without precedent, and while some of these great churches – in particular, William of St Calais’s Durham – could readily bear comparison with the most advanced continental buildings of their day, it was not in England that Norman patronage was most productive. Southern Italy allowed its Norman appropriators to take everything they wanted from a long-established melting-pot of cultures: Latin, Byzantine, and Saracenic. It was in Norman Apulia and Capua, Calabria, Salerno and Sicily – not in Lombardy or in Germany, in England, France or Russia – that the ‘Renaissance of the Twelfth Century’ first originated.
This Renaissance was not limited to the arts. However, it was in church-building, in particular, that scholar-priests and princes found common ground. And one of their earliest cooperative ventures was at Monte Cassino, in Norman Capua, the sixth-century birthplace of Benedictine monachism in the West. It was there, after Richard of Aversa drove the Lombards from Capua in 1058, that Abbot Desiderius, with Richard’s help, made Monte Cassino a busy hive of the arts, drawing on every culture of the region. And it was from Desiderius’s new church that Abbot Hugh of Cluny (a visitor there in 1083) took some of the ideas – the Byzantine vault and the Saracenic pointed arch – which he would re-use almost immediately in his comprehensive rebuilding of Cluny III. Another eminent Monte Cassino scholar, the Latin poet Alfanus, was raised to Archbishop of Salerno in 1058. And when, two decades later, the Norman Robert Guiscard took Salerno as well, it was Duke Robert’s sudden riches which built Archbishop Alfanus a fine new cathedral, equipped with costly mosaics in the best Greek tradition and with great bronze doors (as at Monte Cassino) from Constantinople.
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The dedication of Salerno Cathedral in 1084 was one of Gregory VII’s last public acts as pope-in-exile. Following his death in 1085, Abbot Desiderius, against his better judgement, accepted office as Victor III. And Desiderius, in turn, was succeeded by Urban II (1088–99), a former prior of Cluny. Each had Norman support. Gregory VII (1073–85) had first enlisted Normans as his principal allies against the Germans; Desiderius, when pope as much as abbot, remained dependent on the support of Norman princes; and Urban II’s great Crusade, preached so charismatically at Clermont on 27 November 1095, would probably never have reached Jerusalem without their leadership.
Only five years before, the successful expulsion of Sicily’s Arab rulers by Roger ‘the Great Count’, younger brother of Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia, had established a model for Christian renewal in the Mediterranean. And Sicily’s enormous wealth, fuelling Crusader hopes of similar booty in the East, was in truth far more real than the legendary golden pavements of Jerusalem. Significantly for the arts, that wealth was almost entirely Mediterranean-based, combining seaborne commerce – the Arab, Byzantine, and (increasingly) North Italian trades – with the export of Sicily’s high-quality grains. And the island’s new rulers soon found it more convenient to forget – or ignore – their Norman origins. Roger II, crowned King of Sicily and Apulia on 25 December 1130, had been Count of Sicily since 1105 and Duke of Apulia from 1122. At Roger’s cosmopolitan court – over which he presided with Byzantine pomp – French and Latin, Greek and Arabic were all in common use. And although, from Roger’s death in 1154, the Latinization of Norman Sicily appreciably gathered pace, it would be a long time yet before incoming Latin settlers outnumbered the indigenous Greeks, and almost as long before the last Arab merchant left Palermo.
(#litres_trial_promo) Roger II’s two outstanding buildings – the new cathedral at Cefalù and his Palatine Chapel at Palermo – were both begun soon after he was crowned king. And in this exceptional context of cross-fertilizing cultures, whereas each church is of Latin (or Romanesque) plan, the expensive high-quality mosaics which ornament both buildings are unmistakably Greek, while the pointed arches of Roger’s palace chapel, and its rich stalactite-style ceiling, are just as obviously of Arab inspiration. That identical mix of Latin, Greek and Arab, on an even grander scale, again characterized the new cathedral at Monreale, west of Palermo, built by William II (1165–89). King William, Ibn Jubayr relates, spoke Arabic. And the pointed arches of Monreale’s nave arcades and cloister, completed in the 1180s, are at least as Saracenic as those of the Palatine Chapel of William’s grandfather. Similarly, while Monreale’s plan is Latin, its mosaics are Greek. And it was for those mosaics in particular – political in purpose, spectacular in spread, enormous in cost, Greek in execution, yet Latin in subject – that William II’s huge cathedral was most admired.
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In late twelfth-century English art, some significance attaches to William II’s marriage in 1177 to Joanna of England, Henry II’s daughter. And there are contemporary English wall-painting schemes, even in remote country churches, which quite clearly have a Byzantine cast. However, the great majority of English pilgrims had always travelled to the Holy Land by way of Sicily. And it was most probably a Greek icon, brought home by one of those, which furnished the inspiration in c. 1150 for two high-quality miniatures (‘the Byzantine Diptych’) in Henry of Blois’s Winchester Psalter. A decade or so later, there is even more direct evidence of a migratory Sicilian art in the Morgan Master’s extraordinary contributions to Bishop Henry’s great Winchester Bible of 1160–75. And that same Master’s exquisite Palermo-based miniatures would themselves become the model for the Byzantine-style frescos, contemporary with Monreale, of the Holy Sepulchre Chapel at Winchester Cathedral.
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Such links are obvious. Nevertheless, the strong Byzantine presence in Western art – in Germany and France, as well as Italy and England – was both too early and too general for eastward-looking Sicily to be its source. A more likely genesis for this characteristically twelfth-century emphasis in the arts was Abbot Desiderius’s rebuilding of Monte Cassino. When planning his great church, Desiderius had visited Rome in the mid-1060s to buy antiques: ‘huge quantities of columns, bases, architraves, and marbles of different colours’. But there had been no native-born mosaicists or opus sectile (ornamental marble) paviours at Monte Cassino when work began, and Desiderius had accordingly used imported Greeks to train his younger monks in those forgotten arts ‘lest this knowledge be lost again in Italy’. ‘Four hundred and fifty years have passed’, wrote his friend Archbishop Alfanus, ‘during which this kind of art has been excluded from the cities of Italy; [but] something that had been alien to us for a long time has now become our own again.’
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That instinctive reaching back into the past for renewal in the arts came to be closely identified with the missionary reforming programme to which Desiderius, as a Gregorian, was committed. While never a fanatic in Gregory VII’s cause, Desiderius followed the pope in condemning lay investiture (royal intervention in church appointments) and simoniacal ordination (clerical office obtained by purchase), and came to support the separation of Church and State – of Papacy and Empire, King and Bishop, God and Mammon – which was what the Investiture Contest was all about. In the almost three centuries since Leo III’s coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor in the West on 25 December 800, German theocracy had travelled too far. And as Desiderius looked to Rome for his direction in Church reform, so Rome’s anti-imperial reforming popes, seeking renewal in building also, took inspiration from Monte Cassino. What resulted was an architecture which, while more antiquarian than scholarly, was archaeologically correct in a way not seen again for three centuries. Rome itself, as Desiderius had discovered, was rich in re-usable antiquities. And when Innocent II (1130–43) began his huge new church at Santa Maria in Trastevere, he was free to plunder Ancient Rome for his materials. Innocent II’s grand parade of columns with their antique Ionic capitals, his re-used sculptured brackets on their classically straight entablatures, his archaizing marble pavements and rich mosaics, would all have been familiar in Early Christian Rome. The model for Santa Maria in Trastevere was no church of its own period but the fifth-century basilica, still standing today, at Santa Maria Maggiore.
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In the long papal schism which began with Innocent II’s disputed election and ended only with the death of the antipope Anacletus II in January 1138, the pope’s most capable lieutenant was Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux. Bernard was a reformer of quite a different kind, finding his inspiration in the poverty-driven austerities and literal truths of the primitive Church. Yet there was nothing in the least austere about the lavish mosaics and pavements of Santa Maria in Trastevere. And the church Bernard built at his newly acquired abbey of Tre Fontane on Rome’s Via Laurentia, exactly contemporary with Innocent’s own, was so stripped-down and bare as to be seen as a reproach, inviting unfavourable comparisons. Bernard himself never hid his real feelings. ‘What business has gold in the sanctuary?’, he asked, in a characteristic borrowing from the feisty Neronian satirist, Persius Flaccus (fl.34–62). ‘To speak quite openly, avarice, which is nothing but idolatry, is the source of all this … for through the sight of extravagant but marvellous vanities, men are more moved to contribute offerings than to pray … [and while] eyes feast on gold-mounted reliquaries and purses gape … the poor find nothing to sustain them.’
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There was room, in point of fact, for a renewal of both kinds, each finding its rationale in the fourth-century Church. Nevertheless, it was Bernard’s populist message which caught the tide. ‘See’, exclaimed Orderic Vitalis, echoing Rodulfus Glaber at the Millennium, ‘though evil abounds in the world, the devotion of the faithful in cloisters grows more abundant and bears fruit a hundredfold in the Lord’s field. Monasteries are founded everywhere in mountain valleys and plains, observing new rites and wearing different habits; the swarm of cowled monks spreads all over the world.’ But while generous in his praise of Bernard’s valiant white-monk ‘army’ – a favourite Bernardine metaphor – Orderic (the black monk) was perfectly aware as he wrote of a major public-relations disaster in the making. Old-style Benedictines like himself had always worn black.
Now however, as if to make a show of righteousness, the men of our time [the Cistercians] reject black, which the earlier fathers always adopted as a mark of humility both for the cloaks of the clergy and for the cowls of monks … they specially favour white in their habit, and thereby seem remarkable and conspicuous to others … they have built monasteries with their own hands in lonely, wooded places and have thoughtfully provided them with holy names, such as Maison-Dieu, Clairvaux, Bonmont, and L’Aumône and others of like kind … [so that] many noble warriors and profound philosophers have flocked to them … [and others] who were parched with thirst have drunk from their spring; many streams have flowed out of it through all parts of France … through Aquitaine, Brittany, Gascony, and Spain.
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‘Do as none does and the world marvels’ was a proverb (his biographer tells us) often on Bernard’s lips and ever in his heart.
(#litres_trial_promo) And there is no doubting that his timing was impeccable. Furthermore, while his message was wrapped persuasively in the age-old language of renewal, Bernard’s policies were more radical than they appeared. It was at Cïteaux, wrote Philip of Harvengt in the 1140s, using the familiar reformer’s code, that ‘the monastic order, formerly dead, was revived; there the old ashes were poked; it was reformed by the grace of novelty, and by zeal it recovered its proper state … and the rule of Benedict recovered in our times the truth of the letter’.
(#litres_trial_promo) But ‘as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also’ (James 2:26). And those many ‘workshops of total sanctity’ which so exhilarated Philip would not have survived long – let alone multiplied as they did – had they failed to make their way in the real world. Throughout the Catholic West, and deep into its marches with Muslim Spain and the Slavic East, there had never been a boom quite like this one. The Cistercians were not the only monks to make a killing.
O how innumerable a crowd of monks [apostrophized Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny] has by divine grace multiplied above all in our days, has covered almost the entire countryside of Gaul, filled the towns, castles, and fortresses; however varied in clothing and customs, the army of the Lord Sabaoth has sworn under one faith and love in the sacraments of the same monastic name.
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Peter the Venerable’s increasingly démodé Cluniacs had long ceased to function as the Lord of Hosts’ front-line troops. However, they had already profited hugely from the new reforming emphasis which their long-lived abbots, Odilo (994–1049) and Hugh (1049–1109), had each helped promote in his turn. And what the reforms had begun to bring to them, even before 1100, were large numbers of parish churches, with their tithes and other offerings, formerly treated by lay owners as private property. It was Leo IX’s Council of Rome in 1050 which urged the restoration of all lost church revenues to their clergy. And that was immediately the message of Bishop Airard of Nantes in the 1050s, having in mind – he told his hearers – that ‘in France more than elsewhere the wicked custom has grown up that ecclesiastical revenues, tithes, and oblations are usurped by others than the ministers of the churches to which they rightly belong, and sustenance is evilly transferred from the clergy to laymen and from the poor to the rich.’ Airard’s message came too early to win general support; and he was driven from office in 1059 in favour of a pastor of the landowning party. Nevertheless, he had already secured the release before that time of several parish churches, including those of Rodald ‘who set an example to others and gave up everything he possessed and left it to me what to do with it, and I gave it all, just as it had been given to me, to St Martin and the monks of Marmoutier’.
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That first eleventh-century trickle of church transfers rose to a flood after the triumph of the reforming party at the Concordat of Worms in 1122 had brought the Investiture Contest decisively to an end. And it is very clear that, as the conscience of lay proprietors increasingly got the better of them, the contemporary rebuilding of parish churches throughout the West owed more to changes of ownership than to population growth, to landowner wealth, to developing ritual, or any other cause. One especially well-documented example of such a rebuilding, where the new church still survives, is an arrangement of the 1170s by which William, son of Ernis, gave the English Cluniacs of Castle Acre three acres in Long Sutton ‘in the field called Heoldefen next the road, to build a parish church there. And my wish is that the earlier wooden church of the same vill, in place of which the new church will be built, shall be taken away and the bodies buried in it shall be taken to the new church.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Long Sutton, in the fertile Lincolnshire fens, was a developing market-town, and its church was ambitious from the start. For another century and more, church and town continued to grow in unison, before the Great Pestilence brought calamity and recession.
‘Each man [they say] must have a beginning, for the fair lasts but a while.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And for many reforming clergy, both in the twelfth century and the next, that beginning could come only in the towns. In particular, that was true of the regular canons – Augustinians for the most part – who, as priests as well as monks, attracted endowments which almost always took the form of parish churches. Then, in the thirteenth century, it was in the towns again that the friars – Dominicans and Franciscans, Carmelites and Austin Friars – made their homes. Not so the Cistercians, nor other ‘hermit-monks’, whose statutes from the start had provided that ‘none of our monasteries is to be constructed in towns, castles or villages, but in places remote from human intercourse’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Paradoxically that policy, far from removing their abbeys from the natural growth-points of the economy, located them initially on those expanding frontiers of wealth – of clearance and reclamation, of conquest and new settlement – at which major development was still possible. Frontiers are hostile places. And when, in 1112, a young Burgundian nobleman, Bernard of Fontaines, joined the little community of ascetics settled since 1098 in ‘the wilderness known as Cîteaux … where men rarely penetrated and none but wild things lived’, it was weak and on the point of collapse. Yet just as soon as Bernard had absorbed Cîteaux’s disciplines, he left it again to found his own community in its image. And it was from Bernard’s Clairvaux – with Morimond and Pontigny and Cîteaux itself – that the huge expansion of the Cistercian order almost immediately took place, so that just forty years later, on Bernard’s death, there would be well over 350 abbeys in a mighty monastic family which even its rivals acknowledged to be ‘a model for all monks, a mirror for the diligent, [and] a spur to the indolent’ of all convictions.
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‘That was the golden age of Clairvaux’, wrote William of St Thierry, re-telling the story of Abbot Bernard’s first two decades, when ‘men of virtue, once rich in goods and honour and glorying now in the poverty of Christ, established the Church of God in their own blood, in toil and hardship, in hunger and thirst, in cold and exposure, in persecution and insults, in difficulties and in death, preparing the Clairvaux of today, which enjoys sufficiency and peace.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But Bernard’s first ‘little huddle of huts’ at Clairvaux, ‘strangled and overshadowed by its thickly wooded hills’, was quickly filled to bursting by the many who hurried there to join him. And the standard Cistercian abbey of the order’s main expansion period – with ‘no statues or pictures’, with ‘windows of clear glass’, and with ‘no bell-towers of stone’ (provided the statutes) – would have had much more in common with the new Clairvaux II after 1135, when the saint at last agreed to its rebuilding. ‘Should you wish to picture Clairvaux’, begins a famous description of Bernard’s second abbey, ‘imagine two hills and between them a narrow valley, which widens out as it approaches the monastery. The abbey covers the half of one hillside and the whole of the other. With one rich in vineyards, the other in crops, they do double duty, gladdening the heart and serving our necessities, one shelving flank providing food, the other drink.’ Characteristically, though, it was not in his account of Clairvaux’s buildings – as a Cluniac might have done – that the Cistercian author came to life, but in his transparent delight in the tumbling waters of the Aube and in the ‘smiling face of the earth’.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was another Cistercian writer, Gilbert of Swineshead, who described the site of his own English abbey as ‘a secret, cultivated, well-watered, and fertile place and a wooded valley [which] resounds in springtime with the sweet song of birds, so that it can revive the dead spirit, remove the aversions of the dainty soul, [and] soften the hardness of the undevout mind’. And it was a third, Walter Daniel, who found Paradise (no less) in the wooded hills and dashing streams of Aelred’s Rievaulx.
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Of Abbot Aelred, Walter wrote: ‘This man turned Rievaulx into a veritable stronghold for the comfort and support of the weak … an abode of peace and piety where God and neighbour might be loved in fullest measure.’ To Rievaulx, ‘monks in want of brotherly understanding and compassion came flocking from foreign countries and the farther ends of the earth’; and no restless ‘rolling-stone’ was turned away. Yet Rievaulx’s lush meadows, like those of its Yorkshire sister-house at Fountains, had only lately been ‘a place of horror and vast solitude … thick set with thorns, and fit rather to be the lair of wild beasts than the home of human beings’. And the gentle Aelred, abbot from 1147, was as much successful manager as caring father. Before his death in 1166, Aelred had more than doubled Rievaulx’s size in ‘monks, lay-brothers, hired men, farms, lands and chattels’, leaving it well equipped to support an even greater company than the already huge throng of 140 choir-monks and 500 lay-brethren and servants which had packed the church on feast-days ‘like bees into a hive, unable to move forward for very numbers’.
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Aelred was a Cistercian of the second generation. And by his death, many white-monk houses had ceased to live by the austere code of their founders. One sharp contemporary verdict on what the Cistercians had become – especially worth attending because delivered by an admirer and reported by an abbot of their own order – is that of Wulfric of Haselbury Plucknett, a well-regarded Somerset recluse. Wulfric, said Abbot John of Ford, his biographer:
clasped all Cistercians in a close embrace, like sons of his own body, or rather of Christ Jesus. He lauded the Order to the skies and never hesitated to direct to it those who came to consult him about reforming their lives. There was only one matter, according to this friend and champion of our Order, in which the Cistercians displeased God: when it came to lands made over to them, they exercised their rights too freely and, more intent on law than on justice, seemed insufficiently mindful of their duty to those men committed to their lordship.
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However, the problem for the Cistercians, as for the other rural orders of the twelfth-century reform – the Carthusians and Tironensians, the Gilbertines, Premonstratensians and Grandmontines – was that both in the quality of their recruitment and in the largesse of their friends, support was very rapidly falling off. To meet their continuing building commitments – and Aelred’s hugely expanded Rievaulx was only one of many white-monk houses already rebuilt almost entirely before 1200 – Cistercian abbots everywhere had begun accepting those very properties, from feudalized lands to parish churches and their tithes, which their predecessors had on principle rejected.
(#litres_trial_promo) Those earlier abbots had invariably made sure that their houses were sufficiently endowed. And few Cistercian communities ever ran much risk of the wretched poverty felt, for example, by the hermit-monks of Grandmont, struggling to maintain themselves on a mountain-top so ‘stern and cold, infertile and rocky, misty and exposed to the winds’ that even ‘the water is colder and worse than in other places, for it produces sickness instead of health’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet from the mid-century already, the very success of the Cistercians had begun to cost them dear, losing them the respect and loyalty of just those powerful men and women for whom the soldierly discipline of Abbot Bernard’s troops had always been their principal attraction.
Bernard had communed easily with princes. However, the West’s most affluent patrons – bishops as well as dynasts – were beginning to find other homes for their money. One major beneficiary would be the Friars Mendicant, who arrived with the new century. But before that fresh distraction, the rebuilding of Europe’s cathedrals had entered a new phase, driven at least in part by popular piety. ‘We have begun the construction of a larger church [at Aix-en-Provence]’, promised Archbishop Rostan de Fos’s encyclical of 1070, addressed to all the faithful of the diocese, ‘in which you and other visitors will have space enough to stand … We ask each of you to give what he can, so as to receive from God and us a full remission of his sins … [then] for everything you give, you will receive a hundredfold from the Lord in the day of Judgement.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And it was pilgrims again, drawn to Chartres Cathedral by the Virgin’s shrine, who had contributed to its rebuilding after the great fire of 1020. At Chartres, the chief attraction was an ancient image of the Virgin ‘about to bring forth’, with the Tunic she was wearing at childbirth. And there were already some lone voices – among them that of Guibert, Abbot of Nogent – who spoke out eloquently against the folly of such cults.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet there is no mistaking the furious passion of those Chartres citizens who, as their new cathedral neared completion in 1145, ‘in silence and with humility … [and] not without discipline and tears’, dragged waggon-loads of stone and wood to aid the works. ‘Powerful princes of the world’, wrote Abbot Haimon of that same scene, ‘men brought up in honour and wealth, nobles, men and women, have bent their proud and haughty necks to the harness of carts, and, like beasts of burden, have dragged to the abode of Christ these waggons loaded with wines, grains, oil, stone, wood, and all that is necessary for the wants of life or for the construction of the church’.
(#litres_trial_promo) But already Haimon’s emphasis was on the high birth of his devout penitents, and it was from the rich that the works received their funding. Thus when, on 10 June 1194, Chartres Cathedral burnt down again, what made another start feasible was not the Sisyphean labours of the city’s ardent poor but the solid wealth of its prudhommes and their friends.
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Cathedral-building is almost always long-term. And those great twelfth-century programmes at Laon and Notre-Dame de Paris, at Norwich and Canterbury, at Zamora and Salamanca, at Tournai, Worms and Mainz, all took generations to complete. Cologne Cathedral, the most ambitious yet, although begun at a fine pace in 1248, was not finished until the late nineteenth century. However, the mere fact that so many ambitious projects were launched at the same time says much for the health of the economy. Rhineland Cologne, always a minting capital, was at the centre of a revival which, after more than a century of bullion shortages, took off again in 1168 with the chance discovery of an important new silver source at Christiansdorf (later Freiberg), in Meissen. In less than twenty years from that first opening of Freiberg’s seams, the circulation throughout the West of hundreds of millions of silver pfennigs had transformed its trading economy.
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For cathedral-building bishops everywhere, the fact that this new wealth was largely created in the towns gave them whatever assurances they still needed. With population on the increase and labour cheap and plentiful, the ideal context had been established for daring programmes of new works characterized by leap-frogging ambition. Silver-rich Cologne remained for generations the most insanely ambitious project of them all. However, a seductive target had been set. And Cologne’s challenge, taken up first in 1386 by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, tyrant of Milan, was then accepted by the canons of Seville. It was one of those canons who, in 1401–2, made the famous boast: ‘We shall build a cathedral so fine that none shall be its equal … so great and of such a kind that those who see it completed will think that we were mad.’
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And that, in just a century, is what they did.
CHAPTER TWO Commercial Revolution (#ulink_2ca23c1e-b555-5963-a073-f6c810271b56)
Europe’s commercial revolution is now sometimes seen as beginning at the Millennium, with that ‘birth of the market’ and ‘transformation of town/country relations’ which Guy Bois has located within a few years of 970.
(#litres_trial_promo) However, most historians would date it later, and all agree that it was in the long thirteenth century – from the 1150s (or a little earlier) to the 1340s (or a little later) – that genuine surpluses built up, to result in the huge cathedrals of today. Cologne was only one of many Western cities which grew spectacularly in the twelfth century, adding two new circuits of defences; Rheims, at least doubling its size, was another. Both then began cathedrals – Rheims in 1211, Cologne in 1248 – on a scale so vast that nobody could have known how they would end. ‘Spend and God shall send’, the cathedral-builders told each other; ‘God loves a glad giver’, they advised their friends. But prayer was not the only funding strategy they employed. Abbot Suger, in the previous century, had shown the way. Before beginning on the rebuilding of his abbey church at Saint-Denis, Suger’s first priority had been to set about the recovery of his rents. Only after that, he reported, ‘having put the situation to rights, I had my hands free to proceed with construction’. Even so, he had been concerned about the future: ‘[but] when later on our investments became more substantial, we never found ourselves running short, and an actual abundance of resources caused us to admit: “Everything that comes in sufficient quantities comes from God”.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet in 1148, when Suger told his story, a more reliable source of funding was the rising rent-roll of his abbey, having all the wealth of Paris on its doorstep.
With the economy speeding up and money no longer tight, one circumstance especially favoured large-scale building. ‘Thou shalt not lend upon usury’, ran the ancient teaching of the Church, whether ‘usury of money, usury of victuals, [or] usury of any thing that is lent upon usury’ (Deuteronomy 23: 19). And while frequently disregarded from the thirteenth century if not earlier, that doctrine remained unchanged throughout the Middle Ages, holding back the evolution of money markets. It was not, for example, until late in the seventeenth century that London developed fully the sophisticated banking and commercial systems which helped make it into Europe’s largest city. And before that time, the unresolved problem of the urban rich was where – if not in land or treasure – to keep their money. In compensation, towns before the plague were good places to live: they were free, well-protected, and expanding quickly. But where fully a third of Europe’s cultivable land-space was already alienated to the Church, and where most of the remainder was locked away in the protected family holdings of the nobility, what was left sold only at a premium. Confident in their own abilities and anticipating little profit from the fields outside their walls, the comfortably-off citizens of Chartres, Bourges and Rheims, of Beauvais, Tours and Amiens, were the more easily persuaded to put their money into building when almost every other option was circumscribed.
Where they began was on the rebuilding of their cathedrals. But with the arrival of the friars, from early in the thirteenth century, another popular receptacle for surplus profits opened up. It was in 1210 that Francis of Assisi’s Regula Prima was first approved at Rome, and as late as 1216 that Dominic of Caleruega’s Order of Friars Preachers was formally recognized by Pope Honorius III. Yet so well targeted were the Mendicants, closely focused on the towns, that Matthew Paris (a Benedictine of St Albans) would say about them by the mid-century:
Brothers of many orders swarmed, now Preachers [Dominicans], now Minors [Franciscans], now Cruciferi [Crutched Friars], now Carmelites … The Preachers indeed and the Minors at first led a life of poverty and the utmost sanctity, devoting themselves wholly to preaching, hearing confessions, divine services in church, reading and study. Embracing poverty voluntarily for God, they abandoned many revenues, keeping nothing for themselves for the morrow by way of victuals. But within a few years they were stocking up carefully and erecting extremely fine buildings.
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Writing in 1250, Matthew Paris had seen the friars triumph over his own brethren too many times. And what he neglects to mention is that it was not always – nor even usually – the friars themselves who had chosen to build with such magnificence. Both the Dominicans and the Franciscans – the two senior orders – had insisted from the start on simple life-styles. ‘Our brothers shall have modest and humble houses’, runs a Dominican constitution of 1228, ‘so that the walls of houses without an upper room shall not exceed twelve feet in height, and of those with an upper room twenty feet, the church thirty feet; and their roofs should not be vaulted in stone, except perhaps over choir and sacristy.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And when, in 1260, Bonaventure (the ‘Seraphic Doctor’) brought the Franciscans back to unity after the divisions which had followed their founder’s death, his new statutes insisted that no churches of the order should have bell-towers of their own; that expensive vaults (as with the Dominicans) should be limited to the presbytery; that the only stained-glass imagery should be in the great east window over the high altar; and that ‘since exquisite craftsmanship and superfluity are directly contrary to poverty, we order that such exquisite craftsmanship, whether in pictures, sculpture, windows, columns and suchlike, and any superfluity in length, width or height above what is fitting to the requirements of the place, be more strictly avoided’.
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Such ‘superfluities’ had indeed characterized a great number of Franciscan churches, not least the huge basilica at Assisi itself which Brother Elias began building, soon after Francis’s death in 1226, in clear contravention of the saint’s explicit wishes. Yet it was overeager patrons, in almost every case, who had commissioned them. ‘King Louis’, wrote Jean de Joinville in his hagiographic history of Louis IX of France (1226–70), ‘loved all people who devoted themselves to the service of God by taking on the religious habit; none of these ever came to him without his giving them what they needed for a living.’ And while it was the Franciscans and the Dominicans who profited most from that largesse, Louis bought land also for the Carmelites on the Seine near Charenton, ‘where he built them a monastery and supplied it, at his own expense, with vestments, chalices, and such other things as are essential for the service of our Saviour’; he provided a site and built a church for the Austin Friars ‘outside the Porte Montmartre’; and he gave the Friars of the Holy Cross (Crutched Friars) a house ‘in the street once known as the Carrefour du Temple, but now called the rue Sainte-Croix’. In this way, boasts Joinville, ‘the good King Louis surrounded the city of Paris with people vowed to the service of religion’.
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‘They have already encircled the city’, sang Rutebeuf, the jongleur, taking the opposite view; ‘God keep Paris from harm/and preserve her from false religion.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And it was undoubtedly the case that Louis IX’s too obvious advocacy of the friars in their long mid-century dispute with the secular masters of the University cost him much support in his own capital. ‘There were times’, Joinville admits, ‘when [even] some of those who were most in his confidence found fault with the king for spending so lavishly on what seemed to them over-generous benefactions’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet the friars, whether as preachers to urban audiences or as buriers of the dead, were in no danger of losing their appeal. It was in Louis’s own Sainte-Chapelle – built at huge cost in the 1240s to house his most precious relic, the Crown of Thorns – that the king and his family heard the friars preach on many occasions. And high on the list of Louis’s favourite preachers was that same Bonaventure, once himself a famous teacher in the Paris schools, who restored order to the Franciscans in 1260. Over a quarter of Bonaventure’s sermons while minister-general are known to have been delivered on return visits to Paris, when the king was very often in his audience. They satisfied an addiction as powerful in Louis IX as the passion of Henry III, his English brother-in-law, for hearing masses.
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With Louis’s monumental reliquary rising before him as a challenge, Henry III was at least as determined to build a shrine of his own of similarly exemplary magnificence. Begun in 1246, when work on the Sainte-Chapelle (consecrated in 1248) was still in progress, Henry’s abbey church at Westminster replaced the demolished pre-Conquest church of King Edward the Confessor, whose canonization in 1161 had made him the focus of a developing cult to which Henry was personally devoted. No materials were too expensive nor spaces too grand for a work of such intense royal piety. Yet Henry was impatient to see it finished: ‘Because the king wishes that the works of the church of Westminster should be greatly speeded up (multum expedirentur)’, orders Henry III’s testy writ of 30 October 1252, ‘Henry, the master of the said works, is directed to have all the marble work raised this winter that can be done without danger.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The cost of this one project was enormous; Westminster alone (of all Henry’s many building enterprises) absorbed the equivalent of more than a year of the royal revenues, and contributed significantly to the popular unrest which culminated in the Baronial Revolt of 1263–5. Yet as Louis IX had told his critics: ‘I would rather have such excessive sums as I spend devoted to almsgiving for the love of God than used in empty ostentation and the vanities of this world.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And where ‘magnificence’ in every gesture was routinely demanded of a king, there was little to be gained by royal parsimony. A generation later, in typical Mendicant-speak, the Dominican Federico Franconi would invoke a pagan Greek philosopher to justify the pious works of Louis’s nephew Charles II, King of Sicily (1285–1309):
According to Aristotle, Ethics 4, it is the part of the magnificent man to go to great expense and to make donations, and especially in connection with God and the building of temples. Thus our lord King Charles acted as befits a magnificent man and went to great expense and made gifts to knights, counts, and the like … How great were the gifts he made to clerics and religious! Indeed, too, how many were the churches and monasteries, how many were the convents that he built and endowed!
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Magnificence was as desirable in the government of cities also, for as the Florentine patrician, Pagolantonio Soderini, would later explain to his fellow disputants in Francesco Guicciardini’s political Dialogue of the 1520s: ‘Although cities were founded principally to protect those who took refuge in them and to provide them with the commodities of everyday life, nevertheless their rulers are also responsible for making them magnificent and illustrious, so their inhabitants can acquire reputation and fame among other nations for being generous, intelligent, virtuous and prudent.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But public works, in the last resort, are usually funded by private wealth. And probably the most significant contribution the friars ever made to the self-esteem of Europe’s cities was to give wealth-creation recognition in the Church. It was to Aristotle again, only recently become accessible in translations of their own making, that Mendicant scholars turned for a less condemnatory view of personal profit – deemed, until then, to be no better than exploitation – which began with the defence of private property. Aristotle, in his own day, had seen nothing wrong with private property. And for the Aristotelian Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, not only was personal wealth no sin, but the rich stood a better chance of being virtuous: thus ‘exterior riches are necessary for the good of virtue, since through them we sustain ourselves and can help others’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Contemporaneously, it was the Franciscan master Guibert of Tournai, teaching alongside Aquinas (the ‘Angelic Doctor’) in the Paris schools, who assured the class of merchants that ‘gold and silver make neither good men nor bad men: the use of them is good, and the abuse of them is bad’: in effect, that there is nothing sinful in buying and selling provided always that the motives are not base.
(#litres_trial_promo) And while some of the friars’ other rationalizations of money-making – of interest (‘usury’) as an acceptable charge for venture capital, and of a fair (or ‘just’) price as being whatever the market would bear – were more problematic, they were nevertheless entirely successful in promoting Christ the Good Merchant (Bonus Negotiator) as a commerce-friendly figure, on a level with Christ the Lawyer (Advocatus) or Christ the Lord (Dominus).
Taking the sin out of commerce was never more necessary than in this century of growth, when profits were accumulating all the time. And what made that growth significant – for the arts as for all else – was that a substantial proportion of it was real. The poor have few protectors. And when Pisa first expanded from its original walled core of just 30 hectares to the 114 hectares of 1162, and then again to the 185 defended hectares of 1300, it was less to enclose the shantytowns of migrant workers than to shelter the spreading suburbs of the rich.
(#litres_trial_promo) Florence, over the same period, grew by almost eight times: from 80 to 620 hectares. And while Genoa, the wealthiest of the Lombard cities, always stayed much more compact, the huge increase in trading volumes which the Genoese experienced through the thirteenth century in particular – well beyond even their considerable population growth of some 230 per cent – is the clearest possible demonstration of rising affluence.
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What Genoa and other Mediterranean cities enjoyed throughout the long thirteenth century was a consistently favourable trading balance with the commodity-starved but silver-rich nations of the North. Italian luxury goods – silks and linen, worked leather and fine woollens, armour and weapons, precious stones and spices – were all exchanged for northern silver. And although the bulk of the accumulated bullion was then passed on immediately to Naples and southern Italy, to North Africa, Asia Minor and the Near East, much also stuck to the fingers of Lombard middlemen. In direct response to that abundance, Italian interest rates fell sharply, from a typical 20 per cent at the beginning of the century to less than half that figure before its end, bringing the cost of a commercial loan in Genoa down as low as 7 per cent, in Venice to 8 per cent, in Florence to 10. And while personal loans were more expensive and usury (even as Mendicant casuistry had redefined it) was still condemned by the Church, every circumstance now favoured the entrepreneur.
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With bills of exchange in regular use and with book money increasingly substituting for real, the first to benefit were the citizen-bankers of northern Italy. They challenged one another like young bulls. ‘The noble city called Venice’, wrote Martin da Canale, its thirteenth-century chronicler, is ‘the most beautiful and delightful in the world’; the Piazza San Marco is ‘the most beautiful square in the whole world, and on the east side is the most beautiful church in the world, the church of the lord Saint Mark’. And when, on the eve of the Black Death, Agnolo di Tura (‘called the Fat’) recorded the completion in 1346 of the great piazza, or Campo, at Siena, he was equally confident in awarding it the crown as ‘the most beautiful square, with the most beautiful and abundant fountain and the most handsome and noble houses and workshops around it of any square in Italy’. Chief among the newest and grandest of those ‘handsome and noble houses’ was Siena’s enormous Palazzo Pubblico, for which the clinching argument had been that ‘it is a matter of honour for each city that its rulers and officials should occupy beautiful and honourable buildings, both for the sake of the commune itself and because strangers often go to visit them on business; this is a matter of great importance for the prestige of the city.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And what then came to be exhibited in Siena’s heart of government – the Sala de’ Nove (Chamber of the Nine) – was Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s huge fresco cycle of The Effects of Good and Bad Government in Town and Country, among the most impressive didactic paintings ever made.
Both Ambrogio and his brother Pietro (also a major painter) are believed to have died in the Black Death. And another casualty of that catastrophe was the projected extension, finally agreed as late as 1339, of Siena’s already big thirteenth-century cathedral. A huge new nave was to have been built on the line of the existing south transept, enormously increasing the floor area. But construction had begun to falter even before the plague reached Siena in the spring of 1348, and the entire enterprise was abandoned soon afterwards. As a display of citizen hubris roused to fever pitch, Siena’s failed Nuovo Duomo would be difficult to match. Yet it has a parallel in the new cathedral proposed at Beauvais a century earlier, following the fire of 1225: ‘the tallest structure ever built in northern Europe and certainly the most ambitious cathedral project of the High Gothic era’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Bishop Miles’s Beauvais Cathedral, like the Nuovo Duomo at Siena, was never finished. There was a major collapse of the upper choir in 1284, the great crossing tower (only recently completed) fell in 1573, and the long nave of the original plan was never built. But if pushing technology to its limits may sometimes end in tears, it was a luxury that the newly affluent could well afford. John de Cella, Abbot of St Albans (1195–1214), headed one of the wealthiest of the English black-monk houses. He won the praise of his monks for his rebuilding (‘in every detail faultlessly’) of their ‘new and splendid’ dormitory and ‘very beautiful’ refectory. Yet it was Abbot John also who made the grievous error of entrusting his most prestigious project, the rebuilding of the western show-front of his substantial abbey church, to Master Hugh de Goldcliff – ‘a deceitful and unreliable man, but a craftsman of great reputation’. Then
It came about by the treacherous advice of the said Hugh that carved work, unnecessary, trifling, and beyond measure costly, was added; and before the middle of the work had risen as high as the water-table, the abbot was tired of it and began to weary and to be alarmed, and the work languished. And as the walls were left uncovered during the rainy season the stones, which were very soft, broke into little bits, and the wall, like the fallen and ruinous stonework, with its columns, bases and capitals, slipped and fell by its own weight; so that the wreck of images and flowers was a cause of smiles and laughter to those that saw it.
