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The Man Who Wrote Everything

3 July 2023
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Ramon Lull (c.1232 – 1315/1316).

He’s not, strictly speaking, a saint, only a blessed, but Ramon Llull (1232-1316) deserves a place in any list of holy men. However, the Fool of Love was for the first 30 years of his life fool to an altogether more earthly sort of love. Llull was attached to the household of the future James II of Majorca and he eventually became its seneschal. Marriage and two children did nothing to cool his ardent pursuit of the court’s women, to whom he composed many songs in the romantic troubadour style of the period.

‘The more apt I found myself to sin the more I allowed my nature to obey the dictates of my body,’ he wrote later. Not even the shock of one of his amours yielding to his advances, only to reveal breasts ravaged by cancer, could stop his philandering.

But then, in the summer of 1263, while Ramon was busy writing another song in honour of a new love, he looked up from his work to see ‘our Lord Jesus Christ hanging upon the Cross’. Llull, his poetic flow seriously interrupted, escaped to his bed, no doubt assuming that a good night’s sleep would clear his mind of such troublesome visions. But when he next returned to songwriting, the figure returned and a terrified Llull again retired to bed. Ramon was no dilettante libertine and three more times he returned to his love song, only to be faced with the same figure.

Llull decided that these must be authentic visions rather than mental phantoms and he set himself to working out what they meant. In the end he decided that ‘our Lord God Jesus Christ desired none other thing than that he should wholly abandon the world and devote himself to His service’. This he decided to do by trying to convert the unbelievers (in Ramon’s world, this meant chiefly Muslims), by writing a book, ‘the best in the world, against the errors of unbelievers’, and setting up colleges to teach Arabic to missionaries.

Ramon then sold his possessions, though keeping some back to support his wife and children, distributed the proceeds to the poor and spent the next nine years in study. It was only then, approaching his 40th year, that Llull began the literary and missionary work for which he would become famous, known in later centuries as the Doctor Illuminatus, the Illuminated Doctor, from the series of mystical visions he had on Mount Randa in Majorca.

The sheer scale of his labours almost defy belief. Llull was the author of 265 works in Catalan, Arabic and Latin; the writer of the seminal Catalan novel, Blanquerna; a missionary in almost constant travel between Europe and north Africa; a teacher at the University of Paris when it was the foremost institution of learning in Christendom; a suitor at papal and imperial courts; and the originator of the Art, a systematisation of, well, everything with respect to God’s attributes. This was the book, ‘the best in the world’, that Llull believed showed the truth and which he illustrated through diagrams, tables and, literally, millions of words.

This indefatigable man continued working throughout his long life. At 75 we find him, on a mission to north Africa, ‘beaten with sticks and with fists, and forcibly dragged along by his beard, which was very long, until he was locked in the latrine of the thieves’ jail’. Ramon continued in this vein until the end and whether his death occurred in Tunis, or on a ship sailing back, we can say that few men have ever packed so much life and adventure into the second half of a life.

The Men Who Sold Themselves

3 July 2023
Edoardo
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Categories: History
St Peter Nolasco (1189 – 1256), founder of the Mercedarians

You’d have thought that being mother to God would take up all of your time, but you’d be wrong. In fact, as with her Son, not even death has been able to put a stop to the activities of the young woman from Nazareth, and on 1 August 1218 Mary appeared in a vision to a young Catalan named Peter Nolasco, instructing him on how to continue his work of redeeming captives. 

During the seven-and-a-half centuries of conflict between Christian and Muslim Spain a common feature was the taking of captives for ransom. Now this was all very well if you were a member of the nobility and had someone to pay for your release, but many Christians from poor families were also captured in the general trawling for profit and plunder that took place during a gaza (a religiously sanctioned raid into the dar ul harb or house of war, that part of the world that had not accepted Islam). To be captured during a gaza was by definition to become a slave, a state which could be escaped only by conversion to Islam (which many prisoners did) or redemption.

It was this work of buying out of slavery the ‘poor of Christ’ that Peter Nolasco embarked upon, helped by his background as a merchant. In fact, Nolasco switched from buying goods to buying people, but all his efforts seemed only to swell the number of captives held in Muslim hands.

It was at this point that he received his vision of the Blessed Virgin, who advised him to form an order dedicated to the redemption of captives. The next day Nolasco sought an audience with the king, Jaume I, who received him well and agreed to help in the foundation of the Order of the Virgin Mary of Mercy of the Redemption of Captives (or Mercedarians as they are called). The order set up a redemption fund to buy back captives but, if all else failed, each member of the order took personal vows to hand himself over in place of a prisoner. The best estimate we have is that the order brought 11,615 slaves out of captivity between 1218 and 1301.

If that wasn’t enough, Our Lady of Mercy delivered the whole city of Barcelona from a plague of locusts in 1637. A grateful city adopted her as patron and celebrated her feast on 24 September, or at least it did until Franco clamped down on all things Catalan. But sometimes things suppressed simply wait for an opportunity to burst forth, and that’s precisely what happened with the Festes de la Mercé. What had been a simple religious feast turned into a week-long celebration of Catalan identity, all inextricably bound up with a long-dead Jewish girl. But then, what else would we expect of her?

Our Lady of Montserrat

3 July 2023
Edoardo
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Categories: History
The statue of Our Lady venerated at the Santa Maria de Montserrat monastery in mountains near Barcelona, Spain.

On 25 March 1522 a young soldier hung up his sword in front of a small statue. He crossed himself and looked at the dark features of a crowned woman and the child seated upon her knee, hand raised in benediction. Then he turned and limped away, his leg still weak from the cannonball that had wrecked it. He would wage war no more. The man was Ignatius of Loyola and he would go on to found the Jesuits. The statue was the Black Virgin of Montserrat, and she would go on to greet pilgrims by the million.

Black Madonnas – that is pictures or statues of Mary that depict her with dark skin – are widespread through the Catholic world and often come with a reputation for working miracles. Theories as to why Mary should be represented thus vary from the spurious (they’re really depictions of Isis and Horus) to the practical (centuries of candle smoke have stained them) but whatever the reason they always seem to evoke popular devotion.

La Moreneta, or ‘Little Dark One’ as the Virgin of Montserrat is usually called, is no exception. Pious enthusiasm dates the statue to St Luke in the first century, po-faced scepticism to the 12th. Whichever is true – and there is also evidence for the statue having been hidden from the Moors and then rediscovered in the ninth century – what is certain is how quickly the statue became a major centre of pilgrimage from the 12th century onwards. This was no doubt helped by the identification of the mountain as the site of the Holy Grail in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval romance Parsifal. But what really swung it was the miracles. And it certainly didn’t hurt that King Alfonse X ascribed miracles to Our Lady of Montserrat in his canticles, songs composed in honour of the Blessed Virgin that are still sung. For when all is said and done, one can gauge the popularity of shrines by their results: those that produce get the pilgrims, those that don’t fade into obscurity. By these standards the Little Dark One must still be doing the business: even today more than two million people visit each year.

The Three-Time Queen

19 June 2023
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Emma of Normandy (c.985 – 6 March 1052). Queen of England, Norway and Denmark.

In 1002, Emma, the daughter of Richard the Fearless, Duke of Normandy, married Æthelred, soon to be known as the Unready. As queen of England, Emma produced two sons, Edward and Alfred. But when Æthelred fled the country in the face of Swein Forkbeard’s Viking invasion, Emma left too, taking her sons with her. But, in a telling commentary on her marriage, the queen made her own way to Normandy.

When Æthelred died, Edmund Ironside, his son from his first marriage, led the fight against a new Viking invasion led by Cnut, the son of Swein Forkbeard. But when Edmund died, leaving the crown to Cnut by default, the Dane nevertheless needed to shore up the legitimacy of his claim to the throne. What better way to do that than by marrying the queen?

So Emma married the son of the man who had deposed her own first husband. Even then, it was a tale that required a little spinning, and Emma made sure it would be spun in her favour.

Emma commissioned a monk to write her version of these events; by her telling, Cnut wooed her back to England and into marriage with gifts and promises. Given the political nature of such a match, Emma may not have had much of a choice in the matter. But power mattered to the queen and she was willing to make sacrifices to get and keep power: in this case, the children of her first marriage, Edward and Alfred.

Emma left the two boys behind in Normandy while she set about producing a new heir to the throne with Cnut. According to her book, the political marriage became a true partnership and contemporary records bear this out: Emma had far higher status as Cnut’s queen than she had ever enjoyed as Æthelred’s wife.

When Cnut died in 1035, the succession seemed clear: surely it would go to Harthacnut, his son with Emma. But Cnut had produced another son, Harold Harefoot, with his first wife and Harold Harefoot was on hand to claim the throne of England.

Harthacnut on the other hand, was abroad, trying to defend his claims to Norway and Denmark. Emma’s struggle on her son’s behalf was helped by Earl Godwin, an Englishman whom Cnut had raised to one of the highest ranks in the land. However, Harthacnut did not return to claim the throne and, fed up with trying to keep the throne warm for a disinterested prince, Earl Godwin defected to Harold Harefoot’s side.

At this point, Emma remembered that she had another two sons, just over the Channel, who also had claims on the throne. Edward tried, but his tentative invasion failed. Then it was Alfred’s turn. Earl Godwin met him, feasted the young prince and his followers, put them up for the night and then set upon them: Alfred’s men were variously sold into slavery, murdered, mutilated, blinded and scalped. Alfred himself was not killed but his eyes were put out, wounds from which he failed to recover.

With Earl Godwin on his side, Harold Harefoot became undisputed king and Emma went into exile again, seeking refuge not in Normandy – where presumably Edward might have had some pointed questions about his mother’s recent conduct – but in Flanders. Ever the survivor, Emma swiftly returned to favour when Harold Harefoot died and Harthacnut took belated control of England in 1040. Having reacquainted herself with Edward, Emma worked for his return to England in 1041. And return he did but, remarkably, he returned to act as co-king alongside his half brother, with Emma the third person of a ruling trinity. This arrangement was likely made to shore up Harthacnut’s increasingly unpopular reign.

Harthacnut died in 1042 and shortly afterwards Edward moved against his mother, appearing unexpectedly at her power base in Winchester and depriving Emma of her treasures. Edward, for one, had not forgotten what had happened to his younger brother, nor the way Emma had abandoned him in Normandy. Although Emma was allowed to retain her base in Winchester and Edward accepted her back into his court, her power had been broken.

Besides, there was another power behind Edward’s throne: Earl Godwin and his family. Despite Godwin’s role in his brother’s death, Edward married the earl’s daughter. From Winchester, Emma, that consummate player of the political game, must have thought the future set: a grandson of Earl Godwin would, in time, take the throne. But it did not work out like that.

Emma did not live to see the final tragic playing out of the events set in motion by her marriages to Æthelred and Cnut. She died in 1052, the wife and mother of kings, and one of the most fascinating women of her age.

England’s Worst King? Probably

19 June 2023
Edoardo
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Categories: History
King Æthelred the Unready (c.968 – 23 April 1016). Reigned 978-1013/1014 – 1016

‘The Unready’ nickname comes from the Old English, Unræd, and means not that he was unprepared but that he was ill-advised. It is a play on his Christian name, which means ‘noble counsel’. The people of England always preferred to place the blame for the calamities that befell them through Æthelred’s long reign on the men around the king rather than the king himself. Æthelred, ever one to pass the buck, was likely all too happy to allow his councillors to take the blame. He even managed to escape the blame for how he came to the throne in the first place.

On the death of his father, Edgar the Peaceful, in 975, Æthelred’s elder half brother, Edward, took the throne. Edward reigned for three years until he made the mistake of going to visit Æthelred, his half brother, and his step mother, Queen Ælfthryth, at Corfe Castle, their stronghold in Dorset. When Edward arrived, he was greeted respectfully by Æthelred’s men but then, before the king could dismount, they grabbed his arms, immobilising him, and stabbed Edward to death.

Æthelred was only ten, so he was not held responsible for Edward’s murder. With no other princes available, Æthelred became king, ruling first with the support of a council of leading men and his formidable mother.

The early years of Æthelred’s reign saw considerable reform and, indeed, if left in peace he might have gone down in history as a good king save for the circumstances of his taking the throne. But Æthelred was not to be left in peace.

After a hundred years of peace, the Vikings were back.

A major Viking fleet appeared in 991 and defeated an English army near Maldon. Showing that the English, even then, liked nothing better than glorifying a valiant defeat, the battle was commemorated in the Old English poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’, which tells how the liege men of Byrhtnoth decided to fight to the death alongside their fallen lord rather than flee the fight.

One defeat was enough. Æthelred paid off the Vikings. This first time, the cost of peace was 10,000 pounds. The Danes took the money and then returned for more next year and the year after. Second time round, the cost had risen to 22,000 pounds of gold and silver. The third time, it was 24,000 pounds. The fourth, 36,000 pounds. The fifth, 48,000 poounds.

Æthelred had inherited the most efficient tax-gathering government in Europe, and he set about milking the realm to pay off the Danes. But where others before him had paid Viking fleets to buy time, Æthelred and his advisers appeared to have no other strategy: Æthelred never once faced the Vikings in battle.

What he did do was enter an alliance with Duke Richard of Normandy to try to deny Viking fleets safe harbour across the Channel: to cement the alliance, the recently widowed Æthelred married the duke’s sister, Emma, starting the relationship with Normandy that would play out, two generations later, in the second conquest of England.

It was the second conquest, because by 1013, the English were a thoroughly demoralized people, ripe for invasion, and King Swein Forkbeard of Denmark duly obliged. Æthelred fled into exile. But then, on 3 February 1014, Swein Forkbeard, with the country beneath his whiskers, died of natural causes.

Æthelred returned, promising to rule better, but the murder of two earls by his favoured councilor, Eadric Streona, showed that nothing had changed. Swein’s son, Cnut, returned at the head of a new invasion fleet and Æthelred finally did something for his country: he died, leaving his son, Edmund Ironside to lead the fight against Cnut.

The Greatest Book Review Ever

9 June 2023
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

My own review for The Book of Magic, I now realise, was mere enthusiasm when compared to another review of the book I saw on Amazon.

I await the day when someone reviews one of my books by saying it smells slightly of salt and vinegar crisps.

Book review: The Book of Magic edited by Brian Copenhaver

8 June 2023
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
The Book of Magic edited by Brian Copenhaver

The Book of Magic is a masterpiece of scholarship. The editor, Brian Copenhaver, selects texts, from antiquity to the Enlightenment, demonstrating how the idea of magic changed through the centuries. Each section begins with a short introduction on the author but the scholarship is best demonstrated in the copious footnotes, that provide a running, explicatory and illuminating commentry to each original text. A demonstration of how scholarship can shine light on the past.

Brief Bios of Anglo-Saxon kings: Harold

5 June 2023
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Harold Godwinson (c.1022 – 14 October 1066)

The son of Earl Godwin, Harold was the most powerful man in the land after his father’s death – more powerful than King Edward. While his sister was married to the king, Harold himself had no direct claim on the throne. Nevertheless, he claimed it when Edward died, there being no one in England powerful enough to oppose him. But, across the Channel, Duke William believed that Edward, who had grown up in Normandy, had promised the crown to him. Their rival claims would be settled on the most famous date in English history.

Brief Bios of Anglo-Saxon kings: Edward the Confessor

5 June 2023
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Edward the Confessor (c.1003 – 5 January 1066)

Edward grew up in exile in Normandy. Returning as king without a local power base, Edward needed help from Earl Godwin, the most powerful man in the land. In return, Godwin had his daughter marry Edward – despite Godwin’s part in the death of Edward’s brother, Alfred. In 1051, Edward expelled Godwin and his sons, and put his queen in a convent, but the Godwins returned next year with an army, forcing their reacceptance. The childless Edward made no public proclamation of who he wanted as heir, leaving the throne to be contested when he died in 1066, thus setting in motion the conflagration that would consume the House of Godwin later that year. It’s hard not to see it as Edward’s belated revenge upon a family that he hated but could not dispense with.

Brief Bios of Anglo-Saxon kings: Eadwig

5 June 2023
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Eadwig caught in flagrante delicto by an unamused Abbot Dunstan.

Eadwig (c.940 – 959) famously excused himself from the banquet following his own coronation to exercise himself with a noblewoman – and her daughter. Abbot Dunstan was sent to bring Eadwig back and, apparently, had to use force to get the king from the women’s bed. The relationship between the king and the reforming abbot did not improve thereafter.