JM: (Some) Fascinating historical figure(s) from the high/late middle ages (1200-1500).
You know, this time span is really, really crowded with fascinating people, at the tail ends especially. When mentally composing the post, I went “but what about *insert v.v. interesting person* all the time. Ruthlessly cutting off anyone who lived a life long enough to have a few decades in the 15th and a few in the 16th century helped only a little. (That’s why Jakob Fugger and Albrecht Dürer didn’t make it, though. Oh, and of course no Luther or any of the humanist who had their glory days firmly in the 16th century and in my mind are Renaissance, not medieval people anyway.) Here’s one remaining selection:
Hildegard von Bingen(1098 - 1179): most famous German mystic of medieval times, of either gender, preacher, abbess, visionary and polymath. As of 2012, she’s also officially a Doctor of the Church. She wrote what is the earliest surviving morality play, composed songs, and was the Nun You Do Not Want To Cross, Ever. At first, she was part of a community of nuns attached a male monastery and after the death of her mentor Jutta was elected successor by her fellow sisters. Hildegard, however, had no intention of serving as prioress with Abbot Kuno, the leader of the monastery, as boss. She asked for permission for her and the sisters to leave and found their own cloister. Kuno refused. (The monastery would have lost all the dowries from the nuns.) Hildegard got the approval of the nearest archbishop (of Mainz), Kuno refused to listen, Hildegard enlisted the Almighty himself, who temporarily paralyzed her, she told Kuno, due to being unhappy Kuno was stopping her from following God’s command. When Kuno himself couldn’t move Hildegard (physically), he finally caved and allowed Hildegard and her nuns to leave. Hildegard founded her monastery (and dictated what future visions told her to scribes), preached sermons (usually something only the male clergy did), and corresponded not only with fellow abbesses and abbots but with princes and Popes. (She may or may not have acted as counselor of Emperor Frederick I., aka Barbarossa. The evidence is debated. I say yes.) A visionary with a ruthless practicality, Hildegard’s collection of medical writings ensured she’d become a New Age heroine in the 20th century. But don’t enlist her for social justice yet: even in her own time, she was criticized for accepting only noblewomen in her monastery. Her argument for this was that she didn’t want status divisions among her sisters; her critics pointed out the dowry issue. Hildegard eventually founded another nunnery (in Eibingen) where nuns from all backgrounds could join, but kept the noblewomen only clause for her original one (in Rupertsberg). If you want to know more about Hildegard, you could do worse than watch Margarethe von Trotta’s movie Vision, starring Barbara Sukowa, reviewed here; Margarethe von Trotta is probably our most famous feminist director, and excels at complex relationships between women, which this movie is an example of.
Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122 (debated) - 1204): I don’t have to explain this one, do I? Duchess of Aquitaine, Queen of France, Queen of England, rule breaker and power player extraordinaire. Was still able to cross the Pyrenees on a political mission at age 70, in medieval travel conditions. Is forever looking like Katherine Hepburn in my mind. Oh, just read the fiction.
Moshe Ben Maimon, aka Moses Maimonides, aka Musa bin Maimun (1135 - 1204): one of the most important scholars of the middle ages, and arguably the most famous Jewish one. (Actually, there’s a Jiddish medieval saying about him that goes “From Moshe to Moshe, there was no one like Moshe” which makes an even bigger claim.) As a philosopher and as a doctor, he influenced pretty much every one else (meaning Christians and Muslims as well) in his time and afterwards, Maimonides was born in Cordoba at the eve of the golden age. When the invading Almohads, who represented a more intolerant Islam, put an end to that and put the Jewish population of Cordoba to a “convert or leave” choice, Maimonides’ family left, and ended up on Marocco (in Fes, to be precise). After some years and an interlude in Jerusalem, they went to Egypt, first to Alexandria and then to Cairo, where Moses Maimonides made his name and remained for the rest of his life. Since writing philosophical tracts didn’t pay a living then any more than they do know, he was also a practicing physician, and there’s a famous letter in which he describes his exhausting daily routine to his Procencal translator Schmuel ibn Tibbon. (His patients included Saladin himself.) Maimonides’ most famous philosophical work is the “Guide to the Perplexed”, in which he tries to reconcile Jewish Faith with Aristotelian logic and Neo Platonian philosophy. (A lot of Thomas Aquinas’ work is written in response to this.) His medical work, which is written in Arabic, made him the go-to authority of the day for a lot of Muslim medical scholars. In an age of religious warfare, Maimonides makes for a singularly attractive figure.
Frederick II (1194 - 1250) of Hohenstaufen: stupor mundi, as his contemporaries called him, the amazement of the world (both in the good and bad sense), when they didn’t call him antichrist (he was excommunicated four times). Nietzsche called him “the first European”, not just due to his multinational origin (son of the German Emperor Henry VI and the Norman Constance d’Hauteville, raised in Sicily and absorbing its Sicilian-Norman-Saracen culture). You can also call him a Renaissance personality in medieval times, both in the good and the bad sense of the term. Frederick had a keen scientific mind; his book about falconry is also an empirical study of birds in general, and he did what practically no one else would have dared to, go against Aristotle (THE authority for scholars) based on his own observations. (Correctly, too, as we know today.) He was the first ruler to outlaw trials by combat because of their irrationality. His laws, the Constitutions of Melfi, were the most modern laws of the world back then (and remained so for a few centuries more); they included, btw, protection for prostitutes (they specifically said that raping a prostitute was as much a crime as raping wives and maidens was). When, during his second time in the German territories (he was only there twice, spending most of his life in Italy where he was born), a typical medieval display of Antijudaism happened and Jews were accused of having murdered a Christian child, Frederick when the whole affair was brought before him stunned his Christian subjects by not just demanding evidence and deciding in favour of the Jews but also taking the opportunity to call for an assembly of scholars (Christian and Jewish alike) in Jewish law who were to investigate whether Jewish law even allowed for any human sacrifices. When, unsurprisingly, this ended in the conclusion that it did not, Frederick made it illegal to use this accusation against Jews in his realms. (Sadly, this ruling did not survive him for long.) He also was the only crusader who didn’t fight a single battle but concluded his Crusade successfully based on negotiations alone. (It helped he was fluent in Arabic, which came with the Sicilian childhood.) (The only ones trying to kill him during his time in Palestine were some Templars, which the Sultan Malik al Kamil warned him about in time.)
So much for the bright side. But don’t enlist Frederick for social justice, either. He was absolutely ruthless. Those Constitutions of Melfi were modern for their time also because they were laws for an absolute monarchy, and if you went up against him as a ruler, there was no mercy. (He also seems to have inherited a bit of the infamous Hohenstaufen temper; on one notorious occasion, he literally kicked a surrendering opponent when the guy was down.) The fact he was constantly accused of heresy and atheism by the popes he clashed with doesn’t mean he wasn’t using the heresy charge as a convenient tool against unruly subjects in the German territories himself. And sure, he was a pioneer in writing love poetry in the Volgare, i.e. the Sicilian version of Italian, as opposed to Latin. But if you had the bad luck of being married to him and weren’t his first wife (whom he married when he was 14 and she was 25, the only one who was crowned alongside him, and whom he later buried in an oddly touching gesture wearing not the crown of Sicilian queens, but that of Sicilian kings, i.e. his own), you lived in a harem (literally, he had one, Muslim style) and weren’t even allowed to see your visiting brother, as wife No.3, Isabella of England, found out when her brother Richard of Cornwall visited. And we’ll never know whether or not the papal party’s accusation that he did the language deprivation experiment on infants (i.e. raising them with the nurses forbidden to talk to them in order to find out humanity’s original language) was true. All of which means that modern historians are as much appalled by Frederick as they’re drawn to him. (In short, much like his contemporaries.) But they are most definitely fascinated. So am I. Let me leave you with my favourite Frederick anecdote: when the Great Khan Batu sent messages demanding European rulers to surrender to him or die, and promising that if they did surrender he’d find offices at court for them (this was during the biggest expansion of a the Mongol Empire, when they had already reached the Danube, so no, he wasn’t kidding), Frederick quipped back that if needs must he did have some skills as a falconer.
(Yet more people from the 12th and 13th century considered and dropped for lack of space: Abelard and Heloise, Walther von der Vogelweide. But I used a quote of his for the cut.)
John of Gaunt (1340 - 1399): I freely admit one reason why I find the man fascinating is that I encountered him first in 20th century avatar fictionalized form, i.e. in Susan Howatch’s novel Wheel of Fortune, see here. But the interest didn’t lessen when I looked up the original John, not least because either way, his life was so counter established narrative patterns. With an older brother whose military success was seen as dazzling (in the day) and compared to whom his own efforts were found wanting (to the extent that he was one of the first political figures in England to conclude the 100 years war wasn’t winnable and maybe peace negotiations were the way to go), and then with a child nephew as King, he ought to have been the typical usurping uncle. He certainly had the manpower and the money, having made two rich marriages in succession and being the most powerful and wealthiest noble in England. And certainly a sizable part of his contemporaries believed he would do it. (For that matter, young Richard probably thought he’d do it at some point.) And he certainly wasn’t just naturally modest (the display of his wealth in his London residence, the Savoy Palace at the Strand, was so ostentatious that it became a natural target during the Peasant Revolt later) or without ambition. (See also: rich marriages. The second one was to Blanche of Castile, and he certainly wanted that crown. And didn’t get it.) But he didn’t try to take the crown from his nephew. Why did he resist temptation? Similarly: the relationship with Katherine Swynford, his mistress of 30 years whom he eventually married. He was hardly unusual in having a mistress at all (not in his family and not in his era), but having one only and having a second family with her, then ending the relationship for politics, then starting it again and finally marrying her, all this is an odd mixture of romance and realism, with romance winning out. Incidentally, since that third marriage made him Geoffrey Chaucer’s brother-in-law, and given John of Gaunt was Chaucer’s patron before, I wish Chaucer would have left us an inside record of an awkward dysfunctional Plantagenet family meeting. But Chaucer was probably too discreet (and interested in survival).
Manduhai Khatun (aka Manduhai the Wise) (1449 - ca. 1510 (we don’t know for sure)): at the time of her birth, there wasn’t much left of the Mongol Empire (the Mongols had been driven out of China generations earlier), and there was so much infighting between tribes and clans that it amounted to a state of constant anarchy and civil war, despite a nominal rulership by a Great Khan. The warlords were actually in charge. Manduhai managed to unite the Mongols once more and strengthen them to the point that the Chinese built the Great Wall in its present form out of worry. She did this not despite, but because of being a woman. At age 16 or thereabouts, she was married to Manduul Khan (one of the de facto powerless Great Khans) as his second wife. By the time he died, she was 23, and since there was no son to succeed Manduul Khan, Manduhai was expected to do the usual thing of marrying one of the most powerful warlords, thereby legitimizing his claim. There was certainly no lack of competitors, most prominently the general Unebolod. What Manduhai did instead was unprecedented (though possibly inspired by the way another woman had risen to power in China just a few years earlier). She took the five years old boy who was the last living direct descendant of Genghis Khan, Batu Möngke, renamed him Dayan Khan (Khan of the whole, of everyone) and married him instead. Then she went about uniting the Mongols and ruling them in his name. Amazingly, Unebolod, instead of reacting badly as a man scorned, supported her in this. Also amazingly: by the time Batu Möngke had grown up, he didn’t try to get rid of Manduhai, or she of him. (There had been female regents before, for sons, but it usually ended badly for them at that point.) They became an actual couple as well as co-rulers, went on to have eight children together (this did not stop Manduhai from governing; she even rode into battle pregnant, if necessary), and until 1913, every Khan of the Mongols was descended from them. Manduhai died peacefully and of natural causes, a rarity among Mongol rulers of either gender. All hail the Queen!
(Left out despite the fact their biographical data would (mostly) fit the criteria, and they’re definitely fascinating: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Rodrigo Borgia. Why? Because it weren’t the middle ages in Italy anymore. These two were Renaissance people.)
The other days
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1135917.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Hildegard von Bingen(1098 - 1179): most famous German mystic of medieval times, of either gender, preacher, abbess, visionary and polymath. As of 2012, she’s also officially a Doctor of the Church. She wrote what is the earliest surviving morality play, composed songs, and was the Nun You Do Not Want To Cross, Ever. At first, she was part of a community of nuns attached a male monastery and after the death of her mentor Jutta was elected successor by her fellow sisters. Hildegard, however, had no intention of serving as prioress with Abbot Kuno, the leader of the monastery, as boss. She asked for permission for her and the sisters to leave and found their own cloister. Kuno refused. (The monastery would have lost all the dowries from the nuns.) Hildegard got the approval of the nearest archbishop (of Mainz), Kuno refused to listen, Hildegard enlisted the Almighty himself, who temporarily paralyzed her, she told Kuno, due to being unhappy Kuno was stopping her from following God’s command. When Kuno himself couldn’t move Hildegard (physically), he finally caved and allowed Hildegard and her nuns to leave. Hildegard founded her monastery (and dictated what future visions told her to scribes), preached sermons (usually something only the male clergy did), and corresponded not only with fellow abbesses and abbots but with princes and Popes. (She may or may not have acted as counselor of Emperor Frederick I., aka Barbarossa. The evidence is debated. I say yes.) A visionary with a ruthless practicality, Hildegard’s collection of medical writings ensured she’d become a New Age heroine in the 20th century. But don’t enlist her for social justice yet: even in her own time, she was criticized for accepting only noblewomen in her monastery. Her argument for this was that she didn’t want status divisions among her sisters; her critics pointed out the dowry issue. Hildegard eventually founded another nunnery (in Eibingen) where nuns from all backgrounds could join, but kept the noblewomen only clause for her original one (in Rupertsberg). If you want to know more about Hildegard, you could do worse than watch Margarethe von Trotta’s movie Vision, starring Barbara Sukowa, reviewed here; Margarethe von Trotta is probably our most famous feminist director, and excels at complex relationships between women, which this movie is an example of.
Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122 (debated) - 1204): I don’t have to explain this one, do I? Duchess of Aquitaine, Queen of France, Queen of England, rule breaker and power player extraordinaire. Was still able to cross the Pyrenees on a political mission at age 70, in medieval travel conditions. Is forever looking like Katherine Hepburn in my mind. Oh, just read the fiction.
Moshe Ben Maimon, aka Moses Maimonides, aka Musa bin Maimun (1135 - 1204): one of the most important scholars of the middle ages, and arguably the most famous Jewish one. (Actually, there’s a Jiddish medieval saying about him that goes “From Moshe to Moshe, there was no one like Moshe” which makes an even bigger claim.) As a philosopher and as a doctor, he influenced pretty much every one else (meaning Christians and Muslims as well) in his time and afterwards, Maimonides was born in Cordoba at the eve of the golden age. When the invading Almohads, who represented a more intolerant Islam, put an end to that and put the Jewish population of Cordoba to a “convert or leave” choice, Maimonides’ family left, and ended up on Marocco (in Fes, to be precise). After some years and an interlude in Jerusalem, they went to Egypt, first to Alexandria and then to Cairo, where Moses Maimonides made his name and remained for the rest of his life. Since writing philosophical tracts didn’t pay a living then any more than they do know, he was also a practicing physician, and there’s a famous letter in which he describes his exhausting daily routine to his Procencal translator Schmuel ibn Tibbon. (His patients included Saladin himself.) Maimonides’ most famous philosophical work is the “Guide to the Perplexed”, in which he tries to reconcile Jewish Faith with Aristotelian logic and Neo Platonian philosophy. (A lot of Thomas Aquinas’ work is written in response to this.) His medical work, which is written in Arabic, made him the go-to authority of the day for a lot of Muslim medical scholars. In an age of religious warfare, Maimonides makes for a singularly attractive figure.
Frederick II (1194 - 1250) of Hohenstaufen: stupor mundi, as his contemporaries called him, the amazement of the world (both in the good and bad sense), when they didn’t call him antichrist (he was excommunicated four times). Nietzsche called him “the first European”, not just due to his multinational origin (son of the German Emperor Henry VI and the Norman Constance d’Hauteville, raised in Sicily and absorbing its Sicilian-Norman-Saracen culture). You can also call him a Renaissance personality in medieval times, both in the good and the bad sense of the term. Frederick had a keen scientific mind; his book about falconry is also an empirical study of birds in general, and he did what practically no one else would have dared to, go against Aristotle (THE authority for scholars) based on his own observations. (Correctly, too, as we know today.) He was the first ruler to outlaw trials by combat because of their irrationality. His laws, the Constitutions of Melfi, were the most modern laws of the world back then (and remained so for a few centuries more); they included, btw, protection for prostitutes (they specifically said that raping a prostitute was as much a crime as raping wives and maidens was). When, during his second time in the German territories (he was only there twice, spending most of his life in Italy where he was born), a typical medieval display of Antijudaism happened and Jews were accused of having murdered a Christian child, Frederick when the whole affair was brought before him stunned his Christian subjects by not just demanding evidence and deciding in favour of the Jews but also taking the opportunity to call for an assembly of scholars (Christian and Jewish alike) in Jewish law who were to investigate whether Jewish law even allowed for any human sacrifices. When, unsurprisingly, this ended in the conclusion that it did not, Frederick made it illegal to use this accusation against Jews in his realms. (Sadly, this ruling did not survive him for long.) He also was the only crusader who didn’t fight a single battle but concluded his Crusade successfully based on negotiations alone. (It helped he was fluent in Arabic, which came with the Sicilian childhood.) (The only ones trying to kill him during his time in Palestine were some Templars, which the Sultan Malik al Kamil warned him about in time.)
So much for the bright side. But don’t enlist Frederick for social justice, either. He was absolutely ruthless. Those Constitutions of Melfi were modern for their time also because they were laws for an absolute monarchy, and if you went up against him as a ruler, there was no mercy. (He also seems to have inherited a bit of the infamous Hohenstaufen temper; on one notorious occasion, he literally kicked a surrendering opponent when the guy was down.) The fact he was constantly accused of heresy and atheism by the popes he clashed with doesn’t mean he wasn’t using the heresy charge as a convenient tool against unruly subjects in the German territories himself. And sure, he was a pioneer in writing love poetry in the Volgare, i.e. the Sicilian version of Italian, as opposed to Latin. But if you had the bad luck of being married to him and weren’t his first wife (whom he married when he was 14 and she was 25, the only one who was crowned alongside him, and whom he later buried in an oddly touching gesture wearing not the crown of Sicilian queens, but that of Sicilian kings, i.e. his own), you lived in a harem (literally, he had one, Muslim style) and weren’t even allowed to see your visiting brother, as wife No.3, Isabella of England, found out when her brother Richard of Cornwall visited. And we’ll never know whether or not the papal party’s accusation that he did the language deprivation experiment on infants (i.e. raising them with the nurses forbidden to talk to them in order to find out humanity’s original language) was true. All of which means that modern historians are as much appalled by Frederick as they’re drawn to him. (In short, much like his contemporaries.) But they are most definitely fascinated. So am I. Let me leave you with my favourite Frederick anecdote: when the Great Khan Batu sent messages demanding European rulers to surrender to him or die, and promising that if they did surrender he’d find offices at court for them (this was during the biggest expansion of a the Mongol Empire, when they had already reached the Danube, so no, he wasn’t kidding), Frederick quipped back that if needs must he did have some skills as a falconer.
(Yet more people from the 12th and 13th century considered and dropped for lack of space: Abelard and Heloise, Walther von der Vogelweide. But I used a quote of his for the cut.)
John of Gaunt (1340 - 1399): I freely admit one reason why I find the man fascinating is that I encountered him first in 20th century avatar fictionalized form, i.e. in Susan Howatch’s novel Wheel of Fortune, see here. But the interest didn’t lessen when I looked up the original John, not least because either way, his life was so counter established narrative patterns. With an older brother whose military success was seen as dazzling (in the day) and compared to whom his own efforts were found wanting (to the extent that he was one of the first political figures in England to conclude the 100 years war wasn’t winnable and maybe peace negotiations were the way to go), and then with a child nephew as King, he ought to have been the typical usurping uncle. He certainly had the manpower and the money, having made two rich marriages in succession and being the most powerful and wealthiest noble in England. And certainly a sizable part of his contemporaries believed he would do it. (For that matter, young Richard probably thought he’d do it at some point.) And he certainly wasn’t just naturally modest (the display of his wealth in his London residence, the Savoy Palace at the Strand, was so ostentatious that it became a natural target during the Peasant Revolt later) or without ambition. (See also: rich marriages. The second one was to Blanche of Castile, and he certainly wanted that crown. And didn’t get it.) But he didn’t try to take the crown from his nephew. Why did he resist temptation? Similarly: the relationship with Katherine Swynford, his mistress of 30 years whom he eventually married. He was hardly unusual in having a mistress at all (not in his family and not in his era), but having one only and having a second family with her, then ending the relationship for politics, then starting it again and finally marrying her, all this is an odd mixture of romance and realism, with romance winning out. Incidentally, since that third marriage made him Geoffrey Chaucer’s brother-in-law, and given John of Gaunt was Chaucer’s patron before, I wish Chaucer would have left us an inside record of an awkward dysfunctional Plantagenet family meeting. But Chaucer was probably too discreet (and interested in survival).
Manduhai Khatun (aka Manduhai the Wise) (1449 - ca. 1510 (we don’t know for sure)): at the time of her birth, there wasn’t much left of the Mongol Empire (the Mongols had been driven out of China generations earlier), and there was so much infighting between tribes and clans that it amounted to a state of constant anarchy and civil war, despite a nominal rulership by a Great Khan. The warlords were actually in charge. Manduhai managed to unite the Mongols once more and strengthen them to the point that the Chinese built the Great Wall in its present form out of worry. She did this not despite, but because of being a woman. At age 16 or thereabouts, she was married to Manduul Khan (one of the de facto powerless Great Khans) as his second wife. By the time he died, she was 23, and since there was no son to succeed Manduul Khan, Manduhai was expected to do the usual thing of marrying one of the most powerful warlords, thereby legitimizing his claim. There was certainly no lack of competitors, most prominently the general Unebolod. What Manduhai did instead was unprecedented (though possibly inspired by the way another woman had risen to power in China just a few years earlier). She took the five years old boy who was the last living direct descendant of Genghis Khan, Batu Möngke, renamed him Dayan Khan (Khan of the whole, of everyone) and married him instead. Then she went about uniting the Mongols and ruling them in his name. Amazingly, Unebolod, instead of reacting badly as a man scorned, supported her in this. Also amazingly: by the time Batu Möngke had grown up, he didn’t try to get rid of Manduhai, or she of him. (There had been female regents before, for sons, but it usually ended badly for them at that point.) They became an actual couple as well as co-rulers, went on to have eight children together (this did not stop Manduhai from governing; she even rode into battle pregnant, if necessary), and until 1913, every Khan of the Mongols was descended from them. Manduhai died peacefully and of natural causes, a rarity among Mongol rulers of either gender. All hail the Queen!
(Left out despite the fact their biographical data would (mostly) fit the criteria, and they’re definitely fascinating: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Rodrigo Borgia. Why? Because it weren’t the middle ages in Italy anymore. These two were Renaissance people.)
The other days
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1135917.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.