A World Lit Only by Fire (13 page)

Pilgrims headed for over a thousand shrines whose miracles had been recognized by Rome. There was Our Lady of Chartres, Our
Lady of the Rose at Lucca, Our Guardian Lady in Genoa, and other Our Ladies at Le Puy, Auray, Grenoble, Valenciennes, Liesse,
Rocamadour, Ossier. … It went on and on. One popular destination was the tomb of Pierre de Luxembourg, a cardinal who had
died, aged eighteen, of anorexia; within fifteen months of his death 1,964 miracles were credited to the magic he had left
in his bones. Some saints were regarded as medical specialists; victims of cholera headed for a chapel of Saint Vitus, who
was believed to be particularly efficacious for that disease.

But nothing could compete with the two star attractions: scenes actually visited by the savior himself and spectacular phenomena
confirmed by the Vatican. At Santa Maria Maggiore, people were told, they could see the actual manger where Christ was born,
or, at St. John Lateran, the holy steps Jesus ascended while wearing his crown of thorns, or, at St. Peter in Montorio, the
place where Peter was martyred by Nero. Englishmen believed that the venerable abbot of St. Germer need only bless a fountain
and lo! its waters would heal the sick, restore sight to the blind, and make the dumb speak. Once, according to pilgrims,
the abbot had visited a village parched for lack of water. He led the peasants into the church, and, as they watched, smote
a stone with his staff. Behold! Water gushed forth, not only to slake thirsts but also possessing miraculous powers to cure
all pain and illness.

T
RAVEL WAS
slow, expensive, uncomfortable—and perilous. It was slowest for those who rode in coaches, faster for walkers, and fastest
for horsemen, who were few because of the need to change and stable steeds. The expenses chiefly arose from the countless
tolls, the discomfort from a score of irritants. Bridges spanning rivers were shaky (priests recommended that before crossing
them travelers commend themselves to God); other streams had to be forded; the roads were deplorable—mostly trails and muddy
ruts, impassable, except in summer, by two-wheeled carts—and nights en route had to be spent in Europe’s wretched inns.
These were unsanitary places, the beds wedged against one another, blankets crawling with roaches, rats, and fleas; whores
plied their trade and then slipped away with a man’s money, and innkeepers seized guests’ baggage on the pretext that they
had not paid.

The peril came from highwaymen, whose mythic joys and miseries were celebrated by the Parisian François Villon. In reality
there was nothing attractive about these criminals in the woods. They were pitiless thieves, kidnappers, and killers, and
they flourished because they were so seldom pursued. Between towns the traveler was on his own. Except in a few places like
Castile, where roads were patrolled by the archers of the Santa Hermandad, no policemen were stationed in the open country.
Outlaws had always lurked in the woods, but their menace had increased as their ranks were thickened by impoverished knights
returning from the illstarred crusades, demobilized veterans of various foreign campaigns, and, in England, renegades from
the recent War of the Roses. Sometimes these brigands traveled in roving gangs, waiting to ambush strangers; sometimes they
stood by the road disguised as beggars or pilgrims, knives at the ready. Even gallant seigneurs declined responsibility for
travelers passing through their lands at night, and many a less-principled sire was either a bandit himself or an accomplice
of outlaws, overlooking their outrages provided they hold important personages harmless and present him with lavish gifts
at Christmas.

Therefore honest travelers carried well-honed daggers, knowing they might have to kill and hoping they would have the stomach
for it. Wayfarers from different lands usually banded together, seeking collective security, though they often excluded Englishmen,
who in that age were distrusted, suspected of petty thefts, regarded by seamen as pirates, and notorious for the false weights
and shoddy goods of their merchants. Even Britons like Chaucer, who denounced greed, were themselves greedy. Their women were
unwelcome for another reason. They were so foul-mouthed that Joan of Arc always referred to them as “the Goddams.” And the
English of both sexes were known, even then, for their insolence. In 1500 the Venetian ambassador to London reported to his
government that his hosts were “great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think there are no other
men than themselves, and no other country but England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner they say that ‘he looks
like an Englishman,’ and that it is a great pity that he is not one.”

Doubtless the same thing could be said, mutatis mutandis, of other people, but Englishmen, aware of their reputation, always
went abroad heavily armed—unless they were rich. Surrounded by bands of knights in full armor, wealthy Europeans traveled
in painted, gilded, carved, and curtained horse-drawn coaches. They knew they were marks for thieves, and never left their
fiefs to visit cities, or attend the great August fairs, unless heavily guarded.

A Y
ORKSHIRE
gravestone bears this inscription:

Hear underneath dis laihl stean

las Robert earl of Huntingtun

neer arcir yer az hie sa geud

And pipl kauld in Robin Heud

sick utlawz as he an iz men

il england nivr si agen

Obiit 24 kal Decembris 1247

Robin Hood lived; this marker confirms it, just as the Easter tables attest to the existence of the great Arthur. But that
is
all
the tombstone does. Everything we know about that period suggests that Robin was merely another wellborn cutthroat who hid
in shrubbery by roadsides, waiting to rob helpless wayfarers. The possibility that he stole from the rich and gave to the
poor is, like the tale of that other cold-blooded rogue, Jesse James, highly unlikely. Even unlikelier is the conceit that
Robin Hood, aka Heud, was accompanied by a bedmate called Maid Marian, a giant known as Little John, and a lapsed Catholic
named Friar Tuck. Almost certainly they were creatures of an ingenious folk imagination, and their contemporary, the sheriff
of Nottingham, is probably the most libeled law enforcement officer in this millennium.

The more we study those remote centuries, the unlikelier such legends become. Later mythmakers invested the Middle Ages with
a bogus aura of romance. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is an example. He was a real man, but there was nothing enchanting about
him. Quite the opposite; he was horrible, a pyschopath and pederast who, on June 20, 1484, spirited away 130 children in the
Saxon village of Hammel and used them in unspeakable ways. Accounts of the aftermath vary. According to some, his victims
were never seen again; others told of dismembered little bodies found scattered in the forest underbrush or festooning the
branches of trees.

The most imaginative cluster of fables appeared in print the year after the Piper’s mass murders, when William Caxton published
Sir Thomas Malory’s
Le morte d’Arthur
. Later, bowdlerized versions of this great work have obscured the fact that Malory, contemplating medieval morality, seldom
wore blinders. He had no illusions about his heroine when he wrote: “There syr Launcelot toke the Fayrest Ladie by the hand,
and she was naked as a nedel.” Some of his characters may actually have existed. For over a thousand years villagers in remote
parts of Wales have called an adulteress “a regular Guinevere.” But Launcelot du Lac is entirely fictitious, and given the
colossal time sprawl of the Middle Ages, it is highly unlikely that Guinevere, if indeed she lived, even shared the same century
with Arthur.

W
E KNOW LITTLE
of the circumstances under which Magellan and his Beatriz were married in 1517, but if they were united by transcendental
love, they were an odd couple. It is true that a young archduke in Vienna’s imperial court had introduced the diamond ring
as a sign of engagement forty years earlier, but its vogue had been confined to the patriciate, and even there it had found
little favor. Typically, news of an imminent marriage spread when the pregnancy of the bride-elect began to show. If she had
been particularly user-friendly, raising genuine doubts about the child’s paternity, those who had enjoyed her favors drew
straws. “Virginity,” one historian of the period writes, “had to be protected by every device of custom, morals, law, religion,
paternal authority, pedagogy, and ‘point of honor’; yet somehow it managed to get lost.”

No one was actually scandalized; the normal, eternal reproductive instincts were merely asserting themselves. But such random
matrimony disappointed parents; a girl’s wedding was the pivotal event in her life, and its economic implications—the ceremony
was among other things a merging of belongings—concerned both families. The tradition of arranged marriages, sensibly conceived,
was obviously crumbling. Commentators of the time, believing that the old way was best, were troubled. In his
Colloquia familiaria
(
Colloquies
) Erasmus recommended that youths let fathers choose their brides and trust that love would grow as acquaintance ripened.
Even Rabelais agreed in
Le cinquiesme et dernier livre
. Couples who kicked over the traces were reproached in
The Schole-master
by Roger Ascham, tutor to England’s royal family. Ascham bitterly regretted that “our time is so far gone from the old discipline
and obedience as now not only young gentlemen but even very young girls dare … marry themselves in spite of father, mother,
God, good order, and all.” At the University of Wittenberg, Martin Luther, dismayed that the son of a faculty colleague had
plighted his troth without consulting his father—and that a young judge had found the vow legal—thought the reputation
of the institution was being tarnished. He wrote: “Many parents have ordered their sons home … saying that we hang wives around
their necks. … The next Sunday I preached a strong sermon, telling men to follow the common road and manner which had been
since the beginning of the world … namely, that parents should give their children to each other with prudence and good will,
without their own preliminary arrangement.”

Females could marry—legally, with or without parental consent—when they reached their twelfth birthday. The age for males
was fourteen. Even before she had reached her teens, a girl knew that unless she married before she was twenty-one, society
would consider her useless, fit only for the nunnery, or, in England, the spinning wheel (a “spinster”). Hence the yearning
of female adolescents for the altar. Getting pregnant was one way to reach it. On Sundays, under watchful parental eyes, girls
would dress modestly and be demure in church, but on weekdays they opened their blouses, hiked their skirts, and romped through
the fields in pursuit of phalli.

Another five centuries would pass before young women would be so open in their pursuit of sex. In Wittenberg Luther complained
that “the race of girls is getting bold, and run after the fellows into their rooms and chambers and wherever they can and
offer them their free love.” Later he fumed that young women had become “immodest, shameless. … The young people of today
are utterly dissolute and disorderly. … The women and girls of Wittenberg have begun to go bare before and behind, and there
is no one to punish or correct them.” If the lover of a soon-to-be unwed mother decided he was not ready for marriage, her
cause was not necessarily lost; often an attractive girl with a fatherless child and a long record of indiscretions could
find a respectable peasant willing to take her to the altar.