Europe: A History (58 page)
The Export of Christianity, 395–785
From the day that Christ said ‘Follow me’, Christianity has been an evangelical religion. And from St Paul’s confirmation that it was open to all comers, there were no limits to its potential constituency. But once the Empire had adopted Christianity as the state religion, religious conversion became a matter of imperial policy. For Christian rulers, the export of the faith was directed not just at individual souls but at whole nations: it was a question of strategic ideology. For the would-be converts, too, the acceptance of Christianity involved political considerations. There was much to be gained in terms of literacy and trade. But the decision to import Christianity from Rome, or from Constantinople, or from neither, involved a crucial political choice.
Ireland came to notice at an early date owing to the apparent spread there of Pelagianism. As a result, Germanus of Auxerre, a Gallo-Roman bishop, took a close interest both in the British Isles and in Brittany. One mission headed by Palladius, the ‘first Bishop of the believing Irish’, who landed at Wicklow in 432, was fruitless; but a second mission by St Patrick (c.385–461), a British disciple of St Germanus, had lasting results. At Tara in Meath he confronted the High King, Laoghaire, kindled the paschal fire on the hill of Slane, and silenced the Druids. The first episcopal see was established at Armagh in 444.
The Frankish conquest of Gaul was closely bound up with the religious
divisions of the province. By the fifth century the Gallo-Roman population had been fully converted to Roman Christianity long since. But the Visigoths, Burgundians, and Alamans who first overran them were Arians, whilst the Franks in the north had remained heathen. Clovis did not accept baptism from the hands of St Remi, Bishop of Rheims, until some point between 496 and 506. But by doing so from one of the Roman bishops, he allied his Merovingian dynasty with the Gallo-Roman populace against their initial barbarian rulers. He is said to have used the Catholic bishops of Aquitaine as a ‘fifth column’. The ‘Catholic connection’ of the Franks, therefore, undoubtedly facilitated the consolidation of their power, and laid the foundation for their special relationship with Rome. Much of our knowledge about early Frankish Christianity derives from the
Historia Francorum
of Gregory of Tours (540–94). Yet Gregory’s eulogy of the Merovingians cannot hide the fact that Clovis, his ‘New Constantine’, was something of a savage. Gregory tells the story of the looted vase of Soissons, which had been smashed to pieces by a Frankish warrior who refused to share the spoil. Clovis waited until the Champ de Mars, the annual parade, of the following spring, where he chided the vase-breaker over the state of his equipment. As the warrior bent down to reach for a weapon, Clovis smashed his skull with a battle-axe, saying,
‘Thus didst thou to the vase of Soissons’
.
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In the sixth century the Christian world was still reeling from the inroads of the barbarians. One series of counter-measures was undertaken by Irish missionaries. Another was launched by the Emperor Justinian, whose reconquests of Africa, Italy, and Spain were motivated in part by the desire to root out Arianism. A third was the work of Gregory I. The Irish missions, which began in 563 with the arrival of St Columba (c.521–97) on lona, were directed first at northern Britain and then at the Frankish dominions. Twenty years later St Columbanus (c.540–615) set out with a band of companions from the great monastery at Bangor, bound for Burgundy. He founded several monasteries, including Luxeuil; sojourned at Bregenz on Lake Constance; offended the Merovingian kings by excoriating their loose living; and died at Bobbio, near Genoa. St Gall (d. 640) missionized what is now Switzerland, giving his name to the great religious centre of St Gallen. St Aidan (d. 651) moved from lona to Holy Island (Lindisfarne) c.635, thereby advancing the conversion of England. In all these instances the Irish monks followed practices that were out of step with Rome. Major problems were to arise in the subsequent period in reconciling the Celtic and the Latin traditions, [
IONA
]
Iberian Christianity was shaken by the imperial invasion of 554. The Arian Visigoths had lived apart from their subjects, who constantly conspired with the imperials of the south. After decades of convulsion, in which the Visigothic kingdom barely held its own against internal rebellion and external attack, Reccared (r. 586–601)—son of an Arian father and a Roman mother—peacefully accepted Catholicism as an act of policy. The decision was confirmed by the second Council of Toledo (589). [
COMPOSTELA
]
In Italy, at almost the same moment, the Arian Lombards accepted Catholicism on the occasion of the marriage of their King Agilulf with the Catholic Frank,
Theodelinda. At the basilica of Monza, near Milan, which they founded, the iron crown of Lombardy can still be seen with its inscription:
AGILULF GRATIA DEI VIR GLORIOSUS REX TOTIUS ITALIAE OFFERT SANCTO IOHANNI BAPTISTAE IN ECCLESIA MODICAE.
Conflict between Catholics and Arians persisted until the eventual Catholic victory at Coronate in 689. [
LEPER
]
IONA
O
NE
evening in May 597, the ageing St Columba expired on the altar steps of his abbey church on the tiny, treeless Hebridean island of lona. He had been copying the Psalms, and had just transcribed the verse of Psalm 34: ‘They that seek the Lord shall want no good thing.’ A native of Donegal, he had founded many churches in Ireland, starting with Derry, before landing with twelve brothers on the
Innis Druinidh
, ‘The Isle of Druids’ in 563. The ‘Apostle of Caledonia’, who crowned the King of Dalriada in his island church, he was instrumental in the expansion of Celtic Christianity and Gaelic civilization to western Scotland. By its mission to Lindisfarne in Northumbria, his community would also launch the Christianization of northern England. He died in the same year that St Augustine of Canterbury established the Roman mission in Kent.
The fate of the Celtic Church on lona is instructive. It survived the terrible Viking raid of 806, when the abbot and 68 monks were killed. The monks of St Columba’s tradition were driven out c.1200, when Reginald, Lord of the Isles, set up a Benedictine monastery and Augustinian convent in their stead. These establishments were already dead or moribund when, in 1560, the reformed Church of Scotland abolished monasticism outright. The island itself passed into the hands of the Campbell Dukes of Argyle, who in 1899 returned it to the Church of Scotland with a view to restoration. The reconstructed cathedral was reconsecrated in 1905. The reconstituted lona community, dedicated to ecumenical work and prayer, was founded by Dr George Macleod in 1938.
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Every age has its own brand of Christianity.
England is said to have caught the attention of the Roman Patriarchs when Gregory I saw fair-headed boys for sale in the slave-market.
Non Angli, sed angelí
(not Angles, but angels), he remarked. Shortly afterwards, in 596–7, he dispatched one of his monks, St Augustine of Canterbury (d. 605) to convert the heathen English. Within a short period Ethelbert, King of Kent, was baptized, and sees were set up at Canterbury, Rochester, and London. The complex story of English Christianity forms the life-work of the ‘Venerable’ Bede (673–735), monk of Jarrow in Northumbria, whose
History of the English Church and People
is one of the monuments of the age. Bede was specially interested in the conflict between the northern and southern missions, with their rival centres at York and
Canterbury, and in their eventual reconciliation at the Synod of Whitby (664). He also records the extensive correspondence of Pope Gregory with Augustine:
Augustine’s Eighth Question. May an expectant mother be baptised? How soon after childbirth may she enter church? And how soon after birth may a child be baptised if in danger of death? How soon after childbirth may a husband have relations with his wife? And may a woman enter church at certain periods? And may she receive Communion at these times? And may a man enter church after relations with his wife before he has washed? Or receive the sacred mystery of communion? These uncouth English people require guidance on all these matters.
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COMPOSTELA
A
CCORDING
to legend, the body of St James the Apostle, together with its severed head, was brought in a stone boat from Palestine to Galicia some time in the fourth century. The mooring-post to which the boat was tied is preserved in the tiny harbour church at Padrón near Corunna. News of the event began to circulate more widely, and some two hundred years later the site of the saint’s shrine at Libredon, or Santiago, attracted a growing stream of pilgrims. In 859, an invocation to St James gave the Christians of Leon a miraculous victory over the Moors. The saint gained the epithet of
Matamoros
or ‘Moorslayer’; and Leon grew into a sovereign kingdom. From 899 a new cathedral was built over the saint’s tomb as a focus for the pilgrimage. Its emblem was the pilgrim’s scrip and the Atlantic starshell,
la compostela
.
Pilgrims’ motives were not simple. Some set out from a belief in the power of famous saints to intercede for their souls. Some set out for a cure. Many went for the joy of fellowship, for a rollicking adventure, or for baser reasons of lust, gain, or escape. Santiago was specially attractive because it lay ‘as far as one could go’, and because it was chosen by the Church as a place of formal penance.
Four long pilgrim trails led half-way across Western Europe to Santiago (see Appendix III, p. 1253). One started at the Church of St Jacques in Paris, and led south via Tours, Poitiers, Saintes, and Bordeaux. The second started at Ste Marie-Madeleine at Vézelay in Burgundy, leading south-west through Bourges and Limoges. The third started at the cathedral of Notre Dame at Le Puy-en-Velay in Auvergne. All three converged at the Pass of Roncevalles in the Pyrenees. A fourth route left St Trophime in Aries, led westwards to Toulouse, crossed the Pyrenees at the Col de Somport, and met the three other routes at Puente la Reina on the River Arga. For the last 250 miles, through the ever-wilder scenery of Asturias, Burgos, and Leon, all pilgrims walked along the same
Camino de Santiago
until they stood before the Portal de la Gloria.
At its height in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the pilgrimage to Santiago was a major transcontinental business. English and Irish pilgrims often made first for Tours, or sailed to Talmont on the Gironde. The Germans and Swiss came down the Rhone to Lyons en route for Vézelay or Le Puy. Italians sailed to Marseilles or direct to Arles. Guide books were written. Abbeys and shrines on the way, such as the Abbey of Ste Foy at Conques, grew rich from pilgrims’ donations. The refuge at Roncevalles served 30,000 meals a year. Churchyards along the road received the remains of those who could go no further.
Historians discuss the factors which made for the unity of Christendom. Santiago de Compostela was certainly one of them.
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LEPER
I
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643 King Rothar of Lombardy issued a decree: ‘If any man become a I leper… and is expelled from his city or dwelling, let him not donate his possessions to anyone. For on the very day he is expelled, he is considered dead.’
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This, in itself, is enough to dispel the myth that leprosy came to Europe with the Crusades.
The ostracism of lepers is attested throughout the Middle Ages. Byzantium, which possessed at least one lazar-house in the fifth century, shared the same attitudes. Leviticus 13 offered ample biblical support. Lepers were forced to live beyond town limits; they had to wear a long robe of distinctive colour marked by the letter L; and they had to signal their approach by bell, clapper, or horn, or by shouting, ‘Unclean, unclean!’ The sixth-century Council of Lyons formally placed them under the care of bishops. In fact, they lived from begging. In 1179 the Third Lateran Council formalized the procedures. Suspect lepers were to be examined before a priest or magistrate and, if found infected, were to be ritually separated from the community through an act of symbolic burial.
A description of this ceremony, the
separatio leprosorum
, was written down at St Algin’s in Angers. The penitent leper stood in an open grave with a black cloth over his head. The priest said: ‘Be dead to the world, be reborn in God.’ The leper said: ‘Jesus, my Redeemer… may I be reborn in Thee.’ Then the priest read the proscription:
I forbid you to enter church, monastery, fair, mill, marketplace or tavern … I forbid you ever to leave your house without your leper’s costume, or to walk barefoot… I forbid you to wash or to drink in the stream or fountain … I forbid you to live with any woman other than your own. If you meet and talk with some person on the road, I forbid you to answer before you have moved downwind … I forbid you to touch a well, or well cord, without your gloves. I forbid you ever to touch children, or to give them anything … I forbid you eating or drinking, except with lepers.
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The leper was then led in procession to the place of exile.
Some rulers sanctioned more ferocious methods. In 1318 Philip V of France charged the country’s lepers of being in league with ‘the Saracens’, and of poisoning wells. He ordered them all to be burned, together with Jews who gave them counsel and comfort.
3
In 1371, 1388, 1394,1402, and 1404 the municipality of Paris vainly called for the leprosy laws to be enforced. The ferocity of their reactions derived from the rooted belief that leprosy was a punishment for sexual depravity. The disease carried a heavy moral stigma, which caused the risk of contagion to be grossly exaggerated.
Even so, leprosy affected high and low. It struck down Baldwin IV, King of Jerusalem, and Hugh d’Orivalle, Bishop of London (d. 1085). Physicians had no clue of its bacterial cause, and few suggestions for its relief. Following Avicenna, they stressed its supposed psychological symptoms of craftiness and lust. The
leprosarium
or lazar-house was a common sight beyond city walls. In England the leper colony at Hambledown, near Canterbury, grew into a sizeable settlement. At Burton Lazar it was located near the healing waters, later used for brewing.
Medieval literature used leprosy as a sensational device. In several versions of Tristan and Isolde, the heroine is saved from burning only to be thrown to the lepers:
Do sprach der herzoge, ich wil sie
minen sichen bringen,
die suln sie alle minnen
sô stirbet sie lesterlichen.
(The Duke spoke: I will bring her to my sick ones. They will all love her, so that she will die dishonourably.)
4
By all accounts leprosy greatly declined in sixteenth-century Europe. Its place was taken by syphilis [
SYPHILUS
.
] But prejudices’did not change. In 1933 the
OED
defined it as ‘a loathsome disease’,
elephantiasis graecorum
. And in 1959 a popular American novelist could be criticized for repeating all the old degrading stereotypes.
5
Leprosy was the medieval counterpart to AIDS.
