Happy New Year! Its now 2023 and we're back for the next half of the early middle ages in ten objects. When we left off we had reached the eighth century and were in Indonesia. Let's see where our journey will take us next.
Object number six: the hunting knife of Charlemagne, made in Anglo-Saxon England or Scandinavia, 750 - 800 AD (Aachen Cathedral Treasury, Germany, visited 13 May 2022)
Moving away from Indonesia to the other end of the Eurasian supercontinent, to the area I actually have expertise in, lets look an object from the same century. This is the so-called "hunting knife of Charlemagne." We don't actually know if it belonged to Charlemagne, since its existence is not documented, but we do know that the knife is at least contemporary to him and somehow found its way to Aachen. Its got a simple horn handle with a silver hilt. But where the craftsmanship that produced it really comes into its own is with the blade. It is made from steel that has been pattern-welded. Pattern-welding is a metallurgical technique that the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic peoples living around the North Sea had mastered by the early seventh century - quite a lot of the weapons found in the Sutton Hoo hoard were made using this technique.Pattern-welding involved the use of steel (an iron alloy typically containing 0.2 - 1% carbon) and another iron alloy (typically phosphoric iron). The bars of the two alloys then got hammered together, twisted and welded into the body of the artefact. After this, the artefact would be grinded and polished on a whetstone (there was a thriving trade in these in the eighth century) and the metal would be etched with acid, revealing the decorative patterns - typically they would appear rope-like. Stuff like this really brings home the basic truth that people in the "Dark Ages" weren't stupid.
So how did the knife get to Charlemagne? Well, it could have been purchased through trade or given as a diplomatic gift. What has become abundantly clear, ever since the publication of Richard Hodges' seminal work "Dark Age Economics" (1982), is that from the seventh century onwards there was a thriving North Sea trading zone that linked up the emerging Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in lowland Britain with northern Francia, Frisia, Denmark, Norway and southern Sweden. Anglo-Saxon ports like Hamwic (Southampton) in Wessex, Lundenwic (London) which came under Mercian control by the 730s, Gipeswic (Ipswich) in East Anglia and Eoforwic (York) in Northumbria traded with Continental trading towns or emporia like Quentovic in Francia, Dorestad in Frisia, Ribe in Denmark, Kaupang in Norway and Birka in Sweden. There were also diplomatic ties between Anglo-Saxon and Continental rulers. Indeed, in 796, Charlemagne had sent a letter to King Offa of Mercia. The Mercians had by this point conquered Kent and Sussex, while the kings of Wessex and East Anglia recognised Mercian overlordship, making Offa the most powerful ruler in Britain and a near neighbour to Charlemagne's Empire separated only by the English Channel. Before the letter was sent, a diplomatic incident had occurred in which Mercian merchants were barred from all the ports in Charlemagne's Empire because Offa had refused Charlemagne's offer of a marriage alliance in which one of his daughters would marry into the Mercian royal family. The letter was sent to remedy the situation and itself discusses the following:
- Mercian pilgrims coming into Frankish ports, presumably on their way to Rome, are to be granted complete free movement.
- Mercian merchants have to pay tolls on their goods when they arrive in Frankish ports, but will also enjoy full legal protection on Frankish soil and can have any business disputes with the locals resolved in the Frankish courts.
- On behalf of the late Pope Hadrian I, all the Mercian bishops will receive gifts of ecclesiastical vestments, and Charlemagne himself presents Offa with a gift of a ceremonial belt, two silk cloaks and an Avar sword (the Frankish conquest of the Avar Khaganate was taking place at exactly this time).
While the letter of 796 doesn't provide us with an answer as to how the knife got from Anglo-Saxon England to Francia and into Charlemagne's possession. But it does provide us with the necessary context and some possibilities as to how it might have - it could have been acquired through trade, or it could have been given as a diplomatic gift by Offa or another Anglo-Saxon ruler to Charlemagne. Like with a lot of other objects from this period, we simply can't know anything conclusive about its provenance or early history unless it found its way into the documentary sources. And a lot of the objects mentioned in the documentary sources sadly no longer survive - like the Avar sword Charlemagne gave to Offa.
Charlemagne would have undoubtedly been pleased to receive the knife. One of the things we can most clearly establish about Charlemagne's personality is that he enjoyed hunting. Einhard, his friend and biographer, of course talks quite a bit about Charlemagne's love of hunting. Notker the Stammerer, writing three generations after Einhard, tells a number of anecdotes about Charlemagne's love of hunting, including one about how he shamed his courtiers for dressing in fancy silks and satins on a hunting trip while he himself dressed in simple wool and sheepskin. At the same time, hunting was a sensible thing for any early medieval king to do. It provided fresh game for dinner. It gave opportunities to display masculine strength and courage such as when taking down a wild boar. It also allowed the king to bond with his aristocrats over a shared experience (much like a corporate teambuilding event in today's world) whilst at the same time reinforcing rank and precedence. The hunt was a formal and ritualised affair (much like foxhunting still is in the UK today), and as Notker's anecdote suggests things like dress (or indeed weaponry) could be very important in showing social distinctions. Charlemagne's decision to reside permanently at his new palace at Aachen from the mid-790s may well have been influenced by his love of hunting - it was very close to the forests of the Ardennes, teaming with wild beasts of all kinds. Though it probably also had something to do with his love of swimming (the thermal springs there had been used for bathing since at least Roman times), and the fact that it was located in the original powerbase of the Carolingian family (roughly where France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Germany intersect with each other).
Yet it is worth noting that the sheath, which is made of leather, gold, precious stones and glass, was actually made later, sometime in the eleventh century. This shows that the knife had a history of use after Charlemagne's death in 814. And with any historical artefact, you have to ask the question: how and why does it survive to us today?
The answer to this comes with later politics. In the year 1000, the nineteen-year-old Emperor Otto III opened up Charlemagne's tomb in Aachen and found that the Carolingian monarch's body had not decayed and was in perfect condition - commonly identified as a sign of holiness and potential sainthood since at least the sixth century. Otto III trimmed Charlemagne's nails and replaced his nose with a gold one, but may have fiddled around with the emperor's tomb in other ways. Why Otto III did this has created much debate and controversy among historians, as has just about everything else he did during his remarkably short life (he died before his twenty-second birthday). He's quite possibly the most controversial ruler in medieval German history, and there's some stiff competition there. For this particular incident, its a question of whether Otto was planning to make a case for Charlemagne's sainthood as part of his political programme, or whether this was just an episode of teenaged silliness. We don't really know either way, because Otto did not last very long after that. But more than a century and a half down the line, another German emperor actually did do what Otto might have been planning.
On 29th December 1165, Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa held a magnificent ceremony at Aachen, and Charlemagne was officially declared (canonised) as a saint. That this was done to make a very explicit political point, there's no reasonable doubt. You see, Frederick I Barbarossa had refused to support Rolando of Siena in the papal election of 1159, because he was anti-imperial. Indeed, as papal legate in 1157, Rolando had suggested to Barbarossa that the Empire was nothing but a fief of the papacy, and that the emperor therefore owed homage to the pope as his feudal lord, and for that was nearly run-through with a sword by Otto von Wittelsbach, Barbarossa's right-hand man, narrowly saved by the emperor's timely intervention. Frederick Barbarossa thus backed his own candidate, Cardinal Octavian, known for his pro-German and imperial sympathies, and thus in 1159 two popes (Alexander III and Victor IV) were elected, who then promptly excommunicated each other. The Empire thus entered a state of cold war with the papacy, and when Victor IV (Cardinal Octavian) died in 1164, Barbarossa proceeded to elect another pope of his own - Paschal III. Barbarossa thus desperately needed to show that the authority of the German emperors came directly from God, not from being crowned by the popes. Already in 1158, his chief propagandist, Rainald Von Dassel, archbishop of Cologne, had claimed that the emperors ruled in direct succession from Augustus Caesar. Before then the Romans had enjoyed a special place in God's plan for humanity since the foundation of the city of Rome itself by Romulus. The Empire, the imperial office and its sacred authority were thus older than Christianity itself. But Barbarossa needed more than that. He needed to show that Charlemagne, the first emperor to be crowned by the pope, didn't actually need the pope to make him holy and give him sacred authority. And what better way to do that than make Charlemagne a saint!
Now every saint needs their relics. So Frederick Barbarossa and his advisers got them together. Like with a lot of saints' relics, many of the ones they chose were completely fake - the so-called "hunting horn of Charlemagne" was actually made in tenth century Egypt and so it couldn't possibly have ever been in Charlemagne's possession. But the hunting knife of Charlemagne was indeed from his lifetime, and so far as we can tell today it did actually belong to him. Still, many people at the time remained totally unconvinced. And in 1177, Frederick Barbarossa gave up with his struggle against Pope Alexander III and came to terms with him at the Peace of Venice. Two years later, at the Third Lateran Council, Pope Alexander III declared Charlemagne's sainthood invalid, along with all other decisions made by Barbarossa's anti-popes Victor IV and Paschal III. Alexander's successor, Innocent III (r.1198 - 1216), softened his position somewhat and allowed Charlemagne to be a figure of purely local veneration in Aachen and four other German towns.
The ultimate failure of the German emperors to canonise Charlemagne is a huge contrast to what happened elsewhere. Other European monarchies were much more successful in getting a royal saint and thus proving that their authority was sacred. Norway acquired its royal saint, Olaf Haraldsson (r.1015 - 1028), within a generation of its conversion to Christianity when Bishop Grimketel of Nidaros canonised the recently deceased king as a saint. Though this was of course before the papal revolution, the papacy did not retrospectively quibble with it. Hungary got its royal saint, King Istvan I (r.1000 - 1038), when Stephen's grandson King Laszlo I got his wish on 15th August 1083 from none other than Pope Gregory VII. Around the same time as Frederick Barbarossa was locked in his cold war with the papacy, King Henry II of England, who had backed Pope Alexander III in the election, got his wish (and that of the monks of Westminster Abbey) granted on 7th February 1161 when Alexander issued a papal bull declaring Edward the Confessor to be a saint. And past the end of our period, the French monarchy got St Louis IX (r.1226 - 1270) canonised in 1297 as part of a compromise over church-state relations between King Philip IV the Fair and Pope Boniface VIII. So really, how well you got on with the legitimate pope was what decided everything. Its a huge myth that the papal revolution of the eleventh century secularised kingship, and that royal authority only became sacred and God-given again with the Reformation and the rise of absolutism in the sixteenth century. Meanwhile, of course, the knife of Charlemagne was preserved in the cathedral treasury at Aachen, where it still is to this very day.
Object number seven: a monumental lapidary inscription of Abbot Audibert, 838 AD (Castelvecchio Museum, Verona, Italy, visited 10 June 2022)
This monumental inscription on a large medallion of white marble was made in the year 838 by Abbot Audibert. That Audibert chose a circular shaped block of stone rather than the traditional rectangular one is itself noteworthy, though as is so often the case we can't know his reasoning. Following in the tradition of ancient Roman monumental inscription, such as the one we saw on the tomb in part 1, it is written in square capitals. Some basic religious imagery also features in that the image of the cross has been carved onto the stone medallion and part of the inscription is written inside it. The inscription itself is fairly simple and reads (again, all faults with the translation are my own):
Abbot Audibert renovated this oratory of Saint Donatus in the twenty-fifth year of the lord emperor Louis [838].
Apart from this, we know nothing about Abbot Audibert. Unlike Alcuin, Theodulf of Orleans, Adalhard of Corbie, Benedict of Aniane, Rabanus Maurus, Lupus of Ferrieres, Hincmar of Rheims and a whole host of other Carolingian churchmen I haven't cared to name, this Veronese abbot didn't write any books and stayed well-clear of court politics. Nor is there any mention of him in any published ninth century charters (from a quick google search). By his work shall ye know him!
What we can tell is that Audibert obviously wanted to be remembered for posterity as a builder and restorer of churches, otherwise he wouldn't have put up this inscription. In this sense, he followed expectations of what made a good bishop or abbot that went back to at least the fifth century Roman Empire. We can also tell that his education was not up to the standards expected of a senior cleric in the Carolingian period. For example, he uses the ablative oratorio where the accusative oratorium would be more appropriate and domino where the genitive domini should go. Alcuin or Lupus of Ferrieres would be senseless with rage if they saw these grammatical mistakes. This taps into the question that historians have debated a lot since the 1970s - how far down did Carolingian educational reform really go?
As a final thing to note, Audibert dated his inscription according to the year of the reign of Emperor Louis the Pious (r.814 - 840) he wrote it in. Emperor Louis the Pious had been crowned as co-emperor and Charlemagne's successor in 813, so twenty-fifth year of his reign mentioned on the inscription would have been 838. All official documents of the Carolingian monarchs were dated according to regnal year, as indeed are those of British monarchs today - Elizabeth II passed away in her 71st regnal year and we are currently in year 1 of the reign of Charles III. That a relatively minor, local figure not connected to the Carolingian court and not living in a Carolingian powerbase would date his inscription like this is indicative of the strong royal authority and legitimacy the Carolingians had across their empire by the 830s. By contrast, the use of AD dating, which began to enter mainstream use in Western Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries, or other alternative methods of reckoning the years on an official document or inscription would indicate an ebbing-away of royal power or that an attempt to replace the reigning dynasty was on the cards. Indeed, some regions, like Catalonia in the years after 987, continued to date their charters according to the regnal years of the Carolingian monarchs even after Carolingians ceased to reign anywhere.
Object number eight: an ivory casket panel of the rape of Europa, made in Constantinople, 980 - 1010 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 27 October 2022)
Moving eastwards and towards the end of the first millennium, the next object I've chosen is an ivory panel which belonged to a casket made in Constantinople sometime in the closing decades of the tenth century, or possibly at the beginning of the eleventh. It depicts the Greek and Roman myth of the Rape of Europa. In the centre of the panel is Europa riding on the back of Zeus/ Jupiter, who is disguised as a white bull. Europa is clinging on to the bull's neck as he swims through the sea whilst waving her scarf. A cupid flies down to crown her with a laurel wreath, while another cupid wades into the sea with a flaming torch before the bull. On the left, Europa's female companions watch in amazement with their arms outstretched. On the right, Ares/ Mars and Aphrodite/ Venus begin to embrace each other on the further shore where Europa and the bull are headed, perhaps a foreshadowing of what is to come - Zeus, being Zeus, would go on to have sex with Europa, and King Minos was born.
This isn't the only ivory casket panel from the tenth and eleventh century Roman Empire (what most historians would now call the Byzantine Empire) to show scenes from Classical mythology. Just opposite this object in the exact same room in the V&A, you can find the much more intact Veroli Casket, also made in Constantinople and in roughly the same timeframe. The panels on the Veroli Casket show various images of the god Dionysus/ Bacchus, as well as scenes from the stories of Bellerophon and Iphigenia. We're clearly dealing with a cultural environment in which knowledge of the Greek and Roman myths was highly prized. Wealthy people would thus have stories from them displayed on their more luxurious household objects, to demonstrate how learned and cultured they were. The fact that the casket panel is made from carved elephant ivory, imported to Constantinople from Africa at great expense, shows that it was also meant to demonstrate the owner's wealth. Whoever it belonged to must have been a very wealthy member of the Roman elite, possibly a high-ranking bureaucrat or military officer at the imperial court in Constantinople or a senator - the Roman senate still existed in the East until the thirteenth century.
Of all the objects in this series, this is the second-most secular. This is because, while it depicts gods, these were gods that no one believed in by the time this object was made. The Roman East had been thoroughly Christianised in the fourth to sixth centuries. Some isolated pockets of paganism survived until quite late. The Maniotes, who lived in the middle finger of the Peloponnese and claimed descent from the ancient Spartans themselves, weren't converted until the reign of Emperor Basil I (r.867 - 886) according to the manual on statecraft and foreign policy written by his grandson Emperor Constantine VII (r.913 - 959). Needless to say, the Mani peninsula was an exceptional case, being a remote, mountainous, wild and effectively ungovernable region. Later on, French crusaders, Venetians and Ottoman Turks alike had only the most shaky control over the Mani, and the bandit clans and pirates that still dominated the region in the nineteenth century gave the modern Greek state a massive headache. It suffices to say that by the 980s, worship of Zeus and the other Olympian gods was no longer in anyone's living memory. Asides from a small Jewish minority, who were generally free of persecution, everyone in the Roman Empire was a Christian.
Indeed, Christianity, specifically Greek Orthodox Christianity, is such a big part of how we view the medieval Roman Empire, or as we now prefer to call it, Byzantium. When "Byzantine Art" comes to mind, we tend to think of mosaics and icons with ethereal gold backgrounds, of the Theotokos (the Virgin Mary) in shapeless robes of lapis lazuli, of stern-looking and majestic-looking Christ Pantokrator (literally as ruler of the universe) and saints and emperors wearing timeless garments. Yet, like with a lot of what we think we know about Byzantium, this view of Byzantine art is ultimately misleading. Plenty of secular art of a very different style existed in the Roman Empire of the tenth to twelfth centuries.
Around the time this casket was made, the Roman Empire was going through what historians call "The Macedonian Renaissance." Under the so-called Macedonian dynasty of emperors (867 - 1056), contemporaries to Alfred the Great and the West Saxon kings of England, the Roman Empire enjoyed a new period of military success and cultural revival. A series of reconquests against the Arabs and Bulgarians led to Cilicia, Armenia, Northern Syria, Cyprus, Crete and the Balkans being reconquered. By 1025, at the death of Emperor Basil II, one of the greatest soldier emperors, the Roman imperial frontier was once again at the Danube and Euphrates for the first time since the seventh century. Just like in the time of Augustus, Trajan and Constantine, the Roman army was still the strongest, most disciplined and professional fighting force in all of Europe, and its generals had such a strong grasp of military tactics and strategy, they even wrote treatises on them. A new building-boom for churches, both in the capital and in the provinces, was in motion and would continue into the twelfth century. And the study of Classical Roman literature and history was thriving. Great encyclopaedias of ancient Greek and Roman authors like the Excerpta Constantiniana and the Suda were compiled in the mid-tenth century under the orders of Emperor Constantine VII. Meanwhile, good working knowledge of Homer, Plato and Dio Cassius were essential parts of education for anyone who wanted to be a member of the governing class, as a civil servant, bishop or general. It was this kind of cultural milieu that produced art like this. Indeed, judging from the artistic style of the ivory panel, which pays a great deal of anatomical detail to the human figure and shows Europa, her companions, Ares and Aphrodite wearing recognisably Classical garb, its clear that the craftsmen who made it had some familiarity with Hellenistic and early Imperial Roman art. Indeed, Constantinople in this period was something of a veritable art museum that contained the best of ancient sculpture, almost all of which has since vanished without a trace. Thus this artwork represents a revival of Classical culture, and how the now thoroughly Christian Roman Empire still looked back fondly on its pagan past.
Object number nine: A coppery alloy statue of the Hindu god Ganesha, made in Thanjavur in southern India, 1000 - 1200 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, visited 10 December 2022)
Now for the penultimate object, we will be going yet further east and to a region, or should I really say, a subcontinent, whose history I know very little about. Of course, this ignorance of Indian history is far more widespread. Indeed, the recent move towards a "Global Middle Ages" hasn't done a particularly good job of integrating India into it, as opposed to China or West Africa. Often those who try to include the Subcontinent in global comparative histories make a frankly token effort and read just one book. Yet, from my perspective as a western early medievalist, India definitely belongs to a "Global Middle Ages." India was very much in the minds of early medieval westerners in ways that China and West Africa were not. The ancient Greeks and Romans had almost nothing to say about those latter two regions, and Western Europeans had no direct contact with them until the thirteenth century. The Islamic world, on the other hand, did have direct contacts with both China and West Africa through trade by the ninth century. Thus some would interpret this as simply indicative of Western Europe being a peripheral, backwater region in the early medieval period. That argument can be had, though as you can guess I'm not particularly sympathetic to it.
But India definitely was on the minds of early medieval Western Europeans. It was often mentioned by the Classical authors who were read in the fifth to twelfth century West. Early medieval Christians believed that in 53 AD St Thomas the Apostle had sailed over to Kerala in southern India and established a Christian church there. Our old friend Gregory Tours, writing in 590, describes how a certain passing acquaintance of his called Theodorus had visited the shrine of St Thomas in India and told him about it. Indian pepper was consumed at the Merovingian royal court in the seventh century and was known to the Venerable Bede in the early eighth. And in 883, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Alfred the Great sent two envoys to India to provide gifts for the shrine of St Bartholomew - Caitlin Green has made a strong case for this being an event that actually happened. India also appears on an eleventh century Anglo-Saxon world map, whereas China doesn't.
This object came from the Chola kingdom, located in the tip of the Indian peninsula. The Cholas wrote and spoke the Tamil language, one of the official languages of southern India and Sri Lanka. Tamil is a Dravidian language, which means its a language that was historically spoken by the indigenous pre-Indo-European inhabitants of the Indian Subcontinent, and still is spoken by their descendants today. By contrast, in northern India, the lingua franca was Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, related distantly to Latin and Greek, which occupied a similar position to Latin in the early medieval West, as a language of religion, administration, classical literature and elite culture. From my very limited outsider knowledge, the Cholas are fascinating but not easy to study. They have very different sources that we do for early medieval Western Europe, Byzantium, the Islamic World or China. We have no narrative histories for them, though we do have Tamil poems, king-lists and royal sagas. We also have lots of surviving copper-plate inscriptions in Tamil, which mostly record land transactions and other economic arrangements. We also have an abundance of temples and artworks surviving from the Chola period, though they're very difficult to precisely date.
The history of the Cholas goes back a very long way indeed. Indeed, they're first mentioned in northern Indian sources in the third century BC, as southern neighbours of Ashoka (304 - 232 BC), the ruler of the Mauryan Empire (321 - 185 BC). The Mauryan Empire was the first proper empire in Indian history, which controlled almost the entire subcontinent except the southern tip (where the Cholas were) but only for two generations before it broke up. Graeco-Roman sources also briefly mention the Cholas, such as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and the Geography of Ptolemy. However, the Cholas only really start to generate writings of their own from the seventh century AD. Alfred the Great's envoys, Sigehelm and Aethelstan, probably visited the Chola court if they ever made it to the Shrine of St Thomas in India in the first place - if they did, its a shame no records of it survive as I really want to know what it would have felt like to be Anglo-Saxon visiting India in the ninth century. In the late ninth and tenth centuries, the so-called Imperial Cholas formed a powerful Empire in southern India that by 1000 covered all of the modern Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Naddu and most of Karnatka and Andhra Pradesh, as well as the northern half of Sri Lanka. Their most powerful ruler was Rajaraja I (r.985 - 1014 AD), a contemporary of Aethelred the Unready, Basil II, Hugh Capet, Otto III and so many of the other people I'm interested in. He was an very skilled military commander who expanded the Chola Empire to its furthest extent and centralised government, turning the local tribute-paying vassals, autonomous chieftains and client kings into appointed officials dependent on the state. In the early decades of the eleventh century, Rajaraja created anthologies of all the great early Tamil poets, much like Constantine VII had done in the Roman Empire a few generations earlier. And In 1000 he organised a massive land survey of his entire empire, and reorganised all the administrative districts - its too tempting to make comparisons between Rajaraja and William the Conqueror (both of whom did live in the same century) here. Finally, Rajaraja also established trade links with Song China and Chola embassies were received at the Chinese imperial court in Kaifeng on multiple occasions in the eleventh century. After the mid-twelfth century, the Cholas went into decline but their dynasty didn't end until 1279. One has to be impressed with how long they lasted - more than a millennium and a half. Only the Imperial House of Japan (the Yamato), in continuous existence since 660 BC, can compare with them for sheer longevity.
The Cholas were a staunchly Hindu dynasty and this is reflected in this artefact. It depicts the Hindu god Ganesh, and it was produced in Thanjavur, one of the most important Chola cities where Rajaraja I founded the great 66 metres tall Brihadisvara temple in 1010 AD. The statue shows Ganesh standing. In his four hands, he holds a noose, an elephant goad, a wood apple and a broken tusk. He wears a coronet, a necklace, armlets, anklets and a loincloth and has a regal bearing about him. His plump belly reflects his fondness for sweetmeats. According to some Hindu texts, Ganesh was beheaded by his father, Lord Shiva, when he accidentally mistook him for a rival. He promised to his wife, Parvati, to replace Ganesh's head with that of the first animal that would come along, and that happened to be an elephant. This statue of Ganesh would be used for religious processions, in which he would be carried on the parade up to the temple on a palanquin behind the statues of his mother, Parvati, and father, Lord Shiva. The statue would also receive prayers and offerings from people about to embark of business ventures. You see, Ganesh had originally been a God of agriculture, but by the eleventh century he was starting to be seen as a patron of merchants and commerce. Indeed, Chola India was experiencing an economic and commercial takeoff in the period this statue was created, much like the one going on simultaneously in Western Europe. Just like in eleventh and twelfth century Western Christendom in Chola southern India the explosion of religious devotion, artistic production and economic growth all went hand in hand.
Object ten: Champleve enamel reliquary box of the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket from Limoges, France, 1180 - 1190 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 27 October 2022)
Our final object continues the previous object's theme of religious devotion, but brings me back to much more familiar historical territory and much closer to home. It is a reliquary casket, made to house the relics of the saint for veneration. which shows the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral by four knights (though only three are depicted here) on 29th December 1170. The drama of the whole scene is very well-captured by the artist who designed it here. A knight decapitates the Archbishop of Canterbury while he nonchalantly picks up a chalice from the altar, appropriately laid out for religious services, as part of his duty of performing the mass. This makes him appear both if he has no care at all about what is going on around him and is just going to carry on with his duties to God (performing the mass was and is literally called "divine service"), and like he has heroically accepted martyrdom. There's no indication that he's trying to fight back, run away or bargain with the knights. He thus appears the perfect martyr for Christ. The knights, who are not wearing their armour like they are often depicted, appear suitably thuggish and menacing. The first knight decapitates Becket, while the other two advance with drawn axes and swords. Meanwhile two monks of Canterbury cathedral priory stand with their faces aghast and their arms held up in terror. On the rectangular roof panel above, we see on the left the dead archbishop of Canterbury in his funeral shroud while a bishop and a number of other clerics perform the customary funeral rites. On the right we see Thomas Becket's soul ascending straight up to Heaven, flanked by two angels carrying his shroud.
This reliquary box was one of 52 showing the same scenes (the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket, his funeral and ascent up to heaven) made in Limoges in the Duchy of Aquitaine in France, using the champleve enamelling technique. Limoges was one of the three leading production centres of champleve enamel objects in Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, along with Cologne in the German Rhineland and Liege in what is now Belgium. Its been estimated that 7,500 champleve enamel objects manufactured in Limoges survive from the period 1160 - 1370; Limoges enamels went into swift decline following the Black Prince's sack of Limoges during the Hundred Years' War, though some were still being produced as late as 1630. The technique required to make champleve enamel caskets like this involves the following steps (you can also watch the video of it being done here): - A regular wooden casket is made.
- Plaques are cut out from a larger sheet of copper and designs are drawn onto them using a mathematical compass or pointed tool.
- Holes are drilled using a bow drill in the borders of the plaques to allow them to be nailed onto the wooden core.
- Troughs are cut into the metal to hold the enamel.
- The enamel is made by grinding glass with mortar and pestle, and mixed with water.
- The wet enamel is then laid on the plaques using a quill.
- Once all the colours have been laid on to the copper plaque, the kiln is then fired up to 1000 degrees Celsius and the plaques are placed inside it - a medieval enameller would have needed to rely on his own judgement as to when the kiln was hot enough.
- The plaques get fired in the kiln for a few minutes, then left to cool before the process gets repeated two or three times.
- The plaques are then cleaned with a special stone, additional engravings for decoration are added and the exposed bits of copper get gilded.
- The enamel plaques get hammered onto the wooden casket with nails.
Those medieval craftsmen were truly capable of some incredible things weren't they!
Its artworks like this reliquary box (and the fact that there are 52 others almost exactly like it) which really illustrate the historical significance of Thomas Becket's murder. In 1178, less than a decade after it happened, William II (r.1166 - 1189), the Norman king of Sicily, had a mosaic of Thomas Becket created in the cathedral-monastery complex he was building at Monreale in the hills just outside Palermo. I had the pleasure of visiting Monreale last July - its a wonderful place. In 1191, 21 years after Becket's murder took place, it was carved onto a baptismal font in a church in Skane in southern Sweden (then a part of the kingdom of Denmark). Across the next three hundred years, Thomas Becket's story would be told in countless artworks not just from England and France but also from Spain, Germany, Italy and Norway, and in 1232 in Poland a new Cistercian abbey church was dedicated to him. King Henry II of England, whose anger at the archbishop was generally acknowledged by contemporaries to be the root cause of Becket's murder, decided to make amends for it by building masses of new churches. These required vast amount of lead for pipes, roofs and stained glass windows, which were mined and smelted in the Peak District and Cumbria. The atmospheric lead pollution created by all this lead-smelting shows up in the cores of glaciers in the Swiss Alps. Close analysis of these by modern researchers has shown that this building boom in response to Thomas Becket's murder caused levels of lead pollution not seen since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, and which would not be equalled again until the start of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. Thomas Becket's murder was thus a significant event in environmental history.
Significant is generally a word one would choose to apply to Thomas Becket. Becket's martyrdom provided the main inspiration for one of the few clauses of Magna Carta that is still on the UK statute books today "the English Church is to be free in perpetuity and to have its rights in full and its liberties intact." Thomas Becket's shrine at Canterbury eclipsed that of St Cuthbert at Durham as the most popular pilgrimage site in England, and had it not been for that then one of the greatest works of English literature (Chaucer's Canterbury Tales) would likely never have been written. As pointed out earlier, he was venerated in churches across Western Europe. Thomas Becket became such a powerful symbol of resistance to royal authority that Henry VIII had the saint's shrine destroyed and his bones pulverised to dust in 1538. And as a trainee secondary school history teacher, I can confirm that he's one of the most popular topics to teach in secondary schools at Key Stage 3 level (11 - 14 years old). Even schools with the most minimal commitment to teaching medieval history at Key Stage 3, as per the broad-brush, inspecific requirements of the National Curriculum, and which teach none at GCSE (14 - 16 years old) and A Level (16 - 18 years old), will teach Thomas Becket's murder. The other topics typically included within the bare minimum of medieval history taught at Key Stage 3 are the Norman Conquest, the Magna Carta, the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt and some more general stuff on medieval life, religion and justice. Its interesting to consider why Becket is such a popular topic to be taught to schoolchildren, typically in year 7 (11 - 12 years old). I have yet to teach it myself, though I suspect that among the reasons are that its an inherently gripping and dramatic story with some big personalities involved (Henry II and Becket) and lots of gore. Its a good topic for introducing Key Stage 3 pupils to the second order concepts of historical significance (ditto) and evidence and enquiry (we have plenty of contemporary sources and even an eyewitness account from Edward Grim, one of the monks who saw the murder). Finally, its the perfect case study for exploring the key theme of the relationship between the crown and the church in the Middle Ages.
Which brings us on to the final thing for us to think about. Why did I choose to end the series of ten objects with this one? And does Thomas Becket belong in the early middle ages at all? I've tried to evade the question of periodisation until this point. But I don't think I can any longer. What I can say is that most historians would not consider Thomas Becket as early medieval. The general agreement among academic historians is that the Middle Ages, conventionally spanning about a thousand years of European history, make no sense as a single period and have to be broken up into smaller sub-periods. But what are those sub-periods and where do we draw the cut-off points. French and Italian medievalists generally divide the Middle Ages in two - into an "upper" and lower" medieval period, with the cut-off point typically being somewhere in the eleventh century. Meanwhile, British and German medievalists typically divide it into three - into an early medieval period, a high or central medieval period and a late medieval period. As to where exactly the early middle ages becomes the high or central middle ages, there is no agreement. Some would go as early as 900, with the final breakup of the Carolingian Empire giving birth to the early forerunners of the European states we now know and love (France, Germany and Italy), as well as generally pointing the way to a post-imperial future for the European Continent (tell that to Frederick Barbarossa, Charles V, Napoleon and Hitler). Others would go as late as c.1100, with similarly earth-shattering events like the Investiture Controversy and the First Crusade. Parochially, most English historians can't resist the power of 1066 as a marker for the great divide. But generally, from a European perspective, most Anglophone historians would go for sometime in the half centuries on either side of the year 1000 as the dividing line between early and high middle ages. Its between 950 and 1050 that the last of the barbarian invasions (Vikings and Magyars) cease and the final remnants of ancient Roman society disappear from Europe (i.e., agricultural chattel slavery). Its also when general signs that Europe is really entering the "real" Middle Ages start appearing - monastic orders, castles, knights, serfdom, primogeniture, giant Romanesque cathedrals and popular heresy. Very few historians, however, would take the early middle ages into the twelfth century. Partly because, if your early middle ages go beyond 1100, then you haven't got much of a high middle ages left before you have to move on to the late middle ages sometime around 1300 - unless, of course, you believe the middle ages really end in the eighteenth century (as some do). Also, can you really call the century that sees the invention of tournaments, Gothic architecture, the scholastic method, universities, Arthurian romances and windmills, as well as the earliest beginnings of merchant capitalism, the middle class and modern bureaucratic government, "early medieval" by any sane definition?
Personally, I would go for 1000 as the end of the early middle ages - it really is as good an end-point as any. But I include the eleventh and twelfth centuries within my remit, just like how I include the fifth and sixth centuries there too despite some people's protests that that's still late antiquity. Change doesn't happen overnight and everything comes from somehow. And the period 400 - 1200, the timeframe covered by this series and more broadly by this blog, is quite simply what fits in all the bits of history that I love the most.
But for more than just completely subjective reasons, I think Thomas Becket deserves a place here in the story of the early middle ages in ten objects. In part, its to show that we have well and truly left the early middle ages. Lurking in the background of Thomas Becket's story is the papal revolution. The original dispute that led to Henry II and Thomas Becket falling out in 1164, over whether or not the clergy should be put under the jurisdiction of secular courts, was a direct result of the papal revolutionaries' sustained attempts since the mid-eleventh century to decrease the control of kings over the clergy. And the fact that Becket was canonised by the Pope in 1173, only three years after his death, is indicative of how the papacy was taking control of the process of making saints, one which would be complete by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Becket's story thus illustrates how the papal revolution of the eleventh century had irreversibly changed medieval power relations and the church. The fact that Becket became venerated in places as far apart from each other as Scandinavia, Spain and Sicily also demonstrates how much Latin Christendom had both expanded and become more unified in the post-1000 period.
But some of Becket's story would have still been familiar to people from the early middle ages. In particular, what came towards the very end of it. On 12th July 1174, Henry II walked barefoot through the streets of Canterbury, entered the cathedral, ordered the very monks who had witnessed Becket's murder to whip him and received 300 lashings from them. The next morning he heard that the Scottish king, William the Lion, had been captured and northern England was finally safe from invasion. Shortly after that, his rebellious barons sued for peace and his sons, Henry and Richard, and wife Eleanor also surrendered, thus ending the three year political crisis and civil war that had engulfed England after Becket's death. Now this kind of phenomenon, of a king performing penance for the health and salvation of the state, would be completely recognisable to the Carolingians. There are echoes of Emperor Louis the Pious' penance at Attigny in 822 for the blinding of his nephew Bernard of Italy here. Political penance was generally a very early medieval thing as went with the grain of a very early medieval conception of kingship, originating in the seventh century, that the king was personally accountable to God for the moral and spiritual welfare of his people. Before the Carolingians, Visigothic kings had pioneered political penance, and after them the Ottonians and Anglo-Saxons made use of it too - Otto III and Aethelred the Unready would have congratulated Henry II on what he did in 1174. But as it turned out, Henry II's pilgrimage to Canterbury was the last great act of political penance done by a medieval king. In that sense, if in that sense only, the Becket controversy did indeed mark the end of an era.
And so ends our story of the early middle ages through ten objects. I apologise for it not providing a coherent narrative. But what I have tried to do is at least provide some common themes and show the sheer richness of Eurasian history and material culture in this period. I hope that at least in that endeavour, I have succeeded. And as this is the first post of 2023, I would like to wish a Happy New Year to you all.
