One story told about Guilhem takes place near the end of his life. In it, he commits himself to life as a monk in a monastery to atone for the violent way he’s lived. But he is so big, so loud, and so hungry that the miserly abbot conspires to get rid of him by sending him on an errand through a forest known for its murderous brigands. My chapters about William, the golden belt, and the donkey’s leg were inspired by that legend. Though I left out the original ending: When Guilhem returns home, he picks up the evil abbot by his feet, swings him around his head, and throws him over the walls of the monastery into a lake, where the abbot drowns.
In creating William, one idea that excited me was turning the historical Guilhem’s war against the Muslims of Spain on its head: William’s father is the crusader, while William is part-Christian, part-Muslim; part-European, part-African.
One reason that I wanted to recast William’s background is that I wanted to explore the very different state of RACE RELATIONS in Medieval Europe. Having brown skin in France in the Middle Ages was very different from having brown skin in North America today. The transatlantic slave trade (which is a polite way of saying the mass kidnapping and enslavement of millions of innocent Africans) started about four hundred years ago, in the centuries just after the Middle Ages. There was a (comparatively) small amount of slavery in the Middle Ages, and it had nothing to do with the color of your skin; it had to do with whether you’d been conquered in war, or whether your parents or grandparents had been slaves.
Having brown skin in Europe in the Middle Ages was very, very unusual—most medieval French people would go through their whole lives and never see someone with dark skin. But they did not have the kind of hatred based on skin color that we’ve seen in the last four hundred years. Medieval people hated one another for lots of different reasons: religion, language, culture, geography, politics, and so on. But hatred based exclusively on skin color? That’s the modern world’s special invention.
Jacob wasn’t inspired by a specific historical or legendary character. Rather, I wanted to explore his experience of religion, in contrast to and conflict with those around him. RELIGION was one of the defining facts of life for a medieval person. There was no separation of Church and State in the Middle Ages, as we have today—nor really separation of Church and anything. Religion defined the way people lived their lives and saw the world.
You might say that we, today, live in a scientific age. We know all sorts of things—that the moon is round, that the earth is spinning, that microscopic bugs live in our eyebrows—because scientists say so. We don’t question these things, even though the vast majority of us have never visited the moon or felt the earth spinning or seen these bugs in our eyebrows. We just believe it, because the scientists say so. The scientists of the Middle Ages were theologians, and what they said about God, pretty much everyone believed. As I tried to show with the great theologian-scientist Roger Bacon (the drunk friar at the inn), religion was science in the Middle Ages.
And for the vast, vast majority of medieval Europeans that religion was Christianity. By the thirteenth century, when this book takes place, Christianity had conquered almost every part of Europe, with the exception of Spain and small pockets in the east and in Scandinavia. Peasants were Christian and kings were Christian—it was the one unifying factor of these highly divided and unequal societies. Christianity was also used to regulate and rule. It provided unity, control, and guidance to all the people of Europe.
Well, almost all the people. There were always holdouts, and these people presented a real problem for the rulers of the Christian kingdoms of Europe. One group of non-Christians were pagans. “Pagan” was how Christians referred to people who followed the polytheistic religions that had dominated Europe before the arrival of Christianity, from the pantheons of the Romans or Vikings to the beliefs of the Celts or Slavs. In the thirteenth century, since there were very few pagans left, the word “pagan” came to mean primitive, backward, and un-Christian.
Much more threatening to the Christian hierarchy than pagans were heretics. “Heretics” were Christians who held beliefs that were contrary to the teachings of the church. When The Inquisitor’s Tale takes place, heresy was rampant—at least, according to the authorities it was. And it’s true that areas of southern France and northern Italy were occupied by the Cathars and the Waldensians, respectively, thus destabilizing the religious and secular authorities. Inquisitors were trained and recruited to take on—and destroy—these groups. It was highly successful—unfortunately for those heretics, who were often killed for their beliefs.
JEWS also presented serious problems for the Christian rulers of medieval Europe. Jews occupied a tenuous position in society. Very few owned land, and they were typically banned from joining the trade guilds that served Christian townspeople. That didn’t leave many jobs for them. The poor became ragpickers, restitching and reselling used clothing. The luckier Jews became traders and moneylenders. This made them very important to the kings and lords of Europe. There was a time when no king could wage a war and no lord could build a new manor house without borrowing money from Jewish lenders. Jewish lenders played a similar role to banks today. But when you borrow money from someone, and have to pay it back, it often means you stop liking them. Sometimes it means you start hating them. And that happened, all over Europe.
Jews also presented a problem for the Christian authorities, because, according to the Bible, Jews believed in the same God as Christians did, had witnessed Jesus’s life and death, and still didn’t believe he was God. Popes and bishops and priests saw Jews as a threat to the faith of their followers. Add to that the hatred that grew as Jewish moneylending expanded, and you had a very dangerous situation for Jews.
There were increasingly frequent reports of organized violence against Jewish communities as the Middle Ages went on. Sometimes a group of Christians would descend on a Jewish neighborhood and beat them or set fire to their homes. And sometimes a king would force all the Jews to leave his kingdom—which was a convenient way not to have to pay back his loans from them, and to confiscate all their wealth and property.
The situation of the Jews in France under King Louis IX, the Louis of The Inquisitor’s Tale, was incredibly complex. The year that my wife and I lived in Europe, we spent most of our time in Paris. One day, we went to the Museum of Jewish Art and History (Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme). As we explored the collection, we came across a small plaque that told the story of twenty thousand volumes of Talmud being burned by the famous and beloved Saint Louis and his mother, Blanche of Castile. For a long time thereafter, the story tormented me. I couldn’t put it out of my mind. I knew of the cruelty to Jews across Europe, from Roman times through the Holocaust. I had read books about it; I had been to museums devoted to memorializing it. But this tiny plaque, explaining that the entire collected wisdom of the Jews of France had been burned before their very eyes by the most enlightened king in Europe—the king who had built the beautiful Sainte-Chapelle church, who an American city is named after—I couldn’t get over it. I still am not over it. That plaque, more than any of my other experiences in Europe, inspired the story of this book.
We know that Louis hated Jews. He said so, more than once, and he complained of how many Jews lived in Paris (the real number was probably around 4,000 during his reign, but it may well have felt like 10,000 to him). And he oversaw the burning of the Talmuds. But he was not all bad. There was only one episode of large scale violence against Jewish people (as opposed to Jewish property) during his reign. Louis condemned this act of violence, and saw to it that the perpetrators were punished—though only with a fine.
Indeed, outside of his treatment of the Jews, Louis seems to have been a wise and kind ruler. One particularly charming example is this: His predecessors used the Wood of Vincennes for their royal hunts. Louis had no interest in hunting. Instead, he went to Vincennes to sit under a tree and invited common folk to ga
ther around him to tell him their problems. He often visited the Grandmontine Abbey there, too, and he did the menial chores the monks did. And when the Holy Nail was lost, he indeed fell to the earth and screamed and wept—at least, according to Jean of Joinville, who wrote Louis’s biography after the king’s death. In depicting Louis, I tried to show some of these complexities and contradictions, though it would take a book much longer than mine to show him in all his complex glory. There are books that do just that listed in my bibliography.
I could only hope to provide a slender portrait of a very complicated king, and it is possible that I was too kind to him. On the other hand, I may have been too cruel to Blanche of Castile. She was, indeed, a very controlling mother. And she really did preside over the burning of the Talmuds. But I have no idea if she would have insulted her dinner companions as I have her do, or been quite so callous toward the knights sinking in the bay. Sometimes our depictions of historical figures have to take on shades of gray, and sometimes they become more black-and-white, as the storytelling demands.
MONT-SAINT-MICHEL, and the bay around it, became a character itself in this book. I first became interested in the site when my wife and I saw the Bayeux Tapestry, in Bayeux, France.
The Bayeux Tapestry isn’t actually a tapestry. It’s an embroidery, sewed by a small group of nuns in the 1070s, and the best way to describe it is a 230-foot long graphic novel that tells the story of the Norman Conquest. And it’s amazing. But of all the 236 feet, 6 inches stuck in my mind forever: a knight on a horse is seen drowning in quicksand in front of Mont-Saint-Michel.
My wife and I were so intrigued by this that we hired a guide to take us for a walk in the bay around Mont-Saint-Michel at low tide. I encourage you to do this—but you must have a guide, because there really is quicksand. In fact, the guide showed us how to wade into the quicksand, sink, and then get ourselves out of it. The secret is to lie on your belly and drag yourself out, just as Clotho tells the children to do. We also learned that a person walking on quicksand sinks slowly into it, but a horse, especially a horse with an armored knight, would sink much, much faster, because they are much heavier, and all their weight is concentrated on the horse’s four small hooves. Before we went on our walk in the bay, my wife told an elderly friend of hers about our plans. The woman began to cry. She begged us not to go. She had grown up, it turned out, very near Mont-Saint-Michel, and had owned a horse as a girl. She had ridden the horse out into the bay—straight into quicksand. She managed to get off the horse in time, but the horse completely disappeared into the quicksand, and she never saw it again.
There are many wonderful medieval stories that survive in manuscripts of sermons and chronicles and saints’ lives. I stole just a few for this book.
The story that Abbot Hubert tells, about his best friend returning from Hell, is adapted from a tale recorded by William of Malmesbury, a chronicler who lived from 1109 to 1143.
The farting dragon was inspired by a short passage from the “Life of Saint Martha,” as told in 1260 by Jacob de Voragine in his book of saints’ lives, The Golden Legend. He writes that Martha comes to a forest where there is a dragon. “When [the dragon] is pursued he casts out of his belly behind, his ordure, the space of an acre of land on them that follow him, and it is bright as glass, and what it toucheth it burneth as fire.” Awesome.
There is a real “Song of Hildebrand,” which was written down in 830 or so. It was transcribed in a mixture of Old Bavarian and Old Saxon, and I was lucky enough to hear it sung, in the original language, by a wonderful scholar and performer named Benjamin Bagby. The story basically goes the way I tell it, though my version isn’t a translation so much as a retelling. It really does end unresolved, which is just the coolest and most heartbreaking ending to an Old High German battle song ever. I imagine.
I hope, if nothing else, this book has convinced you that the Middle Ages were not “dark” (never call them the Dark Ages!), but rather an amazing, vibrant, dynamic period. Universities were invented, the modern financial system was born, kingship as we know it developed—and so did much of the religious strife that currently grips our world.
The High Middle Ages was a time of cultural collaboration and collision. It was, in that way, very much like today. Jews lived among Christians—sometimes happily, often less so. The Crusades, which began in this period, brought Europe into regular (sometimes tragically violent) contact with Muslim kingdoms and Caliphates. The Muslim conquest of Spain created the Kingdom of Al-Andalus, which was multiethnic and where Muslims, Jews, and Christians all lived and worked together in relative peace and harmony. And the Mongols brought an Asian empire to the very doorstep of Europe.
It was a time when people were redefining how they lived with the “other,” with people who were different from them. The parallels between our time and theirs are rich, poignant, and, too often, tragic. As I put the finishing touches on this novel, more than a hundred and forty people were killed in Paris by terrorists. It turns out they planned the attack from apartments in the town of Saint-Denis. The tragic irony of this haunts me. Zealots kill, and the victims retaliate with killing, and the cycle continues, extending forward and backward in history, apparently without end. I can think of nothing sane to say about this except this book.
Annotated Bibliography
While much of the information in this book came from living sources—professors of medieval history and tour guides through ruined monasteries, for example—I also relied on many, many books. Some of these books might be used in a school setting, even though they were written with an adult audience in mind. Others are popular histories and are accessible to adults looking to learn more. And some are fairly dense scholarly works and are best consulted for deep dives into specific topics. I’ve included just a few of my favorite sources and divided them into those that might be useful to young people and those that are probably best for adults, with a short note on each title.
For Young People and Adults
Bennet, Judith M. A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295–1344. Boston: McGraw-Hill College, 1999.
This is a wonderful and accessible account of one peasant village in England. It is short, the images are very good, and it provides the reader with a vivid picture of how life was really lived by the peasants of Western Europe. I highly recommend it for classroom use or personal edification.
Coles, Richard. Lives of the Improbable Saints and Legends of the Improbable Saints. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2012.
Saint Denis, who carried his head for miles while it preached a sermon, and Saint Lawrence, who proclaimed “this side’s done” while being roasted alive, are just two of the amazing saints described by Coles in these humorous, kid-friendly, illustrated books.
Hozeski, Bruce W. (trans. and ed.). Hildegard’s Healing Plants. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.
This is just a list of plants, collected and written by one of the great geniuses of the Middle Ages—and really, of all time—Hildegard von Bingen. Hildegard was an abbess, a philosopher, a healer, and a composer (her music is still performed today, and it is beautiful). Her book of plants is a great source for healing herbs . . . and poisons.
Joynes, Andrew (ed.). Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels, and Prodigies. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: Boydell Press, 2001.
This is one of my favorite collections of medieval primary sources. I mean, how can you beat a collection of genuine medieval ghost stories? Joynes places each one in context, too, which allows you to feel both scholarly and scared at the same time.
Ross, James Bruce, and Mary Martin McLaughlin (eds.). The Portable Medieval Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
A treasure trove of medieval sources. Probably too dense for middle schoolers, but high schoolers (and college students and adults) can use the table of contents to find medieval writings on all sorts of topics, from Italian fashion in the fourteent
h century to the founding documents of the University of Paris to how one community of Jews dealt with the Black Death.
Schlitz, Laura Amy. Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village. Boston: Candlewick Press, 2007.
While a work of fiction, this Newbery Award–winning collection of monologues is so thoroughly researched and richly imagined that, paired with the Bennet book, you will feel like you really know what it’s like to live in a medieval village. Also, it’ll make you laugh.
Swan, Charles, and Wynnard Hooper (trans. and eds.). Gesta Romanorum, or Entertaining Moral Stories. New York: Dover, 1959.
This book may be my favorite medieval book—and I wouldn’t be alone, because it was among the most popular books in the Middle Ages. It is a collection of amusing and supposedly morally edifying stories gathered from the sermons of traveling preachers during the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. Many of the stories are funny, others are disgusting, and some are amazing. Best of all, they always end in an obscure moral that has nothing to do with the story.
White, T. H. (trans. and ed.). The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century. New York: Dover, 1984.
A wonderful bestiary edited and translated by the author of the Arthur saga, The Once and Future King. A sample: The Manticora “has a threefold row of teeth meeting alternately: the face of a man, with gleaming, blood-red eyes: a lion’s body: a tail like the sting of a scorpion, and a shrill voice which is so sibilant it resembles the notes of flutes. It hankers after human flesh most ravenously.”
For Adults
Abelard, Peter. Yes and No (Sic et Non). Priscilla Throop (trans.). Charlotte, Vermont: MedievalMS, 2008.