Or much of human history, applying a seal to a document was the way to certify its legality and to identify the people who had ratified it. During antiquity and the early Middle Ages, this meant only powerful men-kings, bishops, heads of
Monasteries-and occasionally powerful women. But as participation in documentary practices became more and more common, corporations (like universities and crusading orders), towns, and many individual people also came to use seals. The devices (images) and legends (writing) on these seals were carefully chosen to capture central attributes of their owners' personality or status. Seals were made by pressing a deeply incised lead matrix onto hot wax or resin, which would quickly dry to form a durable impression. The images reproduced here are later engravings that make the features of the original seals easier to see.
A. Seal of the town of Dover, 1281. Dover has long been one of the busiest and most important port cities of England because of its strategic proximity to France; indeed, the Dover Strait that separates this town from Calais, just across the English Channel, is only twenty-one miles wide. In 1281, when this seal was used, ferries and other ships like the one depicted here (in a later engraving) would have made this crossing several times a day. The legend around the edges of the seal reads (in Latin): "Seal of the commune of barons of Dover." It reflects the extraordinary status accorded to the freemen of Dover by the English crown: because of their crucial role in the economy and defense of the kingdom, they were considered a corporate body and entitled to representation in Parliament alongside individual barons.
B. Personal seal of Charles II, king of Naples and Sicily, 1289.
Charles II (b. 1254, r. 1285-1309) was the son and heir of Charles of Anjou, who became King Charles I of Sicily in 1266 and died in 1285. This means that Charles II had succeeded his father and had reigned as king for four years before he used this seal to ratify an agreement to his own daughter's marriage in 1289. Yet the seal in image B was clearly made for him when he was a young man-probably when he was first knighted. It depicts him as count of Anjou (see the heraldic fleur-de-lys) and gives him his other princely titles, including "Son of King Charles of Sicily." Although he was thirty-five-years old, a king in his own right, and a father, he was still using this older seal!
Questions for Analysis
1. Medieval towns represented themselves in a variety of ways on their seals: sometimes showing a group portrait of town councilors, sometimes a local saint, sometimes a heraldic beast, sometimes distinctive architectural features. Why would Dover choose this image? What messages does this seal convey?
2. Think carefully about the mystery of Charles II's seal. Usually, an important agreement like a marriage contract (with the son of the French king, no less!) would have carried a king's official, royal seal. What are all the possible reasons why Charles would still have been using this outdated seal? What are the possible ramifications of this choice? In your role as historian-detective, how would you go about solving this mystery?
3. The seals of medieval women were almost always shaped like almonds (pointed ovals - the technical term is vesica-shaped). Yet Ingeborg's seal is round, like the seals of men and corporations. Why might that be the case?
4. In general, what are the value of seals for the study of history? What are the various ways in which they function as sources?
C. Seal of Ingeborg Hakansdotter, duchess of Sweden, 1321. Ingeborg (1301-1361) was the daughter of King Hakon V of Norway and was betrothed to a Swedish duke, Erick Magnusson, when she was only eleven years old. After a dramatic series of events that left her a young widow, she became the regent for her son, Magnus was elected king of both Norway and Sweden in 1319. Ingeborg herself was barely eighteen at the time. The legend on her seal (image C) reads "Ingeborg by the Grace of God Duchess of Norway"-her official title.
THE MEETING OF JOACHIM AND ANNA BY GIOTTO.
According to legend, Anna and Joachim were an aged and infertile couple who were able to conceive their only child, Mary, through divine intervention. Hence, this painting may portray the moment of her conception-but it also portrays the affection of husband and wife. ¦ What human characteristics and values does it convey to the viewer?
Of Florence pioneered what he called a “sweet new style” of poetry in his native tongue, which was now so different from the Latin of Roman Italy that it had become a language in its own right. Yet as a scholar and devotee of classical Latin verse, Dante also strove to make this Italian vernacular an instrument for serious political and social critique. His great work, known in his own day as the Comedy (called by later admirers the Divine Comedy) was composed during the years he spent in exile from his beloved city, after the political party he supported was ousted from power in 1301.
The Comedy describes the poet’s imaginary journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise, a journey beginning in a “dark wood”: a metaphor for the personal and political crises that threatened Dante’s faith and livelihood. In the poem, the narrator is led out of this forest and through the first two realms (hell and purgatory) by the Roman poet Virgil (see Chapter 5), who represents the best of classical culture. But he can only be guided toward knowledge of the divine in paradise by his deceased beloved, Beatrice, who symbolizes Christian wisdom. In the course of this visionary pilgrimage, Dante’s narrator meets the souls of many historical personages and contemporaries, questioning them closely and inviting them to explain why they met their several fates: this is his ingenious way of commenting on current events and passing judgment on his enemies. In many ways, this monumental poem represents the fusion of classical and Christian cultures, Latin learning and vernacular artistry.
Dante’s Comedy responded creatively to the political turmoil that engulfed Italy during his lifetime, a situation that was transforming the papacy in ways that he condemned. Indeed, many of the men whom Dante imaginatively placed in Hell were popes or men who had held high office in the Church, or foreign rulers who sought to subjugate Italian territories (like the Holy Roman Emperor), or rapacious Italian princes and factional leaders who fought among themselves, creating a state of permanent warfare among and within cities (like Dante’s native Florence). But despite the weakening authority of the papal office, which caused violent divisions within the Church, popular piety arguably achieved its strongest expressions during this era.
As we saw in Chapter 9, Innocent III’s reign marked the height of papal power, but it also sowed seeds of disaster. The popes of the thirteenth century continued to centralize the government of the Church, as Innocent had done, but they simultaneously became involved in protracted political struggles that compromised the papacy’s credibility.
For example, because the Papal States bordered on the kingdom of Sicily—which comprised the important city of Naples and southern Italy, too—subsequent popes came into conflict with its ruler, the emperor Frederick II, who proved a fierce opponent. And instead of excommunicating him and calling for his deposition, as Innocent might have done, the reigning pope called a crusade against him—a cynical admission of crusading’s overtly political motives. To implement this crusade, the papacy became preoccupied with finding a military champion to advance their cause. They found him in Charles of Anjou, the youngest brother of the French king Louis IX (see below). But Charles made matters worse by antagonizing his own subjects, who offered their allegiance to the king of Aragon. The pope then made Aragon the target of another crusade, which resulted in the death of the new French king, Philip III (r. 1270-85). In the wake of this debacle, Philip’s son, Philip IV, resolved to punish the papacy for misusing its powers.
THE PAPAL PALACE AT AVIGNON. This great fortified palace was begun in 1339 and symbolizes the apparent permanence of the papal residence in Avignon. ¦ Why would it have been constructed as a fortress as well as a palace?
The Limits of Papal Propaganda
In 1300, Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1294-1303) celebrated a papal jubilee in Rome and offered a full crusader’s indulgence to every pilgrim: the promise of absolution from all sins. It was a tacit recognition that Rome, not Jerusalem, was now the center of the Christian world—and also a tacit admission that the Crusades of the past two centuries had failed.
But just nine years after this confident assertion of Rome’s unassailable status, Rome had become obsolete. The new capital of Christendom was in France, because King Philip IV had challenged Boniface to a political duel and won. The pretext was unimpressive: Boniface had protested against Philip’s plan to bring a French bishop to trial on a charge of treason—thus violating the bishop’s ecclesiastical immunity. Philip, who had probably anticipated this objection, accused Boniface of heresy and sent a troop of knights to arrest him. At the papal residence of Anagni in 1303, Boniface (then in his seventies) was so mistreated by Philip’s thugs that he died a month later. Philip then pressed his advantage. He forced the new pope, Clement V, to thank him publically for his zealous defense of the faith and then, in 1309, moved the entire papal court from Rome to Avignon (AH-vee-nyon), a city near the southeastern border of his own realm.
The papacy’s capitulation to French royal power illustrates the enormous gap that had opened up between rhetoric and reality in the centuries since the Investiture Conflict (see Chapter 8). Although Boniface was merely repeating an old claim, that kings ruled only by divine approval as recognized by the Church, the fact was that the Church now exercised its authority only by bowing to the superior power of a particular king.
The Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy
The papacy would remain in Avignon for nearly seventy years, until 1378 (see Chapter 11). This period is often called the “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy, recalling the Jews’ exile in Babylon during the sixth century b. c.e. (see Chapter 2). Even though the move was probably supposed to be temporary, it was not reversed after Philip IV’s death in 1314, perhaps because many found that doing business in Avignon was easier than doing business in Rome. Not only was it closer to the major centers of power in northwestern Europe, it was now far removed from the tumultuous politics of Italy and was safe from the aggressive attentions of the German emperors.
All of these considerations were important for a succession of popes closely allied with the aims of the French monarchy. In time, Avignon began to feel like home; in fact it was home for all of the popes elected there, who were natives of the region, as were nearly all the cardinals whom they appointed. This further cemented their loyalty to the French king. And the longer the papacy stayed, the larger its bureaucracy grew and the harder it was to contemplate moving it.
Although the papacy never abandoned its claims to the overlordship of Rome and the Papal States, making good on these claims required decades of diplomacy and a great deal of money. The Avignon popes accordingly imposed new taxes and obligations on the wealthy dioceses of France, England, Germany, and Spain. Judicial cases from ecclesiastical courts also brought large revenues into the papal coffers. Most controversially, the Avignon popes claimed the right to appoint bishops and priests to vacant offices anywhere in Christendom, directly, therefore bypassing the rights of individual dioceses and allowing the papacy to collect huge fees from successful appointees.
By these and other measures, the Avignon popes further strengthened administrative control over the Church. But they also further weakened the papacy’s moral authority. Stories of the court’s unseemly luxury circulated widely, especially during the reign of the notoriously corrupt Clement VI (r. 1342-52), who openly sold spiritual benefits for money (boasting that he would appoint a jackass to a bishopric if he thought it would turn a profit) and insisted that his sexual transgressions were therapeutic. His reign coincided with the Black Death, whose terrifying and demoralizing effects were not alleviated by the quality of his leadership.
Uniting the Faithful: The Power of Sacraments
Despite the centralizing power of the papacy, which came to fruition under Innocent III, most medieval Christians accessed the Church at a local level, within their communities. Somewhat paradoxically, this was another of Innocent Ill’s legacies: because he had insisted that all people should have direct access to religious instruction, nearly all of Europe was covered by a network of parish churches by the end of the thirteenth century. In these churches, parish priests not only taught the elements of Christian doctrine, they administered the sacraments (“holy rites”) that conveyed the grace of God to individual Christians, marking significant moments in the life cycle of every person and significant times in the Christian calendar.
Medieval piety came to revolve around these seven sacraments: baptism, confirmation, confession (or penance), communion, marriage, extreme unction (last rites for the dying), and ordination (of priests). Baptism, a ceremony of initiation administered in the early centuries of Christianity to adults (see Chapter 6), had become a sacrament administered to infants as soon as possible after birth, to safeguard their souls in case of an early death. The confirmation of adolescents reaffirmed the promises made on a child’s behalf at baptism by parents and godparents. Periodic confession of sins to a priest guaranteed forgiveness by God; for if a sinner did not perform appropriate acts of penance, atonement for sins would have to be completed in purgatory—that netherworld between heaven and hell explored by Dante, whose existence was made a matter of Church doctrine for the first time in 1274 (though its existence had been posited by Pope Gregory the Great centuries earlier—see Chapter 7).
Marriage was a relatively new sacrament, increasingly emphasized but very seldom practiced as a ceremony; in reality, marriage in this period required only the exchange of solemn promises and was often formed simply by an act of sexual intercourse or the fact of cohabitation. Extreme unction refers to the holy oil with which the priest anointed the forehead of a dying person, signifying the final absolution of all sins and thus offering a final assurance of salvation. Like baptism, this rite could, in an emergency, be administered by any Christian believer. The other sacraments, however, could be administered only by a properly ordained priest— or, in the case of confirmation and ordination, by a bishop. Ordination was therefore the only sacrament reserved for the small percentage of Christians who became priests, and it conveyed to the priest the special authority to share God’s grace through the sacraments: a power that could never be lost, even by a priest who led an immoral life.
This sacramental system was the foundation on which the practices of medieval popular piety rested. Pilgrimages, for example, were a form of penance and could lessen one’s time in purgatory. Crusading was a kind of extreme pilgrimage that promised the complete fulfillment of all penances the crusader might owe for all the sins of his (or her) life. Many other pious acts—saying the prayers of the rosary, for example, or giving alms to the poor—could also serve as penance for one’s sins while constituting good works that would help the believer in his or her journey toward salvation.
Of these sacraments, the one was most central to the religious lives of medieval Christians was the communion ceremony of the Mass, also known as the Eucharist. As we noted in Chapter 9, the ritual power of the Mass was greatly enhanced in the twelfth century, when the Church began promoting the doctrine of transubstantiation. Christians attending Mass were taught that when the priest spoke the ritual words “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” the substances of bread and wine on the altar were miraculously transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. To consume one or both of these substances was to ingest holiness; and so powerful was this idea that most Christians received the sacramental bread just once a year, at Easter. Some holy women, however, attempted to sustain themselves by consuming only the single morsel of bread consecrated at daily Mass.
"THIS IS MY BODY": THE ELEVATION OF THE HOST.
This fresco from a chapel in Assisi was painted by Simone Martini in the 1320s. It shows the moment in the Mass when the priest raises the eucharistic host so that it can be seen by the faithful. The Latin phrase spoken at this moment, Hoc est corpus meum ("This is my body"), came to be regarded as a magical formula because it could transform one substance into another: hocus pocus. ¦ Since medieval Christians believed that the sight of the host was just as powerful as ingesting it, how would they have responded to this life-size image of the elevation? ¦ What does the appearance of angels (above the altar) signify?
Yet, to share in the miracle of the Eucharist, one did not have to consume it. One had only to witness the elevation of the host, the wafer of bread raised up by the priest, which “hosted” the real presence of Jesus Christ. Daily attendance at Mass simply to view the consecration of the host was therefore a common form of devotion, and this was facilitated by the practice of displaying a consecrated wafer in a special reliquary called a monstrance (“showcase”), which could be set up on an altar or carried through the streets. Believers sometimes attributed astonishing properties to the eucharistic host, feeding it to sick animals or rushing from church to church to see the consecrated bread as many times as possible in a day. Some of these practices were criticized as superstitious. But, by and large, these expressions of popular piety were encouraged and fervently practiced by many.
The fundamental theme of preachers in this era, that salvation lay open to any Christian who strove for it, helps to explain the central place of the Mass and other sacraments in daily life. It also led many to seek out new paths that could lead to God. As we noted in Chapter 9, some believers who sought to achieve a mystical union with God (through rigorous prayer, penance, and personal sacrifice) were ultimately condemned for heresy because they did not subordinate themselves to the authority of the Church. But even less radical figures might find themselves treading on dangerous ground, especially if they published their ideas. For example, the German preacher Master Eckhart (c. 12601327), a Dominican friar, taught that there is a “spark” deep within every human soul and that God lives in this spark. Through prayer and self-renunciation, any person could therefore retreat into the inner recesses of her being and access divinity. This conveyed the message that a layperson might attain salvation through her own efforts, without the intervention of a priest or any of the sacraments he alone could perform. As a result, many of Eckhart’s teachings were condemned. But views like these would find support in the teachings of popular preachers after the Black Death, when close-knit communities revolving around the parish church were broken up or weakened (see Chapter 11).
When the French king Philip IV transplanted the papal court from Rome to Avignon, he was not just responding to previous popes’ abuse of power: he was bolstering his own. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the growth of strong territorial monarchies, combined with the increasing sophistication of royal justice, taxation, and propaganda, had given some secular rulers a higher degree of power than any western European ruler had wielded since the time of Charlemagne (see Chapter 7).
Meanwhile, monarchs’ willingness to support the Church’s crusading efforts not only yielded distinct economic and political advantages, it also allowed them to assert their commitment to the moral and spiritual improvement of their realms. Although a king still needed to be anointed with holy oil at the time of his coronation in order to claim that he ruled “by the grace of God”—a rite that required a bishop and, by extension, papal support—a king’s authority in his own realm rested on the acquiescence of the aristocracy and on popular perceptions of his reputation for justice, piety, and regard for his subjects’ prosperity. On the wider stage of the medieval world, it also rested on his successful assertion of his kingdom’s sovereignty.
Sovereignty can be defined as inviolable authority over a defined territory. In Chapter 9, we noted that Philip Augustus was the first monarch to call himself “king of France” and not “king of the French.” In other words, he was defining his kingship in geographical terms, claiming that there was an entity called France and that he was king within that area.
But what was France? Was it the tiny “island” (Ile-de-France) around Paris, which had been his father’s domain? If so, then France was very small—and very vulnerable, which would make it hard to maintain a claim to sovereignty. Was it, rather, any region whose lord was willing to do homage to the French king, like Champagne or Normandy? In that case, the king would need to enforce these rights of lordship constantly and, if necessary, exert his rule directly—as Philip did when he took Normandy away from England’s King John in 1214.
But what if some of France’s neighboring lords ruled in their own right, as did the independent counts of Flanders, thus threatening the security of France’s borders? In that case, the king would either need to forge an alliance with these borderlands or negate their independence. He would need to assert his sovereignty by absorbing these regions into an ever-growing kingdom.
This is the problem: a claim to sovereignty is only credible if it can be backed up with real power, and a state’s or ruler’s power must never seem stagnant or passive. The problem of sovereignty, then, is a zero-sum game: one state’s sovereignty is won and maintained by diminishing that of other states. Although many French citizens today would assert that France has, in some mystical way, always existed in its present form, the fact is that France and every other modern European state was being cobbled together in the medieval period through a process of annexation and colonization—just as the United States was assembled at the expense of the empires that had colonized North America (the British, French, and Spanish), not to mention the killing or displacement of autonomous native peoples.
The process of achieving sovereignty is thus an aggressive and often violent one, affecting not only the rulers of territories but their peoples, too. In Spain, the “Reconquest” of Muslim lands, which had accelerated in the twelfth century, continued apace in the thirteenth and fourteenth, to the detriment of these regions’ Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. German princes continued to push northward into the Baltic, where native peoples’ resistance to colonizing efforts was met with brutal force. Meanwhile, the Scandinavian kingdoms that had been forming in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were warring among themselves and their neighbors for the control of contested regions and resources. Italy and the Mediterranean became a constant battleground, as we have observed. Among all these emerging states, the two most strident and successful in their assertion of sovereignty were France and England.
The Prestige of France: The Saintly Kingship of Louis IX
After the death of Philip Augustus in 1223, the heirs to the French throne continued to pursue an expansionist policy, pushing the boundaries of their influence out to the east and south. There were significant pockets of resistance, though, notably from the southwestern lands that the kings of England had inherited from Eleanor of Aquitaine (see Chapter 9) and from the independent towns of Flanders that had escaped conquest under Philip Augustus. In 1302, citizen militias from several of these towns, fighting on foot with farming implements and other unconventional weapons, even managed to defeat a heavily armed French cavalry. This victory at the Battle of Courtrai (Kortrijk) is still celebrated as a national holiday in Belgium (although, ironically, its ultimate meaning is currently at the center of a divisive controversy between French - and Flemishspeaking Belgians).
This defeat was a setback for Philip IV of France, but we have already observed that Philip had other ways of asserting the power of French sovereignty. Much of that power derived from his grandfather, Louis IX (r. 1226-70), who would probably have been horrified by the ways his grandson used it. Louis was famous for his piety and for his conscientious exercise of his kingly duties. Unlike most of his fellow princes, he not only pledged to go on crusade— he actually went. And while both of his campaigns were notorious failures (he died on the second, in 1270) they cemented Louis’s saintly reputation and political clout.
First, Louis’s willingness to risk his life (and that of his brothers) in the service of the Church would give him tremendous influence in papal affairs—a key factor in making his youngest brother, Charles of Anjou, the king of Naples and Sicily. Second, the necessity of ensuring the good governance of his kingdom during his years of absence prompted Louis to reform or invent many key aspects of royal governance, which made France the bureaucratic rival of England for the first time. Third, Louis’s first crusading venture was
A CONTAINER FOR THE CROWN OF THORNS. The Sainte-Chapelle, built by Louis IX, was a giant reliquary for the display of this potent artifact and symbol that Christ's divine majesty, which increased the prestige of king of France.
Seen as confirmation that the king of France had inherited the mantle of Charlemagne as the protector of the Church and the representative of Christ on earth. Although it was a military fiasco, this crusade found lasting artistic expression in the Sainte-Chapelle (Holy Chapel), a gorgeous jewel box of a church that Louis built in Paris for his collection of Passion relics—that is, artifacts thought to have been used for the torture and crucifixion of Christ. The most important of these was the Crown of Thorns, intended by Pilate as a mocking reference to “the king of the Jews” (see Chapter 6). Now that this holy crown belonged to Louis and was housed in Paris, it could be taken as a sign that Paris was the new Jerusalem.
Widely regarded as a saint in his lifetime, Louis was formally canonized in 1297—by the same Pope Boniface VIII brought down by Philip IV. Indeed, Boniface partly intended this gesture as a rebuke to the saint’s grandson. Philip himself, however, turned it to his advantage. He even used his grandfather’s pious reputation as a cloak for his frankly rapacious treatment of the Knights Templar, whose military order he suppressed in 1314 so that he could confiscate its extensive property and dissolve his own debts to the order. He had expelled the Jews from his realm in 1306 for similar reasons.
(r. 1272-1307). Unlike Philip, Edward had to build up the sovereignty of his state almost from scratch. His father, Henry III (1216-1272), had a long but troubled reign. Inheriting the throne as a young boy, shortly after his father John’s loss of Normandy and capitulation to Magna Carta (see Chapter 9), Henry had to contend with factions among his regents and, later, the restive barons of his realm who rose against him on several occasions. His son Edward even sided with the rebels at one point, but later worked alongside his father to suppress them. When Edward himself became king in 1272, he took steps toward ensuring that there would be no further revolts on his watch, tightening his control on the aristocracy and their lands, diffusing their power by strengthening that of Parliament, reforming the administration of the realm, and clarifying its laws.
Having seen to the internal affairs of England, Edward looked to its borders. Since Welsh chieftains had been major backers of the barons who had rebelled against his father, Edward was determined to clean up the border region and bring “wild Wales” within the orbit of English sovereignty. He initially attempted to do this by making treaties with various Welsh princes, but none of these arrangements were stable or gave Edward the type of control he wanted. He accordingly embarked on an ambitious and ruthless campaign of castlebuilding, ringing the hilly country with enormous fortifications on a scale not seen in most of Europe; they were more
CAERNARVON CASTLE. One of many massive fortifications built by Edward I, this castle was the birthplace of the first English "Prince of Wales" and the site where the current Prince of Wales, Charles, was formally invested with that title in 1969. ¦ Castles of this size and strength had been constructed in the Crusader States and on the disputed frontiers of Muslim and Christian Spain but never before in Britain (see the photos on pages 292 and 295 of Chapter 9). ¦ What does their construction reveal about Edward's attitude toward the Welsh?
Castles and Control: Edward I and the Expansion of English Rule
The expulsion of Jews who depended on a king’s personal protection had actually been a precedent set by Philip’s contemporary and kinsman, Edward I of England
World History
