Courtly love, the recommended standards of polite relationships between knights and ladies in medieval Europe, changed manners at the time and has had a long-lasting influence on our ideas of courtesy.
Eleanor of Aquitaine, heiress of the Duke of Aquitaine, married the king of France as a teenager. While in Paris she perhaps heard the leading philosopher of the day (Peter Abelard) lecture, was chastised by a saint (Bernard of Clairvaux), and advised by Abbot Suger, who commissioned the first Gothic building. Eleanor also went on the second Crusade to the Holy Landbefore, at the age of30, she divorced her husband and married the 18-year-old king of England. As Duchess of Aquitaine and Queen of England she participated in the creation of the culture of courtly love and bore four sons, two of whom would become kings. While Eleanor’s life was extraordinary, her personal experiences reflected the remarkable burst of creativity and energy of the period between 1050 and 1150. It was a time of new ideas, increasing prosperity, and fervent religiosity which to some degree touched all the people and institutions of Europe.
In the political arena, both the papacy and the monarchies began to bring stabihty to their respective domains. Pohtical stability allowed trade to flourish once again and all classes to take advantage of increased agrarian prosperity. It also led to a revival of piety among the ordinary people—inspiring them to build new churches and undertake pilgrimages and crusades. Philosophy and learning revived as scholars reinterpreted ancient texts. The peace of the era forced the rough manners of war to give way to the polite behavior of the court, creating a new impetus to write romances and love lyrics.
The founding of one new monastery had particularly far-reaching consequences for lay piety, architecture, learning, and the papacy. It had become customary for kings and lords to endow monasteries and nunneries with sufficient land for their inhabitants’ livelihood and with laborers to support them so that they could spend their lives in prayer. Their motives were twofold. They wanted the monks and nuns to pray for their souls so that their afterlife would be spent in heaven rather than heU. But they also saw these establishments as offering an honorable career for the extra daughters and sons who would not marry or could not be endowed with lands.
Placing these superfluous noble children in monastic institutions sometimes had good results. Some became worthy abbots and
The Order of Cluny was responsible for great church reform, for an increase in piety, and for a new style of architecture known as the Romanesque. The rounded arches on the windows and the massive walls of the abbey church at Cluny are typical of the Romanesque style.
Abbesses and occasionally even saints. But often the children had no taste for monastic life and hved very corruptly. They spent more time with their married brothers and sisters in their castles and, against monastic rules, took loven and concubines themselves.
To counteract the strong lay influence on monasteries, the Duke of Aquitaine founded a monastery at Cluny in 910. The Cluniac monks used the Benedictine Rule and were permitted to select their own abbot rather than accepting the duke’s choice. The abbot was answerable only to the pope, not to the duke. The monastery gradually gained respect and adherents. Other monasteries reformed and declared themselves Cluniacs. The movement inspired Emperor Henry III of Germany, who reformed the Church in Germany. He then crossed the Alps to Rome, where three men were claiming to be pope. He deposed aU of them and put in their place a series of popes who also supported the reform of the Church.
The new wave of piety inspired the laity as well as the clergy. Because they no longer feared that their churches would be destroyed in warfare, the laity began to contribute some of their excess profits from agriculture to building parish churches, cathedrals, and new monastic houses. The architecture of the churches they built was derived firom previous Roman models and is therefore called Romanesque. Romanesque architecture incorporated rounded arches and vaults, and ceilings or
Roofs of masonry (including barrel vaults and cross vaults). The buildings also tended to be low, and required a massive amount of masonry to hold up their stone ceilings. Some churches had wooden ceilings that allowed for height in the nave, which in turn allowed more windows in the clerestory (the wall extending above the aisles to the roof of the nave).
To counterbalance the massive appearance of the masonry and the absence of large windows, the interiors of churches were brightly painted with Biblical scenes, including the lives of the saints, piemres of heaven and hell, and other such paintings that would instruct the congregation as they attended services or visited the churches. In the apse (a semi-circular room on the east end of a church) was a very large picture, often a mosaic, of Jesus giving the law to Christians. The effects of the heavy masonry were further lightened both inside and out with carvings featuring biblical scenes, saints, and Christian symbols. A popular theme for the carvings over the main entrance to large churches was the symbols of the four gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This set of carvings was called the tympanum, from the Greek word for dmm.
World History
