When the Sun Stands Still

Have a holly, jolly Christmas. It’s the best time of the year

Well, I can’t say that Christmas is the best time of my year.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the holiday. I love festive mood, the gatherings with family and friends, and hope that infuses the season.

But the days are too short and too cold for someone who really prefers long, hot days of summer. Winter’s chill seems colder because I compare it to the 80-degree days of summer—not the minus 20 degree days of late January.

Maeshowe from the outside.

What I notice most, though, is that the “black of night” seems thicker and heavier, and I find myself craving light—as most people do. As people probably always have.

Years ago, I traveled to the Islands of Orkney in June. The days stretched on forever as the summer solstice neared. Nights were lit by soft sunlight and the residents of Kirkwall reveled in the extra light.

The tour guide at Maeshowe, a chambered cairne build roughly 3000 years BC, even noted the mood of the islanders, adding: “You should be here in December.”

Frankly, I couldn’t imagine being there in December when there is just a “soft glow” for a few hours, then darkness.

Sunlight peeks into the chamber of Maeshowe. 

Historically, Maeshowe is significant for the Viking graffiti carved into the walls. Psychologically, it’s significant because the last rays of sunlight slip down the long entrance corridor during the winter solstice. The purpose of that alignment is anyone’s guess, but the ancient builders clearly marked the passing of the darkest nights.

Celebrating the Solstice—and the slow return of the light—has a long history in the Northern Hemisphere. How and when Christmas became hopelessly entangled with the Solstice celebration is a long tale and probably one that we’ll never fully unravel, but I think the mixing of Christmas with lights and evergreens was inevitable from the moment the Roman Emperor Constantine first celebrated Christ’s Mass on Dec. 25.

The theology might not work, but the psychology makes sense. We crave light when the days are darkest. Regardless of whatever light you use to brighten these short days, Happy Holidays and best wishes for the new yaer.

Keena Kincaid writes historical romances in which passion, magic and treachery collide to create unforgettable stories. If you want to know more about her as an author or looking for a Christmas gift idea, visit her Facebook page or her Amazon page.

Change was Good: Plague and the end of Medieval Europe

This is the last of a six-part series about the Middle Ages with the goal of giving casual readers of medieval romances a better understanding of the time period. Today's topic is the Black Death and end of the Middle Ages.

Previously

In First the Fall, Then the Barbarians, we discussed the macro trends of the early medieval period and how they set the foundation for the Early Middle Ages. We painted kings and knights with a broad brush and learned the benefits of political stability in Huzzah! Knights, Kings and Living the High Life. We looked at war and social change in Ideals of Chivalry and Realities of War and discussed the lives of medieval women in Wives, Mothers, and Nuns. We considered the difference between ‘the church’ and ‘The Church’ in The Desire for God, Power, and Learning.

Some scholars put the beginning of the Renaissance—or the end of the Middle Ages—as early as 1215 with the reign of Frederick II, whose personality and intellectual curiosity heralded the Renaissance. Others put it as late as 1469, the year Lorenzo de Medici began ruling Florence and who could arguably be called the patron of the Italian Renaissance.

If I had to pick a date and defend it for a dissertation, I would argue for 1352, the year after the first wave of the plague burned itself out and the shattered survivors began the painful process of rebuilding their world.

The beginning of the End

Numerically, more died in the Spanish Flu epidemic between 1917-18, but total deaths were 3 percent to 5 percent of the global population.

Yersinia pestis, the bacteria associated with the Great Mortality, touched European shores in 1347, and in the course of five years, killed an estimated 50 million people from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. That’s 60 percent of the European population. In other words, every six out of 10 people living in Europe died; in some places, however, mortality was 80 percent. That would be 30 million to 48 million dead in California and 12,000 to 18,000 where I currently live.

Scholars will argue the exact number, but noodle the idea of at least half (if not more) of the people in your town dying of disease within a month. If you live in a town of 25,000, you will have ~15,000 people die in a few weeks. You have to find those people, bury them, divvy up their goods, and fill their place in the town’s social structure.

The Black death, also called Bubonic Plague because many victims suffered from swollen lymph nodes or buboes in the neck, armpit or groin, is often attributed to infected fleas biting humans after their preferred host, the black rat, died. However, based on the speed, virulence, and rapidity of transmission, many Plague scholars believe there were at least three strains of plague circulating Europe, including a pneumonic strain that appears to have been airborne.

Most scholars believe Yersinia pestis originated in central Asia and spread through China along the main east-west trade routes through commerce and war. It came to Europe in the fall of 1347 on Italian merchant ships fleeing Caffa (sometimes spelled Kaffa). In what might well be the most effective instance of germ warfare ever, when Mongol leader Jeni Beg realized he could not take the city because plague had destroyed his army, he lobbed the plague-riddled corpses over the wall, infecting those within the city (although rats came and went unimpeded by either army, so Jeni Beg can’t take all the credit or the blame). Defenders, fleeing plague, brought the disease to Marselles in the second week of September. By November, it was in Genoa, Venice and Pisa. These cities served as bridgeheads from which the plague conquered all of Europe.

Nothing to do but Wait and Pray

Horrifyingly, people knew it was coming. Stories arrived in a town or city weeks or months in advance of the assault. As people fled cities to avoid the plague (often bringing it with them) they told stories of thousands dead in a few weeks, of people dancing  in the morning, feeling ill in the afternoon, and being dead by evening, and of whole families lost and no one realizing it because their neighbors were dead, as well.

Surviving accounts tell us of mass burials and wild pigs and dogs digging up the shallowly buried corpses and of rivers being consecrated to handle the dead because a city ran out of land and people to bury its dead. One Italian man wrote of burying his wife and five sons with his own hands.

Modern epidemiologists may debate the exact cause of the Plague, but the key point from a societal point-of-view is simply this: all efforts to contain or stop the plague failed.

• Medicine failed.
• Human sacrifice failed (i.e. the slaughter of thousands of urban Jews accused of poisoning wells to kill Christians).
• Prayer failed.

As a result of the horror and the failure of social systems to contain the suffering, the plague altered how people saw themselves and each other, weakened their faith in institutions and God, and bestowed unprecedented opportunities for mobility and prosperity on survivors.

Loss of Faith

As we discussed in an earlier post, the church (local parish priests and monks) and The Church (the institution) were the driving force of medieval society, but when society turned to the church in both forms for comfort, for answers, for intercession, the Church failed. It could neither offer answers nor comfort for the dying. Many churchmen fled their posts in an attempt to save their own lives and those that stayed, usually died.

Then—as now—people searched for reason behind the plague and in the absence of answers, many people believed the plague was divine punishment for sins. When prayers, votive churches, and the various fasts days called for by the Church failed to even slow the plague, people began to question the righteousness of the church and its divine role in society. This change in perception weakened people’s faith in the church, which led directly to the Reformation, as well the Enlightenment, separation of Church and State, the idea of upward mobility and concept of to individual liberty.

It also changed individual lives—often for the better.

Moving on Up

To be honest, if you survived plague, your life was almost immediately materially better off than it had been or would have been if the Black Death hadn’t overrun Europe. That’s harsh, especially to the millions who died horrific deaths, but it’s also true.

Prior to 1347, Europe was over-populated and culturally stagnant. The 12^th century intellectual blossoming that led to the High Middle Ages had faded. Social mobility had come to a standstill and Europe struggled to feed itself, which means the majority of the population was malnourished and one bad harvest from starvation.

As Plague wiped out the population, many people found themselves the sole heirs to their extended family. When consolidated, this inheritance was often substantial enough to change the life of the survivor. This wealth included food animals as well as tools (looms, hence the word heirloom) and money. Food was no longer scarce or unaffordable, which means diet and overall health improved, as well.

Our survivors had health and wealth, skills that were in demand, and an understandable skepticism of the church. They could afford to educate their children. They were willing to risk their noble lord’s wrath and move to the city or to another estate where that lord offered a relief of heriot and daily wages, and were no longer content with their place in the Great Chain of Being. They were needed enough by society that they could ignore efforts from the nobility and the church to reinstitute “traditional values,” and efforts to put the lower orders back into their place failed.

Many of the social changes brought by the plague would have happened anyway, but probably not for another century or two. What the plague did was concentrate these changes into a few painful decades.

A New Outbreak

The plague resurfaced in Europe every decade or so until 1666, but we are not free of the bubonic plague. An outbreak occurred in the early 19th century in China and southeast Asia. Much of our medical knowledge of the plague comes from this outbreak.

And in 1994, bubonic and pneumonic plague surfaced in Surat India, killing only 56 people thanks to the quick and efficient response of India's government and modern antibiotics. Of note, however, is how people reacted to this outbreak. As with the 14th century outbreak, Doctors and nurses refused to treat the sick. People fled the city of Surat in packed trains going to New Delhi and other cities. The plague traveled with them. Others blamed local Muslim populations for poisoning the city’s water supply. Sigh.

About 20 people in the U.S. are infected with plague every year and a few die, mostly because the medical community doesn’t recognize symptoms in time.

If you’d like to learn more about the plague, let me know and I can most links and suggestions in the comments. Overall, though, the clearest learning from a study of plague, is simply this: individuals are fragile, but humanity is resilient.

I hope you have enjoyed this blog series of medieval Europe. I have only skimmed the surface of long and complex time period, so please ask questions. However, I am on a plane from Hawaii today, so feel free to discuss among yourselves until I land stateside.

Keena Kincaid writes historical romances in which passion, magic and treachery collide to create unforgettable stories. Her books are available from Prairie Rose Publications and Amazon. For more information on her stories, visit her Amazon page, her website, or Facebook.

The Desire for God, Power, and Learning

This is the fifth of a six-part series about the Middle Ages with the goal of giving casual readers of medieval romances a better understanding of the time period. This brief blog doesn’t even begin to cover it the complexity of the Middle Ages or why Friar Tuck and Jorge de Burgos are both equally representative of medieval Men of God.

  

Previously

In First the Fall, Then the Babarians, we discussed the macro trends of the early medieval period and how they set the foundation for the Early Middle Ages. We painted kings and knights with a broad brush and learned the benefits of political stability in Huzzah! Knights, Kings and Living the High Life. We looked at war and social change in Ideals of Chivalry and Realities of War and discussed the lives of medieval women in Wives, Mothers, and Nuns. Today, we’re focusing on The Desire for God, Power, and Learning.

The Church (in the Middle Ages there was only one) is a rich, complex subject, which is why thousands of books have been written on it. The desire for God, for learning, for power, for refuge, for utopia can be found in the men and women (but mostly men) who served as friars, monks, priests, bishops, abbots and popes.

The idea of the separation of Church and State would be heretical to the medieval mind. We have a hard time understanding how intertwined life and faith were in medieval Europe. The cycle of prayers, holy days, and sacraments marked the hours, days and stages of a person’s life. Sin was a state of being; evil, an active presence, and purgatory’s cleansing tortures a real and terrifying thought. This is medieval Europe.

On the surface, it appears the Christianization of the Saxons, the Franks and other tribes took place in a relatively short period of time. But beliefs and thoughts change slowly. Evidence suggests that many people in the early Middle Ages hedged their bets by practicing both Christian and Pagan rites. Hence, pagan beliefs mingled with Christian traditions and persisted throughout the Middle Ages.

Herb lore, sympathetic magic, and the supernatural all fell under the umbrella of Christianity. Angels and saints interceded; demons interfered. A drop of the Virgin Mary's milk would help with conception and childbirth. A neighbor's curse would cause your cow to founder and die. 

If you scratch the surface, you’ll find two churches in the Middle Ages: the local church and the Church.

A tale of two churches

Stone musicians from the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

The local Church was the center of the medieval community. Important events took place within the confines of the Church or churchyard. Baptism took place within a few hours of birth. Marriages were celebrated in the churchyard. Masses were in Latin, but sermons would be in the vernacular, and holy days determined what you ate that day.

At this level, the church was the priests and local monastics. It was human, it was involved, and it was concerned with individuals. This was where pagan traditions became mixed with Christian custom, where herb lore and sympathetic magic were part of daily life, and where people prayed to saints that were former pagan gods and made pilgrimages to shrines that had been sacred for thousands of years without ever questioning their Christian faith.

The Church, on the other hand, was an organized, bureaucratic entity most interested in strengthening its position and growing its power. By the 13th century, the pope oversaw a transnational “monarchy” that was larger and wealthier than any other kingdom at the time. Popes asserted their claims to rule by divine authority and argued the spiritual kingdom was higher than temporal kingdoms. The rulers of these earthly kingdoms disagreed. The struggle between miter and crown lasted centuries but rarely touched the common people unless the kingdom was under interdict, which meant local priests were forbidden to administer sacraments).

The wealth, political influence and sheer size of the church are hard to exaggerate. It directed movements like the Crusades, kept learning alive long enough for literacy to become a necessity again, and moderated society through the promotion of ethical warfare, a system of courts, expanding education to the laity and sponsoring the military orders that provided safe transportation along the pilgrim routes.

The power of The Church is also often over-emphasized. Its teachings were as much a reflection of society, as society was a reflection of it. For instance, the Church didn’t direct society’s view of women, but reinforced society’s view and restated it in extreme rhetoric. The same was true for non-believers, homosexuals, heretics or anyone who didn’t confirm to the social standards of the day. However, people didn’t always align with institutional dogma. Templar knights in Jerusalem were friends with Muslims, merchants and bankers had business relationships with Jews, and women ran businesses and fiefdoms in their husband’s absence or in widowhood.

Many monks worked in the scriptorium, copying ancient texts and illuminating prayer books like the one above. 

Poverty, obedience and—say what?

For some, the word “monasticism” calls to mind the soft whoosh of rough robes on stone, of sleepy monks shuffling from the dormitory through a narrow slype to the church choir. Voices rise and fall in chanted worship in the dark night. Others only think about what the monks supposedly renounced: personal wealth and comfort, free will, and physical pleasure.

Close up of marginalia from an illuminated manuscript. 

Monasticism, like Feudalism, matured over time. The key to understanding it is to view it as a verb. It’s not an ideal, like chivalry, but a discipline, like kung fu. It’s a way of living where everything extraneous to worship is purged.

We’ve discussed the myths of knighthood. Similarly, the myths of monasticism are just as uninteresting when compared to the reality. The stereotype seems to ping between the ale-loving, goodhearted Friar Tuck to the judgmental, murderous monk Jorge de Burgos from the The Name of the Rose. 

In the beginning, monks were men and women who wanted to live a life of worship and prayer, separating themselves from the world to avoid distractions. By the high Middle Ages, not all monks were there to live a life of prayer. They were drawn to an order by a love of learning, a desire to serve their communities, or because their parents gave them to the order as boys.

Women, as usual, had fewer options. Although many of us shudder at the thought of being cloistered and celibate, these women had access to learning, the opportunity to govern the order, and a place of respect in society. They tended outlived their married sisters, and somewhere back in graduate school, I remember reading that nuns enjoyed fewer wrinkles and more robust health as they aged than other women.

Most importantly, rather than being viewed as cowards for withdrawing from the world, monks were generally viewed as spiritual knights, tirelessly working to protect people from the ravages of sin.

News eyes, old data

Much of how we currently interpret history comes out of the social history movement of the 20th century. After World War I, when much of the western world lost faith in its political, religious, and social institutions, people began to look at the "every day life of every day people." Medievalists began to scour the records for facts on the social life of the times and began re-interpreting those facts according to the fashion of the day. The feminist movement, the ecumenical movement, and the P.C. movement have been absolute boons in giving us new ways of interpreting medieval society and unearthing small details that went unnoticed when historical research and teaching focused on kings and wars.

As writers, all this academic gold mining gives us a great deal of room to maneuver. Our local priests can be greedy or saintly or barely literate. Monks succor the poor, reform the church, or retire from crusades to solve crimes. Bishops can be sincere and pious or money-grubbing social climbers. Our hero can be as involved or uninvolved in the struggle between church and crown as we need him to be. Our heroes and heroines can interact with individuals in ways that might defy the “official” position. Just keep in mind, our hero or heroine isn’t going to be a pantheist or an atheist. Those words would mean nothing to them, and egalitarianism is inconceivable because of the Great Chain of Being.

Leave a comment for a chance to win a copy of one of my medieval romances.


Keena Kincaid writes historical romances in which passion, magic and treachery collide to create unforgettable stories. Her books are available from Prairie Rose Publications and Amazon. For more information on her stories, visit her Amazon page, her website, or Facebook.

Huzzah! Knights, Kings and Living the High Life

Town square anchored by medieval church in Astorga, Spain. The city began life as a Roman outpost, then town, and is now a major stop on the Camino de Santiago.

This is the second of a six-part series about the Middle Ages with the goal of giving casual readers of medieval romances a better understanding of the time period.  Eventually, we’ll talk about why there were no damsels in distress and why a knight is shining armor isn’t a good sign but first… we’re going to discuss The High Middle Ages, which is pretty much what people think of when you say “medieval.”

Previously...

In First the Fall, Then the Babarians, we discussed the macro trends of the early medieval period and how they set the foundation for the Early Middle Ages. In short, these trends were the breakdown of the Pax Romana followed by mass, sometimes violent, migrations that led to the establishment of dozens of small kingdoms in which kings vowed to protect while those around him pledged loyalty and service. 

Today, we're talking about kings and knights.

High Middle Ages (~1100 to 1400) 

For most people, Medieval travel was disguised as a "pilgrimage."

The High Middle Ages started about 1050 A.D. (shortly after the millennium came and went without the world ending—yes, medieval Europe had a Y1K scare) and lasted until about the 1348. After that date, repeated waves of plague, war and economic troubles inexorably altered society. The period between the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance is typically called the Late Middle Ages. From an academic point-of-view, I prefer to call it a transition period, but that’s me.

During the High Middle Ages, the barbarian invasions ceased, the Vikings got religion and grew roots, and Europe became more politically organized and—most importantly—politically stable, which leads to wealth, leisure, scholarship, art and architecture and travel. Politically instability leads to the loss of those key social components.

Key Trends

• Population growth. The population reached levels in the mid-13th century that wouldn’t be seen again for 600 years.
• A warming trend from the 10th to the 14th century bolstered crop yields and saw wheat grown in Scandinavia and wine grapes raised in England
• Food production increased due to the use of a heavier plow, horses instead of oxen, and a three-field system.

This population boom also contributed to the growth of urban centers and in industrial and economic activity during the period. This period brought us spinning wheels (an improvement over the distaff), magnetic compasses (major impact on navigation and trade) and movable type (which made possible the printing press—arguably the most significant advance of our species).

Bumper crops contributed to increased trade and learning, which created an outburst of creativity in art and architecture. In part because of the Crusades, the learned rediscovered Aristotle. The philosophical giants of the age included Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, and Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch). 

Political leadership was in the hands of the likes of Pope Gregory VII, Henry II, and Emperor Henry IV, and the power struggle between church and state reached its apex. The era also gave us chivalric role models such as Richard the Lionheart, William Marshal, and Edward, the Black Prince.

On the downside, the social structure solidified with titles, occupations and place becoming inherited. What this meant for most people is if their father were a tanner, they would be a tanner.

Knights also became common baronial accouterments. Technically, these armed men served the king (each vassal owed the king so many lance fees depending upon the size of his lands) but these knights also kept royal power in check as the king couldn’t always force his vassals to do as he bid. Under weak kings household knights amounted to a private army and contributed to the Anarchy of the English Civil War and kept the Capetian Kings’ influence limited to its power base in and around Paris. 

A Good King

Unlike the early Middle Ages when the king had to be a good warrior, warrior kings could be disastrous during this era. The most extreme case is probably Richard I, who didn’t pay attention to the administrative details, didn’t leave an heir before traipsing off on crusade and bankrupting England during his 10-year reign. 

His brother John, on the other hand, had the makings of a good king because he was an able administrator. He failed, though, because he inherited a bankrupt kingdom from his brother and was extremely unpopular with his nobles and subjects. In my opinion, he neither liked people nor was liked by them, so the ability to build relationships, which is critical to good governance in any era, eluded him.

The Good Fight

The Crusades stimulated the economy, reviving trade and banking, weakened many noble families (who were bankrupted or destroyed by the crusades), which in turned strengthened crown and miter, and energized learning, contributing to the growth of universities. Another benefit, less easily traced but one that we can assume is a certain refinement that came from the lords and knights who did return from the Holy Land. Travel tends to change how one thinks. It was true then. It’s true now.

Leisure time was a benefit of political stability. Society could build the great cathedrals, people could afford to go on pilgrimages, and families could survive having a son spend years at one of the universities. Leisure time also allowed for the growth of jousts or tournaments, the football (soccer) of its day.

If you've never seen the Heath Ledger movie A Knights Tale, watch it. The anachronisms are legion. But the movie captures the spirit of a medieval tournament, and is good brain candy.

Note: these tournaments were similar to today’s modern rodeo, a celebration of skills that are no longer needed in everyday life. With this in mind, we’ll talk about the Ideals of Chivalry vs. Realities of War next month.

Keena Kincaid writes historical romances in which passion, magic and treachery collide to create unforgettable stories. Her books are available from Prairie Rose Publications and Amazon. For more information on her stories, visit her Amazon page, her website, or Facebook.