by CKR
Thomas Cahill tells us what he thinks is a Christmas story for our times. Perhaps St. Francis did indeed go along on the Fifth Crusade and make friends with Muslims. But there’s more to the background than Cahill tells us.
Cahill has written a new book he’d like you to buy. He spoke here in Santa Fe a few months ago, but parking was so bad that I decided not to bother with the crowd. I was intrigued by the promise of his finding the origins of feminism in what is sometimes called the High Middle Ages.
I looked at his book in the bookstore, haven’t read it; apparently he credits the orders of nuns, new at that time, with encouraging women into something that he considers the beginnings of feminism. It’s hard for me to trace direct lines of thought back that far, but perhaps he does. It wasn’t what I found in my study of the middle ages, and, as far as I could tell from flipping through his book, he didn’t find what I did.
That’s the trouble with history, of course, particularly as far back as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for which the sources are limited: it’s easy to cobble together a story that goes along with one’s prejudices. That may be what I’m doing, too. My interpretation of this bit of history has little support from the official historians; I’ve found one book that comes close. But I’ve got the events all here and in chronological order.
What Cahill ignores are the late twelfth-century courts of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Marie of Champagne, her daughter by King Louis VII of France. He ignores the literature that came out of those courts, and the follow-ons by Gottfried of Strassburg and Wolfram of Eschenbach*, in Germany. Women and men told stories in the French courts, and some wrote them down. Those stories were about knights and women, how they dealt with warfare and the return home, and their personal, emotional conflicts. Those stories were lightly grouped around the court of a King Arthur of Britain, lightly, not the forced unity we see today.
Ah yes, you may be thinking, courtly love; but these stories were not of the highly stylized interactions many think of today under that rubric. They were of people working out the difficulties of a life lived outside the direction of priests. The knight rode into the forest where there was no path. I consider them the beginnings of individualism and the novel, maybe even of the dreaded secular humanism.
There were others dissatisfied with the oppression of a Church that must have gone stale. Perhaps they were dissatisfied with a Church that preached war when it found no other way to motivate people. Sects like the Cathars and Waldensians were springing up, and of course there had been contact with Islam, both in Iberia and the Holy Land, for several centuries.
The Church recognized the individualistic threat in those secular stories and the organizational threat from the dissidents. St. Francis may have been responding to the dissident societal currents when he founded his “hippie” order, or he may have been part of a more orchestrated response. Perhaps he genuinely wanted peace and simplicity and was going against the Church in his own way while staying within it, as Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform Communism from within. However, about the time that Francis was doing his thing, someone who may have belonged to the older Cistercian monastic order wrote a series of stories, the Morte d’Arthur, which put a different slant on Arthur and his knights.
The Cistercian version of the stories presents the characters in a different moral world. Every time a quandry arises, an itinerant priest shows up to tell them God’s Holy Will, which frequently includes confession. Confession had been upgraded to a requirement at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and it needed some hype. The Morte d’Arthur also introduced a virgin and sinless knight, Galahad, who “attained” the Holy Grail, which seems to have meant dying before his purity could be corrupted. Galahad’s virtue contrasted with his father’s, Lancelot’s, sins of the flesh, just as this Holy Grail, which looked much like an ethereal communion cup, contrasted with the pagan graal,a platter that provided the food and drink of everyone’s desire.
A propaganda war, then, in the early thirteenth century! And St. Francis was part of it.
Wolfram’s Parzival, probably written in that same lively time between 1205 and 1215, features wise women who raise Parzival, tell him his true name, guide him through his hard times, and bear his children during his quest in which he learns compassion. When I first read Joseph Campbell’s shortened version of the story in Creative Mythology, I thought that there had to be more to it, that the women were a larger part of the story than Campbell allowed them to be. So I bought the Hatto translation of Parzival and picked up the adjacent Cistercian Quest for the Holy Grail as well. I found I was right, and, as a bonus, reading the two books side by side was enlightening. Wolfram’s Parzival was half-brother to a Muslim warrior, and they reconcile at the end of the book. The reconciliation leads to the half-brother being baptized, but that was what Francis was after, too.
Cahill tells us that Francis went along on the Fifth Crusade to preach peace. I’m not sure which crusade he’s talking about; probably the crusade against the sultanate of Egypt in 1217. The numbering of the crusades gets fuzzy after the Fourth in 1204, as the legitimacy of crusading began to break down. In the Fourth Crusade, the Crusaders, short of money, got distracted by negotiations with Venice for transport to the Holy Land via ship and decided to attack Constantinople, the eastern seat of the Church, instead of the infidels. The split in the Church persists to today.
In 1209, Crusaders were authorized by the Church to go after the Cathars in southern France. That was mixed in with French politics; Paris wanted more unambiguous rule, which neatly dovetailed with the Church’s desire to eliminate the dissidents. This crusade continued into the 1230s. And then the Germans headed east to civilize the Baltic pagans via the sword. Both crusades were highly successful for the crusaders. The one in Egypt wasn’t.
Wolfram and Gottfried, who wrote a version of Tristan and Isolde with some of the same themes as Wolfram’s, may have been killed as heretics in all this; we don’t know their fate.
History is written by the victors, and the Church was victorious in delaying the Reformation for more than two hundred years. The price was an anarchic and plague-stricken Europe, as Barbara Tuchman described in A Distant Mirror that didn’t recover until it could exploit the riches of the New World. Martin Luther more or less accomplished what the dissidents of the thirteenth century may have been trying to do. Sir Thomas Malory rewrote the stories of King Arthur’s knights yet again. Malory liked battles and knights’ heads split open and guts in the dirt.
I keep wondering what our world would be like if we had been able to stick with Wolfram, Gottfried and the twelfth-century romances.
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* This site is infected by some of the post-hoc additions by the Cistercians, Malory, and other redactors of the Arthur stories. But it’s not bad in outline.