Turning to medieval violence, we have two items to share:
Medieval Hermit Pope Not Murdered, as Believed
Discovery.com reports that Italian researchers have debunked the theory that Pope Celestine V was killed by a nail to the head. They explain that a half-inch hole that can be seen in the remains of his skull was made long after he died, probably during one of his reburials.
Pope Celestine was a hermit monk who accepted the papacy in 1294 at age 85, but then months later resigned. It was believed that his successor, Pope Boniface VIII, had him murdered.
Tor Vergata of the University of Rome explained, “We can’t establish the real cause of death. A previous research carried test for heavy metal poisoning with negative results.”
Husband Castrates Wife's Lover, Then Sues (Medieval Style!)
Katherine O'Meara, writing in The Prodigal Ex Pat, tells us about a court case from Ireland in the year 1307. She came across the court case while her writing her thesis - it involves John Don (Dunne) of Youghal, Cork, his wife Basilia, and her lover Stephen le Clerk. I won't give it away, for it is a good read, but now I know what 'abciderunt ejus testiculos' means and that I should never trust a taverner!
Jorge Mario Bergoglio has become the latest man to follow in the footsteps of Saint Peter and become the Bishop of Rome and Pope of the Catholic Church.
The Argentinian Cardinal has chosen his papal name to be Pope Francis, inspired by Saint Francis of Assisi, the 13th century Italian who founded the Franciscans.
In an article from the Washington Post, some of the reasons why Cardinal Bergoglio took the name Francis are discussed. Chad Pecknold, assistant professor of theology at the Catholic University of America, commented “I think he’s going to be the people’s pope. We often associate Saint Francis with incredible love for humanity.”
You can learn more about the founder of the Franciscan Order from there two articles:
It was hard to find a video detailing the life of St Francis of Assisi, but I did come across this - A Day in the Life of St Francis - which has its own unique take on the man...
Voting is a quintessentially medieval activity. Sure, popular representations of the Middle Ages focus on kings and knights, princesses and peasants, but medieval people, especially in cities, loved to vote. They organized themselves into groups - guilds, religious fraternities, charitable organization, drinking societies - and wrote complicated bylaws governing elections. Many cities embraced various kinds of representative government during the High Middle Ages. Even the army outside the walls of Constantinople in 1204 took time to develop a voting system to elect the next emperor.
With a new Pope about to be chosen, it might be a good time to look at some of his predecessors, and hope that the next heir to St. Peter will not be like any of these pontiffs from the Middle Ages...
Pope Stephen VI
(896-897)
Also called Stephen VII, this Pope's short reign is mostly known for having put on trial the previous Pope...who was dead. Stephen ordered the body of Pope Formosus exhumed, dressed in the Papal vestments, and set upon a throne. In what is known as the Cadaver Synod, Stephen charged the rotting corpse with perjury, coveting the Papacy, and breaking other church laws. During the trial, Pope Stephen screamed at Formosus, as well as mocked and insulted him.
Formosus was found guilty, and was punished by having his clothes stripped off, three of his fingers chopped off, and the rest of the body thrown into the Tiber River.
Stephen's reign did not last much longer - he was strangled to death.
(955-964)
For much of the tenth century, the city of Rome was dominated by the Theophylact family, and they often made the decision who would sit on St. Peter's Throne. Perhaps they didn't have too many choices, but it is hard to imagine they could not have picked someone better than John XII, who is about 18 years old when he became Pope. His youth had one benefit, as began his pontificate by personally leading armies against the local enemies.
However, it soon became apparent that John was more interested in the women of Rome than in handling church affairs. His antics eventually led to Emperor Otto I calling a synod to depose the young Pope. According to one chronicler, the charges against John included:
He had fornicated with the widow of Rainier, with Stephana his father's concubine, with the widow Anna, and with his own niece, and he made the sacred palace into a whorehouse. They said that he had gone hunting publicly; that he had blinded his confessor Benedict, and thereafter Benedict had died; that he had killed John, cardinal subdeacon, after castrating him; and that he had set fires, girded on a sword, and put on a helmet and cuirass. All, clerics as well as laymen, declared that he had toasted to the devil with wine. They said when playing at dice, he invoked Jupiter, Venus and other demons. They even said he did not celebrate Matins at the canonical hours nor did he make the sign of the cross.
Pope John retaliated by excommunicating the synod, and when he caught three of the men who took part, he had one flogged, cut off the right hand of the second, and removed the nose and ears of the third. Alas, his reign ended soon after, at the age of 27, when was "stricken by paralysis in the act of adultery" and died.
Pope Benedict IX
(1032 - off and on to 1048)
Another descendant of the Theophylact family, Benedict was at least 20 when he became Pope. Sexual scandals soon started, leading many church officials to complain about him. The Abbot of Monte Cassino, who later became a Pope too, wrote about "his rapes, murders and other unspeakable acts. His life as a pope was so vile, so foul, so execrable, that I shudder to think of it."
What also sets Benedict apart from most other popes was that he resigned as well. Unlike Pope Benedict XVI, who resigned because of his old age, this Benedict resigned in exchange for a large sum of money - bribed by his godfather John Gratian, who then became the new Pope, Gregory VI. However, Benedict soon had seller's remorse, and over the next Rome and the St.Peter's was fought over between the various sides. Eventually the German Emperor came down and removed all the contenders, naming a new Pope. Benedict lived on until 1056, but never regained the Papacy.
Pope Boniface VIII
(1294-1303)
Before he became Pope, Boniface was instrumental in persuading his predecessor, Pope Celestine V, to retire. Once he got to the Papal Throne, Boniface decided that having Celestine around was too much of a threat, so he captured the elderly man and imprisoned him until his death ten months later.
Most of his reign was spent in conflicts with the other states in Italy, but Boniface got in trouble when he decided to pick a fight with Philip IV, King of France. Eventually, he excommunicated the French king and proclaimed that all monarchs were subordinate to the Papacy. Philip responded by sending an army into Italy, where they captured Boniface at his summer retreat in Anagni. The French troops beat up and nearly killed Boniface - three days later he was dead, perhaps killing himself.
The Italian poet Dante, in his work The Divine Comedy, has Boniface relegated to the eight circle of hell for simony.
Pope Alexander VI
(1492-1503)
While he may not have been guilty of all the deeds depicted in the popular show The Borgias, Pope Alexander VI was one of the most notorious schemers to hold the papacy. He made many efforts to enrich his family and get his children into positions of power, and he also had enough time to have a mistress.
His death in 1503 is something of a mystery - Alexander may have been poisoned, and his son Cesare Borgias was suspected of committing the crime. Rumours soon spread, aided by the rapid decomposition of Alexander's remains. One person who saw the body commented, "It was a revolting scene to look at that deformed, blackened corpse, prodigiously swelled, and exhaling an infectious smell; his lips and nose were covered with brown drivel, his mouth was opened very widely, and his tongue, inflated by poison, fell out upon his chin; therefore no fanatic or devotee dared to kiss his feet or hands, as custom would have required."
A Dash Of Olive Oil May Preserve British Cathedral
A report from NPR about using the oleic acid from Olive Oil to preserve York Minster in England
Will this be the last Pope?
According to areport from Discovery.com, a 12th century prophecy suggests that the about-to-be-elected Pope will be the last one before the Last Judgment. Apparently, in 1139 an Irish archbishop named St. Malachy gave Pope Innocent II a list of who the next 112 Popes will be.
This 112th Pope will be named Peter the Roman, and according to the prophecy will “feed his flock amid many tribulations, after which the City of the Seven Hills shall be utterly destroyed, and the awful Judge will judge the people.”
The document containing the prophecy was found in the Vatican Archives in 1590, and many scholars believe it was actually created in the sixteenth century.
The Cat and the Manuscript
This great picture went viral last week - Emir O. Filipovic, a scholar working in the Dubrovnik State Archives in Croatia, found this when he opened up a manuscript. Apparently, a 15th-century cat must have got his paws into the ink, then onto this document. Emir took a photo of it, and later on tweeted to Erik Kwakkel and from there it went call over the world. Click here to read Emir's article about it.
Beginning today, we will be changing how the Medieval News blog is presented. We hope to bring you a new post every day or two, which will cover what medieval and history news stories are out there, and some interesting things that were also found online. We hope you enjoy the links and videos!
Pope Benedict XVI announced today that he will be resigning as the Pontiff effective February 28, 2013. Also known as Joseph Ratzinger, the 85-year old Pope has been suffering from poor health. Still, this is a very surprising announcement, with the last Pope to resign being Gregory XII in 1415. A few months ago, we posted about The Pope who Quit, by Jon M. Sweeney, which details the papal intrigues surrounding the resignation of Celestine V in 1294.
The Financial Times has profiled the British Library's efforts at digitizing its 25,000 medieval manuscripts, and profiles six of these items. Claire Breay, head of medieval and earlier manuscripts at the British Library, explains “Anybody can enjoy them whether they are the leading academic on some aspect of that manuscript … or a schoolchild doing a project." Some beautiful images here.
Jason Peters has been examining records related to royal forests in Huntingdonshire during the Middle Ages. Using local archives and geographic computer programs, he was able to locate various royal and private forests in the county. In fact, nearly all of the county was legally considered a forest.
Peters explains, “A Norman-Medieval forest was, in effect, a legally defined conservation area where no matter who was the landowner construction, resource exploitation, habitat degradation and hunting of game could not be undertaken without Crown approval. The Forest of County Huntingdon was an evolving, dynamic, socio-political phenomenon, not limited to woodland habitat but extending across pastures, Fenlands, arable, meadows and rivers.
“There is 800 years of history that hasn’t been understood. People could be living somewhere that was a forest. By mapping areas that we now know were woods, we can understand the ecology of the area, which could be very important when considering any future development.”
The City of Leicester is already showcasing the story of Richard III, and has a temporary exhibition about the discovery of the English King. Here is a video of how it looks:
Richard III Memes
Some pretty funny work being done with Richard III this week...
Top Tips for Visiting Medieval Cairo
Finally, I want to point you to a podcast I heard the other day: Elizabeth Eva Leach, Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, spoke as part of the Engage: Social Media Talks series, about Blogging and Tweeting. Professor Leach is a medievalist who has developed a very good website about her work, and also tweets from @eeleach. For those interested in using social media as part of their academic career, this is well worth a listen too!
The Pope Who Quit: A True Medieval Tale of Mystery, Death and Salvation
By Jon M. Sweeney
Published by Image Books, 2012
Reviewed by Michael Walsh
During the late Pope John Paul II’s long, drawn-out illness, one of the FAQs was, inevitably, can a pope resign? The answer, of course, was yes. A pope has done so, and therefore one might do so again.
Practically every commentator at the time seemed to be aware that Celestine V (1294) had given up the papal office. As the distinguished historian Maurice Powicke long ago remarked, it is a well-known story. Author Jon Sweeney takes issue with the Powicke view, but the story is known to anyone who has ever opened a history of the papacy. It is, nonetheless, a story worth retelling.
In the long sede vacante following the death of Pope Nicholas IV (1288-92), Charles II of Sicily was desperate for a pope, any pope, who would ratify his secret treaty of La Junquera. A monk, Peter Morrone, was conveniently at hand. The king did not write Morrone’s letter to the cardinals in their prolonged conclave, but he may well have inspired it. The letter precipitated Morrone’s election as Celestine V.
The big question of Celestine’s pontificate is, did Peter Morrone -- as he once was and after his pontificate returned to being -- jump from the throne, or was he pushed?
Sweeney spends a good many of his 250 pages describing the spiritual milieu in which Celestine was formed. He emphasizes Morrone’s holiness and love of solitude. Sweeney’s conclusion necessarily follows: Celestine left the papal office because he judged he could not fulfill it. The only proper thing for a holy man to do, therefore, was to resign (not a scruple that seems to have worried too many Roman pontiffs).
A collaboration between the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana at the Vatican will bring historical texts dating back to the Middle Ages into the digital era. 1.5 million pages from both collections will be digitised and made publicly available.
The Bodleian Libraries and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana will embark on a new collaborative digitisation project with the aim of opening up repositories of medieval and early modern texts and making a selection of their remarkable treasures freely available online to researchers and the general public worldwide.
The digitised collections will be in three subject areas: Greek manuscripts, 15th-century printed books (incunabula) and Hebrew manuscripts and early printed books. These areas have been chosen for the strength of the collections in both libraries and their importance for scholarship in their respective fields. The project will span four years and will result in approximately 1.5 million pages being made available in digital format
Three of the letters brought from Vatican archives to Azerbaijan last December were interpreted.
Chief of translation and information department of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences Institute of Manuscripts Farid Alekberli told APA.
The letters were sent by the Roman pontiffs to Safavid Shah Abbas I. One of the letters were written by Roman Pontiff Paul V. He spoke about the bilateral political relations, as well as Safavid envoys to Vatican. In the letter dated back 20 July, 1605, Paul V apologized to Shah Abbas I for killing of his envoy Bayramgulu Bey in Rome. The pontiff said that he regretted that couldn’t prevent this murder, but looking forward for friendly relations with Safavid House. The pontiff sent three envoys to Azerbaijan – Paul Simon, Joan Tadeusz and Zimsend. These envoys were appointed before the Paul V’s papacy by Pope Clement VIII.
Jeremy Irons looked up from the latest tiny cigarette he’d rolled and raised an eyebrow. It’s amazing how much meaning some people can convey with one bit of facial hair. We’d been talking about the licentiousness of Rodrigo Borgia, the character Irons plays in the new nine-part series The Borgias, who schemed his way into the Vatican as Pope Alexander VI in 1492. Rodrigo caroused, slept around, left his by-blows all over Spain and Italy. It really was a different time, wasn’t it? Right?
“He did have a mistress,” said Irons in that famous, just-rolled-out-of-the-wrong-bed voice – the voice of Scar, the bad lion, and Claus von Bulow, the bad husband, and now Borgia, the bad pope. “But I have a Cardinal friend at the moment who's had a mistress for 12 years. He's a Cardinal today, and a great man!”
One day early in the sixteen-twenties, an archivist working in the library of the Holy See stumbled upon a text of Procopius’s “Historia Arcana” (“The Secret History”), which painted a devastating new portrait of the Emperor Justinian and his inner circle as venal, corrupt, immoral, and un-Christian. The discovery set off a bitter debate about just who Justinian was, and raised questions about the way history is written. The tale of its discovery also exemplifies some of the paradoxical problems that have long haunted the institution in which it was found: the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Vatican Apostolic Library—or, as its present-day users call it, the Vat. One problem is obvious: the Vat’s collection, which has been accreting since the mid-fourteen-hundreds, is so vast that even the people who run it haven’t always known what they’re sitting on top of. Another is that although the library was founded as, essentially, a public information resource, the Vatican itself has had a historically vexed relationship to knowledge, power, secrecy, and authority.
Dr Joanna Story, Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Leicester, will deliver a keynote lecture at the prestigious Old St Peter’s conference taking place at the British School at Rome from the 22nd to the 25th March.
Old St Peter's was built by the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine, in the early fourth century, over the site where the Apostle Peter was thought to have been buried. The massive basilica - the biggest in the western empire - became the focus of St Peter's cult and the most important church in western Christendom for 1300 years until its destruction in the 16th century. But despite its central importance and the survival of extensive documentary, artistic and archaeological evidence, many secrets remain to be uncovered.
This major international conference brings together academics from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Florence, Rome and many other top institutions to deliver papers on the history of the basilica.
Dr Story will deliver a lecture entitled ‘The Carolingians and Old St Peter’s’, which will focus on the gifts given by Charlemagne’s family to St Peter which were placed within the basilica.
Dr Story commented:“Old St Peter's was a vast structure that fired the faith and imagination of kings and pilgrims throughout the Middle Ages. It was almost totally destroyed during the Renaissance, but surviving fragments and eye witness accounts that date from as early as the eighth century mean that we can reconstruct in detail its function as a ‘theatre’ of worship, burial and power throughout the Middle Ages.”
‘Old St Peter’s Conference’ takes place from the 22 – 25 March at the British School at Rome. To visit the conference’s website, please visit http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/oldstpeters/
Conservation work has been completed on the Papal Bull which granted medieval Scotland its first university, the University of St Andrews.
The Bull of Foundation is one of a series of six letters from the Pope, sent in 1413, which together brought the University fully and formally into existence.
This document embodies the 1412 charter, issued by Bishop Henry Wardlaw, which granted the masters and students of St Andrews recognition as a properly constituted corporation. It marks the culmination of three years of academic development and the birth of the third oldest university in the English-speaking world.
Having been stored for years in a portfolio folder, this surviving piece of the history of Scottish education was showing its age, as it approached its 600th anniversary.
A team of experts at the University of Dundee Book and Paper Conservation Studio spent three weeks giving the Bull its 600 year service, at a total cost of £600 - just £1 for every year of its life.
Work included surface cleaning, the repair of vulnerable edge tears, the realignment of the document's silk tag, and the provision of a cutting-edge storage box and mount to allow safe storage and display.
With the Papal Bull preserved and protected, plans are now being developed for a `tour of goodwill' to allow people the opportunity to connect with Scottish history and the 600th anniversary of the University of St Andrews.
University of St Andrews Muniments Archivist Rachel Hart said: "We are the custodians of a vital piece of evidence not only of the University's history but also of its place as an international seat of learning within the history of Scotland. The Bull of Foundation is an amazing document to see and I hope that with the 600th anniversary approaching, many may have the opportunity."
In May 1410 a group of masters, mainly graduates of Paris, initiated a school of higher studies in St Andrews, the seat of the greatest bishopric in Scotland and location of a monastery noted as a centre for learning. By February 1412 the society had established itself sufficiently to obtain a charter of incorporation and privileges from the Bishop, Henry Wardlaw. This granted the masters and students recognition as a properly constituted corporation, duly privileged and safeguarded for the pursuit of learning. However, recognised university status and the authority to grant degrees could only be conferred by the Pope or the Emperor as heads of Christendom.
At time there was a schism in the Church and two rival papacies. Scotland believed that the Avignon Pope, now exiled in Peñiscola, was the lawful Pope. Accordingly, confirmation was sought from Pope Benedict XIII and in August 1413 a series of Papal Bulls were issued. With their promulgation in St Andrews Priory on 4 February 1414, the University of St Andrews may be said to have come fully and formally into existence.
The University of St Andrews will be marking its 600th anniversary in 2013.
