Life in a Medieval City (20 page)

All the scholars observe that grammar helps in understanding the Holy Scriptures. The Bible, they point out, is rich in figures of speech, and a study of the literary art assists in appreciating it. Like St. Jerome, they compare secular learning to a heathen slave girl; the Hebrew who wishes to marry her must cut her hair and nails; similarly, the Christian who loves secular learning must purify it from all errors so that it will be worthy to serve God.

The authors who are so revered fulfill many needs. They dispense information about everything from medicine to history. Ovid is prized for his moral sayings. Collections of “sentences,” or apothegms containing wise saws from the writings of antique and medieval authors, are popular.

After grammar comes rhetoric, the second of the arts in the trivium, literally the “craft of speech.” In democratic Athens and Rome speechmaking was a major element in public life. In the Middle Ages political oratory has little place, and judicial rhetoric is only beginning to reappear with the revival of Roman law. Yet students practice both these forms of eloquence as school exercises. Of more practical use is the course in letter writing.

Logic, or dialectic, the third subject of the trivium, teaches clear thinking. It leans heavily on Aristotle. Disputation is a teaching method and a pastime. On examination and speech day at a cathedral school, the students may hold competitions in syllogisms, fictitious arguments, harangues, and epigrams.

The scientific part of the curriculum, the quadrivium, is not much influenced by the Greek science that scholars and translators are bringing in from the Moslem world. The pupil at the cathedral school absorbs relatively little true scientific knowledge. He may be given a smattering of natural history from the popular encyclopedias of the Dark Ages, based on Pliny and other Roman sources. He may learn, for example, that ostriches eat iron, that elephants fear only dragons and mice, that hyenas change their sex at will, that weasels conceive by the ear and deliver by the mouth.

The most popular subject in the quadrivium is astronomy, a mixture of science and astrology. Arithmetic involves, as earlier, the
computus
, a body of rules for determining the date of movable feasts. The scholar may also learn the use of the abacus, the computer of the ancient and medieval world. He learns something of the properties of numbers, especially ratio and proportion, and the propositions (without the proofs) of Euclid’s first book of geometry. As part of his geometry course he may acquire some rudiments of geography, studying a map of the world
⁴
that shows the circular earth composed of three continents equal in size—Asia, Africa, and Europe—separated by narrow bands of water. East is at the top, Jerusalem at the center. In various places on the map one may marvel at dragons, sirens, men with dogs’ heads, men with feet turned backward, men with umbrella feet with which they protect themselves from the sun while lying down. It is not a map for finding one’s way, but for illustration and edification. More practical and less picturesque maps exist—mariners’ charts produced by sailors armed with the newly introduced compass and astrolabe, accurately delineating coastlines, capes, bays, and shallows, and locating ports of call and places for watering and victualing so that a navigator can find them easily. But the schoolboy and his teachers know nothing of such maps.

The science of the thirteenth century, in fact, resides mainly outside the schools. Furriers, trappers, hunters, and poachers could correct much of the natural history in the encyclopedias. The craftsmen who are building the cathedral know geology, engineering, geometry, arithmetic, and mineralogy, and have an intimate acquaintance with nature. The capitals of their piers are decorated with leaves of plantain, ivy and oak, arum, ranunculus, fern, clover, coladine, hepatica, columbine, cress, parsley, strawberry, snapdragon, and broom—all observed with care and re-created with precision. The notebook of the great architect-engineer Villard de Honnecourt is filled not only with columns and vaults, but with animal and even insect life—a lobster, parrots, a snail’s shell, a fly, a dragonfly, a grasshopper, not to mention a bear, a lion, a cat, and a swan. Even the gargoyles with which the cathedral workers give an aesthetic justification to their drainspouts reveal a command of animal anatomy.

Many of the businessmen fathers of the cathedral school-boys are aware of a truly remarkable new piece of learning, a historic advance in the most basic of all sciences, mathematics. Introduced into western Europe from Moslem North Africa, not by a scholar, but by an Italian businessman, it is nothing less than the use of Arabic numbers. Leonard Fibonacci, a Pisan, has written a treatise called
Liber Abaci
popularizing the new system and summarizing the arithmetical knowledge of the Arabs. The numerals (actually Indian in origin) are spreading through the Italian business community. The key to the Hindu-Arabic system is the zero, which permits the position of the digit to indicate its value as unit, ten, hundred, or thousand. Rapid and accurate computation can be done, something difficult with clumsy Roman numbers. The businessmen of Troyes still prefer their calculating boards, but they are familiar with the new notation through their contacts with Italian businessmen and moneychangers at the fairs.

The cathedral school offers no French grammar, composition, or literature, no languages except Latin—not even Greek. It teaches no history, except a bit incidentally in the grammar course, and no science, except a little natural science that emerges from a study of the “authors.” Music is taught only as a theoretical science. There are no courses in social science, physical education, or art.

The use of Latin throughout the schools gives a wide currency to ideas and makes sources of culture accessible to everyone, even though students probably never learn to read it as proficiently as their native French, English, or German. Latin is a cultural catalyst, but it is also an impediment to self-expression and communication.

There is no university in Troyes, which is not surprising, since there are only five in northwest Europe
⁵
—at Paris, Orléans, Angers, Oxford, and Cambridge. There are three more in the south of France, eleven in Italy, three in Spain. Of these twenty-two, the two oldest, at Bologna and Paris, are by far the most important. Their precise origins are lost in the twelfth century, but they are true archetypes, for the Greeks and Romans had no universities.

A bright alumnus of the cathedral school at Troyes who wishes to continue his education may journey to Paris, only a hundred miles away. If he does, he will join some two or three thousand young men in the Latin Quarter, who every morning grope their way out of their lodgings to join the crowd of clerical gowns and tonsured heads hurrying to the Street of the Straw, so-named from the floor covering on which students sit all morning. At noon the scholars break for dinner, meeting again in the afternoon for another lecture or a disputation. When the day is over they may turn to studying or copying by candlelight, or, since all forms of athletics, and even chess, are prohibited, to gaming, drinking, and whoring. Although scholars usually enter the university at fourteen or fifteen, their private lives are almost entirely unsupervised. There are no university buildings.
⁶
Classes are held in the masters’ houses. Student lodgings, schools, and brothels are cheek by jowl, and sometimes masters and students conduct disputations on the second floor, whores and pimps on the first.

The favorite sport of university students is fighting—with each other, with the townspeople, with the provost’s guard. Some of their riots make history, for the University of Paris is by 1250 an institution of formidable stature. A democratic anomaly in the heart of a feudal monarchy, it enjoys remarkable power and prestige and extraordinary privileges. Though it has a charter from the king of France, it is thoroughly international, with some of its most celebrated scholars from Italy, Germany, and England. Pope Innocent III was a master at Paris; Thomas Aquinas is studying there in 1250.

Though the University of Paris is famous for its faculty of theology,
⁷
the learning it transmits to most of its students is more secular than that of the cathedral schools. Aristotle is the supreme text and master. After six years’ study a student may face the examiners, and if he passes receive a license to teach. Ultimately he may take orders and become a church official, or a scholarly luminary at this or another university. He may go on to study medicine or law, both lucrative and prestigious professions. He may become a copyist. Or he may enter the service of some prince or baron. For a young burgher of Troyes, the count of Champagne’s service is most attractive. He can rise to become bailiff, or keeper of the Fair, with splendid emoluments, not to mention opportunities for graft. Education pays, in the thirteenth as in other centuries.

12.

Books and Authors

Sire cuens, j’ai vielé
Devant vous en vostre ostel,
Si ne m’avez rien doné
Ne mes gages aquité:
     C’est vilanie!

[
Sir count, I have played the
viol before you in your house, and
you have given me nought, nor paid my
expenses: ’Tis villainy!
]

—
COLIN MUSET

A
number of students in the twelfth century followed none of the conventional paths. Instead they undertook the footloose and precarious existence of wandering scholars, drifting from one school or one patron to another, passing their days in taverns, living by their wits. Some of them, the so-called “Goliards,” contributed to the world’s literature a stock of Latin verse of a new kind—lyric, frankly pagan, satirical, and irreverent.

But many of the poets who have created a literary revival in the past century and a half write in the vernacular, especially in one of two varieties of French—Provençal or northern. An important center for the latter is Troyes. Count Henry the Generous and his bluestocking countess, Marie, daughter of Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine, patronized a number of poets, of whom the most famous was Chrétien de Troyes. Chrétien’s verse tales of the Round Table not only are of high literary merit, but serve as the chief source of all Arthurian romances.

Another sort of Champenois literary production came out of the Fourth Crusade. Geoffroi de Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne and native of the neighborhood of Troyes, helped sack Constantinople and afterwards wrote an account of his adventures whose naive vigor and honesty won him a niche in literature as well as history. Neither a clerk nor a poet, but a plain soldier, Geoffroi wrote in vernacular prose, and so won the distinction of creating the very first masterpiece in French prose.

The present count of Champagne, Thibaut IV, is a poet. Guarded through his minority by his capable mother, Blanche of Navarre, Thibaut grew up to marry, one after the other, a Hapsburg, a Beaujeu, and a Bourbon princess, by whom he had eight children. To these children he added four more, products of his numerous love affairs. But the enduring passion of his life was a chaste one, owing to the inaccessibility of its object, the queen of France. This lady, Blanche of Castile, wife and widow of Louis VIII and mother of Louis IX (St.-Louis), was a dozen years Thibaut’s senior. Nevertheless Thibaut’s penchant for Blanche was such that he was suspected of poisoning her husband when the king died suddenly. The injustice of the accusation provoked Thibaut to join a couple of baronial troublemakers, Hugo of La Marche and Peter of Brittany, in a sort of antiroyal civil war. When on sober second thought Thibaut changed his mind, Hugo and Peter turned their spite against him and invaded Champagne, setting haystacks and hovels ablaze. Stopped by the walls of Troyes, they were forced to turn around and go home when a relieving force arrived, sent by Queen Blanche.

Partly as a result of the war, Thibaut was constrained to sell three of his cities—Blois, Chartres and Sancerre—to the king of France. At the last moment he felt a reluctance to hand over Blois, cradle of his dynasty, and carried stubbornness to the point of courting a royal invasion. But forty-six-year-old Blanche of Castile dissuaded thirty-three-year-old Thibaut in an interview of which the dialogue was recorded, or at least reported, by a chronicler:

Blanche:
Pardieu, Count Thibaut, you ought to have remembered the kindness shown you by the king my son, who came to your aid, to save your land from the barons of France when they would have set fire to it all and laid it in ashes.

Thibaut
(overcome by the queen’s beauty and virtue): By my faith, madame, my heart and my body and all my land is at your command, and there is nothing which to please you I would not readily do; and against you or yours, please God, I will never go.

Thibaut’s fancy for Blanche needed sublimation. Sage counselors recommended a study of canzonets for the viol, as a result of which Thibaut soon began turning out “the most beautiful canzonets anyone had ever heard” (a judgment in which a later day concurs). The verses of Thibaut the Songwriter were sung by trouvères and jongleurs throughout Europe. A favorite:

Las! Si j’avois pouvoir d’oublier

Sa beauté, a beauté, son bien dire,