A Beginner’s Guide to Gothic Architecture
This chapter contains:
Beginner’s guide to Gothic Architecture
Sculpture and Portable Objects
Italy, Germany, and the Czech Republic
“Ile-de-France”; “in the French manner”
lux nova
Notre Dame = Our Lady
pointed arch
ribbed vaults
flying buttress
piers and colonettes
lancet windows
rose window
bar tracery
triforium
clerestory
Gallery of Kings
harmonic facade
jamb figures
So, rather than having massive, drum-like columns as in the Romanesque churches, the new columns could be more slender. This slimness was repeated in the upper levels of the nave, so that the gallery and clerestory would not seem to overpower the lower arcade. In fact, the column basically continued all the way to the roof, and became part of the vault.
In the vault, the pointed arch could be seen in three dimensions where the ribbed vaulting met in the center of the ceiling of each bay. This ribbed vaulting is another distinguishing feature of Gothic architecture. However, it should be noted that prototypes for the pointed arches and ribbed vaulting were seen first in late-Romanesque buildings.
The new understanding of architecture and design led to more fantastic examples of vaulting and ornamentation, and the Early Gothic or Lancet style (from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) developed into the Decorated or Rayonnant Gothic (roughly fourteenth century). The ornate stonework that held the windows–called tracery–became more florid, and other stonework even more exuberant.
The ribbed vaulting became more complicated and was crossed with lierne ribs into complex webs, or the addition of cross ribs, called tierceron. As the decoration developed further, the Perpendicular or International Gothic took over (fifteenth century). Fan vaulting decorated half-conoid shapes extending from the tops of the columnar ribs.
The slender columns and lighter systems of thrust allowed for larger windows and more light. The windows, tracery, carvings, and ribs make up a dizzying display of decoration that one encounters in a Gothic church. In late Gothic buildings, almost every surface is decorated. Although such a building as a whole is ordered and coherent, the profusion of shapes and patterns can make a sense of order difficult to discern at first glance.
After the great flowering of Gothic style, tastes again shifted back to the neat, straight lines and rational geometry of the Classical era. It was in the Renaissance that the name Gothic came to be applied to this medieval style that seemed vulgar to Renaissance sensibilities. It is still the term we use today, though hopefully without the implied insult, which negates the amazing leaps of imagination and engineering that were required to build such edifices.
by DR. BETH HARRIS and DR. STEVEN ZUCKER
Gothic Art on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
Source: Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker and Valerie Spanswick, “Gothic architecture, an introduction,” in Smarthistory, January 25, 2023, accessed November 4, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/gothic-architecture-an-introduction/.
Cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres, c.1145 and 1194-c.1220, Chartres (France)
URL: https://youtu.be/Jk3VsinLgvc
Chartres Cathedral on Google Maps
Chartres Cathedral on Mapping Gothic France
Source: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres,” in Smarthistory, December 18, 2015, accessed November 18, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/cathedral-of-notre-dame-de-chartres-part-1-of-3/.
The blaze that engulfed the Cathedral of Notre Dame on the small Island known as the Île de la Cité in Paris in April 2019 was a terrible tragedy. Though it may not give us much comfort to learn that the total or partial destruction of churches by fire was a fairly common occurrence in medieval Europe, it does provide some perspective. For example, a fire destroyed most of Chartres Cathedral in 1020 (and again in 1194), in the city of Reims, the cathedral was badly damaged in a fire in 1210, and at Beauvais, the cathedral was rebuilt after a fire in the 1180s. The list goes on and on.
During the medieval periods of the Romanesque and the Gothic (c. 1000-1400), church fires were less frequent than they had been previously due to the development of stone vaulting (which began to replace the timber ceilings commonly found in European churches). But even a stone vault, as we saw at Notre Dame in Paris, is itself protected by a timber roof (sometimes rising more than 50 feet above the stone vaulting and pitched to prevent the accumulation of rain and snow), and this is what caught fire.
Art historian Caroline Brazelius, who has worked on the building for years said, “between the vaults and the roof, there is a forest of timber” — old, dry, porous, and highly flammable timber. Still, photographs of the interior show at least some of the stone vaulting survived the recent fire. The builders of Notre Dame used Parisian limestone, but, as Brazelius notes “when it’s exposed to fire, stone is damaged. It doesn’t actually burn….It becomes friable. It chips, and it’s no longer structurally sound.”
Churches are often an amalgamation of architectural styles, the result of building campaigns and modifications undertaken at different times, some due to fire, some due to the desire for what a new style represents, and some due to (often inaccurate) restoration efforts. And on a single site, churches were often built and rebuilt — and this is the case with Notre Dame in Paris. Before the Gothic-style church was built, a Carolingian church occupied the site (it was destroyed during the 9th century Viking invasions), and before that, a 6th century Merovingian Church stood on the site.
If we go back further, to the pre-Christian era, Julius Caesar’s armies famously conquered much of what we call France today (Roman Paris dates back to 52 BCE). Archaeological evidence suggests that a pagan temple and then a Christian basilica were built on this site. The ancient Romans also built a palace for the emperor on the Île de la Cité, and after the Roman empire collapsed, Clovis I, King of the Franks (who converted to Christianity) established his palace there as well. The Île de la Cité would remain the location of a royal residence until the 14th century. As one historian has noted, “Notre Dame … was not only a religious but also a royal monument that displayed the might of the church and the monarchy, each enhancing the power of the other.” [1]
The Gothic Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris took nearly 100 years to complete (c. 1163-1250) and modifications, restorations, and renovations continued for centuries after. The early Gothic style employed at the beginning of the campaign became outdated and the later Gothic style, the Rayonnant, became fashionable and can be seen in the transepts. The crossing spire that the world watched fall while engulfed in flames was a reproduction created during a 19th-century restoration campaign.
In the following centuries, the church (and its sculptural decoration) survived multiple episodes of intentional destruction: during the Protestant Reformation (due to Protestant objection to religious imagery), and during the revolutions of 1789 and 1830 (because of the church’s close association with the monarchy). It remained in a neglected state until Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) revived popular interest the building.
As of this writing, just a few days after the April 15th blaze, evaluation of the damage caused by the fire is only just beginning, but a reported one billion dollars has been already been raised to support the reconstruction of Notre Dame de Paris.
Additional resources:
The Cathedral’s construction (official website of Notre Dame de Paris)
Source: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “The Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Paris,” in Smarthistory, April 24, 2019, accessed November 11, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/notre-dame-fire/.
See also:
URL:https://youtu.be/xsHYPNYmJCs
With its two soaring towers and three large portals filled with sculpture, Amiens Cathedral crowns the northern French city of Amiens. The cathedral is still one of the tallest structures in the city, its spire climbing nearly 400 feet into the air. You can see the skeletal stone structure on the exterior of the church, where flying buttresses support the upper walls like spider legs or a ribcage. The lace-like façade is made up of slender colonnettes and screen-like openings, heightening the contrast of light and shadow. Deeply set portals topped with tall gables pull the viewer in, an invitation to approach the building and cross the threshold.
Through a series of intertwined images, each portal tells a story important to the Christian Church and the local Christian community through its stately sculpture. Within these portals, there is a whole sculpted universe to discover, with a multitude of figures, creatures, and narrative scenes, large and small. Some art historians have called this façade a sermon wrought in stone. If you visit the right portal, you will see images from the life of the Virgin Mary; in the left portal, you’ll find the story of Saint Firmin, the first bishop of Amiens, and images of local saints. Let’s take a closer look at the central portal.
The central portal announces its importance through its emphasized height and width. This is where you will find the trumeau figure of Christ—the Beau Dieu, or beautiful God—surrounded by the twelve apostles. You’ll notice that the figures on the portal at Amiens are sculpted with a high degree of realism, and that their heavy drapery hangs in languid folds on the figures’ bodies.
The Beau Dieu looks out onto visitors to the cathedral with an expression of peace, holding one hand in a gesture of blessing and a book in the other, signifying the importance of the biblical text. Originally, this figure and the rest of the portal sculpture would have been painted in dazzling colors, enhancing their lifelike qualities. Some of this polychromy remains along the hem of the Beau Dieu’s garment and in the outward gaze of the eyes.
Above the trumeau, the tympanum depicts two more images of Christ. One version of Christ appears seated between kneeling figures of the Virgin Mary and St. John. He presides over the Last Judgment, a biblical event described in the last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, in which the dead are awakened and sorted into Heaven and Hell.
On the lowest register of the tympanum, we see figures awakening from their tombs while St. Michael, flanked by trumpeting angels, weighs the souls of the dead. Above this register on the left, St. Francis leads a line of figures clothed in long robes into Heaven, where they are welcomed by St. Peter. On the right side of this register, a demon pushes a line of terrified, naked figures into the jaws of Hell. At the very top of the tympanum, a third image of Christ flies above the whole scene with two swords coming out of his mouth, a representation of the Christ of the Apocalypse, described in the Book of Revelation:
Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: king of kings and lord of lords.Revelation 2:15
In addition to the three depictions of Christ, another set of images carved in relief appear at eye level: the Vices and Virtues. These quatrefoils are presented in pairs: Courage and Cowardice, Patience and Anger, Chastity and Lust.
The Virtues are represented by seated female figures holding shields, while narrative scenes depict the Vices. In the example illustrated here, the vice of cowardice is represented on the bottom as a knight so frightened by a small rabbit that he jumps away and drops his sword. Above, is the virtue of courage represented by a seated figure holding a shield with the image of a lion.
These images suggest to the viewer that they, too, can choose to follow a life of virtue, rather than a life of vice. By following this prescription, he or she can work towards an afterlife in the kingdom of Heaven, like St. Francis, and avoid the jaws of Hell.
When you enter the cathedral (the entrance is on the west side), you might notice that the interior space is organized into three main aisles: a tall central aisle, called the nave, flanked by narrower aisles on either side. The church is laid out in a Latin cross plan, with a transept that intersects the nave and defines the choir.
If you look up, you’ll see that the building is made up of three levels: the arcade, the triforium, and the clerestory of tall windows. The large piers that support the main arcade are over six feet in diameter, supporting a series of pointed arches crowned with quadripartite ribbed groin vaults.
Just below the triforium, you might notice the sculpted foliate band that runs the entire length of the cathedral. This feature is unique to Amiens; no other Gothic cathedral from this period has comparable foliate carving as elaborate or monumental in scale. The foliate band is made up of hundreds of individually sculpted blocks that fit together to create a seamless line of foliage—though if you look closely, you’ll see subtle differences throughout the building. The foliate carving in the nave is robust, while the transepts have less emphasis on the fleshy leaves. In the choir, the pattern changes altogether. The three modes of foliate carving correspond roughly to the three phases of construction carried out by three separate architects.
Little remains of the original stained glass in the clerestory, which has been replaced with clear windows. Originally, light coming into the cathedral would have been filtered through the saturated jewel tones of colored glass. The medieval stained glass was removed before World War I as a precaution, but most of it was destroyed in a fire while in storage. The clear glass was installed later in the 20th century, incorporating fragments of medieval glass that survived. Some of the original panels can be seen in the choir triforium and rose windows.
Amiens Cathedral is not only one of the most important examples of Gothic architecture from the medieval period, it is an experiential work of art signed by its makers. At the center of a large labyrinth, we find a plaque that depicts four men: the bishop Evrard de Foulloy, under whose leadership the cathedral’s construction began, and three architects: Robert de Luzarches, Thomas de Cormont, and Thomas’s son, Renaud. It is unusual that we know the names of these medieval master masons, as few building records from this time survive. These architects directed the construction of the cathedral beginning in 1220 until the installation of the labyrinth pavement in 1288 (today’s pavement, a faithful replica of the original, was replaced in the 1880s). Even though work continued after 1288, much of what we see today is the creation of these architects and their teams of sculptors and stonecutters.
You can notice changes in the building’s design as you compare work in the nave and transepts with the architecture in the choir. The last architect, Renaud de Cormont, made some departures from his father’s design, including installing stained glass behind the triforium instead of opting for a solid wall, changing the decorative sculpture in the capitals, and altering the design of the foliate band.
Unfortunately, some of these changes also led to structural instability in this part of the building. Just before 1500, one of the vaults suffered a partial collapse. The building had to be reinforced by an iron chain (still hidden inside the triforium today), and additional flying buttresses on the exterior.
On the exterior of this part of the building, we also see a difference in the flying buttresses: whereas the flying buttresses in the nave are solid, Renaud chose to use lace-like patterns in the openwork flying buttresses in the choir.
Why did Renaud do this? Art historians don’t have a definitive answer, but it is possible that the architect was responding to trends in Gothic design opting for more light, thinner supports, and more decorative qualities. Whatever the intention, the aesthetic effect is one of extraordinary delicacy.
In the choir, the architecture appears to float, as if the vaults were suspended above with little to support them. The added stained glass in the triforium would have filled this important part of the building—where the canons performed the mass in front of the high altar—with an ethereal light of dazzling color.
Through its architecture, sculpture, and history, Amiens Cathedral provides a window into the practice and culture of religious belief of the Middle Ages, as well as the ingenuity of medieval architects, masons, and artisans. This building stands as an irreplaceable example of the many dynamic forces at work in Gothic architecture.
Amiens Cathedral (official website)
Life of a Cathedral: Notre-Dame of Amiens
Virtual Tour of Amiens Cathedral
Amiens Cathedral Construction Sequence
Source: Dr. Emogene Cataldo, “Amiens Cathedral,” in Smarthistory, March 18, 2021, accessed November 11, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/amiens/.
URL: https://youtu.be/vigjJih8Pn4
Source: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Sainte-Chapelle, Paris,” in Smarthistory, May 24, 2017, accessed November 11, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/sainte-chapelle-paris/.
Source: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Humanizing Mary: the Virgin of Jeanne d’Evreux,” in Smarthistory, October 5, 2017, accessed November 11, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/virgin-jeanne-devreux/.
A knight crawls across a sword-shaped bridge while he is pelted with swords and arrows. A maiden cradles a unicorn’s head in her lap while a hunter pierces the unicorn from behind with a spear. Knights attempt to invade a castle yet are pelted with flowers by the castle’s female inhabitants. A man spies on two lovers from his hiding place within a tree.
What do these scenes have in common? They are just a few examples of the images that adorn a lavish ivory box created in late medieval France.
Just as today’s pop culture can be found repeated across a wide variety of visual formats—movies, comic books, clothing, and memes, to name a few—so it was in the Middle Ages. Popular romances such as the legends of King Arthur and the Romance of the Rose were retold in a plethora of visual adaptations: illuminated manuscripts, textiles, architectural ornament, and small-scale sculpture, such as the ivory box currently at the Walters Art Museum whose imagery is described above.
The ivory box discussed in detail here is one of eight surviving ivory composite caskets. It is composite because the scenes that are carved into relief on its sides and lid hail from a variety of medieval stories and traditions. It is a casket, coming from the French term “coffret,” which translated means casket, but more generally means box; here, it has no connection to death. Far from being a macabre object, such ivory boxes are thought to have played a material role in medieval courtship, possibly given as a gift from one lover to another as a token of his or her affection. About the size of a modern-day jewelry box, these caskets could have held valued trinkets, such as love letters, jewelry, locks of hair, or other small objects of personal significance.
That this ivory casket is one of eight with near identical imagery suggests several ideas to art historians. First, the eight caskets were produced in the same time period and place, likely Paris, a major center of ivory production in fourteenth-century France. As an artistic material, ivory was valuable and highly sought after. Imported during the later Middle Ages from eastern Africa, ivory was used by skilled artisans to render a variety of small scale sculptures, from boxes and statuettes to mirror cases and combs. The close similarities in the subject and style of the caskets’ imagery may point to their creation within a single medieval workshop, or among a group of artisans who were influenced by each other’s work. In addition, the repetition of these scenes of daring deeds and romantic love across the eight caskets suggests that such imagery was popular among a courtly medieval audience.
Late medieval household inventories are evidence that carved ivories were owned by members of nobility and royalty, such as Jean, the Duke of Berry and Clémence of Hungary, Queen of France. Such socially elevated, and therefore educated, patrons would certainly have been aware of and able to “read” the multivalent and playful imagery carved into the caskets, thanks to their familiarity with both the literary texts and oral traditions of the romance genre.
Furthermore, whereas today we distinguish between the sacred and the secular, or the religious and the irreligious (think of the separation between Church and State), this was not the case in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, medieval images of Christian devotion could be found alongside images of mortal life, such as romantic love. This intertwining of Christianity and romance underpins the imagery found on the eight composite ivory caskets.
The Walters Art Museum casket’s lid is decorated with a very busy scene divided into two parts. The metal fastenings that hold the casket together also divide the lid into sections, allowing for it to be read similar to cartoon panels. On each end of the lid, an image known as the “Siege of the Castle of Love” is depicted. Knights armed with a variety of weapons—bows and arrows, and a trebuchet—attempt to gain access to a castle inhabited solely by women. The women respond playfully, fending off the knights’ advances, but with flowers as ammunition!
Although art historians are unsure of the origin of this image, it is also found within illuminated manuscripts (such as the Luttrell Psalter), suggesting that it was a well-known theme during the later Middle Ages. The lid’s two center panels continue the theme of combat, depicting two knights jousting, observed by a balcony full of maidens. Both scenes focus on male combat and female acquiescence and observation, suggesting that the scenes were intended to serve as an allegory of romantic courtship.
Moving from the lid to the left-end panel, the theme of romantic courtship is continued, although here it is juxtaposed with an image of Christian significance. On the left side of the panel, forbidden lovers Tristan and Isolde (from the legends of King Arthur) meet for a secret rendezvous. They are foiled, however, by Tristan’s uncle, King Mark, who spies on them from between the branches of the tree. Luckily, Tristan and Isolde see King Mark’s reflection in a pool of water, and so pretend to be “just friends.”
To the right of this scene of unrequited love, a more violent episode occurs. A maiden holds a chaplet in her right hand. With her left hand, she cradles the head of a unicorn. Unfortunately for the unicorn, a hunter has snuck up behind him, and has pierced him through with a spear. It may seem strange to us, as contemporary viewers, that for a medieval viewer, this violent image of the capture of a mythical creature was symbolic of love. However, such was the case. Indeed, the unicorn as a symbol of love appears in a variety of other medieval artistic contexts, such as the late fifteenth-century unicorn tapestry, now at the Met Cloisters, in which the unicorn is similarly depicted as captive, and serves as a visual metaphor of marriage and fertility.
In the Middle Ages, the unicorn was viewed as a semi-mythical and incredibly shy creature. It was said that the only way to catch a unicorn was to bait it with a virgin girl, symbolic of the dangers of feminine wiles. The unicorn was simultaneously viewed as a symbol of Christ, who was sometimes referred to as a “spiritual unicorn,” because he allowed himself to be killed on account of his love for humanity. Read as one, the killing of the defenseless unicorn, paired with its Christian interpretation, results in this image’s complex meaning—symbolic of both Christ’s sacrifice as well as the perils of feminine seduction in the pursuit of romantic love.
Taken together, the scenes of Tristan and Isolde’s romantic tryst and the death of the unicorn present to viewers two opposing versions of love. Whereas Tristan and Isolde exemplify romantic, physical, and forbidden love, the unicorn represents a Christian’s pure love for Christ as Savior, a love meant to last beyond the mortal world.
Moving to the rear panel of the Walters casket, we come to a further four images from the legends of King Arthur. Like on the casket’s lid, metal fastenings act to divide the rear panel’s imagery into four distinct sections. From left, the first, third, and fourth sections depict the adventures of the gallant Sir Gawain, a true ladies’ man. Neither vicious lion nor hailstorm of swords and arrows will prevent Sir Gawain from rescuing the maidens of the Marvelous Castle, who are depicted in the rightmost section. Meanwhile, in the second from left panel, Sir Lancelot crawls across the infamous Sword Bridge. Like Gawain, he is pelted with weaponry, and the water beneath the bridge churns ominously. Also like Gawain, Lancelot’s chivalrous efforts are for the benefit of a woman—his (forbidden) lover Queen Guinevere, the wife of Lancelot’s friend and lord, King Arthur. These four scenes of knightly daring thus have a more obvious message than the unicorn on the left-end panel. Love, at least in medieval legends, often comes at the price of a grand gesture.
Perhaps for a medieval man or woman, that grand gesture could have been the presentation of this luxury ivory casket to a special someone. The ivory casket would have been an intimate gift— both in terms of its small size, and the close observation required to understand the images. In this way, for their medieval viewers, ivory composite caskets could function as visual surveys of the genre of love, translating into image popular ideas of courtship, chivalry, and romantic and Christian love.
Additional resources:
And the angel thrust in his sharp sickle into the earth, and gathered the vineyard of the earth, and cast it into the great press of the wrath of God (Douay-Rheims translation)
The illustration is a visual interpretation of this text, with some extra details added. A figure on the right harvests grapes from the vines on the right and Christ, with his cruciform (cross-shaped) halo, pours the grapes from the basket on his back into the winepress. God and his angels bless the scene from above.
And I saw another sign in heaven, great and wonderful: seven angels having the seven last plagues. For in them is filled up the wrath of God.(Douay-Rheims translation)
In 1226 a French king died, leaving his queen to rule his kingdom until their son came of age. The 38-year-old widow, Blanche of Castile, had her work cut out for her. Rebelling barons were eager to win back lands that her husband’s father had seized from them. They rallied troops against her, defamed her character, and even accused her of adultery and murder.
Caught in a perilous web of treachery, insurrections, and open warfare, Blanche persuaded, cajoled, negotiated, and fought would-be enemies after her husband, King Louis VIII, died of dysentery after only a three-year reign. When their son Louis IX took the helm in 1234, he inherited a kingdom that was, for a time anyway, at peace.
A dazzling illumination in New York’s Morgan Library could well depict Blanche of Castile and her son Louis, a beardless youth crowned king. A cleric and a scribe are depicted underneath them (see image at the top of the page). Each figure is set against a ground of burnished gold, seated beneath a trefoil arch. Stylized and colorful buildings dance above their heads, suggesting a sophisticated, urban setting—perhaps Paris, the capital city of the Capetian kingdom (the Capetians were one of the oldest royal families in France) and home to a renowned school of theology.
This last page the New York Morgan Library’s manuscript MS M 240 is the last quire (folded page) of a three-volume moralized bible, the majority of which is housed at the Cathedral Treasury in Toledo, Spain. Moralized bibles, made expressely for the French royal house, include lavishly illustrated abbreviated passages from the Old and New Testaments. Explanatory texts that allude to historical events and tales accompany these literary and visual readings, which—woven together—convey a moral.
Assuming historians are correct in identifying the two rulers, we are looking at the four people intensely involved in the production of this manuscript. As patron and ruler, Queen Blanche of Castile would have financed its production. As ruler-to-be, Louis IX’s job was to take its lessons to heart along with those from the other biblical and ancient texts that his tutors read with him.
Louis IX, wearing an open crown atop his head, returns his mother’s glance. In his right hand he holds a scepter, indicating his kingly status. It is topped by the characteristic fleur-de-lys on which, curiously, a small bird sits. A four-pedaled brooch, dominated by a large square of sapphire blue in the center, secures a pink mantle lined with green that rests on his boyish shoulders.
In his left hand, between his forefinger and thumb, Louis holds a small golden ball or disc. During the mass that followed coronations, French kings and queens would traditionally give the presiding bishop of Reims 13 gold coins (all French kings were crowned in this northern French cathedral town.) This could reference Louis’ 1226 coronation, just three weeks after his father’s death, suggesting a probable date for this bible’s commission. A manuscript this lavish, however, would have taken eight to ten years to complete—perfect timing, because in 1235, the 21-year-old Louis was ready to assume the rule of his Capetian kingdom from his mother.
Queen Blanche and her son, the young king, echo a gesture and pose that would have been familiar to many Christians: the Virgin Mary and Christ enthroned side-by-side as celestial rulers of heaven, found in the numerous Coronations of the Virgin carved in ivory, wood, and stone. This scene was especially prevalent in tympana, the top sculpted semi-circle over cathedral portals found throughout France. On beholding the Morgan illumination, viewers would have immediately made the connection between this earthly Queen Blanche and her son, anointed by God with the divine right to rule, and that of Mary, Queen of heaven and her son, divine figures who offer salvation.
The illumination’s bottom register depicts a tonsured cleric (churchman with a partly shaved head), left, and an illuminator, right.
The cleric wears a sleeveless cloak appropriate for divine services—this is an educated man—and emphasizes his role as a scholar. He tilts his head forward and points his right forefinger at the artist across from him, as though giving instructions. No clues are given as to this cleric’s religious order, as he probably represents the many Parisian theologians responsible for the manuscript’s visual and literary content—all of whom were undoubtedly told to spare no expense.
On the right, the artist, donning a blue surcoat and wearing a cap, is seated on cushioned bench.
Knife in his left hand and stylus in his right, he looks down at his work: four vertically-stacked circles in a left column, with part of a fifth visible on the right. We know, from the 4887 medallions that precede this illumination, what’s next on this artist’s agenda: he will apply a thin sheet of gold leaf onto the background, and then paint the medallion’s biblical and explanatory scenes in brilliant hues of lapis lazuli, green, red, yellow, grey, orange and sepia.
Blanche undoubtedly hand-picked the theologians whose job it was to establish this manuscript’s guidelines, select biblical passages, write explanations, hire copyists, and oversee the images that the artists should paint. Art and text, mutually dependent, spelled out advice that its readers, Louis IX and perhaps his siblings, could practice in their enlightened rule. The nobles, church officials, and perhaps even common folk who viewed this page could be reassured that their ruler had been well trained to deal with whatever calamities came his way.
This 13th century illumination, both dazzling and edifying, represents the cutting edge of lavishness in a society that embraced conspicuous consumption. As a pedagogical tool, perhaps it played no small part in helping Louis IX achieve the status of sainthood, awarded by Pope Bonifiace VIII 27 years after the king’s death. This and other images in the bible moralisée explain why Parisian illuminators monopolized manuscript production at this time. Look again at the work. Who else could compete against such a resounding image of character and grace?
Additional resources:
This page at The Morgan Library and Museum
Deluxe medieval devotional books used images and texts together to produce compelling, spiritual experiences for their readers. One particularly dramatic image confronts the reader from the pages of a book made for a woman, Bonne of Luxembourg, in the French royal family. In the center of the parchment page, on a blue field teeming with scrolling golden vines, the instruments used to torture Christ during the Passion stand arranged for the viewer’s inspection.
In the center, filling the composition from top to bottom, is a gaping, disembodied wound. Framed with an almond-shaped ring of white flesh, the bright orange-red tones of torn flesh deepen in color closer to the irregular, vertical brown gash in the center. This is the spear wound created in Christ’s side after his death on the cross, isolated for the pious reader’s contemplation. Shown at what medieval Christians believed to be actual size (about 2 inches), the wound dominates the composition while the miniature instruments of torture that surround it seem to fade into the background. Along with the text (a prayer describing Christ’s suffering), and the manuscript’s lively margins, this graphic painting worked to engage viewers in emotional contemplation of Jesus’ sacrifice.
In the Middle Ages, this powerful image was meant to orient pious readers’ attention to Christ’s body and the physical suffering he endured to ensure their salvation. This emphasis on Christ’s body is part of a larger trend in late medieval devotion known as affective piety, in which compassion for Christ’s suffering held the key to salvation. With its almond shape, vertical orientation, and confrontational placement, the wound of Christ in the Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg might remind a modern viewer of the Eye of Sauron (known from J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings). Medieval viewers likely overlaid other associations onto such images of Christ’s wound. The change in the wound’s orientation from a diagonal slit to a vertical opening and the isolation of the wound as an almond-shaped device transform it into an image strongly reminiscent of medieval representations of the vulva and the vaginal opening. Similar imagery persists in modern visual culture, such as Judy Chicago’s 1979 installation The Dinner Party. This association of Christ’s side wound with female reproductive organs has connections with mystical writings that eroticized the body of Christ and that emphasized its nurturing and generative qualities.
Although we often think of paintings today as freestanding, portable objects, paintings in medieval books were not meant to be isolated from their manuscript context. When closed, Bonne’s prayer book measures just over five inches high—smaller than an adult’s hand. This small size distinguishes personal prayer books from books sized for display, like the Winchester Bible. Deluxe prayer books like Bonne’s were status symbols, but they were also intimate, personal objects that facilitated direct communication with God.
The image of Christ’s side wound is one of fifteen miniatures distributed among the 334 folios of the prayer book. Each miniature introduces and illustrates the themes of the manuscript’s most important texts. The miniature of the wound comes in the midst of the final text, focusing on Christ’s experience on the cross.
This text opens with a miniature of the crucified Christ showing his side wound to two kneeling figures: Bonne and her husband, the future French king John the Good. Viewed in sequence, the miniature with the crucified Christ instructed Bonne (personally!) where to focus her devotional attentions, while the miniature of the wound three folios later provided her direct, visual access to it. The wound provides a dramatic climax to the prayer and the book.
Devotion to Christ’s side wound emerges from late medieval Christian mysticism, writings by monastic men and especially women articulating their personal, visionary, and ecstatic experiences of the divine. In mystical writings, Christ’s body often takes on feminine qualities, becoming permeable, generative, and nourishing. Catherine of Siena’s biography records a vision in which Christ nourishes the mystic from his side wound, an encounter that is simultaneously maternal and erotic:
With that, he tenderly placed his right hand on her neck, and drew her towards the wound in his side. ‘Drink, daughter, from my side,’ he said, ‘and by that draught your soul shall become enraptured with such delight that your very body, which for my sake you have denied, shall be inundated with its overflowing goodness.’ Drawn close in this way, … she fastened her lips upon that sacred wound, … and there she slaked her thirst.[1]
Images of the side wound and the mystical tradition from which they emerge have provided fertile material for scholars engaged in “queering” the Middle Ages. Queering means questioning assumptions of heterosexual and cisgender normativity in the past, providing a critique of modern scholarship in the process.
The image of the side wound, like Catherine’s vision, grants feminine bodily attributes to Christ, destabilizing assumptions about his gender. In mystical images and texts, Christ’s capacity to transcend the gender binary, like his capacity to transcend the binary of life and death, underscores his divinity. Christ is not the only figure within medieval culture to transgress the gender binary. Medieval literature—religious and secular alike—is replete with transgender figures, from saints like Marinos the Monk and, perhaps, Joan of Arc, to the fictional protagonists of the thirteenth-century romances Silence and Yde et Olive.
While the voices of actual marginalized people are rarely recorded in medieval documents, Eleanor Rykener is a striking exception. Arrested in late fourteenth-century London for sexual misconduct, and named in court records as John, she identified herself as Eleanor in her testimony. While the gender-ambiguous Christ is a social construction, it can nevertheless call our attention to individuals and groups hidden within or excluded from the historical record and give modern students a means to consider their positions and experiences within their time.
Echoing the eroticism of Catherine’s vision, medieval readers’ interactions with their devotional books could be very intimate, including the touching or kissing of images, and other images of the wound of Christ show paint loss from readers’ pious stroking of the paint. Such devotion to Christ’s side wound further destabilizes presumptions of heterosexuality in medieval and much modern thought. With its focus on touch and penetration, the devotion of men and women alike to Christ’s side wound had the capacity for queer connotations. The ragged, parted lips of Christ’s wound carried many meanings for their medieval viewers, from the pleasures of being enveloped in divine love to protections in childbirth.
Bonne, who was married at seventeen to the French royal heir and bore nine children before her death of plague at age 34, may have found these associations with pregnancy particularly meaningful. However, the reproductive and the erotic resonances of the image are not mutually exclusive, and, regardless of Bonne’s sexuality, we can see in this imagery a potential model for same-sex desire in the Middle Ages. Such models are crucial for the study of sexualities in a period when homosexual relationships, especially between women, were rarely acknowledged in mainstream texts or conversations. When references to homosexuality do appear in medieval art, it is often framed as a sin, as in the representations of “sodomy” in moralized bibles. Still, more subtle, positive references to homosexual identities may be found. Medieval gossip about Bonne’s son, Jean, Duke of Berry, implies that he may have been attracted to men. Art historian Michael Camille has suggested that Paul de Limbourg devised several well-dressed young men in the feasting miniature of the Très Riches Heures for the duke’s pleasure.
The images and texts of Bonne of Luxembourg’s prayer book contained many layered messages for its royal reader. While the content of images and texts alike would have been planned by a devotional adviser, the paintings are attributed to Parisian illuminator Jean le Noir and his workshop, which by 1358 included his daughter, Bourgot, in a prominent role. The commercial book shops of the late Middle Ages were collaborative, often family enterprises, with men and women of different generations working side-by-side. Three artists’ hands have been identified within the manuscript, though it is not possible to know which belonged to Jean, Bourgot, or other workshop members.
Jean le Noir’s workshop specialized in the grisaille style of painting first popularized among the royal patrons of France during the previous generation by illuminator Jean Pucelle. The Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg looks back both in style and in content to the miniature prayer book Pucelle made for an earlier queen of France, Jeanne d’Évreux, between about 1324 and 1328.
While the imagery of Bonne’s prayer book brought her into intimate contact with God, its style connected her with the royal French line. These connections were carried forward by Bonne’s children, particularly Jean de Berry, who around 1371 commissioned a prayer book with the same Passion texts as his mother’s from the now elderly Jean le Noir. These stylistic, thematic, and textual traditions across generations speak to the complex dynamics of transgression and normativity within medieval manuscript patronage at the highest levels.
Read more about Private Devotion in Medieval Christianity on the Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline
Construction of the current church building was begun circa 1108, and was essentially completed around 50 years later. The basic layout for churches at that time was the shape of a cross, with the east end as the top, the transepts making the crossing arm, and the nave as the longer extension at the bottom of the cross. The east end held the altar and choir, or quire, which were used by the clergy during daily masses. The nave was accessible to the lay community. Although medieval British churches are basically oriented east to west, they all vary slightly. When a new church was to be built, the patron saint was selected and the altar location laid out. On the saint’s day, a line would be surveyed from the position of the rising sun through the altar site and extending in a westerly direction. This was the orientation of the new building.
In clerical terms, Southwell Minster is a cathedral; but rather than rummage in ecclesiastical definitions, this essay will look at the architectural styles.
Interior order
On entering Southwell Minster, the sense of space feels logical and follows a well-defined and rhythmic order. The nave is in the Norman, or Romanesque, architectural style. It is delineated by simple rounded – Roman – stone arches springing from heavy round stone columns. The arcade on each side separates the nave from the side aisles, which allow people to move through the church to smaller side chapels. Above the first tier is a second arcade with smaller arches defining the gallery, and above that is another arcade – smaller still – which includes windows and is known as the clerestory. The ceiling of Southwell Minster is a wooden barrel vault.
The arches, column capitals, window surrounds, and portals are decorated with carved patterns that are geometric and straightforward. Although the material is stone, its lack of detailed texture gives it a plastic quality, especially when seen in some lights. The stone, Permian sandstone, has a warm cream color, while the heavy arches and massive walls impart a feeling of strength and permanence. This commanding style represented effective propaganda for William the Conqueror, who had invaded Britain in 1066 and imposed strong organizational systems in both the Church and government.
From Norman to Gothic
The transepts are also in the Norman style, severe and blunt. But as you move further east and enter the quire, the uncomplicated architecture and decoration gives way to pointed arches and curlicue embellishments. The sense of moving to a different building and place are somewhat confusing at first, until you are fully inside the east end and find yourself enveloped in the Gothic style.
The original east end of Southwell, and of many other medieval cathedrals, was found to be too small once the building was completed, so the old east end was pulled down and replaced with a larger extension in the latest fashion. Although the new east end was built within roughly one hundred years of the original building, architecture had moved on quickly. Now the arches were pointed at the top, and the decoration was more and more ornate. Structurally, new techniques allowed for larger windows than were possible in the Romanesque idiom.
Prebendary seats of stone
The Chapter House, begun circa 1300, is accessible from the north transept, and was the meeting hall of the original prebends (a clergy member drawing a stipend from Anglican church revenues) associated with the minster. Each prebend, who would have held certain responsibilities for his area of the diocese, had a stone seat on the wall of the chapter house. Each seat alcove is topped with decorated trefoil arches and a variety of leaves. The “Leaves of Southwell” have been documented as some of the best medieval stone carvings in England, and represent oak, ivy, hawthorn, grape, hops, and other flora.
Because the Southwell Chapter House is relatively small, it does not require a center column to support the roof as a larger area would. The octagonal room is topped by a vault carried not only on ribs that reach to the center, but also on cross ribs that span between the main ribs. These intermediate ribs are known as tiercerons, and signify a further development into the more complex and decorated vaults that are an integral part of the English Decorated and Perpendicular Gothic styles.
As a whole or in its individual parts, Southwell Minster is a brilliant example of medieval architecture in England and its rapid development over 200 years. The building has suffered relatively little damage or major alteration over its thousand-year life. Indeed, part of its appeal is its architectural integrity, as well as the fact that it is a living (i.e., still in use) building.
As the years have passed, new decoration has been added that reflects a functioning parish community – a baptismal font from 1661, stained glass windows from various centuries, a modern sculpture of Christus Rex from the twentieth century. The church is not overrun with tourists, but is still very much a local parish with an active congregation that continues to use the building, ring the bells, and weave the ties of history into twenty-first century life.
Cathedrals of Britain from the BBC
There are so many superlatives consorting with the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Salisbury: it has the tallest spire in Britain (404 feet); it houses the best preserved of the four surviving original copies of the Magna Carta (1215); it has the oldest working clock in Europe (1386); it has the largest cathedral cloisters and cathedral close (grounds) in Britain; the choir (or quire) stalls are the largest and earliest complete set in Britain; the vault is the highest in Britain. Bigger, better, best—and built in a mere 38 years, roughly from 1220 to 1258, which is a pretty short construction schedule for a large stone building made without motorized equipment.
One factor that enabled Salisbury Cathedral to become so extraordinary is that it was the first major cathedral to be built on an unobstructed site. The architect and clerics were able to conceive a design and lay it out exactly as they wanted. Construction was carried out in one campaign, giving the complex a cohesive motif and singular identity. The cloisters were started as a purely decorative feature only five years after the cathedral building was completed, with shapes, patterns, and materials that copy those of the cathedral interior.
It was an ideal opportunity in the development of Early English Gothic architecture, and Salisbury Cathedral made full use of the new techniques of this emerging style. Pointed arches and lancet shapes are everywhere, from the prominent west windows to the painted arches of the east end. The narrow piers of the cathedral were made of cut stone rather than rubble-filled drums, as in earlier buildings, which changed the method of distributing the structure’s weight and allowed for more light in the interior.
The piers are decorated with slender columns of dark gray Purbeck marble, which reappear in clusters and as stand-alone supports in the arches of the gallery, clerestory, and cloisters. The gallery and cloisters repeat the same patterns of plate tracery—basically stone cut-out shapes—of quatrefoils, cinquefoils, even hexafoils and octofoils. Proportions are uniform throughout.
One deviation from the typical Gothic style is the way the lower arcade level of the nave is cut off by a string course that runs between it and the gallery. In most churches of this period, the columns or piers stretch upwards in one form or another all the way to the ceiling or vault (see diagram below). Here at Salisbury the arcade is merely an arcade, and the effect is more like a layer cake with the upper tiers sitting on top of rather than extending from the lower level.
The original design called for a fairly ordinary square crossing tower of modest height. But in the early part of the 14th century, two stories were added to the tower, and then the pointed spire was added in 1330. The spire is the most readily identified feature of the cathedral and is visible for miles. However, the addition of this landmark tower and spire added over 6,000 tons of weight to the supporting structure. Because the building had not been engineered to carry the extra weight, additional buttressing was required internally and externally. The transepts now sport masonry girders, or strainer arches, to support the weight. Not surprisingly, the spire has never been straight and now tilts to the southeast by about 27 inches.
Over the centuries the cathedral has been subject to well-intentioned, but heavy-handed restorations by later architects such as James Wyatt and Sir George Gilbert Scott, who tried to conform the building to contemporary tastes. Therefore, the interior has lost some of its original decoration and furnishings, including stained glass and small chapels, and new things have been added. This is pretty typical, though, of a building that is several centuries old. Fortunately, the regularity and clean lines of the cathedral have not been tampered with. It is still refined, polished, and generally easy on the eye.
Although it inspires the usual awe felt in such a grand and substantial building, and is as pretty as a wedding cake, it has had some criticism from art historians: Nikolaus Pevsner and Harry Batsford both disliked the west front, with its encrustation of statues and “variegated pettiness” (Batsford). John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic and writer, found the building “profound and gloomy.” Indeed, in gray weather, the monochromatic scheme of Chilmark stone and Purbeck marble is just gray upon gray.
The pictures, however, show the widely changing character of the neutral tones; sunlight transforms the building, and the visitor’s experience of it. This very quality is what made the Gothic style so revolutionary—the ability to get sunlight into a large building with massive stone walls. Windows are everywhere, and when the light streams through the clerestory arches and the enormous west window, the interior turns from drear gray to transcendent gold.
The Cathedral of Britain from the BBC
History of Salisbury Cathedral
Salisbury Cathedral Stained Glass
John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (Smarthistory essay)
Source: Valerie Spanswick, Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Salisbury Cathedral,” in Smarthistory, August 8, 2015, accessed November 21, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/salisbury-cathedral/.
Source: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Lincoln Cathedral,” in Smarthistory, July 19, 2017, accessed November 21, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/lincoln-cathedral/.
Gothic architecture from the V&A
Source: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Wells Cathedral,” in Smarthistory, July 18, 2017, accessed November 21, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/wells-cathedral/.
Ely Cathedral, like nearly all medieval English cathedrals, saw many different phases of construction. Major building projects in the Middle Ages were both expensive and time-consuming, so renovations and additions were made piecemeal rather than all at once.The long period of time means that by looking at Ely, we can get a sense of each of the most important medieval English architectural styles, all in one building: Romanesque (in the nave), Early English (in the presbytery), Decorated (in the tower and Lady Chapel), and Perpendicular (in the eastern chantry chapels). See the plan below.
Ely Cathedral, sometimes referred to as “the ship of the Fens,” is a massive building rising up from the flat, marshy fenland of East Anglia. It isvisible from many miles away like a lone ship on a calm sea. Ely’s history began in the seventh century, when an Anglo-Saxon princess named Æthelthryth, or Etheldreda, made a holy vow of virginity. When she was married for political reasons, she fled her husband and founded a nunnery on the Isle of Ely. In Etheldreda’s time, Ely was an island surrounded by marshes (drained later, in the seventeenth century), and the place takes its name from the eels that dwelled in these swampy waters.
Etheldreda died just seven years after founding her nunnery. When her body was translated (ceremonially moved), from its original location fourteen years later, it was found to be incorrupt and it was put into a “new” sarcophagus—actually a reused one from an old Roman settlement nearby. A cult developed around Etheldreda, who became a saint (the common name for Etheldreda is St. Audrey).
Etheldreda’s nunnery was raided by Danish invaders in 870. Whether the relics of Etheldreda survived the raid is an open question, but the author of the twelfth-century text, the Liber Eliensis (Book of Ely), detailed stories of the continued power of Etheldreda’s relics, possibly intended to suggest that they had not been destroyed. Relics were very important objects in the Middle Ages, lending prestige to the churches where they were held, and drawing pilgrims, who would come seeking miracles. The existence of Etheldreda’s relics was therefore very important for the identity of the church at Ely, where in 970, with royal patronage, the church was refounded as a Benedictine monastery.
Though it had been the site of Christian worship for hundreds of years prior to 1082, little is known about the architecture of Ely before this date, when the first Norman abbot of Ely initiated the construction of a new church for the monastery. The foundations were laid out by a man in his 80s named Abbot Simeon who had previously been prior of the important monastic community of Winchester (in the south of England), where his brother, Walchelin, was bishop. Simeon and his brother had orchestrated a building campaign in Winchester that was still underway when Simeon came to Ely, and that in-progress church served as inspiration for much of the Ely building program.
Simeon’s building plans at Ely began in the east end with the choir and transepts. This is typical for churches, since their primary liturgical functions commonly take place in the east end of the church, oriented towards Jerusalem. This part of the church exemplifies the Romanesque style brought from Normandy after the Norman Conquest in 1066. It was completed in two different phases, which we can tell from the new decorative forms that appear on some of the capitals of the columns of the transepts, which were built later than the others.
Work on the nave was begun subsequently, and the south side was completed around 1109, when Ely was officially elevated to the status of a cathedral. Ely’s nave and transepts were some of the first spaces in England to display alternating forms of compound piers. This alternation adds visual rhythm, and diffuses the heaviness of these massive stone forms.
Like most Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, Ely’s nave elevation has three stories. The nave arcade with its alternating piers is on the ground floor. Above this is a gallery with double-light openings, or double, windowless arches, each pair set within a larger arch that mirrors the corresponding arch on the lower level. The third level is a clerestory with triplet openings. The tremendous thickness of the walls (a distinguishing feature of the Romanesque) is balanced by the proliferation of openings as one’s eyes travel upward. The viewer gets the sense that the building becomes lighter and brighter as it soars heavenward.
The west towerthat tops the cathedral’s main entrance was built at the end of the twelfth century, towards the end of the Romanesque period in England.
Experiments in the Gothic style brought over from France had already begun to take hold in England—particularly at Canterbury Cathedral and the northern Cistercianmonasteries. At Ely, though, the tower still exhibits round Romanesque arches instead of the pointed arches that are a hallmark of Gothic architecture.
The exterior is covered almost completely in blind arcading, an English speciality that stands in stark contrast to French medieval architecture, which prefers little extra surface decoration. Below the tower, we see a monumental entrance with blind pointed arches, which was added a bit later in the Early English Gothic style, showing how this new style was rapidly spreading across England during this time.
At the other end of the building, the presbytery was extended eastward in the 1230s and 1240s. In style, it draws from the nave of Lincoln Cathedral, completed just a decade or so earlier. With engaged colonnettes of Purbeck marble and white limestone, as well as complex rib vaults, it reflected the most fashionable architecture of the time. Then, as now, architectural styles came and went quickly, and the wealthiest and most powerful—such as the Bishop and diplomat Hugh of Northwold, who financed the new presbytery—had the means to stay current.
Eastern extensions were popular at this time to provide more room for the shrines of saints, like Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, or, at Ely, the shrine of Etheldreda. The presbytery was large enough to accommodate the many pilgrims who came to Ely to venerate the saint (and brought important income to the church and surrounding area). Having a highly-decorated space made this holy destination even more desirable.
In 1321, a new chapel was begun north of the presbytery, which would eventually become one of the most beautiful and artistically innovative of the English Gothic period. But in the early morning hours of February 13, 1322, just as the monks were finishing their morning prayers, disaster struck. The crossing tower of the cathedral collapsed, crushing parts of the choir, and construction on the chapel had to stop.
Though this collapse was devastating, it made room for one of the most remarkable structures of the English Middle Ages. Alan of Walsingham, sub-prior and sacrist of Ely, quickly initiated the building of a new tower—a tall, octagonal structure (often referred to as “the Octagon”) surmounted by a tower made of timber clad with lead. This type of tower is called a lantern because it is pierced to allow light in. Vaults with tiercerons spring from the base of the Octagon, creating a star-like effect when one looks up.
In the supporting structure below, Etheldreda was commemorated with capitals depicting scenes from her life. These include her marriage to Igfrid, and her rest on the way from Northumberland to Ely. The Octagon, from floor to the central roof boss, is 142 feet tall, the same height as the Pantheon in Rome. This correspondence may have been intentional, since the Octagon is like a Gothic version of the Pantheon’s incredible dome, and the tower above it delivers light throughout, like the opening of the Roman temple.
Once the Octagon was completed, attention was turned back to the Lady Chapel. A Lady Chapel is a space dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and this one is especially clear in its depiction of her life and miracles. The chapel, built in the Decorated Style, is rectangular, and its elevation is composed of a dado and clerestory. A series of niches encircle the room, forming the dado.
Each niche is protected with a nodding ogee canopy and ornamented with relief sculpture relating to the Virgin. It has been observed that the sculptural niches of the dado have a vulvular shape, perhaps not coincidental given that the chapel celebrates the Virgin Mary, whose chief contribution to Christian history was giving birth to Jesus.
The Lady Chapel was interrupted by the collapse of the central tower, and its progress may have been troubled again by the Black Death, which struck England in 1348. On the western side of the chapel, the nodding ogees of the dado flatten, and the diaper-work is halted. The vault fits uneasily on the chapel. Scholars suspect that some of the sculptors and masons at Ely may have fallen victim to the plague, leaving the lavish project to be completed by their less adept colleagues.
Although the Ely Lady Chapel is one of the most beautiful interiors of English medieval art, it’s also one of the most heavily destroyed. During the English Reformation, the sculptures were mutilated because religious imagery was thought to be idolatrous. The images were taken from their niches, and the colorful stained glass that would have filled the windows was destroyed. Some sculpture remains in the life of the Virgin series on the dado, but many have been stripped of their heads or more. Traces of polychromy remain, but are but a pale shadow of the formerly brilliant space.
After the Black Death, a final style of the English Middle Ages emerges as the primary mode of building. This is called the Perpendicular Style because, unlike the flowing, undulating curves of the Decorated Style that preceded it, it emphasizes straight lines and vertical projections. The Perpendicular Style took hold in the second half of the fourteenth century, and continued through the remainder of the Middle Ages—almost two hundred years!
Bishop Alcock’s chantry chapel was built in the Perpendicular Style between 1488 and 1500. A chantry chapel is a space devoted to praying for an individual or a family in order to shorten their time in purgatory. Purgatory was understood to be a fiery place where souls went after death, but unlike hell, one could eventually leave purgatory after serving the required amount of time necessary for sins committed during life. A reduction of one’s sentence in purgatory could be achieved, either during life from the acquisition of indulgences, or in death if one’s loved ones or the executors of their wills prayed for them and ensured that masses were said in their honor.
Alcock is likely to have planned the chapel himself—he had been the Controller of the Royal Works and Buildings under King Henry VII. The chapel is cordoned off from the north aisle with a microarchitectural screen with statue niches that are now empty. Though this screen is extremely intricate and beautifully carved, it doesn’t quite fit in the space allotted for it. Prior to becoming bishop of Ely, Alcock had held the same post at Worcester Cathedral. It is thought that the chapel may have been planned for a large space there, but was instead jammed into tighter accommodations at Ely. Within the chapel is Alcock’s tomb, in a niche, and an altar so that Masses could be said for his soul. Alcock’s memory was also made explicit with the use of his rebus with a cock (rooster) atop a globe, and his coat of arms, three cocks.
The “ship of the Fens” is a wonderful example of the evolution of English architectural style in the Middle Ages: from Romanesque to Early English Gothic, Decorated, and Perpendicular. The people who built churches in the Middle Ages wouldn’t have thought of themselves as building in these styles, however—these are names given by historians in the nineteenth century to describe them retrospectively. The builders themselves would have thought of what they were building simply as “current.” Although Etheldreda sought refuge her marriage in the quiet, eel-filled marshes of Ely, the Middle Ages saw this site develop into a far more elaborate space than she could possibly have imagined.
Additional resources:
Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland entry on Ely Cathedral
Illustrations for some definitions borrowed from the Glossary of Medieval Art and Architecture.
John Maddison, Ely Cathedral: Design and Meaning (Ely: Ely Cathedral Publications, 2000).
Source: Meg Bernstein, “Four styles of English medieval architecture at Ely Cathedral,” in Smarthistory, October 26, 2018, accessed November 25, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/ely-cathedral/.
Additional resources
Explore an interactive map of York Minster
Synagoga and Ecclesia, Strasbourg Cathedral
Depicting Judaism in a medieval Christian ivory
Sarah Brown, “The Chapter House and Its Vestibule,” Stained Glass at York Minster (London: Scala Arts Publishers Inc., 2017), pp. 24–31.
Sarah Brown, York Minster: An Architectural History c. 1220–1500 (Swindon: English Heritage, 2003).
URL: https://youtu.be/YCKzhNQISZo
View on Google Maps
URL: https://youtu.be/Z2Zmmx0u-gE
See also: This painting at The National Gallery
Cite this page as: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris, “The Wilton Diptych,” in Smarthistory, December 11, 2015, accessed November 25, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/the-wilton-diptych/.
This map of Palestine from the Royal manuscripts collection was created by Matthew Paris in mid-13th-century, and is dominated by its plan of Acre – the large walled enclosure with a camel outside it. Jerusalem, another walled enclosure (top right) is small by comparison, and other coastal cities (centre right) are marked simply by castles and towers. It is not known where Matthew Paris got his information about Acre, which a Latin note on the map as ‘the hope and refuge of all Christians in the Holy Land’ – it was the last surviving foothold of the crusaders there.
Matthew Paris (c. 1200–1260) was a medieval monk and chronicler. He entered the Abbey of St Alban as a monk on 12 January 1217. Matthew spent the rest of his life there, apart from visits to the royal court in London, and a year-long mission that took him to an abbey in Norway. Through the maps that he created, however, he travelled the world. His works includes several maps of Great Britain, a world map and maps of Palestine. All are marked by his intense curiosity about the outside world; he experiments with different renderings of Great Britain and of Palestine as if trying to work out his own ideas of what they were really like.
Matthew Paris produced the most important historical writings of the 13th century. His chief work, the Chronica Major, chronicled events from the creation of the world until 1259, the year he died. For its greater part, the Chronica Major is a revision and expansion of an existing chronicle by an earlier St Alban’s monk, called Roger of Wendover. From 1235 onwards, however, it’s the first-hand record of events the author heard about (perhaps from northbound travellers, who would stay at St Alban’s on their first night out of London) or witnessed for himself.
Paris is one of the most engaging of medieval chroniclers. His accounts are detailed and well informed, with lively descriptions of people involved and analysis of the causes and significance of the events recorded. Matthew’s connections made him a well-placed observer of contemporary affairs. He was on personal terms both with the king, Henry III, and his influential brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall. At their courts Paris must have gained many insights into domestic and foreign politics.
His writings reveal a man of strong opinions who was not afraid to speak his mind. Being befriended and publicly honoured by Henry III on several occasions did not prevent him from being as critical of the king’s lack of prudence in political matters as he was praising of his piety in religion.
His itineraries of routes from London to Palestine, of which the first image digitised here is perhaps the most splendid example, accompanied his chronicle of world history. They represented a spiritual rather than a physical journey. Each place on the journey probably had its allegorical counterpart within the cloisters and church of St Albans Abbey (rather like the Stations of the Cross in modern Catholic churches) and the monks would follow the route as a type of spiritual exercise.
The routes themselves, however, are firmly embedded in reality and practicality. Important geographical features, such as rivers, hills and important buildings, are noted, and attractive alternative routes are shown along the way. These are particularly typical of Matthew and would have made him a marvellous tour guide had he been alive today.
In the style of modern digital route planners, the routes are shown as straight lines, with all extraneous information, which the pilgrim could not have seen from the road, omitted. Indeed Matthew probably drew these maps on the basis of written itineraries consisting of lists of place names. Yet he adorns his versions with picturesque town symbols and quite often with additional decoration, such as palm trees or even – once arrived in Palestine – with camels and other exotic animals.
This second map featured here (digitised image 6, ff. 4v–5r) illustrates the end of the journey, with Jerusalem surrounded by a crenellated wall labelled ‘civitas Ierusalem’ (Jerusalem city). Paris has included within the city three important sites: on the left, a domed structure for the Dome of the Rock, transformed by the Crusaders into the Templum Domini (the temple of the Lord), as it is labelled (although it had already been retaken by the Saracens when this map was made). In the right-hand corner is another mosque that had been turned into a church, the Temple of Solomon, a domed building given to the order of the Knights Templar, who took their name from this structure. The third building is the pilgrimage church of the Holy Sepulchre, represented by a circle in the lower corner.
Paris was an accomplished artist, providing many expert drawings in the margins of his manuscripts to illustrate the events he described. Among these are the first known views and plans of London. He also produced maps of Great Britain, intended as a complement to his shorter chronicle of English history, which are the earliest surviving maps with such a high level of detail. They stand out in the history of medieval map making as the first attempts to portray the actual physical appearance of the country rather than represent the relationship between places in simple schematic diagrams.
Article originally published by The British Library (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Source: The British Library, “Matthew Paris’s itinerary maps from London to Palestine,” in Smarthistory, January 20, 2021, accessed November 25, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/matthew-pariss-itinerary-maps-from-london-to-palestine/.
Inventing the image of St. Francis and St. Francis altarpiece
The Gothic style spread across Europe, where artists produced sculpture, painting, and architecture for both Christian and Jewish patrons. c. 1235–1500 C.E.
URL: https://youtu.be/swMOq7pCRzU
Shrine of the Virgin at The Met
Q&A about the Shrine of the Virgin at the University of Dayton
Elina Gertsman, Worlds Within (Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna) (Penn State University Press, 2015)
Melissa R. Katz, “The Non-Gendered Appeal of Vierge Ouvrante Sculpture: Audience, Patronage, and Purpose in Medieval Iberia,” Reassessing the Roles of Women as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture vol. 7 (Brill, January 2012)
Source: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “The Crucifixion, c. 1200 (from Christus triumphans to Christus patiens),” in Smarthistory, December 18, 2020, accessed November 25, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/crucifixion-1200/.
URL: https://youtu.be/mcgJZ2SWyCg
Source: Dr. Elizabeth Rodini and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Venice’s San Marco, a mosaic of spiritual treasure,” in Smarthistory, May 2, 2020, accessed November 21, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/porta-santalipio-mosaic/.
From 362 -1681, the city of Strasbourg and the surrounding region (Alsace) was independent, first governed by the Bishops and then as an independent city. Culturally it shares much with neighboring Germany. It only became a French city in 1681, after the conquest of Alsace. It was annexed by Germany after the fall of France in 1940 and then returned to France after WWII. (see more about Strasbourg in Wikipedia)
Death of the Virgin, South portal, Strasbourg Cathedral
It is hard to look at the Röttgen Pietà and not feel something—perhaps revulsion, horror, or distaste. It is terrifying and the more you look at it, the more intriguing it becomes. This is part of the beauty and drama of Gothic art, which aimed to create an emotional response in medieval viewers.
Earlier medieval representations of Christ focused on his divinity (left). In these works of art, Christ is on the cross, but never suffers. These types of crucifixion images are a type called Christus triumphans or the triumphant Christ. His divinity overcomes all human elements and so Christ stands proud and alert on the cross, immune to human suffering.
In the later Middle Ages, a number of preachers and writers discussed a different type of Christ who suffered in the way that humans suffered. This was different from Catholic writers of earlier ages, who emphasized Christ’s divinity and distance from humanity.
Late medieval devotional writing (from the 13th–15th centuries) leaned toward mysticism and many of these writers had visions of Christ’s suffering. Francis of Assisi stressed Christ’s humanity and poverty. Several writers, such as St. Bonaventure, St. Bridget of Sweden, and St. Bernardino of Siena, imagined Mary’s thoughts as she held her dead son. It wasn’t long before artists began to visualize these new devotional trends. Crucifixion images influenced by this body of devotional literature are called Christus patiens, the patient Christ.
The effects of this new devotional style, which emphasized the humanity of Christ, quickly spread throughout western Europe through the rise of new religious orders (the Franciscans, for example) and the popularity of their preaching. It isn’t hard to see the appeal of the idea that God understands the pain and difficulty of being human. In the Röttgen Pietà, Christ clearly died from the horrific ordeal of crucifixion, but his skin is taut around his ribs, showing that he also led a life of hunger and suffering.
Pietà statues appeared in Germany in the late 1200s and were made in this region throughout the Middle Ages. Many examples of Pietàs survive today. Many of those that survive today are made of marble or stone but the Röttgen Pietà is made of wood and retains some of its original paint. The Röttgen Pietà is the most gruesome of these extant examples.
Pietà, c. 1420, polychromed poplar wood, 92 cm high, Austrian (Harvard Art Museums, © President and Fellows of Harvard College)
Many of the other Pietàs also show a reclining dead Christ with three dimensional wounds and a skeletal abdomen. One of the unique elements of the Röttgen Pietà is Mary’s response to her dead son. She is youthful and draped in heavy robes like many of the other Marys, but her facial expression is different. In Catholic tradition, Mary had a special foreknowledge of the resurrection of Christ and so to her, Christ’s death is not only tragic. Images that reflect Mary’s divine knowledge show her at peace while holding her dead son. Mary in the Röttgen Pietà appears to be angry and confused. She doesn’t seem to know that her son will live again. She shows strong negative emotions that emphasize her humanity, just as the representation of Christ emphasizes his.
All of these Pietàs were devotional images and were intended as a focal point for contemplation and prayer. Even though the statues are horrific, the intent was to show that God and Mary, divine figures, were sympathetic to human suffering, and to the pain, and loss experienced by medieval viewers. By looking at the Röttgen Pietà, medieval viewers may have felt a closer personal connection to God by viewing this representation of death and pain.
In architecture, there is often a dominant mode of design in a given country or region at a particular moment in history. In central and western Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was customary to use Gothic elements such as pointed arches, rib vaults, and thin walls filled with stained glass.
But what about minority groups? Did they follow the trends of the majority or were they told what and how to build by the majority culture? Did the minorities have architects of their own on whom to rely, or were the minority members excluded from certain professions? We know about exclusion and discrimination from modern history. But what happened in the later middle ages?
For centuries, Jews were the most noticeable minority in Europe. They lived only in certain regions, and were excluded from others. Their numbers were usually restricted, even in places where they were allowed to live. Nevertheless, Jews were useful members of society, in part because most Jewish men were literate—they were, and still are, expected to read their prayers (poor Roman Catholics had no schools and relied on priests to read on their behalf). Literate people could be useful in commerce and in keeping records, so some rulers allowed Jews to live in their cities. Often, there was a district designated for Jews, perhaps near the commercial district of a city, near the city walls, or near the palace of the ruler whom they served, (there were formal walled ghettoes only from the mid-sixteenth century onward).
Every Jewish community had to have a place of worship, called a synagogue (from a Greek word related to assembling). Only a few rules governed the design of a synagogue; these rules were found in the Talmud. Later congregations of Jews adhered to these rules as best they could, despite the restrictions on their residence and use of land. Ideally, a synagogue’s focal point, the end of the building’s central axis, would face Jerusalem (to the southeast from the city of Prague).
The synagogue would contain carefully hand-written scrolls of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible that were held in a chest known as a Torah ark when not in use. The ark was located at the building’s focal point. When the scrolls were removed from their storage chest, they would be carried ceremoniously to the center of the synagogue where the elders of the congregation would mount a low platform (bimah) and place the scrolls on a reading table. It would be an honor to be called to read to the congregation. In addition, no one was allowed to live above the synagogue; religious activity was to have pride of place and women would not occupy the same part of the building as men in order to avoid distracting the men from their prayers. Animals and other unclean things were not be allowed to defile the synagogue interior.
An important late medieval synagogue in Prague is called the Old New Synagogue because the city later gained a newer New Synagogue. It is generally known as the Altneushul in Yiddish. It seems to have originally been a small rectangular building erected in the thirteenth century, but late in that century or in the next one, the original synagogue was enlarged. Both stages of construction were apparently designed and built by Christians, because Jews were either formally or tacitly excluded from the guilds (trade associations) of the building crafts. An architect who at other times worked on churches seems to have been in charge because ornamental details are similar to those of a local church; the architect was therefore almost certainly Roman Catholic.
The synagogue stands in what was once the heart of the Jewish quarter. Its floor is lower than the level of the street in order to allow the congregation to utter the words of Psalm 130:1, “Out of the depths, I cry to Thee, O Lord.” The location has become all the more noticeable over time as the level of nearby streets has risen with re-paving, and as Pařížská (Paris Street), just to the east, was built in the nineteenth century to clear part of the old, crowded Jewish neighborhood.
The Altneushul, beyond the vestibule, is a rectangle about 26 feet wide and 45 feet long. It is composed of six bays arranged in two aisles, each with three bays. On the long east-west axis in the center of the building, two slender octagonal pillars allow the interior to be wider than it would have been without these supports. Leaf forms adorn the capitals.
Rib vaults cover each bay, but unlike the four-part, X-shaped ribs found in many Gothic-style vaults, those at the Altneushul have an extra, fifth rib, probably to help ensure stability; the same design can be seen in some secular and Christian buildings of the time. The bimah stands between the octagonal pillars in the center of the synagogue, and the ark on the eastern wall terminates the principal axis of the interior.
This is clearly not the plan of a church. Jews had no need for a church plan with a nave, side aisles, chapels, and a transept because their rituals and customs differed from those of Roman Catholics. Instead, the plan of the Altneushul is more similar to the plan of certain secular buildings, as well as to some chapter houses. The plan of a meeting room was useful for a synagogue in which men meet to read and discuss religious doctrine. When possible, Jews and the Christians would not have wanted to imitate each other’s religious architecture, although in some of the simplest churches, chapels, and synagogues, a single room had to suffice for the congregation. Nevertheless, because members of both religions used the same builders, the individual components or ornamental details of the various buildings often resemble each other in design. The Altneushul has only plant decoration, because at that time, Jews would not allow images of human beings within a religious context.
Seats and desks are distinctive features of a medieval synagogue; medieval churches had no seats and there was no need for desks since most Christians were not literate. Seats are necessary in synagogues because Jews spend hours there, reading their own prayers—in the middle ages, each man did so at his own pace—and discussing religious doctrine. Books were placed on the desks during the reading, and were later stored inside the desks for the next day’s prayer and study meetings, along with the prayer shawls worn during religious services. In the Altneushul, the seats either face the bimah, or are arranged around the bimah platform; the ones we see today are neo-Gothic but reflect the original arrangement. This disposition assures that everyone is close to the bimah where the Torah portion is read each day. Members of the congregation faced each other during prayer, and that practice enhanced the sense of community. This is different from the practice in churches of that time, where the clergymen led Roman Catholics who stood one behind another and listened to a single authoritative voice.
Lighting fixtures are important in synagogues because each man must read the essential texts. In this building, the windows are small, either for customary or structural reasons or to prevent vandals from breaking large and expensive windows. Therefore, artificial lighting was needed and was provided by candlesticks but also by hanging lamps and other devices; the ones in place today are post-medieval.
Often, the bimah was made of wood, with a railing around it. The reading desk on the bimah faced the ark. In the Altneushul, the bimah is a delicate metal construction from the late fifteenth century that allows members of the congregation to easily see the reader. Both the entrance door and the pointed gable over the ark have carved decoration showing vines and fruits, though the ark is often concealed by a handsome curtain placed over it.
So far, this essay has mentioned only men. Where were the women if they were not permitted in the main room of the synagogue? Evidence suggests that in early centuries, they were either excluded from synagogue activity or were accommodated in annexes. By the fourteenth century, a first women’s annex was built at the Altneushul with small windows that opened to the main room where the men gathered. This allowed women to hear the prayers but not to see the men or be seen by them. In the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the congregation built additional annexes to accommodate the increasing numbers of women who elected to, or were allowed to, attend religious services. In the late middle ages, too, the high saddle roof and the brick gable were added, making the synagogue more prominent in the neighborhood.
Given the horrors perpetrated against European Jews during the Second World War, it may seem surprising that this building and several later synagogues in Prague have survived. The Pinkas Synagogue from the late fifteenth century is now a memorial; its walls are painted with the names of over 77,000 Czech Jews who were deported and murdered.
Perversely, the Nazis and their collaborators left these buildings standing in order to provide the setting for a museum of a vanished people that was to contain artifacts collected from the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia and material from an early twentieth-century Jewish museum. These objects are now displayed in several of the other surviving synagogues in Prague, but the Altneushul, as the oldest survivor, has been left to illustrate the appearance of an unusually distinctive medieval synagogue.
View on Google Maps:
Additional Resources:
YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe
When Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada decided to rebuild Toledo Cathedral in 1227, he knew that he was setting into motion something important. He was beginning construction on Spain’s first Gothic cathedral, and he made sure his actions would be remembered. In a chronicle he wrote, that details the history of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal today) from ancient times, he stated:
And the king and Archbishop Rodrigo placed the first stone in the foundations of the church of Toledo, which still remained in the form of a mosque from the times of the Arabs; its form was raised over many days, not without the great admiration of men. [1]
Like many major cities on the Iberian Peninsula, Toledo was in Islamic hands for many centuries after Umayyad forces conquered this area in 711 from the Christian Visigoths. It was several hundred years later (in 1085) when King Alfonso VI captured Toledo and it passed back into Christian hands. For the next 142 years, the city’s cathedral was housed in the Friday mosque (main mosque of an area that hosts Friday prayers) built by the city’s former Islamic rulers.
When Rodrigo began constructing a new cathedral, he was tearing away one of the most potent symbols of Toledo’s Islamic past and replacing it with a new style associated with France: a Gothic cathedral. Toledo Cathedral’s size, decorations, and treasury were unmatched by few other buildings constructed at the time—whether in Iberia or the rest of Europe.
In the following centuries, many other cities in Iberia rebuilt their cathedrals in the Gothic style, always fusing foreign French influences with local artistic traditions.
Many Gothic cathedrals in Iberia— not just Toledo’s—were constructed over the remains of their city’s Friday mosque, and this left a lasting impact on the shape of cathedrals’ structure. When a cathedral replaced a mosque, it was typical for the new building to be very wide because it followed the footprint of the preceding mosque. For example, Toledo Cathedral is as wide as the mosque was—59 meters—and its cloister was built within the confines of the mosque’s ṣaḥn (courtyard). This was also the case with other cathedrals in Zaragoza, Valencia, Seville, Jaén, and Murcia.
Though built over the remains of mosques, these buildings were emphatically Gothic cathedrals and they followed many of the conventions established in France. Archbishop Rodrigo traveled to France around the year 1200, and saw firsthand the new architectural style at places like Notre-Dame in Paris. He even visited the birthplace of the Gothic style, the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis just north of Paris. What he saw there influenced how he rebuilt Toledo’s cathedral. It is likely that he had a French architect design the new cathedral. As in France, building a cathedral took considerable time and at Toledo, it took more than 100 years to complete. As a result, Spanish Gothic cathedrals can reveal how tastes changed, and how structures evolved over time. At Toledo Cathedral, for instance, many additions and alterations from the 14th century onward have changed its appearance.
Like most Gothic cathedrals, Toledo Cathedral is made up of a long nave, a transept (a second long hall that crosses the nave), as well as a semi-circular space at the east end called the apse (the high altar is also located at the east end of the church). The ground plan is reminiscent of Saint-Denis in the double aisles and continuous ring of chapels (radiating chapels) around the apse (off the ambulatory). Toledo Cathedral also closely followed the ground plan of Bourges Cathedral, with a sleek outline created by short transept wings.
Despite the clear influence of French Gothic churches on Spanish cathedrals, many of the cathedrals built on top of old mosques share an unusual feature for a Gothic church: the choir (the enclosed space reserved for the clergy during services) is located in the nave.
In the typical French Gothic cathedral, the choir is commonly located in the apse at the furthest eastern end of the church (although there are exceptions, such as at Reims). Iberian cathedrals instead often have their choir west of the transept in the nave, more in the center of the church such as we see if we look at a ground plan of Toledo Cathedral. This plan can be seen in earlier Romanesque churches such as St. Sernin in Toulouse.
Some believe this may be the consequence of using converted mosques as churches. Mosques were not oriented in the same direction as churches and, as a result, when they were initially consecrated as churches (as Toledo’s cathedral had been after 1085), the high altar (the primary altar of a church) was often in a more central location in the building rather than at the east end of the church (as we see in the later Gothic building).
Later, when many of these churches were being transformed (and enlarged) into Gothic cathedrals, the decision to place the choir in the center of the nave was likely a practical one: it was located where the preceding church (and former mosque) was located. At Toledo, for instance, the altar of the Virgin had been the main altar in the converted mosque, but as the Gothic cathedral was built the altar was left in what became a choir altar (churches often have multiple altars).
In the rebuilt Gothic church, the apse (the semicircular space at the east end) housed the capilla mayor (main chapel). This chapel was the site of the high altar; the earlier placement of the high altar was thus moved. The capilla mayor was considered the most sacred location in any church because it is where the most important rites—including the Eucharist—were performed. It would be distinguished from other chapels by its monumental retablo mayor (main altarpiece), though most retablos that survive today were produced centuries later during the Renaissance.
In most Gothic cathedrals in Spain, this set-up often left a large open space between the capilla mayor in the apse and the choir in the nave in an area called the crossing (at the intersection between the nave and the transept). Congregants would gather in this space and watch the services taking place. While Gothic cathedrals elsewhere in Europe might block off visual access to the sacraments with large choir screens, Iberian devotees could see almost everything that took place in both the choir and the capilla mayor. Being able to more easily witness the miracle of transubstantiation—the bread and wine transforming into the body and blood of Christ during Mass—would have been a revelation for congregants. It was only in 1215 that transubstantiation was officially defined at the Fourth Lateran Council (a meeting of the Catholic Church), and afterwards an increased focus on the Eucharist ensued.
Some cathedrals—especially those not built on old mosques—followed the French model more closely. Both Burgos and León looked to Notre-Dame de Reims for their ground plan, which resulted in much longer apses. León originally had its choir in the apse, but both cathedrals would eventually follow the examples of their Iberian counterparts, and the capilla mayorwould be located in the apse.
Like Gothic structures throughout the rest of Europe, Iberian cathedrals were stunning in the richness of their ornamentation, from the delicate tracery (lace-like ornamental stonework) that framed stained glass windows to the figural sculpture that adorned the façades. The structure of the walls dissolved into sculpted bodies, painted glass, tracery, crockets. (stylized leaves applied to stonework), and stone interlace patterns.
Large-scale statues of saints and biblical figures flanked the doors. Narratives from the Bible, Apocrypha (unofficial books of the Bible of questionable authenticity), or saints’ lives filled the space above. On Toledo Cathedral’s only remaining portal from the 13th century (Puerta del Reloj on the north transept), the tympanum (here a pointed semicircle above the door) is filled with four registers of countless bodies, creating a scrolling narrative that begins in the lower left with the Annunciation (when the Archangel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear the son of God) and ends with the Assumption of the Virgin (when Mary is assumed into Heaven) at the very top.
This sculptural imagery served a number of purposes. It marked the entranceway into the cathedral as the transition point between the mundane world outside and the sacred space within, encouraging churchgoers to enter a more devotional state of mind. It could also identify the most important saints and stories in local history.
For instance, sculpted above an early 14th-century door (Puerta del Perdón) on the Toledo Cathedral’s west façade is the story of the Virgin Mary offering a miraculous garment to Saint Ildefonso, a 7th-century bishop from the city of Toledo.
Other 13th-century cathedrals, like Burgos Cathedral, took the sculptural programs of French cathedrals as their models. There, the Puerta de Sarmental’s tympanum shows Christ in Majesty (enthroned), surrounded by the Four Evangelists at work on their gospels and allegorical figures representing the seven Liberal Arts (studied at medieval universities), which closely follows the iconography of a portal at Amiens Cathedral. This entrance and its sculptural message were intended only for the bishop and clergy of the cathedral, which accounts for its more complex allegories.
The introduction of the Gothic style into Iberia also came with the rise in popularity of stained-glass windows. Throughout the 13th century, many cathedrals filled their wide windows with colored and painted glass, although only León Cathedral has a substantial amount of medieval glass remaining. The thinning of a cathedral’s walls and the use of flying buttresses allowed for the use of larger windows of colored glass—such as we see in French Gothic cathedrals. In the chapels lining the perimeter of León’s cathedral are windows recounting events from the life of Christ or from the lives of well-known Iberian saints, like Saint Ildefonso. One rosette shows a group of pilgrims at Santiago de Compostela, the most popular pilgrimage destination of the Middle Ages (following Rome). Located in the northwestern region of Galicia in Spain, this was thought to be the resting place of the Apostle Saint James (Santiago in Iberia, revered in part for performing miracles of healing and for aiding soldiers in battle against Islamic forces).
In this stained glass window, we see the Romanesque towers of Santiago de Compostela’s cathedral at the top, while in the middle is a long white casket, containing the saint’s relics. Clustered around the tomb are groups of pilgrims. They carry the staffs and satchel bags ornamented with a seashell that identify them as pilgrims of Santiago. Most kneel and clasp their hands in prayer as they look reverently towards the saint’s relics. Another pair appears to have just arrived, stepping forward to behold the tomb. Windows like this reveal the most important devotional figures and experiences in medieval Iberia.
Even as the Middle Ages drew to a close, the Gothic style first introduced at Toledo Cathedral continued to be the most popular form for cathedrals in Iberia. In Seville, the process of demolishing the original mosque and rebuilding in the Gothic style began in 1401 and did not conclude until the early 16th century. Yet even then, the unique multicultural environment of Iberia had an impact on the structure. Following the placement of the altar in the old mosque structure, there was still the separation of the choir and the capilla mayor.
Parts of the old mosque’s courtyard were incorporated into the cloister walls, and the majority of the old minaret (tower used for the Muslim call to prayer) was incorporated into the cathedral’s bell tower. Then, as in the 13th century, a fusion of cultural styles came together in a uniquely Iberian Gothic cathedral.
URL: https://youtu.be/pcB5a_NlPwA
Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras, “Church Reform and the Poetics of Gothic Sculpture in Burgos and Amiens,” Spanish Medieval Art: Recent Studies, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 155–186.
Eduardo Carrero Santamaría, “Presbiterio y coro en la catedral de Toledo. En busca de unas circunstancias,” Hortus Artium Medievalium 15 (2009), pp. 315–237.
Tom Nickson, Toledo Cathedral: Building Histories in Medieval Castile (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016).
Victor Nieto Alcaide, La vidriera española: Ocho siglos de luz (Donostia: San Sebastián: Editorial Nerea, 1998).
Originally designed as a monument symbolizing the Reconquest, the Convent of the Knights Templar of Tomar (transferred in 1344 to the Knights of the Order of Christ) came to symbolize just the opposite during the Manueline period—the opening up of Portugal to other civilizations.
URL: https://youtu.be/3n1OXbvyW4I
Source: UNESCO, “Convent of Christ, Tomar,” in Smarthistory, May 27, 2021, accessed November 24, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/convent-christ-tomar/.
On the eve of the Jewish holiday of Passover, a child traditionally asks a critical question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” This question sets up the ritual narration of the story of Passover, when Moses led the Jews out of slavery in Egypt with a series of miraculous events (recounted in the Jewish Bible in the book of Exodus).
For the last and most terrible in a series of miraculous plagues that ultimately convinced the Egyptian Pharaoh to free the Jews—the death of the first born sons of Egypt—Moses commanded the Jews to paint a red mark on their doors. In doing so, the Angel of Death “passed over” these homes and the children survived. The story of Passover—of miraculous salvation from slavery—is one that is recounted annually by many Jews at a seder, the ritual meal that marks the beginning of the holiday.
The book used to tell the story of Passover around the seder table each year is a special one, known as a haggadah (haggadot, pl). The Golden Haggadah, as you might imagine given its name, is one of the most luxurious examples of these books ever created. In fact, it is one of the most luxurious examples of a medieval illuminated manuscript, regardless of use or patronage. So although the Golden Hagaddah has a practical purpose, it is also a fine work of art used to signal the wealth of its owners.
A hagaddah usually includes the prayers and readings said during the meal and sometimes contained images that could have served as a sort of pictorial aid to envision the history of Passover around the table. In fact, the word “haggadah” actually means “narration” in Hebrew. The Golden Haggadah is one of the most lavishly decorated medieval Haggadot, containing 56 miniatures (small paintings) found within the manuscript. The reason it is called the “Golden” Haggadah is clear—each miniature is decorated with a brilliant gold-leaf background. As such, this manuscript would have been quite expensive to produce and was certainly owned by a wealthy Jewish family. So although many haggadot show signs of use—splashes of wine, etc.—the fine condition of this particular haggadah means that it might have served a more ceremonial purpose, intended to showcase the prosperity of this family living near Barcelona in the early fourteenth century.
The fact that the Golden Haggadah was so richly illuminated is important. Although the second commandment in Judaism forbids the making of “graven images,” haggadot were often seen as education rather than religious and therefore exempt from this rule.
The style of the manuscript may look familiar to you—it is very similar to Christian Gothic manuscripts such as the Bible of Saint Louis. Look, for example, at the figure of Moses and the Pharaoh (above). He doesn’t really look like an Egyptian pharaoh at all but more like a French king. The long flowing body, small architectural details and patterned background reveal that this manuscript was created during the Gothic period. Whether the artists of the Golden Haggadah themselves were Jewish is open to debate, although it is certainly evident that regardless of their religious beliefs, the dominant style of Christian art in Europe clearly influenced the artists of this manuscript.
So the Golden Haggadah is both stylistically an example of Jewish art and Gothic art. Often Christian art is associated with the Gothic style but it is important to remember that artists, regardless of faith, were exchanging ideas and techniques. In fact, while the Golden Haggadah looks Christian (Gothic) in style, other examples of Jewish manuscripts, such as the Sarajevo Haggadah, blend both Christian and Islamic influences. This cross-cultural borrowing of artistic styles happened throughout Europe, but was especially strong in medieval Spain and Portugal, where Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together for many centuries. Despite periods of persecution, the Jews of Spain, known as Sephardic Jews, developed a rich culture of Judaism on the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal). The Golden Haggadah thus stands as a testament to the impact and significance of Jewish culture in medieval Spain—and the rich multicultural atmosphere of that produced such a magnificent manuscript.
Additional resources:
The Golden Haggadah at the British Library (digital manuscript)
Digital Hebrew Treasures from the British Library Collections (British Library blog)
About the Golden Haggadah, from the British Library and more here
URL: https://youtu.be/u3VI63Vh3Lk
Additional resources
This work at The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary.
Silvia Centeno and Nellie Stavisky, ” The Prato Haggadah: an Investigation into the Materials and Techniques of a Hebrew Manuscript from Spain in Relation to Medieval Treatises,” in Craft Treatises and Handbooks: The Dissemination of Technical Knowledge in the Middle Ages, edited by Ricardo Córdoba (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 161–84. edited by
Naomi Steinberger, ed. The Prato Haggadah: Companion Volume to the Facsimile Edition (Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, 2007).
URL: https://youtu.be/N1s7RtMg2Co
The Iberian Peninsula, 1000-1400 C.E. from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Timeline of Art History
Definition of Sephardim from the Jewish Virtual Library
Source: Dr. Ronnie Perelis and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Book of Morals of Philosophers,” in Smarthistory, July 13, 2017, accessed November 21, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/book-of-morals/.
What did Europeans know of the geography, politics, and peoples around the globe in the late 14th century? A celebrated Jewish mapmaker in Majorca, Elisha ben Abraham Cresques, with his knowledge of Catalan, Hebrew, and Arabic, visualized his conception of the universe and the inhabited world in his remarkable 1375 Catalan Atlas. Measuring nearly ten feet in width and spread across six parchment leaves mounted on wooden boards, the map he created represents the height of medieval mapmaking in Majorca—an island off of the eastern coast of the Iberian peninsula (today Spain and Portugal) and a territory of the Crown of Aragon, which, in the 14th century, dominated much of the Mediterranean basin.
Combining various approaches to mapmaking, Cresques created a visual encyclopedia of the world, containing extensive commentary in captions and images designed to encompass all known geographical, historical, and human knowledge. In its ambitious geographic scope, covering lands from the Atlantic to China and from Scandinavia to Africa, the Catalan Atlas presents a highly connected medieval world. By examining the imagery of his Catalan Atlas, we can see how one 14th-century Jewish man understood the political and ethnic realities of his world.
The map’s rich and colorful imagery are exceptionally well-executed; it is not surprise that Cresques, a gifted painter and scribe, worked as the mapmaker to the King of the Crown of Aragon. In fact, he was the only mapmaker of his generation known and documented in the service of the Crown, and his Catalan Atlas was likely a royal commission by King Peter IV of Aragon possibly as a gift to King Charles V of France. [1] The images in the map are oriented in every direction, suggesting that the Atlas would have been prominently displayed on a table to be seen from all sides when viewed by the king and his privileged guests. The Catalan Atlas served as a visualization of the King’s power and worldview. As expected, Cresques imbued the map with the desires of his royal patron, but if we look closely we see that he imbued it with his own worldview as well.
The first two panels of the Catalan Atlas (see above) contain lengthy texts and diagrams charting contemporaneous scientific knowledge of the universe. The content of these panels belongs to a genre of popular astronomy and astrology, known throughout Europe, including charts of the days of the month, systems for determining the course of the tides, and models for calculating the dates of Easter and other Christian holidays. Although this data was compiled by Cresques from Islamic and Jewish astronomical and astrological treatises, they were not intended for practical use. For its royal patron, they instead present a vision of an organized cosmos—a reflection of his stable rule.
At the center of Sheet 2, we see a much-damaged rendering of a seated scholar holding a quadrant. Surrounding him are richly colored concentric circles featuring calendars of the sun, moon, planets, seasons, and the zodiac. This calendar-wheel, along with the accompanying texts and diagrams on Sheet 1, convey a sense of an ordered and structured universe. This diagram echoes contemporaneous representations of the cosmos, but crucially departs in the rendering of the seated scholar. Whereas most medieval manuscripts, as in a thirteenth-century copy of Gossuin de Metz’s Image of the World, often depicted the universe within a Christian worldview, showing God as creator, overseeing and protecting the world, in the Catalan Atlas, God is absent. In God’s place, sits a man with his quadrant, emphasizing that through study and scholarship comes knowledge and power. These introductory panels provide a framework for and a fitting opening to the map of the inhabited world which follows, one befitting its royal patron and audience.
Maps can tell us about the way people conceive of the world around them. They are not merely navigational tools, but also cultural documents, expressing in visual form their owners’ imagination and knowledge of the world. To understand the significance of Cresques’s Catalan Atlas, we first need to look at mappaemundi (literally, cloths or charts of the world), medieval European maps which typically portrayed the world through a Christian lens to reflect the perfection of God’s creation and chart the history of human salvation, both in space and time.
Let’s take, for example, a late thirteenth-century map included within a psalter. The world map prominently places the city of Jerusalem—considered especially holy as the site of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection— at the center of the depicted world. The faces of Adam and Eve appear ensconced in the earthly paradise, the Garden of Eden, on an island at the top of the map. The biblical whale that swallowed the prophet Jonah swims in an ocean while Noah’s ark rests atop Mount Ararat.
Gazing over the world, Christ stands flanked by angels. He raises his right hand in a gesture of blessing while in his other hand he grasps a small globe of the world—a sphere resembling a T-O map of the world. With Christ presiding over the world below him, the represents the totality of human history from the Garden of Eden to the Heavenly Jerusalem.
This religious worldview is absent from Cresques’s Catalan Atlas. Not only does Cresques remove the image of God and most biblical scenes from the cosmological charts and the map itself, but further breaking with medieval conventions for creating a world map, he modeled his Atlas on rectangular portolan charts, nautical maps used by sailors for coastal navigation and maritime exploration. With their attention to detail, portolan charts aided Cresques in rendering regions of the world well-traveled and documented by Europeans (such as the territories surrounding the Mediterranean Sea). As in portolan charts, a complex web of lines called windrose lines (or rhumb lines) crisscross the Atlas. Likewise, coastlines are densely populated with city names. The Catalan Atlas stands out for its geographical realism, accuracy, and the sheer amount of data included.
To define landmasses and fill in the details of more distant territories not yet been mapped in portolan charts or explored as extensively by European travelers, Cresques relied on other Hebrew and Arabic sources. Living in the medieval city of Majorca (then a multilingual and multi-religious society populated by Christians, Muslims, and Jews), Cresques was well-positioned to work across these languages. Moreover, along with access to the library of his royal patron, through ongoing connections between the Jewish populations of Majorca and nearby North Africa, Cresques was likely also able to seek out resources in the cultural arena of the Maghreb. He was not only fluent in Occitan (the language used in Catalonia and Majorca), but he was also fluent in Hebrew, and likely also in Arabic. As a result, he could turn to travel narratives written by Europeans (such as the 13th-century journey of Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo along the Silk road), as well as rely on Arabic sources, such as the riḥla (travelogue) of Moroccan-born Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta in the lands of Afro-Eurasia in the 14th century. He further utilized Arabic geographic and scientific treatises and maps produced by Arab cartographers. Cresques’s use and placement of Arabic city names as well as the spatial organization of his map suggest that he had access to the world map created by famed Arab cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi.
Despite this multicultural atmosphere, over the course of Cresques’s life, the Jewish community of Majorca and across the Iberian Peninsula faced increasing harassment, persecution, and at times forced conversion. These challenges shaped the way Cresques viewed and chose to represent the world around him in his Atlas.
Given that his patron was the King of Aragon, it comes as no surprise that Cresques emphasized the Crown of Aragon’s spheres of political and commercial influence. Since their rise to power in the mid-thirteenth century, the Aragonese pursued a policy of maritime expansion. By the 14th century, they controlled much of the central and western Mediterranean basin, including modern-day northeastern Spain, the islands of Majorca, Sicily, Minorca, Ibiza, and Sardinia, as well as southern Italy up to Naples and parts of Greece and Asia Minor. Although never truly unified as a single entity, these territories were loyal to the Crown of Aragon.
On the Catalan Atlas, Aragonese-ruled territories are marked using the gold and ruby senyera (the Catalan flag) which often appears larger and more prominent than other flags on the map. The island of Majorca, the home of Abraham Cresques, is entirely colored with the senyera, creating an impression of a powerful political presence. Likewise, the large islands of the Mediterranean under Aragonese sovereignty are also distinguished in their ornament, marked entirely in gold with disk and scroll patterns in green, blue, and red. Together, the senyera and the gold-ornamented islands give the impression of a unified Mediterranean dominated by Aragonese political and commercial interests, an image that would have particularly appealed to the Atlas’s patron.
Moving south and east from the Mediterranean, into Africa, and West and East Asia, Cresques again diverged from earlier medieval maps by populating his map with images of rulers. Although often described as portraits, these images are not accurate renderings of the historical individuals, but visual markers of distinct political groups. The rulers are shown using a combination of royal imagery popular in European visual culture, such as scepters and crowns, and costumes and attributes more commonly seen in Islamicate imagery, such as turbans and cloth headcoverings, robes ornamented with tiraz armbands, and attributes such as a sword or shield. Contemporaneous European texts often characterized the Islamic world and its non-European, non-Christian rulers not only as exotic and different, but also as threatening enemies. For the patron of the Catalan Atlas, Peter IV of Aragon, the Islamic world was associated with the centuries-long enemy of the Reconquista and the Crusades, or with new rising threats, such as the emerging Ottoman power. However, through the use of European and Islamicate royal vocabulary, the rulers are rendered not as foreign or menacing, but rather as respected, powerful, and prosperous political rivals.
Perhaps the most famous ruler portrait in Cresques’s map Mansa Musa, is the 14th-century ruler of the Mali Empire known for its abundant resources in gold. In 1324, 50 years prior to the production of the Catalan Atlas, Musa embarked on the hajj, traveling throughout the Islamic lands of West Asia. During his journey in Cairo, Mecca, and Medina, he spent so much gold that the overall value of gold decreased in Egypt for over ten years, causing severe inflation and crippling the local economies.
Whereas Africa often appears on the margins of medieval European maps, Cresques’s depiction of Mansa Musa represents Africa as a powerful economic center. He is shown seated cross-legged atop a cushioned, golden throne, and he wears a golden crown and carries an orb and scepter, traditional emblems of medieval European kings. A turbaned nomad riding on a dromedary approaches Mansa Musa, who gazes at him and extends a piece of gold in his hand, a monetary transaction reinforced by the golden adornments on the nomad’s tents.
Together, they highlight the pivotal role played by the region of Mali in trans-Saharan trade. Since antiquity, networks of exchange had connected Africa and Europe, with commerce in gold and other materials bringing inhabitants of both continents into frequent contact. Gold mined south of the Sahara, along with salt, ivory, and enslaved peoples, was transported to the north by caravans of Saharan traders, reaching the shores of the Mediterranean and its maritime trade networks. The Catalan map pays special attention to this area of trade in both images and written legends, noting not only the abundance of gold, but also knowledge of the region’s fertile soil, settlements along caravan routes, and the production of leather goods.
The imagery of Mansa Musa and the Saharan camel-traders also visualizes 14th-century European notions of race and cultural difference. While skin color could denote geographical regions known or believed to be inhabited by Black people, color symbolism in medieval imagery was predominantly tied to Christian theology, whereby lightness or brightness was associated with virtue, and darkness with sin. For example, during the Crusades, a period of increased anti-Muslim sentiment, Muslims were frequently depicted as dark-skinned by European artists, despite the fact that most Muslims they encountered would have had medium or light complexions. Rather than physiognomic accuracy, color denoted a perception of violence and religious error. In contrast, the majority of the rulers depicted in the Catalan Atlas are shown with fair skin, as political rivals of the Atlas’s patron, but not necessarily as monstrous others. The light complexion of the Muslim rulers as well as accompanying legends praising them as great and powerful may also have related to Cresques’s own positive associations with Islamic culture.
In contrast, the representation of Africa denotes Cresques’s keener awareness with respect to geopolitical diversity and racial difference. The image of King Mansa Musa, although employing common features of European stereotypes of Africans, including tightly curled hair and beard, a low-bridged nose, and full lips, appears mostly to mark geographical distance (rather than blackness as an exotic other). However, in his rendering of the adjacent figures (the nomadic rider to the left and a camel-trader to the right), Cresques’s image takes on a more insidious tone. On the one hand, the distinction between the light skin of the nomadic North African tribes and the dark skin of the Black African camel-trader from further south, suggests accurate knowledge of the region, likely drawn from contemporaneous Islamic maps and treatises. At the same time, the depiction of the black-skinned camel-trader renders the figure as primitive. Represented with his mouth ajar and nude (both often associated in medieval art with barbarism or sexual sin), the figure embodies racist interpretations found in some contemporaneous Islamic and Jewish texts. Perhaps such an image would have promoted Africa as a region ripe for colonization to its Aragonese patron.
Where most medieval mappaemundi incorporated fantastical elements, including mythical beasts or the so-called “monstrous races” (legendary peoples), such as Cynocephali (men with dog’s heads) and Sciapods (one-legged creatures), Cresques attempted to provide as realistic as possible a rendering of both geography and political realms. Most challenging in this respect was his depiction of East Asia. Despite the presence of Europeans in several cities in China, such as Yangzhou, and even after Marco Polo’s famous expedition, East Asia still remained largely unknown to Europeans in the fourteenth century. Here, Cresques could not use portolan charts to accurately plot the region, as European sailors had not yet navigated the area. Cresques relied heavily upon Marco Polo’s travel narrative to fill in the details, including figures that would have appeared almost life-like to medieval viewers, such as sirens in the Indian Ocean, as well as pearl fishers in the Persian Gulf, who Marco Polo noted chant incantations to protect themselves from dangerous fish.
Cresques also incorporated two mythical figures who appear frequently on the easternmost edges of medieval mappaemundi, the nations of Gog and Magog that figured prominently in the Christian vision of the apocalypse (the destruction of the world and the end of time). According to one of these traditions, Alexander the Great enclosed Gog and Magog, fierce and threatening man-eaters, behind mountains to await the arrival of the Antichrist, at which time they would leave their enclosure and bring death and destruction just before Christ’s Second Coming. By the twelfth century, these vicious peoples were often identified in Christian texts with Jews. Cresques’s depiction is in part faithful to this narrative.
We see Alexander the Great facing Satan and pointing to an enclosure in which he will confine the nations of Gog and Magog, represented within a mountainous enclosure. However, rather than appearing as wild nations, they appear as a well-organized army led by a dignified ruler on horseback beneath a large blue canopy. Moreover, the mountains that surround them are distinguished from all other mountains on the map by their use of a wavy border on both sides, rather than only on one side. This pattern more closely resembles the representation of the map’s rivers. The curving lines of the mountain ranges may have subtly represented the legendary River Sambatyon, behind which, according to Jewish narratives, live the ten lost tribes of Israel who dwell under divine protection, isolated from any outside influence, until the arrival of the Jewish messiah. Cresques was likely familiar with several fourteenth-century Jewish texts, that associated the lost tribes with a hope for a messianic future in which Jews were not subordinated by Christianity. By conflating Christian and Jewish mythical imagery, the map communicates different messages depending upon who viewed it. For the map’s patron, it plotted a well-known apocalyptic motif of Gog and Magog onto the map of the world, while at the same time, for Cresques, living in a period of increased persecution under Christian rulers, it highlighted a messianic hope for the lost tribes to cross the River Sambatyon and herald the coming of a Jewish messiah and an independent Jewish future.
In the centuries that followed Cresques’s completion of The Catalan Atlas, religious persecution of the Jewish community of Majorca gravely increased. Within four years of his death in 1391, Majorcan Jews suffered under anti-Jewish riots, at which point, Cresques’s entire family converted to Christianity under severe duress. The more favorable renderings of the Islamic world and a Jewish messianic future in the Catalan Atlas, may suggest that he hoped for a better future for himself and his family in the face of Christian persecution.
Notes:
[1] By 1380, only five years after the map’s completion, it was documented in the royal library of King Charles V of France, possibly intended as a royal gift from the outset.
Mappa Mundi: Hereford Cathedral, annotated Hereford map
The Cresques Project, with translations of the captions of the Catalan Atlas
Source: Dr. Ariel Fein, “The Catalan Atlas,” in Smarthistory, June 6, 2022, accessed November 21, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/catalan-atlas/.
The Black Death arrived on European shores in 1348. By 1350, the year it retreated, it had felled a quarter to half of the region’s population. In 1362, 1368, and 1381, it struck again — as it would periodically well into the 18th century.
The contemporary Sienese chronicler, Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, described its terror. A victim first experiences flu-like symptoms, and then sees a “swell beneath their armpits and in their groins.” Agnolo himself buried his five children with his own hands. He also lost his wife.
The plague hit hard and fast. People lay ill little more than two or three days and died suddenly… .He who was well one day was dead the next and being carried to his grave, ”writes the Carmelite friar Jean de Venette in his 14th century French chronicle. From his native Picardy, Jean witnessed the disease’s impact in northern France; Normandy, for example, lost 70 to 80 percent of its population. Italy was equally devastated. The Florentine author Boccaccio recounts how that city citizens “dug for each graveyard a huge trench, in which they laid the corpses as they arrived by hundreds at a time, piling them up tier upon tier as merchandise is stowed on a ship.
Growing stability in Europe in the late middle ages made possible extensive trade between East and West and within Europe itself. Italian city-states such as Venice and Genoa had trading ports in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black sea — trade that made these cities among the wealthiest cities in Europe. Most historians today generally agree that the plague was likely spread through Eurasia via these trade routes by parasites carried on the backs of rodents. The bacterium Yersinia pestis (and not all historians agree this was the culprit) likely traveled from China to the northwestern shores of the Caspian Sea, then part of the Mongol Empire and by the spring of 1346, Italian merchants in the Crimea, specifically the Genoese -dominated city of Kaffa (today Feodosiya in the Ukraine) brought the disease west. Rats carrying infected fleas boarded ships bound for Constantinople (today Istanbul in Turkey), capital of the Byzantine Empire. Inhabitants there were sickened by the plague by early July.
From these Greek-speaking lands, the plague spread to North Africa and the Middle East with terrible consequences; by autumn 1347, it had reached the French port of Marseilles and progressed both north and west. By early November, the Italian city-states of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice — commercial hubs for European trade — had been struck.
Most of the rest of Europe followed in short order. The disease spread along the active trade routes that northern Italian and Flemish merchants had developed. London and Bruges then communicated the disease via busy shipping lanes to the Nordic countries and the Baltic region (aided by a trading partnership known as the Hanseatic League). Western crusaders seeking to attack the Holy Land prompted innovations in shipbuilding and these larger and faster ships carried large quantities of goods over extensive trade networks— but they also carried the deadly pathogen.
The pandemic ended up killing approximately half of Europe’s population, indiscriminate of people’s wealth, social standing, or religious piety. Survivors “were like persons distraught and almost without feeling,” writes Agnolo, a despair echoed throughout Europe. “God is deaf nowadays and will not hear us. And for our guilt he grinds good men to dust, ”wrote the late 14th century English cleric, William Langland, in his epic poem“ Piers Plowman. ”
With so many dead and dying, patterns that had kept medieval society stable were replaced by hostility, confusion, greed, remorse, abuse — and, at times, genuine caring. Contemporary chronicles tell of eruptions of violence, “Christians massacred Jews in Germany and other parts of the world where Jews lived, and many thousands were burned everywhere, indiscriminately,” wrote Jean de Venette, describing a ritualized attacks against Jews who became scapegoats.
Some Christians became more pious, believing that their piety might endear them to a God who they believed had sent the plague to punish them for their sins. Texts from this time describe Penitent pilgrims, at times flagellating themselves with whips, crowding the roads. Others reacted by assuming a no-holds-barred attitude toward life, giving “themselves over to pleasures: monks, priests, nuns and lay men and women all enjoyed themselves …. Everyone thought themselves rich because he had escaped and regained the world , ”According to Agnolo.
The Black Death turned the economy upside-down. It disrupted trade and put manufacturing on hold as skilled artisans and merchants died by the thousands — not to mention the customers who bought their wares. Workers’ wages skyrocketed as arable land lay fallow; landlords, desperate for people to work their land, were forced to renegotiate farmers’ wages. Famine followed. Widespread death eroded the strict hereditary class divisions that had, for centuries, bound peasants to land owned by local lords.
People struggled to understand what was happening. In Western Europe a terrified populace often turned to their Christian faith. As a result, the Church became wealthier as many of those stricken, in an effort to assure a place in heaven, willed their property to the Church. But the authority of the Church also suffered. as some pointed to the “astrological skies that revealed Saturn in the house of Jupiter” as the cause of the tragedy.
The Black Death radically disrupted society, but did the social, political and religious upheaval created by the plague contribute to the Renaissance? Some historians say yes. With so much land readily available to survivors, the rigid hierarchical structure that marked pre-plague society became more fluid. The Medici family, important patrons of Italian Renaissance culture, originated in the rural area of Mugello in Tuscany and moved to Florence soon after the plague. They initially established their fortune in the wool trade and then branched out into banking. As the family achieved wealth and power, they promoted such artists as Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, and Michelangelo — not to mention producing four popes and two regent queens of France. Would such mobility have been possible without the social and economic upheaval caused by the Black Death? Historians will likely debate this question for many years.
Secrets of the Black Death (Nature video)
Primary documents on the plague including Agnolo di Turo del Grasso and Jean de Venette
What comes to mind when you think of the crusades? Earnest and alarmingly buff knights (in shining armor, of course) engaged in against-the-odds quests to accomplish godly deeds in an evil world? Red crosses on pure white backgrounds? Orlando Bloom?
This is not surprising. A quick look at our pop culture and politics in the West reveals a continued fascination with the crusades. Compared with popular representations, the historical reality is more complicated and often less heroic.
Imagine a man-at-arms in the French city of Clermont in 1095. He is listening to Pope Urban II—the only pope he has ever seen in person!—speak passionately about the need to fight in the Holy Land. His lord is persuaded, and gathers his men and resources. The man-at-arms says goodbye to his family, and departs in 1096 on years of painful journeying and military campaigns. He dies of starvation at Antioch, never seeing Jerusalem. His family never knows his fate. This was crusading.
Now imagine Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily. Frederick regains Jerusalem from the Muslims without waging war—it helps that he knows Arabic. He is crowned the King of Jerusalem in 1229, but returns to Europe to find the pope waging war on his lands. This, too, was crusading—at least it was for some, though others, like the pope, disagreed.
Finally, imagine an English knight in 1370. He plans to travel to northeastern Europe to fight non-Christians and help Christians there expand their territory. He will go for a season, enjoy feasting and knightly camaraderie, then return home and go back to his regular life, with his reputation enhanced by his trip. You guessed it: this was also crusading.
Crusading took many different forms, and attempting to precisely define crusading has engaged historians in intense debates for more than 150 years.
Most of the debates among scholars are concerned with identifying the key characteristics of a crusade. Some, for example, consider only expeditions aimed at Jerusalem or the Holy Land to be crusades. This approach is responsible for the traditional, numbered crusades (i.e., First Crusade, Second Crusade, etc.).
Others downplay the importance of a specific target, and emphasize instead characteristics related to authorization and procedure. These scholars would ask, did a pope authorize the expedition? Did participants take vows and receive certain legal and spiritual privileges? Taking this approach yields a larger number of crusades, spread over a larger geographical area and chronological range. At the same time, some question whether the role of authorities (i.e, the pope) determined a crusade as much as grassroots enthusiasm among ordinary people. These scholars would look, instead, for signs of mass popular support for an expedition. Still others assert that the characteristics of crusading were so diffuse throughout medieval culture that it is impossible and ultimately misleading to attempt to define what was or was not a crusade.
It is also fair to say that many scholars recognize that one can spend too much time seeking a meticulous definition, in essence missing the forest for the trees!
If crusading was so nebulous, how did potential participants know what a crusade was? Remember our man-at-arms in Clermont in 1095? He (and his lord) noticed preaching for a new expedition (perhaps emphasizing a papal proclamation, perhaps not), or heard people around him discussing it. Perhaps he also saw others taking public vows and wearing the sign of the cross on their garments. He may have learned of certain legal privileges designed to encourage participation and help protect property and families in the crusader’s absence. Or perhaps he heard of a papal promise of an indulgence (“indulgence” in this context simply means a spiritual benefit of some kind—the precise kind of indulgence offered for crusading changed over time).
Finally, our man-at-arms was interested in crusading, but for others, someone with authority over them (or someone they loved), may simply have told them it was happening or that they were going. Much like today, some people may have simply paid attention to their taxes; at times, especially in the later Middle Ages, both the Church and secular authorities levied funds for new expeditions. Any or all of these factors may have caught people’s attention, especially if they came from a family or region with a tradition of crusade participation. Meanwhile, for those who were the targets of crusader violence, presumably the only sign needed was the sight of an approaching army bedecked with crosses.
While it’s valuable to seek to understand the crusades from the perspective of participants, it’s equally important to seek out different points of view. Internal criticism of the crusading movement was more limited than many today might expect. What criticisms existed were usually leveled at specific expeditions or participants, rather than at the idea of crusading in general or the underlying attitudes towards religion and violence that made crusading possible.
Muslim voices, whether in the Iberian Peninsula (what is now Spain and Portugal), the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean), or further afield, described the crusades in different ways—often as simple territorial expansion, religious warfare, or a combination of the two. Descriptions of the “Franks” themselves (as the crusaders were called) ranged from respect to ridicule to hostility.
Records from Jewish communities around the Mediterranean sometimes described an undiscriminating ferocity and zealous fervor held by many crusaders, a theme also underlined by Christians within Europe who did not conform to Church teachings, and thus were called “heretics.” Some accounts of the crusades from the Byzantine Empire (a medieval state based on the remains of the classical Roman Empire) emphasized the purported “barbarity” and relative naivete of the crusaders.
Additional resources
Dr. Susanna A. Throop, The Crusades: An Epitome (Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018), an open access book.
Dr. Ariel Fein, “Material culture of the Crusades,” Reframing Art History, 2022.
The Crusades on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
Source: Dr. Susanna Throop, “What were the crusades?,” in Smarthistory, August 8, 2015, accessed November 22, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/what-were-the-crusades-1-of-4/.
In some ways, setting a beginning date for the crusading movement is relatively easy. The First Crusade was preached by Pope Urban II in 1095. Several different expeditions responded to this appeal, but the general dates for the First Crusade are 1096–99, when the city of Jerusalem was conquered. Keep in mind though that crusading didn’t emerge from a vacuum, and many of the elements of crusading were circulating before 1095.
However, finding an end date for the crusades is quite difficult indeed. Scholars used to stress that the heyday of crusading was before 1300. But we now know that crusading continued to flourish—as an ideal even when not in practice—for many centuries after that. Some place the end date at 1571, when the rising Ottoman Empire defeated the Kingdom of Cyprus at the city of Famagusta. Others place it in the late nineteenth century, when the last attempt at a military order (i.e., a Catholic armed religious order, like the medieval Knights Templar) ended. The argument can be made—and is in fact made by some groups around the world—that the crusades never ended at all.
The First Crusade was launched at the Levant (the region at the end of the eastern Mediterranean) with the stated purpose of rescuing Christians and bringing the Christian holy places—specifically Jerusalem—back into (European) Christian hands.
Of all the crusades to the region, the First was the most successful (from the perspective of European participants), and led to the creation of small polities in the Levant, known as the crusader states. European nobles first governed these small states, which were inhabited by some settlers from western Europe as well as native Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
By the time the Second Crusade rolled around (1146–49) crusading had already expanded dramatically. The Second Crusade took place on three fronts: against Muslims in the Levant, against pagans in northern Europe, and against Muslims on the Iberian peninsula (modern day Spain and Portugal). This does not mean that all three fronts were coordinated, as in a modern war. Rather, it means that contemporaries believed that the wars on all three fronts together constituted a larger endeavor.
We should also remember that the Levant and Iberia contained any number of local Christians, Jews, and other religious groups, and they were not always exempted from crusader violence, even though it was held to be wrong to persecute or kill fellow Christians and Jews.
After the Second Crusade, crusading continued to expand and evolve. Muslims (or areas under Muslim governance) continued to be targets, especially when they threatened or reconquered portions of the crusader states, but other targets included Christian “heretics” (for example, in southern France), the Christian Byzantine Empire, and political opponents of the papacy within Europe.
Crusading also developed local traditions. In northern Europe, crusading became a festive seasonal rite of passage for western European knights, complete with honorary feasts and prizes. In other places, crusading interacted with pre-existing factors, for example in Iberia, where both ideas of crusading and of the “Reconquest” were influential. In still other places, again in northern Europe but also Malta, the military orders—armed religious orders (most famously the Knights Templar)—set up independent, or virtually independent states dedicated to perpetual crusading.
Who went on crusade? From the beginning, popes and other leaders sought to encourage only professional men of war, whether kings, lords, knights, or simple men-at-arms, to go on crusade. And from the beginning, individuals of almost every other social class, age, and gender ignored this and wanted to go, too. The only people explicitly forbidden from going on crusade were those who had taken religious vows (like priests and monks), and even then, many tried to find a way to go—and, indeed, many went.
This doesn’t mean that everyone in Europe was pulled inexorably into crusading like water down a drain. Crusading was expensive, and it was very risky. To go on crusade meant leaving your loved ones and your property (if you had any) vulnerable for at least several years and possibly forever. Going on crusade was not an “easy out” for younger sons (as used to be thought) nor was it a reliable treasure-hunting expedition; it impoverished many more people than it profited. Nonetheless, because of the spiritual and social rewards on offer for crusading, crusade leaders were never able to fully stop people of both genders and all classes from accompanying armed parties on crusade, and it is fair to say that many expeditions, especially those to the Levant, included a wide range of age, social classes, and military experience.
Dr. Susanna A. Throop, The Crusades: An Epitome (Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018), an open access book.
Dr. Ariel Fein, “Material culture of the Crusades,” Reframing Art History, 2022.
The Crusades on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
It is hard to summarize the impact of a movement that spanned centuries and continents, crossed social lines, and affected all levels of culture. However, there are a few central effects that can be highlighted.
First, the earliest military orders originated in Jerusalem in the wake of the First Crusade. A miltary order is a religious order in which members take traditional monastic vows—communal poverty, chastity, and obedience—but also commit to violence on behalf of the Christian faith. Well-known examples include the Knights Templar (officially endorsed in 1129), the Knights Hospitaller (confirmed by papal bull in 1113), and the Teutonic Knights (originated in the late twelfth century).
The military orders represented a major theological and military development, and went on to play central roles in the formation of key political units that still exist today as nation-states.
Second, crusading played a major role in European territorial expansion. The First Crusade resulted in the formation of the crusader states in the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean), which were initially governed, and in small part populated, by settlers from Europe.
Crusading in northern and eastern Europe led to the expansion of kingdoms like Denmark and Sweden, as well as the creation of brand-new political units, for example in Prussia. As areas around the Baltic Sea were taken by the crusaders, traders and settlers—mostly German—moved in and profited economically.
In the Mediterranean Sea, crusading led to the conquest and colonization of many islands, which arguably helped ensure Christian control of Mediterranean trade routes (at least for as long as the islands were held). Crusading also played a role in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula (now Spain and Portugal). This was finally completed in 1492, when the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand II and Isabella I conquered the last Muslim community on the peninsula—the city of Granada. They expelled Jews from the country in the same year. And of course, they also authorized and supported the expeditions of Christopher Columbus, who—like many European explorers of his day—believed that the expansion of the Christian faith was one of his duties.
Third, the crusading movement impacted internal European development in a few important ways. The movement helped both to militarize the medieval western Church and to sustain criticism of that militarization. It arguably helped solidify the pope’s control over the Church and made certain financial innovations central to Church operations. And it both reflected and influenced devotional trends. For example, while there was some dedication to St. George from the early Middle Ages, the intensity of that devotion soared in Europe after he reportedly intervened miraculously at the Battle of Antioch in 1098, during the First Crusade.
Secular political theories were influenced by crusading, especially in France and the Iberian peninsula, and government institutions evolved in part to meet the logistical needs of crusading. Credit infrastructures within Europe rose to meet similar needs, and some locales—Venice, in particular—benefitted significantly in economic terms.
It goes without saying that the crusades also had a highly negative effect on interfaith relations.
Fourth, the crusading movement has left an imprint on the world as a whole. For example, many of the national flags of Europe incorporate a cross. In addition, many images of crusaders in our popular culture are indebted to the nineteenth century. Some in that century, like the novelist Sir Walter Scott, portrayed crusaders as brave and glamorous yet backward and unenlightened; simultaneously, they depicted Muslims as heroic, intelligent, and liberal. Others more wholeheartedly romanticized crusading.
These trends in nineteenth-century European culture impacted the Islamic world. Sometimes this influence was quite direct. In 1898 German Emperor Wilhelm II visited the grave of Saladin (Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb, a Muslim leader who led the recapture of Jerusalem in 1187) and was appalled at its state of disrepair. He paid to have it rebuilt, thus helping encourage modern Islamic appreciation of Saladin.
Sometimes the European influence was more diffuse. Modern crusading histories in the Islamic world began to be written in the 1890s, when the Ottoman Empire was in crisis. After the Ottomans, some Arab Nationalists interpreted nineteenth-century imperialism as crusading, and thus linked their efforts to end imperial rule with the efforts of Muslims to resist crusading in previous centuries.
It would be reassuring to believe that nobody in the West has provided grounds for such beliefs, but it would not be true. Sadly, the effects of the crusading movement—at least, as it is now remembered and reimagined—seem to be still unfolding.
Additional resources
Dr. Susanna A. Throop, The Crusades: An Epitome (Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018), an open access book.
Dr. Ariel Fein, “Material culture of the Crusades,” Reframing Art History, 2022.
The Crusades on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.