The Middle Ages in Europe ran for roughly a thousand years, long enough for a great deal to happen and for a great deal to be invented about it afterward. These stories keep to what the records and the ruins support: a siege undone by pig fat, a painter identified by the pigment in her teeth, and a dungeon that began as the best room in the house.
Every tile in a Medieval Europe game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Castles and Sieges
nine stories
1Forty fat pigs brought down a castle corner
On the tile: Rochester1215
King John besieged Rochester Castle from October to December 1215. His miners tunneled beneath the great keep, propped the gap with timber, then burned the props using fat from forty pigs that the record describes as too fat to eat. The southeast corner came down, and the rebels retreated into the northern half of the keep's interior until starvation forced their surrender. When the corner was rebuilt, the masons made it a semicircular turret rather than the square one the mine had destroyed.
Kenilworth's strongest wall was water. In the early 13th century King John added an outer circuit of stone walls and a dam to hold back a great lake, which made the castle one of the most formidable fortresses in the kingdom. In 1266 supporters of the late Simon de Montfort held it against the king through a six-month siege, one of the longest in English medieval history. The lake outlasted the fighting. John of Gaunt turned Kenilworth into a palace, and Henry V built himself a lodge across the water.
The story comes from the chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, writing in 1207. Fishermen off the Suffolk coast, he reported, caught in their nets a wild man, whom in their wonder they brought to the castellan. The constable kept him in custody many days and nights, probably at Orford Castle. Ralph could not settle the question himself, wondering whether this was a mortal man or some fish pretending to have human form. The prisoner eventually escaped back to the sea, and what the fishermen actually landed is anyone's guess.
Edward I's castles in north Wales were shaped by Master James of St George, born around 1230, probably at Saint-Prex in what is now Switzerland, though some historians place his birth in France. He had worked in Savoy on castles including Chillon and Yverdon. Cadw records that the king and his architect built both Conwy Castle and its unbroken ring of town walls, about 1.3 kilometers of them, in a barely believable four years between 1283 and 1287. The Swiss National Museum calls him the greatest mason in Swiss history.
Gilbert de Clare began Caerphilly Castle in 1268 and made it the biggest castle in Wales, second in Britain only to Windsor, with walls, towers and sprawling water defenses covering thirty acres. Its best-loved feature arrived four centuries later. Civil War gunpowder left the southeast tower at a precarious angle, and Cadw notes that Wales's own leaning tower is even wonkier than the one at Pisa. The castle is medieval; the lean is not.
Enguerrand III de Coucy built his fortress in Picardy in the early 13th century and ringed the town with 33 towers and three fortified gates, arranging town, lower courtyard and upper courtyard as three successive defenses. It survived dismantling under Louis XIV in 1652. It did not survive the First World War. As German forces withdrew to the Hindenburg Line, the castle was dynamited on 20 March 1917 on General Ludendorff's orders, with 28 metric tons of cheddite in the keep and 10 in each corner tower.
7Carcassonne's storybook roofs are 19th-century work
On the tile: Carcassonnefrom 1852
The pointed roofs that make Carcassonne look like a storybook city are nineteenth-century work. Eugene Viollet-le-Duc began restoring the fortified city in 1852, and instead of the flat tiles typical of the region he roofed the towers with slate lauzes. His detractors, the historian Hippolyte Taine among them, cried scandal. The official history of the ramparts answers that slate is also found in the Montagne Noire, less than 50 kilometers away, and notes that his choices were criticized until the 1960s and are now inseparable from the place.
Most European towns eventually swallowed or demolished their medieval defenses. Ávila, in central Spain, kept them. The walls trace an even quadrilateral with a perimeter of 2,516 meters, average about 3 meters thick, pierced by nine gates of different periods; twin towers 20 meters high flank the oldest pair. Part of the stonework dates back to 1090, with most of it rebuilt in the 12th century, and UNESCO calls the fortifications the most complete in Spain.
Frederick II completed Castel del Monte, on a hill near Andria in southern Italy, in 1240. The plan is an octagon with an octagonal tower at every angle, and UNESCO credits its layout with mathematical and astronomical precision. Frederick drew scholars to his court from across the Mediterranean, and the building mixes classical, eastern and northern ideas, including a hydraulic installation he used for bathing in the Arabic manner. UNESCO calls the result a unique piece of medieval architecture.
Films give the knight a mount on the scale of a Shire horse, seventeen or eighteen hands high. A University of Exeter project analyzed the largest dataset of English horse bones yet assembled, from 171 separate archaeological sites dated between AD 300 and 1650. Horses in the Middle Ages mostly stood 13 to 14 hands at the shoulder, under the modern pony threshold. Even at the height of the royal stud network in the 13th and 14th centuries, horses of 15 or 16 hands were very rare indeed.
The story says the French threatened to cut off the index and middle fingers of any English archer they captured, so after the victory at Agincourt in 1415 the archers held up those two fingers to prove they still had them. Professor Anne Curry, writing for the Agincourt 600 commemoration, calls that a twentieth-century myth and reports that nobody has managed to find where or when the link was first suggested. Two fifteenth-century narratives do mention mutilation, and the one that counts fingers says three, not two.
The Order of St John of Jerusalem occupied Rhodes from 1309 to 1523 and set about turning the city into a stronghold. UNESCO calls the upper town, with its Palace of the Grand Masters, its Great Hospital and its Street of the Knights, one of the most beautiful urban ensembles of the Gothic period. The Great Hospital went up between 1440 and 1489, on the south side of that street. A military and hospital order left both halves of itself standing in stone.
Asked in 1020 to explain what swearing fealty actually committed a man to, Bishop Fulbert of Chartres wrote to the duke of Aquitaine with a list. One who swears fealty should always keep six things in memory: harmless, safe, honorable, useful, easy, practicable. Harmless meant doing his lord no bodily injury; safe meant not betraying his secrets or the defenses that kept him secure. It is a short answer to a question the age argued about at length.
Bishop Drogo of Terouanne and Count Baldwin established a peace in 1063 that tried to put private warfare on a timetable. The truce of God ran from sunset on Wednesday to sunrise on Monday, and during those four days and five nights no man or woman was to assault, wound or slay another, or attack, seize or destroy a castle, burg or villa. A violator was to be exiled for thirty years as penance and to compensate the injured before he left the bishopric. Otherwise he was excommunicated.
6The council that suspended tournaments for a crusade
On the tile: Tournaments1215
Tournaments had been forbidden by earlier councils, under various penalties, and held anyway. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 tried a deadline instead of a principle. Because tournaments were at that moment a serious obstacle to the success of the crusade, the council strictly prohibited them under penalty of excommunication for a period of three years. The same passage forbids Christians for four years to send ships to Saracen countries, so that more vessels would be available for the Holy Land.
Jean Froissart describes the opening of Crecy in 1346 from the French side. He counts about fifteen thousand Genoese crossbowmen, ordered forward first, who told their constables they were in no state to fight, having already walked some six leagues that day under arms. The earl of Alencon called them a sort of rascals. Before the rain came a great number of crows flying over both armies, then rain and terrible thunder, and when the sky cleared the sun was in French eyes and on English backs.
Froissart's chronicle tells it this way. At Crecy in 1346 the young prince's division was hard pressed, and a knight was sent to the king, who stood on a little windmill hill. Edward III asked whether his son was dead, hurt or felled to the earth. Told he was only hardly matched, the king sent the messenger back with word that they should send to him no more, and should suffer him this day to win his spurs, for the honor of the day was to be his.
At Poitiers in 1356 the French fought dismounted, and King John of France had an axe in his hands while his lords were taken around him. When the press closed in and voices called on him to yield, the man standing nearest was not English. Froissart names him as a knight of Saint-Omer called Sir Denis Morbeke, retained in the wages of the king of England, who had forfeited the realm of France in his youth. The king of France gave his right gauntlet to a Frenchman.
In the hardened dental plaque of a woman buried around 1100 at a small women's religious community in Dalheim, near Paderborn in Germany, researchers found particles of lapis lazuli. Ultramarine made from lapis was reserved, with gold and silver, for the most luxurious manuscripts, and only scribes and painters of exceptional skill were trusted with it. Monica Tromp of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History concluded that the most likely scenario was that the woman was painting with the pigment and licking the end of her brush.
Not every religious woman in the Middle Ages became a nun. The Beguines were unmarried or widowed women who entered a life dedicated to God without retiring from the world, and in the 13th century they founded beguinages: enclosed communities built to meet both their spiritual and their material needs. The surviving Flemish examples are architectural ensembles of houses, churches, outbuildings and green spaces, laid out like a small town or a village. Thirteen of them are listed together in Belgium.
The rock salt under Wieliczka and Bochnia in southern Poland lies in one deposit, and the two mines were worked in parallel and continuously from the 13th century until the late 20th. UNESCO calls them one of the earliest and most important European industrial operations, with royal status and the oldest of their type in Europe. Miners turned the emptied chambers into chapels, workshops and storehouses, and filled them with a substantial collection of statues carved from salt.
St Bernard founded the Cistercian abbey of Fontenay in Burgundy in 1119, and the surviving buildings show what self-sufficiency meant to the earliest Cistercian communities. Beside the stark church, cloister, refectory and sleeping quarters stand a bakery and an ironworks. UNESCO singles out that combination as an excellent illustration of the ideal those first monks practiced. Austerity in the choir did not rule out heavy industry in the yard.
Lübeck, on Germany's Baltic coast, was founded in the 12th century and prospered until the 16th as the major trading center of northern Europe, which earned it the title of former capital and queen city of the Hanseatic League. Bombing in the Second World War did great damage, yet the basic structure of the old town survives: patrician residences of the 15th and 16th centuries, churches, the famous brick Holstentor gate, and the salt storehouses.
San Gimignano stands in Tuscany, 56 kilometers south of Florence, and served as a relay point for pilgrims traveling the Via Francigena to and from Rome. The patrician families who controlled the town built around 72 tower-houses, some as high as 50 meters, as symbols of their wealth and power. Fourteen have survived. They are the reason the place is still called San Gimignano delle belle Torri, San Gimignano of the fine towers.
The abbey of St Gall in Switzerland was one of the most important monasteries in Europe from the eighth century until its secularization in 1805, and UNESCO ranks its library among the richest and oldest in the world. Among its manuscripts is a drawing: five sheets of sheep parchment sewn together, laying out a whole monastery of fifty-two buildings with 333 explanatory notes in Latin. Made at Reichenau in the ninth century, it is the oldest surviving architectural drawing of the Western world.
The University of Bologna is considered the oldest university in the Western world, and it counts nine centuries of history. Its own account is careful with the starting line, describing 1088 as the year conventionally referred to as the founding of the Studium of Bologna. From there the story runs through the bustling Middle Ages, the Renaissance, a long stagnation and a modern revival. An institution that grew rather than opened has to agree on its own birthday.
Nobody who built a medieval cathedral called the style Gothic. Seventeenth-century scholars used the word to mean Germanic or Teutonic, and from the 1640s it attached to the art that had emerged in northern Europe in the Middle Ages, which has nothing to do with the historical Goths. The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that it was originally applied in scorn by Italian architects of the Renaissance. The insult outlived the argument, and the word is now used with admiration.
Domesday Book is often called England's first census. The National Archives, which holds it, states that it is not a census of the population: it is a detailed survey and valuation of landed property, and the people named in it are almost exclusively landholders. William the Conqueror ordered the survey at Christmas 1085 and it was undertaken the following year. The questions were about the manor rather than the household: what it is called, who held it, how many hides.
Magna Carta gets the anniversaries, but the charter issued beside it in 1217 did more for people who owned nothing. During King John's reign about a third of England had been designated royal forest, where penalties for taking wood or building were severe. The Charter of the Forest granted rights to land, food and fuel to a wide range of English society, from barons to commoners. Henry III was not old enough to have a great seal of his own, so it went out under the seals of his regents.
Magna Carta was copied and sent around the kingdom, and most of those copies are long gone. Four originals from 1215 remain: two in the British Library, one at Lincoln Castle, and one at Salisbury Cathedral, which describes its own as the best preserved of the four. The sentence people quote is brief. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice, runs clause 40 of a document King John agreed to on 15 June 1215.
A tapestry has its picture woven into the cloth. The Bayeux Tapestry does not. Its own museum says that despite the name it is in fact a narrative embroidery, wool thread worked onto linen, about 68.3 meters long and about 70 centimeters wide, of which some 50 centimeters carry the embroidery itself. What it tells, scene by scene, is the story of William, Duke of Normandy, who became king of England in 1066 after the Battle of Hastings.
Separating the healthy from the sick is much older than any theory of germs. Emerging Infectious Diseases, the journal of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, records that quarantine was first introduced in 1377 in Dubrovnik, on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia. Trade with East and West was what the city lived on. Its Great Council decreed on 27 July that newcomers wait 30 days in a restricted place before coming in, and later the wait grew to 40.
Forty-six years after Dubrovnik began making arrivals wait, the Republic of Venice opened the first permanent plague hospital, on the small island of Santa Maria di Nazareth. The journal Emerging Infectious Diseases notes that the place was commonly called Nazarethum or Lazarethum, the second form pulled toward the biblical name Lazarus. From that island the word lazaretto spread to mean an isolation hospital anywhere. Venice's answer to plague was not a cure but an address.
The Black Death killed so many workers that the survivors could name their price. England answered with the Ordinance of Laborers, which in theory froze wages at their level before the plague, and then with the Statute of Laborers of 1351 when the ordinance failed. The statute complains of the malice of servants, which were idle, and not willing to serve after the pestilence, without taking excessive wages. The tone measures how far bargaining power had shifted.
8The council that pulled priests out of the ordeals
On the tile: Trial by fire1215
Trial by ordeal asked God to settle guilt through hot iron or cold water, and the ritual needed a cleric to give it authority. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council shut that door. Canon 18 forbade any cleric to pronounce, carry out or attend a death sentence, or to take part in judicial tests and ordeals. The council expected resistance: it threatened ecclesiastical censure against anyone who damaged churches or injured churchmen because of the ruling.
Thomas Becket had been Henry II's chancellor and close friend before the king made him archbishop, and then the two fell out over where royal power ended and the church's began. On 29 December 1170 four knights confronted Becket inside Canterbury Cathedral and killed him. Miracles were reported soon afterward, his tomb became a place of pilgrimage, and Henry himself later walked barefoot through the streets of Canterbury in sackcloth to do penance there.