Matthew Gabriele - The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe

Map by John Wyatt Greenlee

O ur story begins on the east coast of Italy on a sunny day sometime around the year 430 CE, when artisans entered a small chapel and turned the sky blue. The workers labored in the city of Ravenna at the behest, we think, of a woman by the name of Galla Placidia, sister of a Roman emperor, queen of the Visigoths, and eventually regent herself of the Western Roman Empire. A devout Christian, she built or restored churches in Jerusalem, Rome, and right here in Ravenna. Perhaps she commissioned and ordered the decoration of the small chapel as a reliquary; perhaps she planned it for her eventual tomb or to house the body of her son who died in infancy. We have theories, but no sure answers. What we do have is a building where once artists pressed into fresh mortar glass tesserae, small trapezoidal shapes infused with the blue of lapis lazuli, to turn the ceiling into the richest blue sky. They then took glass infused with gold and filled the heavens with stars on the ceiling. On the blue wall, they added other tesserae of white, yellow, and orange to the mix, replanting the flowers of the Garden of Eden. The technologies behind the mosaics were ancient but the people depicted in this world of blue sky and golden stars emerged from a very specific combination of time and place, part of a complicatedbut not cataclysmictransition that would shift balances of power, cultural norms, and ideas about the deepest meanings of human existence.

In sunlight or candlelight, to this day, each mosaic piece, seen at fractionally different angles, can catch the light and reflect it toward its fellows or the eye of the beholder. Nearly 1,600 years later, the space still shimmers like the stars themselves.

On one wall inside the building, Jesus takes precedence as the kindly Good Shepherd sitting among his flock. Other depictions of the Good Shepherd had emphasized Christs rough humanity, picturing him holding a lamb over his shoulder. But here the sheep stand apart, looking at Jesus, one nuzzling his hand. In brilliant robes of gold, the artist or artists perhaps sought to emphasize his divinity, seeking a different kind of truth for them than the more human-like art of the late classical world. On another wall, a male saint confronts a hot iron grill. Perhaps its St. Lawrence, now the patron saint of chefs but famous for the story of his martyrdomburned to death but serene enough to tell the centurion before his death to turn him over, since he was nicely cooked on the one side. Or it might be St. Vincent, a saint popular in Iberia, where Galla spent her time as a Visigothic queen, a man who had to watch as pagans burned his books and then was tortured with fire. Regardless, the stories being told on these wallsand throughout the fifth-century Mediterraneanare synthetic, weaving together strands of time, culture, and place that affirm continuity just as they mark significant change.

Beginnings and endings are arbitrary; they frame the story that the narrator wants to tell. Our story is one that escapes the myth of the Dark Ages, a centuries-old understanding of the medieval world that sees it cast in shadow, only hazily understood, fixed and unchanging, but ultimately the opposite of what we want our modern world to be. So, lets for now forget those traditional transition points between the ancient and medieval worlds, the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, the sack of Rome in 410, or the deposition in 476 of Romulus Augustulus as the last Roman emperor in the West. If we as a culture decide that the Middle Ages existed and had a beginning and end, we dont need to start with decline, darkness, or death. We can start in this shining, sacred, quiet space. This doesnt, of course, erase the violence of the past to replace it with naive nostalgia. Instead, it shows us that paths taken were not foreordained. Shifting our perspective brings people, traditionally marginalized in other tellings, into focus. Starting somewhere else shows us possible worlds.

And nearly a thousand years later, in 1321, we might end the Middle Ages in the exact same place, in the same city, in the same building. Here, once again, we can affirm continuities and mark change, walking with the medieval poet Dante Alighieri as he lingered in the churches of Ravenna, drawing inspiration from these same mosaics as he composed his grand vision that encompassed the whole universe. Dante was an exile from his native Florence and ended his life in the court of the prince of Ravenna. He traveled to Venice and saw the industrial Arsenale, built in the early twelfth century, and placed it in Hell. Alongside it, facing eternal torment, we find popes and Florentines alike. He seethed at the factional politics of the papacy and in the medieval democracy of Florence, and damned them. But in Ravenna, he seems to have been moved by the tranquility of Galla Placidias mausoleum and the majesty of the neighboring imperial mosaics of Justinian and Theodora in the church of San Vitale. It was here in Ravenna, maybe among the shimmering skies of a church built nearly a millennium before, that he found the inspiration to finish the Paradiso, the last book of The Divine Comedy.

Dantes is one of the great works of art of the Middle Ages, or of any age, firmly grounded in its political and cultural moment, inspired by a whole world and a whole millennium of art, culture, and religion that had passed through Italy. The Divine Comedy wallows in death and darkness, even as it captures beauty and light; Dantes ascent through hell, purgatory, and eventually heaven is completed with his vision of God as pure brightness. Its the same journey, perhaps, that devout viewers might imagine as they gaze at the stars and sky of the mosaic in the mausoleum, carrying their thoughts into the bright heavens. The Bright Ages begin and end bracketed by the hope of basking in light.

Medieval beauty is not all sacred, of course, at least not only sacred. The portraits of the Byzantine emperors next to Galla Placidias mausoleum, too, belong to the Middle Ages, not only because hundreds of thousands of medieval eyes would have rested upon them as residents of Italian cities or travelers across the Adriatic moved through the imperial city, but also because of the multiple embedded meanings of these portraits. The mosaics of the emperors are symbols of a Mediterranean world, a medieval world, always in flux, with permeable borders, and signs of movement and cultural intermixing everywhere you look.

And so we look. We also listen to the mixing of languages in the sailors patois and to the commonality of multilingualism across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. We find marketplaces where Jews spoke Latin, Christians spoke Greek, and everyone spoke Arabic. We find coconuts, ginger, and parrots coming in on Venetian ships that would eventually reach the ports of medieval England. We mark the brown skin on the faces of North Africans who always lived in Britain, as well as on French Mediterranean peasants telling dirty stories about horny priests, raunchy women, and easily fooled husbands.

But things that begin need to end, otherwise theres no medium aevum, no middle age, no medieval. So we select one potential end with Dante in the fourteenth century. The Italian humanists who followed him explicitly rejected the medieval and said they existed in a new age, a renewal, a so-called renaissance. We could instead draw the medieval to a close just a bit later in the fourteenth century as plague ravaged Asia, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Or we might say the medieval ends in the fifteenth century as the Ottoman Turks overwhelm the entire Eastern Mediterranean, creating a new empire that extends from the Indian Ocean to, from time to time, the walls of Viennaan empire that would fight with the Christian Venetians and ally itself with the Christian French. Some have even argued that the medieval world comes to a close only with the French Revolution and the fall of the monarchy at the end of the eighteenth century.