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| If I'm gonna have a mustache, I might as well use it. |
Thankfully, I don't have to
live there, at least not in this incarnation. So I'm going to sit
here enjoying my electricity, vaccine-induced antibodies and civil rights, while I tell you guys all about it.
1) As many of you know, the
Moors (that's what they called Muslims back then) occupied Spain from
about 711 AD until 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue and the
Moors were evicted from Spain because f*ck them. During that time,
Arab civilization, technology, science and culture advanced far, far
beyond anything the non-bathing, dead-dropping Christians to the
north were able to come up with. Among other things, they invented
mathematics, neurosurgery and freakin' parachutes.
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| Like this one. |
And what are parachutes made
of? That's right, silk. Know what else was made of silk back then?
Burial shrouds. Christian Europe needed a lot of those, on account of
all the dying going on, so for hundreds of years, they imported them
from Muslim Spain.
The Muslims, being proud
craftsmen, marked their work to show it was theirs. These shrouds
were expensive, so they were used to wrap up important people –
like Saint Cuthbert, who lies in his tomb in Durham Cathedral in a
shroud that reads, “There is no God but Allah.”
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| Joke's on you, Cuthbert. |
2) Some scholars believe
that King Richard the Lionheart (the one who went to the Crusades and
left King John in charge in that Disney movie about Robin Hood), was gay. The evidence? He had no children with his wife, Berengaria,
which was kind of a big deal back in the “give me a son or I'll
chop off your head” days.
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| I mean it, b*tch. |
Richard spent so little time with his wife that the Pope had to order him to do so. Their “relations” were said to be “formal,” and what's more,
Richard appeared to share a “passionate love” with King Philip of
France. By which I mean they ate together, “from the same dish,”
slept in the same bed, and presumably gazed into one another's eyes
between battles. Some historians like to think that this behavior was purely political and not at all sexual, merely symbolic of the union
between the two countries.
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| Uh-huh. Right. |
Richard was Catholic, and
Catholics have to confess their sins. In the Middle Ages, people
often did this publicly, up in the pulpit, in front of the whole
church. Guess what Richard repeatedly confessed to?
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| If you guessed "boning this guy," you win one (1) Internet. |
3) In Europe during the
Middle Ages, drinking water wasn't very safe. Wine and beer were
popular substitutes – wine for the nobility, beer for the peasants.
Hard liquor became popular around the time of the Black Death of
1347-1351. Everyone was dropping dead and medicines seemed useless.
Every medicine, that is, except for booze.
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| Sweet, sweet booze. ~ xlibber |
Liquor alone appeared to revive plague victims and restore them to some state of strength.
Medieval doctors logically deduced that maybe getting dead drunk
could keep you from getting actually dead. So, for about three
hundred years, everyone in Europe drank until they couldn't flee the
witch hunters. They still caught plague and died, but at least they
didn't give a sh*t.
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| Today, the tradition continues. ~ senator86 |
4) Ok, so I lied to you about
the bathing. I wanted to see who would stop reading right now and
rush to the comments to tell me off.
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| There's always one. ~ bisgovik |
People in the Middle Ages did bathe. I know it's fun to think of people in the past as stupid and disgusting, but plenty of people in the present are stupid and disgusting, too, and pointing that out is much more gratifying. Bath houses existed, and flourished until the time of the Protestant Reformation, when uptightness got the better of us. Wooden bathtubs were common, and baths probably occurred at intervals ranging from daily to monthly, depending on the person. Just like some people today, some people back then couldn't be bothered to bathe.
Etiquette manuals of the
time suggested cleaning the hands, face, teeth and fingernails daily.
Hair was usually washed in a bowl of warm water. Fragrant herbs or
rose petals were sometimes added to the water, and perfumed powders
were often applied after bathing.
5) Remember how I told you
that Muslim civilization was far more advanced than Christian
civilization? That being the case, many young men traveled to Spain
to get an education. One of these men was Gerbert d'Aurillac, who
became the first French pope, Pope Sylvester II. He's credited with
reforming European education by emphasing the importance of rhetoric,
logic and grammar in monastery schools. He
introduced the Arabic numeral system to Europe, helped to standardize
the use of the abacus, and revolutionized European astronomy with a
gadget called the armillary sphere, or spherical astrolabe.
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| This thing. It's important. Trust me. |
Of course, you don't get to change the world without catching some sh*t. People accused Gerbert d'Aurillac of dark sorcery and cahooting with the Devil.
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| Pictured here. |
Rumor held that Gerbert won
his papal office in a game of dice with Satan, fiddling contests
having not yet been invented. Others believed he'd stolen his Muslim
teacher's spellbook, and then used it to evade the man's pursuit. He
was said to have built a mechanical head, which answered his
yes-or-no questions, like a Magic 8-Ball for the 10th
century AD.
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| I bet he got sick of hearing "Ask again later" real damn fast. |
