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THE SICILIAN CONNECTION PLEASURE, PRECEDENTS & THE MEDIEVAL
GARDENAnthony Lyman-Dixon
1) The argument2) Notes on the text illustrations3) Sources4) Genealogical table5) Appendix, illustrations and notes of Sicily today 6) Index
Approximately 16,000 words including footnotes, since many of these have been cribbed from other peoples’ research, they may be plagiarised at will, though the courtesy of an acknowledgement would be appreciated
1
Anthony Lyman-DixonLimeburn NurseriesChew MagnaBristol BS40 8QW
arneherbs@aol.comwww.arneherbs.co.uk
My thanks to those who made it all possible
Alex Johnson of Elemental Landscapes and Gillian Mawrey of the Historic Gardens Foundation, who “put me up for it”The Royal Horticultural Society, who provided funding.The Mediterranean Garden Society UK branch, who arranged thetrip and provided gourmet sustenance throughoutThe staff of Arne Herbs who held the place together during my brief escape
2
THE SICILIAN CONNECTION PLEASURE, PRECEDENTS & THE MEDIEVAL GARDEN
Anthony Lyman-Dixon
Amavo La Sicilia nella mia prima giovanezza;M’appariva simile ad un giardino di perenne felicitàMa non ero ancora giunto agli anni della maturitàChe, mirate, divenne una rovente Gehenna Abd Al-Halim c
1100
Did Sicily have a major influence on the design of the great
Medieval garden at Hesdin and if not, what did?
The original question was based on the widely accepted
posits that (i) Robert of Artois had been governor of Sicily
when his garden at Hesdin was being laid out at the end of
the thirteenth century, (ii) a number of Islamic features
were incorporated into the French garden (iii) Robert was an
obsessional romantic who wanted to re-create the fantasy
land of Sicilian puppet shows featuring Carolingian paladins
at home.
Initially the argument seems incontrovertible, based though
it is on circumstantial evidence. Primary sources are
virtually non-existent, in the case of Hesdin they are
3
limited to a set of accounts and even secondary
documentation is inaccessible As “Les Amis du site
historique du Vieil Hesdin” admit “Les documents et livres
concernant Hesdin sont abondants, malheureusement beaucoup d'entre eux
sont extrêmement difficiles à se procurer, même pour une simple consultation”.
Like the Hesdin site itself, Sicily has been repeatedly
wrecked by passing armies and on the ground hard material is
long gone, with traces of the Islamic occupation of Sicily
expunged by everyone from Christian bigots to the
contemporary Mafia. One can not hail Robert as genuine
innovator without some knowledge of the concepts of the
medieval gardens he is said to have changed. An exploration
of the characteristics of the gardens of Sicily is also
called for.
The first and most obvious stumbling block is that the
Angevins who had brutally occupied the island since 1268
were slaughtered almost to the last man during the massacre
of the Vespers in 1282, two years prior to Robert being
appointed “vicaire-général” in August 1284. His regency was
thus more symbolic than real. Yet there are sufficient
contradictions behind these bald facts to fuel a debate that
has been trickling on since Marguerite Charageat’s original
proposal of a Sicilian connection in her paper of 19501
1 Quoted Van Buren 117
4
Today Sicily is economically deprived, politically corrupt2,
covered from Cefalù to Mazzara (and probably beyond) in
jerry-built “villas”, and suffers both from climatic
extremes and man-made pollution. Whilst the populace is
indifferent to tourists, it is positively hostile to
visitors from the Continentale; - “From here, you can see
Italy” remarked our bus driver as we drove through Messina.
In an entire week, I never once heard a Sicilian laugh. But
this is an island populated by the Fertility Goddesses of
the Romans and Greeks. Certainly the Nelsonian naval
officers who settled on the island in the early nineteenth
century and the English Marsala-making magnates recognised
Sicily’s sensuous paradisiacal qualities and enough remains
to make me wonder whether the old deities ever left, - at
least until Italy joined the EU.
Such paradoxes occur more particularly in historical studies
of the island’s gardens for instance Harvey and David
Douglas appear to come up with diametrically opposing views
concerning the extent of Arabic and Byzantine influences.
More realistic than either is Metlitzki’s comment. “Of the rich
flowering of Arabian culture in Sicily very little has survived and the exact pattern
of its composition is still uncertain beyond the general impression of the
2 On the Sicilian May elections Corriere della Sera 15 May quotes the losing candidate “Orlando….denunciando brogli e chiedendo l’annullamentodelle elezione pur tenendo conto delle proportzioni diverse”
5
brilliance and versatility that marked the Sicilian way of life”3 so any
writer’s views are going to be somewhat subjective, or, to
put it another way, one can write any old rubbish without
fear of contradiction. In terms of actual gardens, Harvey
for instance seems to have a strong bias in favour of
Spanish against that of Sicily
Clearly background reading is insufficient to link the
gardens of Medieval Sicily to the bleak war-torn wastes of
Northern Europe. Given Metlitzki’s undeniably valid
comments, no matter much creative exegesis is applied to
historians’ opposing views, without visiting the Island
itself, one puts oneself into the position of a critic who
reviews an opera from his familiarity with the score rather
than from actually attending the performance. A cast of
clock makers, characters associated or thought to be
associated with the gardens, Robert himself, various land
agents, gardeners and Islamic mechanics is scattered across
the internet by a plethora of writers ranging from genuine
historians promoting their personal theories to the weird
and pretentious whose motives are more than a little
dubious. If nothing else, actually standing on the quay at
Palermo restores one’s sense of balance.
3 Metlitzki
6
It is an obvious fact that wars can not be waged without
spawning economic chaos and social turmoil, but
paradoxically the quarrelling between the Christians and
Islamics was of enormous benefit to the diffusion of their
respective cultures. The result was that the Mediterranean
basin became a great cultural whirlpool, circulating
clockwise with Sicily at its vortex. The Christians pushed
the Moslems from Galicia to Sicily; the Normans moved them
on to the Holy Land, from whence they were again pushed out
to North Africa by the crusaders and, following Roger II’s
occupation of Tripoli, back to Granada. The migrants took
their knowledge and skills, sometimes derived from ancient
Greece4, sometimes their own, along with them. This process
is demonstrated by the troubadours whose ethos was
recognised in the nineteenth century as having its roots in
Spain but had actually been acquired by the Sicilians from
Provence. Fortunately gardens are integral to their cultural
environment5, and they provided an essential physical and
spiritual locus for the flotsam of literature, music and
gastronomy borne on the swirling current. Historic gardens
were also intended to represent the power of the secular
magnates who created them and reflect the iconology of the
ruling ecclesiastical establishment. Gardens were therefore
4 And perhaps Rome too, Ovid is frequently cited as one of the sources for “Floire et Blanchflor” 5 Any one doubting this only has to look, for instance at the current government’s trashing of the East London allotments for the ephemeral “glory “of the Olympic games.
7
as intimately bound up in the politics of their time as they
were in cultural activities and it is largely through these
associations that their history can be charted.
The Medieval gardens of Northern Europe were poky, joyless
little things defined by rectangular walls, their right
angles supposedly linking the four points of cosmological
harmony and so delineated perfection from chaos. The planets
and stars were made
of a fifth essence
superior to the four
terrestrial essences
and it was through
the fifth essence
that the prime mover
influenced all life
on earth6. Plants
growing in such a
spiritual environment were happy plants and flourished This
may well be so, but to the medieval gardener it was more
likely that a greater appeal lay in the ease of maintaining
geometrical beds that followed the lines of the walls and
that the walls themselves kept out thieves and grazing
animals. Either way, the walls were expensive to build and
thus limited what could be grown inside. As the medieval
6Kieckheffer 25
8
Martorelli : St George
household was dependent upon plants to an extent
inconceivable today, gardens had to be exploited to the
ultimate degree, producing textiles, dyes, food and
medicines so that the “Pleasure garden” was for the most
part an alien concept. One only has to compare the number of
medieval poems extolling nature with those celebrating
gardens to see where the affections of medieval man lay.
Moreover, it is a “class thing”, gardens were locked, not
necessarily because of the value of their contents, but to
prevent the proletariat seeing the precise manner in which
their betters took their pleasure7 In the context of
pleasure it is also worth noting that whilst medieval man
was frequently murdered during dinner and occasionally
during mass, occasions when he was knifed in the garden can
be recorded on the fingers of one hand. Awareness that he
was safe in the garden only served to emphasise the dangers
beyond the walls and, as numerous commentators have pointed
out, a collective gloom settled upon the Christian world
from when St Augustine arrived in Kent until beyond the
Renaissance.
This was the miserable landscape that the crusaders and
their fellow travellers, -whores, spiritual advisers and
opportunistic merchants, left behind before arriving at the
Sicilian staging post on their way to the Holy Land, and a
7 Most famously Chaucer “Knight’s Tale”
9
considerable shock it was for them too. The climate was
better for a start, so that whilst men were previously
accustomed to clumping about their draughty castles in wool
and furs, the Sicilian Normans wore silk, which as every
literate crusader knew (admittedly a very small number
indeed), spelt a complete absence of moral fibre8.
Shockingly, the Sicilian rulers had shown themselves all too
ready to “go native”, though whether this was due to
broadmindedness or the difficulties in obtaining
reinforcements from Normandy if things went wrong, is a
matter of debate amongst scholars. However, given the
dissent amongst the Islamics and the universal detestation
of the Byzantines, mercenaries were easily obtainable which
makes a nonsense of the latter argument.
Although he is reluctant to admit to any Sicilian influence
on Northern gardens, Harvey nevertheless writes
“Count Robert’s works included a fantastic series of water engines based on the
Arabic “Book of Mechanical Devices (AD 1206) of Ibn Al-Razzaz al-Jazari of
Diyarbaki”
Which, in so far as Al-Djazari’s book was Egyptian is
undeniably correct, but appears to suggest that in default
of a Sicilian influence, Robert, or his engineers, acquired
8 Pliny 11 : 78 Few classics survived the fall of Rome, but Pliny was an exception
10
their copy of Al-Djazari either in Africa or from Castile.
David Douglas is more confident that the Arabic tradition in
Sicily survived the Norman Conquest arguing that
“(Sicily was) under Moslem rule for more than a century before the coming of the
Normans. As a result” he says “while in Southern Italy a large Greek
speaking population carried on the traditions of an earlier culture into the age of
Robert Guiscard and Roger Borsa in Sicily strong Moslem as well as Greek
elements survived”9
Marie-Thèrese Haudebourg suggests that we are still so
overwhelmed by the magnificence of Islamic and more
particularly Andalucian gardens that we are inclined to
over-emphasise their importance in Northern European design.
This dispels the idea that any similarities between Roger
II’s menagerie and that of Henry Ist in the Tower of London
were more than coincidental, for whilst the Sicilian
inspiration was the extensive Persian “Paradise” and
embodied the King’s idea that he was the Lord of creation
(and was consequently regarded by his peers as a cocky
little upstart10), Henry’s lions straitly confined in the
Tower of London, mirrored his insecure hold on the English
throne. This became more tenuous by the hour as his elder
9 Douglas 20110 Runciman 2 : 251, Rather than being personally appointed by God as were the other rulers, Roger declared himself King in 1130. Henry maintained a private animal collection at Woodstock but, unlike the Tower menagerie, it was not intended to send a political message
11
brother Robert, having recovered from a crusading injury and
married to a Guiscard heiress whilst recuperating at
Salerno, was advancing to claim the disputed inheritance.
Fortunately Henry was crafty and Robert being the opposite,
was outsmarted at every turn. At first sight it seems ironic
then that Robert the well-connected traveller had nothing to
show for his Sicilian adventure except a wife, whilst stay-
at-home Henry secured the services of Adelard of Bath who
had studied in Salerno and Sicily during 1109 and his
colleague, Petrus Alfonsi a Sephardic Jew, who ended up as
the personal royal physician.
Under Henry, England’s economy flourished and was better
able than mainland Europe to attract the best brains from
the East. This raises the question of from whence did the
physicians obtain their materia medica . A comparison
between the lists of Northern physicians and those of
Salerno shows the paucity of familiar plants available to
immigrant practitioners11. In one of her less likely and
more frequently repeated assertions, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde
claims that the Normans trashed the Anglo-Saxon libraries 11 “...it is reasonably well known what the apothecary was supposed to have legally in stock and hence what the physician might expect to be available in order that his prescription be prepared correctly....not every apothecary always had ready at hand all the ingredients necessary to prepare each compositum.....variations in local economic patterns andthe temporary disruption of supplies and trade routes make generalizations impossible.” Stannard VIII : 365, although writing of a marginally later period suggests that trade structures were either already in place or were being developed at this time
12
leaving only Latin texts available12. Certainly one can see
that malicious goblins, flying venoms and invocations to
Odin would have limited appeal to the Norman theocracy, but
for those like Henry, who demanded a more tangible therapy
than simply being prayed over, the importation of plants was
a necessity. Therefore though the concept of a “Pleasure
Garden” remained a route to perdition, a system for the
importation of Southern horticultural material was
necessarily in place, albeit undocumented, long before the
Angevin occupancy of the Two Sicilies.
As for Henry’s brother Robert, having once tasted Paradise,
he never again came to terms with life back in the world
from which he had sprung. This was a world in which, for
instance Bernard of Clairvaux claimed that silk on worms
reflected the beauty of God’s handiwork, but on women proved
that they were whores. Here there could be no place for days
passed in “libertinaggio a di svaghi, partecipando a banchetti a libagioni”
described by the Egyptian poet Ibn Qalaqis who spent a
blissful year on the island in 1168 / 6913 In spite of the
prevailing austere Christianity or perhaps because of it,
stories such as “Floire et Blanchflor” and “Aucassin et Nicolette” both
incidentally with garden settings, were widely circulated,
their common theme of sex between ethnic minors in exotic
situations stimulating a twinge of anxiety not because of
12 The Anglo-Saxons had already destroyed their libraries either throughinternecine wars or sheer neglect, Rohde was a most partisan commentator13 Salierno 123
13
the age of the protagonists but because they had crossed the
class and religious divides. This allowed the story teller
to demonstrate his skills in performing the almost
obligatory “neat trick” a sort of literary coup de theatre to
bring about a change in his characters’ circumstances or to
effect their escape from a difficult situation. In “Floire”
and “Aucassin” it is achieved both by the spiritual
conversion and the contrived crossing of the class divide,
which rendered the hitherto unsuitable protagonist14 fit to
join respectable society. Inevitably there is deference to
the convention of out-smarting the unfortunate Moslem ruler,
notwithstanding that his behaviour was generally far more
chivalrous than that of the Christians15. In the way that
social sanctions exist today against the Thai-travellers of
the contemporary internet so those of the church did then,
but it was the couple’s mixed race and class rather than
their age that outraged society. Either way, only the Kings
of Sicily dared flout the conventional morality. Clearly
they were not only bounders beyond the pale, but tainted
with infidel thoughts to go with it.
14 Obviously physical appearance could not be changed so to be acceptable, the girls had to be blonde from the outset, a point emphasised by horticultural metaphors. Blanchflor is obvious, and although Nicolette’s feet are whiter than daisies and she had been baptised, she remained a pariah outside the rigid social hierearchy. Themetamorphosis essential to make a dramatic point is the realisation thatshe is the abducted daughter of the king of Carthage (Cartagena) 15 Christians had a special need to put a veneer on the story as legend claims that Berte, the off-spring of Flor and Blancheflor was the motherof Charlemagne himself
14
Meanwhile, Flanders particularly relished fantasies about
young love played out in luxurious gardens but was yet to
develop in to the economic power house it was to become in
later centuries. Until it did so, achieving the reality
later seen at Hesdin was simply not feasible, England on the
other hand, possessed greater material means, but never
showed any enthusiasm for translating fantasy into reality
although it had the legends of the Celtic outback literally
on its doorstep. In addition to its burgeoning economy,
England possessed a further advantage in that having been
shaken up by the coming of the Normans; it didn’t suffer
from the ossified conformity stretching back to the first
Frankish kings. This inflexibility arguably became worse
during the reign of Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious.
Ironically it was Charlemagne who has gone down in legend as
a great gardener16, the ruler who received gifts of plants
from Haroun in Baghdad, who drew up a list of plants to be
grown throughout his empire and, even more imaginatively
“L’empereur est un grand verger
avec lui sont Roland et Olivier
Ils sont assis sur des tapis blancs…….
sous un pin et sous un églantier
16 Fairbrother 54
15
Which may be allegorical, but affords us a surprise in that
the writer of the Chanson de Roland associated Charlemagne
with gardens at all. The Emperor was the apex of an
oppressive and theocratic dynasty whose clerics complained
that monastic healing gardens were a heretical attempt to
flout the will of God and whose dogma made Walafrid Strabo
feel guilty in the pleasure of pulling up nettles. All a far
cry from the horticultural hedonism of Venantius and
Radegund of an earlier age. Nothing much had changed by the
time Robert of Flanders, cousin of Robert of Normandy
returned to the former Carolingian power base from Sicily
several centuries later.
Harvey claims that prior to the Norman invasions at the end
of the eleventh century, the Saracens had held Sicily for so
brief a period that, compared with Byzantine Naples, and the
influence they exerted on Northern gardens was slight. In
any case, such Arabic effects on Northern gardening as did
occur, were either indirectly derived from the dynastic
links between the Spanish and Sicilian Norman rulers or from
captives seized during William VIII of Aquitaine’s 1064
victory in Aragon and brought to England in 106617. It is
reasonable to suggest therefore that in this first period
after the Normans captured Sicily and England, and after
William VIII’s victorious campaign in Spain, Islamic culture
17 An interesting theory for which Harvey provides no evidence
16
had made little impact on Northern gardens, neither the
economics nor the mind-set of the rulers were amenable to
such a change. There is the further question of whether they
would have recognised a pleasure garden 18 if they had been
literally planted in one, for they had no terms of reference
except Eden. And yet, hovering in the back ground like a
mirage, was the Emir’s garden in “Floire et Blanchflor” few could
have understood the descriptions, but it had a frisson of
naughtiness that appealed to the rigidly conformist
societies in which it was disseminated
In the immediate context of a Sicilian influence on Hesdin,
Terry Comito, in his seminal “The Idea of the Garden in the
Renaissance” writes
“For Charles and his contemporaries, furthermore, such splendor would not
exist in a day dream of Celtic faery (of the sort Roger of Artois, for example
brought home to his pleasure gardens at Hesdin in the thirteenth century) but in
the world of politics and history”19
And the web site of the Friends of Hesdin is unequivocal Les
origines arabes du parc d’ Hesdin sont incontestables. Robert IInd d’Artois avait
gouverné La Sicile de 1285 à 1289. Or, à Palerme se trouvaient de merveilleux
18 Dominique Barthélemy 435 tells us that “the expression “Pleasure garden” occurs as early as the end of the fifteenth century”19 Comito 4:- Notwithstanding the fact that Comito has confused Roger with Robert, suggesting a lack of enthusiasm for this period, his book has become a standard text
17
jardins chantés par les poètes arabes, et dans lequels fonctionnaient des
automates hydrauliques....Aujourd’hui les villages du Parcq et du Bas-Parcq
conservent le souvenir de ces splendeurs, comme le fait le village de Parco en
Sicile
Within a couple of generations trading with the Islamics
became more blatant though this seems more down to
pragmatism than a weakening of the faith. The church was
still fulminating about it in the context of the alum trade
in the fifteenth century but no one took much notice; it had
always gone on and neither the Sicilians nor the Venetians
were going to allow an abstract doctrine to stand in the way
of hard profits. The first openly acknowledged garden
imports from Araby to Northern Europe, albeit grudging and
fictional, were the trees in the Roman De La Rose20
“Privee sui mout et acointe
De Deduit le mignot, le cointe
Ce est cil qui est cist jardins
Qui de la terre Alexandrins
Fist ca les arbres aporter
Qu’il fist par le vergier anter.
Qunat li arbre furent creu
Le mur que vous avez veu
Fist deduiz lors tot entor fer”
20 Roman de la Rose ll 587 …. Lecoy redaction
18
The trees are shown to our hero by the divinely beautiful
Lady Idleness who explains that they are saplings imported
from the land of the Saracens. Idleness is the mistress of
Diversion who created the garden moreover she is wearing a
green coat made in Ghent indicating that the great Flemish
textile trade was already beginning to stir. Imported trees,
overt mistresses, pleasure and luxury textiles all suggest
that serious cracks were beginning to appear in the old
order of fundamentalist asceticism and the first stones on
the route to Hesdin were now laid. This understated fact may
well blow the “Sicily as the prototype for Hesdin” out of
the water without needing any further research for it can
not be denied that each and every artefact in the garden has
its counterpart in the Romantic texts. Robert could easily
have put the whole thing together without travelling any
closer to Sicily than his famous library. Anne Van Buren
made this point in her paper to the Dumbarton Oaks
Colloquium21 but since it lacked the mass-appeal of the
Disney-world dreams set forth in tourist literature. It was
quietly buried. That said, the ideas embodied in Romantic
literature had to be sourced from somewhere and Sicily was
not only easily accessible but possessed all the requisite
elements such as warm, moonlit gardens and exotic silk-clad
21 Anne Hagopian Van Buren DO 117
19
houris. Equally the magical world of Romance could not
entirely escape the political world in which it was composed
and it was this interweaving of fact and fiction that
culminated in Hesdin
The late Jerry Stannard, America’s foremost expert on
medieval gardens acknowledged the role of the writers of the
romances on the development of the pleasure garden no less
than the troubadours who broadcast their stories.
“The pleasure garden as its name signifies is a garden centered area designed
and reserved for pleasure. Its primary purpose was to provide the most suitable
locus for the types of pleasure regarded as appropriate, or at least permissible,
at that place and time. Because the nobility furnished the audience, patronage
and model for generations of poets, artists and occasional moralists, it is not
surprising that this type of garden has been so well served in literature and art
Consequently, much is known of the activities that took place, or were alleged to
have taken place, amidst pleasurable surroundings. However exaggerated those
reports may be, the fact remains that the pleasure garden was a real
garden....the influence (of medieval literary gardens) can not be wished
away.....Out of this sprang the pseudo Near-Eastern progeny that cloys the
senses and clogs the texts of late Medieval romances. But for that very reason,
the literary gardens are important clues to contemporary beliefs regarding what
a pleasure garden ought to be”22 ....
22 Stannard Kansas Exhibition 57
20
As the Hesdin web site describes part of Robert’s creation
“un jardin de roses entouré d'un mur avec tourelles. On est très proche de
l'image des jardins d'amour que l'on trouve dans les romans courtois”
Possibly the greatest single force in this dissemination of
literature was Eleanor of Aquitaine. Born in 1122, both in
time and space, Eleanor was central in the spread of twelfth
century culture, coming mid-way between the Norman conquest
of Sicily and its nominal governorship by her great
grandson, Robert of Artois. Her role is thus popularly seen
as pivotal, but pivotal to what? Would Hesdin have been
built without her legacy? Predictably, Harvey seems inclined
to give her Aquitainian background more credit than he does
to the Sicilians. The marriages of her children influenced
the politics and domestic lives of the most influential
ecclesiastical, lay and artistic figures between Denmark and
the farthest reaches of the decaying Byzantine Empire.
Eleanor was the great-grand daughter of Guillaume VIII, the
Carolingian paladin regarded by Harvey as indirectly
responsible for spreading the Islamic garden culture to
England. She was also the grand-daughter of Guillaume IX
“The Troubadour” and thus immersed in the poetic traditions
of the Iberian marches when she married Louis Capet in
Bordeaux. And of all the great cities of the collapsed Roman
Empire none save Bordeaux had made greater efforts to cling
on to its horticultural heritage.
21
Harvey and Salter attach considerable, though perhaps
excessive, importance to the idea that horticultural ideas
were spread by dynastic marriages23. The brides usually took
large retinues with them who failed to integrate with the
natives24 leaving them the focus of an isolated and
introverted coterie as their husbands occupied themselves in
killing wild beasts and one another. Thus isolated, the
brides turned to telling stories and, if they could, taking
lovers. Eleanor’s own retinue which had accompanied her to
Paris consisted of a large and unpopular gaggle of
Poitevins, immediately stigmatised as gluttonous idlers and
although one can think of few queens less likely than
Eleanor to get down on her hands and knees with a dibber,
the Poitevins’ interest in the literary aspects of gardens
was of enormous importance. The troubadour tradition of
“romantic” love which had been instilled into the new queen
since birth was never going to appeal to a court over which
abbot Suger, her husband’s former tutor, wielded such great
influence. “Love” however the word was interpreted, had to
be enacted in the privacy of gardens rather than in the
great halls under the noses of mothers-in-law and loquacious
23 Neither Elvira of Castile for instance who married Roger IInd of Sicily nor Margarita, daughter of Garcia Ramirez of Navarre who married their son William 1st of Sicily, seem to have exerted any form of influence, horticultural or otherwise. Eleanor’s grand daughter, Bianca of Castile was a politically formidable queen of France but again, had zero influence on gardens 24 eg Marie Antoinette of France and Katherine the Great of Russia
22
servants25. All the same, as Queen of France, Eleanor
still managed to scandalise the Christian establishment so
that whilst her activities on crusade were undoubtedly
exaggerated by her detractors, her “Courts of Love” were
real enough in spite of the efforts of English Victorian
writers to sanitise them. In her gardens, classical learning
and Islam combined to put into effect a liberated feminism
that wasn’t to be seen again for centuries The writing of
the court chaplain, Andreas Capellanus shows a distinctly
Koranic flavour and as Comito writes26
“The three sorts of activity that traditionally and repeatedly find their proper
place in gardens are poetry, philosophy and love, it is Plato who provides
notable early gardens for all three…….and all three activities are presented as
varieties of divine madness ”
The French certainly saw it in that light, having crusaded
in the Holy Land with her husband, tired of the unbalanced
Louis Capet and, complaining that she had “married not a
king, but a monk” 27 demanded a divorce. In his haste to rid
himself of his embarrassing wife, Louis belatedly realised
that, as she jumped into Henry Plantagenet’s bed, she was 25 Husbands failed to appreciate these romantic attachments so that lovers frequently ran the risk of being detached from their limbs and their women savagely punished See following notes on Philippe of Flanders and the daughters-in-law of Philippe IV Le Bel 26Comito 5227 Harvey Plantaganets 48
23
taking a large chunk of his kingdom with her. Henry may not
have been Europe’s best catch at the time, but Eleanor must
have appreciated his potential, besides which his reputedly
satanic ancestry28 promised a more exciting marriage than
the one on which she had hitherto squandered her impulsive
young life.
I suggest that Eleanor’s English daughters had less
influence than that with which they are credited. Of those
by Henry Plantagenet, Kelly29 asserts that Eleanor
Plantagenet took Arthurian romance over the Pyrenees, where
in fact Arthurian romance was already well established,
Matilda married Henry of Saxony whose mother-in-law presided
over another gloomy North European court where any hint of
love would have been still-born, if not by reason of the
climate, then by poverty and inter-familial hatred. Finally
the cross-cultural fertilization between Sicily and England
was already well embedded in popular culture when the eleven
year old Joanna was married to King William IInd. So it
seems somewhat incongruous that the greatest influence on
literary gardens was entirely home-grown in the court of
Marie of Champagne. All the more so given that Marie had
28 Fulk the Black’s wife, a beautiful vampire, was said to have vaulted from the church window at the raising of the host, Kelly 170 & 290, Harvey, “Plantaganets” 26/27. She was either burnt at the stake or flew away, never to be seen again, Giraldus Cambrensis is responsible for spreading the story in Britain29 Kelly 358
24
been fathered upon Eleanor by the god-driven Louis
Capet30. The extent to which Marie and her circle practised
“free love” had exercised academics ever since31.
How much these alleged sex in-the-garden parties32 were down
to Eleanor herself and how much was instigated by Marie,
rebelling against her father’s grimly repressive court is
uncertain. Chrétien de Troyes is said to have written Parzival
partly on a subjective level to rid himself of the bad taste
left by the composition of Tristan and partly as a protest
against adulterous liaisons enjoyed in the “Courts of Love”.
But by then, Eleanor had long since left the French court
and any links between herself and Parzival are almost
certainly imaginary, set though it is in the semi-mythical
land of Anjou. Few save modern fantasists can take seriously
the suggestion that it influenced her choice of second
husband. Doubtless though, during later years, long after
her marriage to Henry had turned sour, she would have
derived some cynical amusement from the romantic allusion
More likely is the suggestion that Chrétien de Troyes was so
disgusted by Marie’s carrying-on that he eventually took his
30 Louis life was supposedly spent in atonement for burning a large number of Poitevins alive in the church in which he had locked them. Marie’s reaction against such a father can be no surprise31 For instance, see Kiblers intro to “Chrétien de Troyes” p 1332 Three of Chrétien’s romances feature beds in gardens, his apologists say that he never betrayed his Cistercian back ground and it was Marie de Champagne who pushed the erotic element
25
services to Philippe of Flanders where the Duke is said to
have lent him the manuscript he was to turn into “Parzival”33
In Chrétien’s version of “Parzival” Clinschor is castrated by
the king of Sicily after being caught in bed with his wife.
Whether or not Marie and her mother were the inspiration
behind Parzival or whether it was Philippe’s manuscript, the
story would certainly have played well with the duke, whose
wife’s alleged affair approximately six years before was
still raw in everyone’s mind34. A more valid
Eleanor/Sicilian literary connection is that following the
marriage of her daughter Joanna to William of Sicily,
Gilbert Fitz-Baderon, Lord of Monmouth encouraged Hue de
Rotelande to write “Ipomedon”35 In this romance Ipomedon,
heir to Apulia, loves La Fière, Duchess of Calabria and is
aided by Medea, Queen of Sicily.
As Eleanor embarked upon her second marriage, amongst her
retinue was the Anglo-Breton cleric, Thomas who wrote the
forerunner of Gottfried’s “Tristan”. In his version, Tristan
driven almost out of his mind by his complex love life
33 Stevens 238, Kelly is of a different opinion34 Philippe of Flanders dismembered Walter de Fontaines for allegedly having it off with his wife, Isabelle de Vermandois. It is thought that Isabelle, who also happened to be Eleanor’s niece was condemned more through her family connections than for her actual conduct which was regarded as unnaturally chaste by everyone except her husband. 35 Salter 413, Eleanor had previously visited Calabria many years beforewhen returning from the crusade with her estranged husband, at that timeromance was probably not uppermost in her mind
26
creates a sinister garden of automata, the features of which
owe much to Arabic precedents.
One day Tristran overcame a giant in a forest just beyond the boundary of the
Duke’s domain and accepted the monster's homage. The following day
Tristran commanded him and his minions, who were skilled carpenters and
goldsmiths, to make a hall in a cavern and to fashion lifelike statues of Queen
Ysolt and Brengvein. When these were finished, the image of Ysolt held in its
right hand a sceptre with a bird perched on it that beat its wings like a live
bird; in its left the image held a ring on which were inscribed the words which
Ysolt had uttered at the parting. Beneath Ysolt's feet lay the image of the
Dwarf who had denounced her to Mark in the orchard, while beside her
reclined Peticru, modelled in pure gold; and as the dog shook its head, its tiny
bell jingled softly. The statue of Brengvein held a vial, around which ran the
legend: 'Queen Ysolt, take this drink that was made for King Mark in Ireland'.
Whenever Tristran visits the image of Ysolt he kisses it and clasps it in his
arms, as if it were alive
It is easy to suppose that this Thomas text did indeed form
part of the Arthurian legends which Kelly suggests were
taken by Eleanor Plantagenet to Spain and to further
suppose, given Sicily and England had virtually parallel
administrations, that tales of the Thomas automata were
carried to Sicily either by Spaniards or directly by English
27
ex-pats36. Again, Thomas and his automata are easily linked
to the Plantagenets and to Chrétien who openly acknowledges
his debt to Thomas. Equally well documented is the
popularity of the Tristan legend in Medieval Sicily.
Nevertheless, it remains totally impossible to form a
convincing chain linking Thomas to the Sicilian puppets and
the Sicilian puppets to Hesdin. In spite of this, it is
these marionettes that
garden historians have
made central to their
arguments about
Sicilian influences on
Robert’s Hesdin design
and it therefore
behoves us to look at
the puppets in some detail. To do this one first has to
define the nature of a puppet, this is essential in the
context of Hesdin where Robert installed both marionettes
and automata37 so when does a puppet/marionette become an
automaton and vice versa? I would suggest that human agency
is required only to initiate a series of actions in the
latter, but marionettes are dependent upon humans for their
36 Salter 408 “By the end of the twelfth century, legends of Arthur wereas familiar in Sicily as in Wales: the Isle of Avalon was frequently identified as Sicily and Arthur was said to have lived in the fortress of Mongibel or Mount Etna.37 Hesdin hosted a meeting on 27 May 2006 , “sur le thème des automates du parc du vieil Hesdin” presented by Elisabeth Pépin-Cléty. I haven’t seen a transcription of her presentation.
28
every action. Technically, marionettes are operated by
strings, and puppets, like Mr Punch for instance, have a
hand up them. Sicilian semantics generally ignore the
difference38 but those investigating Hesdin have
unfortunately compounded the problem by failing to make a
distinction between the marionettes which could well have
been Flemish, the hydraulic water features which may have
been based on Al-Djazari and the later clockwork automata
which again may have been Flemish. Failure to follow up on
these imponderables has allowed them to become the basis of
much dubious speculation upon the origins of Hesdin’s
pleasure garden
The argument that the Plantagenets carried the concept of
the Thomas automata to
Spain where they
became transformed into puppets fails in that marionettes
like the legends on which they were based, were probably
there already. Iberia is a doubtful provenance; in her two
papers concerning the automata in “Floire ”, Maria Segol39
38 The Sicilians invariably use the word “Pupi” but as they delight in telling anyone that will listen, their language is Sicilian not Italian39 Papers for Universities of Purdue and Cairo posted on the web referring to Harvey 45. In fact as Harvey makes clear in the context of Hesdin on page 106, he was fully aware of the Al-Djazari automata to which he controversially ascribes the origin of Robert’s “engins” ; the inference must be that before the publication of Al-Djazari’s book, the work of Heron of Alexandria had been forgotten and secondly that if windchimes were the best the Portuguese could do after its publication, its influence clearly hadn’t spread as far as Lusitania.
29
Teatro dei Pupi in Palermo
invokes Harvey to support her case that “There is evidence
of the existence of automata just such as those described
here.....”, but in fact those described by Harvey as
existing in the Navarrese royal gardens at Tafalla were
nothing of the sort, scarcely more than glorified wind
chimes, - as much “automata” as say, a flute left on a
table. As far as Sicily is concerned, puppets are unlikely
to have appeared until the fifteenth century, as the
Italians themselves admit40. This is endorsed by the fact
the Sicilian puppets are invariably based on characters from
the Carolingian cycle and not from the Arthurian tales. The
timing adds weight to my contention that the puppet shows
were a reaction against the brutal French occupation and its
trappings of pseudo-chivalry, a propaganda exercise probably
encouraged by the Aragonese rulers who supplanted the French
and who may indeed have been responsible for the
marionette’s introduction in the first place. Robert then,
could not have seen them during his period in the Two
Sicilies. The argument that the Hesdin puppets had a
Sicilian origin ultimately derived from some unspecified
Plantagenet/Castilian connection fails further in that
Islamic-style automata had been rich mens’ fantasy-toys ever
since recitals of “Floire et Blanchflor” had become standard
entertainment at courtly dinners as far back as the
40 Even on their own web site the Sicilians don’t claim their marionettes to have been in situ prior to the fifteenth century (www.lifeinitaly.com)
30
millennium. Thus it was hardly innovative for Robert to
bring an idea back across the Alps which had already been
established in northern Europe for centuries. This
nevertheless leaves the intriguing question, since Thomas’
statues lean toward automata rather than marionettes: - from
where did he get his inspiration? Those in “Floire” seem the
most likely or perhaps other automata such as Talos, the
bronze man encountered by the Argonauts, or the magical
black horse of “The Arabian Nights”.
.At the end of the twelfth century Al-Djazari had reproduced
the work of Hero of Alexandria in his “Traité des automates”,
the timing can not be precise but who can say with
exactitude that Thomas could not have become aware of Al-
Djazari’s work from a returning crusader, or indeed, given
the almost total mystery concerning his life, that he had
not crusaded himself. This though is little more than a
procrustean attempt to reconcile the known facts of Hesdin
with popular opinion Failing that, it is not unreasonable to
conclude that the concept of the Hesdin marionettes did have
an oriental basis, one not of Sicilian origin but one
derived instead from “Floire et Blanchflor” via Thomas. The dream
may have been old but what made Robert’s automata unique was
that he translated the “neat tricks” of the romancers into a
functioning part of a magic landscape41.
41 One has to emphasise the environmental setting in order to pre-empt the purists who will point to the previous existence of table fountains
31
However, one can’t put a good story down and the idea of
sophisticated marionettes of Sicilian or Egyptian origin at
Hesdin is asserted as unqualified dogma42 by the likes of
Encyclopaedia Britannica and other web sites such as that
quoted in the footnote, In fact it would appear that Hesdin
contained a variety of “engins”, commencing with the
notorious fornicating monkeys, which Van Buren conclusively
shows were operated by estate workers pulling strings. From
these rapidly evolved the lever powered “puppets”.
Curiously, the web sites of a number of Belgian cities claim
to be the original source of these complicated marionettes
which may or may not be a fiction dreamed up for the
tourists, but which certainly fits in with the idea that
Robert found the prototypes for his monkeys, string operated
or otherwise, on his own door step. These were succeeded by
the clock work devices developed between 1250 and Robert’s
death in 1302. That some engins were hydraulically operated
may be seen as an intermediate step in their evolution and
nothing to do with Araby at all. As in this instance, the
water was an adjunct to the engins rather than as a feature
in its own right, it is more appropriate to deal with it in
and puppets employed to teach the gospel in church42 “Arab influence was especially pronounced at Hesdin, Pas-de-Calais, France, which boasted automata, including a talking owl, based on water-engine technology described in the Book of Mechanical Devices (1206) by Ibn al Razzaz al Jazarí of Diyarbakir” ( From the web site “from vocal memnon to the stereophonic garden” Joseph Dillon Ford Miami1995) but Ford, the writer of this was a professor of music, rather thana historian or horticulturalist and may be forgiven for taking his reference (The Oxford Companion to Gardens, s.v. "pleasance") at its face value.
32
a later section. In the context of a specifically Sicilian
influence, since Robert could scarcely land on his
theoretical fiefdom, let alone administer it, he is not
likely to have returned home with a series of blueprints in
his baggage. Again the emphasis of the Sicilian characters
is almost exclusively Carolingian whilst Robert thought of
himself as an Arthurian character, dressing up as Chrétien
de Troyes’ “Knight and the Lion during a three day tournament at
Artois in 127843.
This necessarily raises the question,
Why monkeys? It’s less a matter of why
the presence of monkeys since everybody
from Charlemagne to René of Anjou had
them, so much as why these animals were
specifically chosen as the subjects for
the marionettes. According to Peter
Robb, there was, until recently, one day
in the year when they are sold on the streets of Naples44 .
It could be that Robert developed an affinity with them and
as his live animals persisted in dying, the marionettes were
the next best thing. I would suggest that a more plausible
theory, given that Robert liked to think of himself as a
mythical knightly figure, is that he fantasised himself into
the figure of Chrétien de Troyes’ “Erec”45 whose tunic had 43 Van Buren 13144 Peter Robb “Midnight in Sicily”. Doubtless this custom is now barred by the EU45 Chrétien de Troyes “Erec” ll 6695
33
been embroidered by fairies from the skins of Berbioletes
(identified as Langur monkeys) In the absence of the precise
Indian species, who was going to quibble that it was the
wrong kind of monkey? Ironically when the supply of monkey
corpses ran out, the marionettes of Hesdin had to be clad in
badger pelts. Van Buren and Harvey both mention his childish
sense of humour so is it beyond the realms of possibility
that they were metaphors for the Flemish weavers whom he
detested and who he wished to similarly skin and string up?
If so, the joke was on him when they slaughtered him at
Coutrai in 1302.
Enthusiasts of an Islamic connection
base their conjecture largely on
Charageat’s over-eager exploitation of Dehaine’s 1886
redaction of the Hesdin accounts. Naomi Miller, clearly
under Charageat’s spell and apparently unaware both that
Robert actually governed Naples and that the Burgundian
Dukes were his successors rather than his contemporaries,
wrote
“En route from the crusades in the late thirteenth century, Robert II d’Artois
passed through Sicily and Naples, and at their courts he must have learned from
Arab engineers about those automata which constituted the “marvels” of the
Park of Hesdin (1295 – 1302, destroyed 1553).....Judging by the gallery of strange
mechanisms and from the eminence of the Hesdin court in the fourteenth
34
Monkeys require warmth
century, it is not surprising that the monumental solar clocks and sun dials have
been linked to the fountains depicted in the manuscripts commissioned by the
Burgundian dukes or to the great fountain at the center of the Palatine court in
Palermo. Robert, like his contemporaries must have been acquainted with the
Eastern and Byzantine hydraulic mechanisms”
In fact Miller’s chronology is so at odds with what we know
of Robert’s life as to be fairly nonsensical. To which one
may add the question, why this compulsion on Robert? Why
“must” he have learned from Arab engineers and why “must” he
have been acquainted with Eastern hydraulic mechanisms? This
seems another example of those who enjoy making tendentious
daisy chains linking Guissin, Robert’s engineer, to Peter
Peregrinus who may have instructed him; Peter to the
Saracens at the siege of Lucera during 1269 from whom, they
claim he learnt his techniques and thence to the Saracens
notwithstanding that they had been thrown out of Sicily
forty years previously, to Heron of Alexandria via Al-
Djazari’s text book “Traité des automates” written in Cairo
during the twelfth century. All of which seems speculative
to say the least. I suggest that whilst Peter was
undoubtedly at Lucera, it is scarcely plausible that a half
starved Saracen would sit down with a detested enemy and
teach him how to make the toys that would be put to use on
the other side of Europe several decades later. One is
35
therefore reluctantly compelled to go with Van Buren’s
reiterated point
“The accounts give no hint of an interest in Islamic culture....of course Robert
saw the great park on passing through Palermo....(which) may well have
included automata, but that is all....there is no evidence that he was ever in
contact with Sicilian or Islamic engineers”
And again,
“... (Robert’s) sculptor, Master Guissin sought to recreate nature through
“artifice, necromancy and magic. For this they did not need Islamic models, the
technology was available from builders in Calais and engineers in Picardy” 46
Her thesis of a home-grown “garden of marvels” is endorsed
by the note books of Villard de Honnecourt, a shadowy
mathematician, possible horologist and alleged Cistercian
architect who was said to have lived in the Picardy area
during Robert’s youth. The notebooks contain avian automata
and an Archimedes screw almost certainly designed to raise
fluids, also a bad drawing of an owl (?) and a worse one of
a monkey. Whilst there is nothing whatever to suggest that
Villard travelled to the East and certainly not to Sicily
for his sources, there is equally nothing to say that he
could not have done so during his undocumented youth.
46 Van Buren 134
36
However rather than Sicily as a potential source of
Villard’s sketches, I would suggest Byzantium which had a
record of rich intellectual cross-fertilization with Araby
stretching back to the reign of Theophilus (829 - 842)47.
After the crusaders sacked the city in 1204, they carried
off every movable object to the extent that the economy
never recovered. They then occupied Constantinople and parts
of the former Empire until the Palaeologi restored a Greek
dynasty in 125948. This Latin subjugation coincides almost
precisely with the period in which Villard is said to have
produced most of his work. It is therefore justifiable to
suppose that his work is Byzantine based, either because he
was a member of the occupying forces or that he managed to
acquire a source book from a returning looter. Moreover, I
shall show on subsequent pages that it was extremely
unlikely that “I giochi d’aqua” in “La Zisa un antico
palazzo di delizie” 49 could have survived until 1270. This
supposition has the merit of reconciling the arguments as to
whether the Hesdin automata were Arabic or North European in
conception. In addition there is the convenient fact that
Miller identifies a Villard design for a drinking bird
automaton as derived from a Heron original. Whilst there can
be no certainty that Villard’s designs were employed in the
47 Wolschke-Bulmahn 9 and Dolezal and Mavroudi 12948 This is a simplistic summary, the actual pattern of civil wars, manoeuvring for trade concessions with the Latins etc is infinitely morecomplex than is here suggested49 Salierno 127
37
park, it seems safer on balance to go with Van Buren’s
argument in favour of domestic sources rather than
Haudebourg
“C’est sans aucun doute l’agrément des jardins siciliens qui a poussé Robert II
d’Artois à entreprendre l’amenagement……du parc d’Hesdin”
That she doesn’t mean a garden based on vaguely imagined
concepts, which would be reasonably credible but instead one
in which actual Islamic automata are re-created in Hesdin as
suggested by her previous comment
“Les automates qui animent ces jardins frappent les imaginations. Héritiers
d’une tradition qui remonte a l’Antiquité et au savant Héron of Alexandrie, les
arabes sont capables de créer des méchanismes que les voyageurs découvrent
avec admiration”50
Crusaders preferred to see themselves as the living
embodiments of past heroes rather than as mere incompetent
cut-throats51 . This inability to come to terms with reality
was confirmed in August 1286, when, as Outremer seemed at
its last gasp Runciman52 described how
50 Haudebourg 19851 For instance see Holmes103 on Edwards sequestration of all Jewish property in England and Gascony to secure the release of Charles’ son, Carlo il zoppo52 Runciman 3 : 397
38
“the residents welcomed their new king with a fortnight of festivity “There were
games and tournaments; and in the great hall of the Hospital pageants were
enacted. There were scenes from the Story of the Round Table, with Lancelot and
Tristram and Palamedes; and they played the tale of the Queen of Feminie, from
the Romance of Troy.”
Not surprisingly Edward had been unimpressed when he had met
them earlier.
Robert was arguably the best of a bad bunch and the greatest
fantasist of them all; for three days in 1278, he had
enjoyed himself enacting the role of one of Chrétien de
Troyes’ greatest heroes, “The Knight and the Lion”. More’s the pity
then that he was to die in a ditch on his home territory
felled by a gaggle of revolting peasants yet his shade may
gain some consolation from the fact that he is hailed to
this day by the French as the epitome of “La Gloire”. Like his
garden artefacts, the connection between Robert and Romance
is more than merely literary, for not only was he directly
descended from Eleanor of Aquitaine , but his father had
died as a crusading champion during an even greater act of
folly than his own. Moreover his sister was married to
Edmund Plantagenet one of the crusading sons of England’s
Henry III. Robert did indeed have a daunting pedigree to
live up to and it is to his credit that he both honoured his
39
destiny and retained sufficient humanity to build what was,
at the end of the day, an extremely childish garden53
Further evidence that the furnishings of Hesdin and other
Trans-Alpine gardens were inspired by Northern romances
rather than Islamic mechanics is provided by the ubiquitous
towers More than mere prisons for wilful adolescents as in
the case of Nicolette and Blanchefloire, they existed as
practical and aesthetic features integral to the garden
either as massive observation posts or scaled down pavilions
at intersecting paths like that illustrated in the “March”
illustration in “Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry”. In fact is
it is worth looking at towers in some detail as they are one
of the features on which Harvey based his argument that
Hesdin was neither original nor Sicilian but Castilian
inspired; in “Mediaeval Gardens” 54 he wrote
“A key concept is the “Gloriette” a word of Spanish origin for a pavilion placed
at the centre of a garden of four quarters of Moorish type; hence glorietta still
signifies a “circus” at the intersection of avenues, or is a summer house placed
there....the name too was given to the works at Leeds in Kent carried out for
Edward I’s queen, Eleanor of Castile between 1278 and her death in 1290. A
Large lake was formed around the earlier castle, with an “inner” island 53 Older readers will recognise most of the features as being identical to those found in the fairground attraction “The Haunted House”. It sayssomething about the “Nanny state” of the 21st century that the Health and Safety executive have ensured that our own children will never enjoysuch delights54 Harvey 105
40
supporting the Gloriette, approached by a two-storied bridge. This layout for a
Spanish queen…is of outstanding importance for its date, a few years before the
analogous developments at the castle of Hesdin. Count Robert II of Artois there
enclosed a great park in 1295 and began a “house in the marsh” with a Gloriette
in a great pool, approached by a bridge, an aviary and a “chapel of glass”.
still unfinished at his death in
1302........and the “spyhouse” of
1440 - 41 in the mews at Charing
Cross, with four windows,
plastered, pargetted and painted
green was probably a small
gloriet (sic) ...At Kenilworth, John
of Gaunt the king’s uncle (titular
king of Castile) was building the
Strong Tower in the state
apartments overlooking both
lake and park
Nevertheless, one
wonders why Edward
should suddenly want to
build a Spanish garden
for a Castilian queen who, after her marriage twenty four
years previously was unlikely to be still pining for her
homeland. Moreover since she was ten years old at the time,
her memories of the landscaping must have been somewhat
41
Duc de Berry's Gloriette
vague. On the other hand, there are only eight years between
Eleanor and Edward’s visit to Sicily en route to a crusade
which proved as disastrous for him personally55 as it
ultimately turned out to be for the whole crusading
movement.
Robert’s work at Hesdin of course long preceded that on both
the mews at Charing Cross and at Kenilworth which makes them
irrelevant to any argument concerning a Castilian influence
on his plans. More generally, in his suggestion of Spanish
origins, Harvey is to some extent supported by Naomi Miller
who writes56
“How Islamic ideas were transmitted to Europe is still largely unknown, but
contacts between craftsmen in the Iberian Peninsula and travellers’ reports
provide likely explanations”
It appears likely that the “gloriettes” of Hesdin and
possibly Leeds, were not so much inspired by Castilian
realities as the fictional dreams found within the pages of
North Europe romances:-
55 He was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt and returned home having achieved nothing56 Miller op cit 143, one might suggest by prisoners, pilgrims, capturedartifacts, normal trade channels, literature and peripatetic entertainers, the troubadour movement is described in detail by John Addington Symonds
42
“At one end of the hall rose a narrow tower high above the castle roof... Up
there stood a shining pillar ... wrought by sorcery. Of diamond, ruby, emerald,
and sard were the costly windows, as wide as they were tall... But among these
columns was none that could compare with the great pillar which stood in the
centre.. Gawain climbed alone to the watch tower. There he found a marvel so
great that he could not take his eyes from it. It seemed to him that he could see
in the great pillar all the lands round about, and it seemed the lands were
circling the column and the mighty mountains collided with a clash. In the pillar
he saw people riding and walking, others running or standing still. He seated
himself at a window to observe the marvel better57.
This extract from Wolfgang Von Eschenbach’s Parzival is
similar to that in Chrétien de Troyes’ version of the same
story given below. Coincidentally perhaps, Von Eschenbach
situates the tower on the mountain above Caltabellotta in
Sicily. Edward had arrived with his wife in North Africa
just as the crusade was grinding to a halt. There he found
St Louis, the French leader dead and Robert of Artois
packing up to leave. Almost at the same time Charles of
Anjou, his odious maternal uncle also turned up so with no
crusade to fight, Edward returned to winter in Sicily prior
to sailing to Acre the following spring (1271). Charles
remained briefly until he had succeeded in extorting a hefty
bribe from the Emir to go away, then he also returned to his
57 Parzival p 312 /314 12 : 587
43
Sicilian base58. Robert travelled across Sicily escorting
the King’s coffin thus giving him a foretaste the paradise
over which he was later to be appointed Regent Whatever the
precise timing therefore, it is inevitable that Edward and
Robert met either in Africa or in Sicily and that Robert
followed his example, though whether from hero-worship, for
by this time Edward was already a seasoned campaigner and
had saved his father’s throne whereas Robert had done
nothing very much, or from sheer jealousy can not be
ascertained. That said, there are sound reasons for
believing that the two men loathed one another.59
In addition to its role as a summer-house cum lookout-post,
the gloriette at Hesdin had another purpose “celle-ci devint une
volière et on utilisait de la “glui à gluier cordes pour prendre oiselés en gloriete”.
These unfortunate birds, captured with bird lime and tied by
their feet to perches, were supplemented with wooden birds
with painted golden feathers. In spite of all the Arab lore
supposedly employed at Hesdin, it is relevant to note a
comment written in about 1392 by the “Menagier de Paris”
referring to the Hesdin keepers’ inability to get the birds
to sit their eggs. The answer given was that it never 58 he had earlier seized the island from the Hohenstaufens with the Pope’s connivance, see below59 The English always maintained close trading links with the Flemings who detested Robert’s family and over the next two generations, constantly rebelled and plotted with English support, A De Montfort in the pay of the Angevins murdered Edward’s favourite cousin and Robert dispossessed Edward of his Gascon territories, during which campaign Edward’s brother (who was married to Robert’s sister) died
44
occurred to those in charge of the aviary to provide their
birds with any water in spite of feeding them a dry diet.
Whilst it could be argued with scant conviction, that basic
skills had been lost in the prevailing political turmoil, a
more likely explanation is that there had been limited
contact between the French and the Saracens who were expert
falconers coupled with an obstinate Gallic determination to
learn nothing from the supplanted Hohenstaufen regime60
The gloriette-aviary certainly hints at a deliberate policy
not to employ alien concepts in the garden but a stronger
argument that Robert’s fantasies had their origins closer to
home is suggested by his “Chapelle de Verre”.
“The hall is very well protected by magic and enchantment.... A learned
astronomer created such a great magic in that palace upon the hill that you’ve
never heard the equal of it.....the walls were not of soft plaster but marble with
60 Frederick 2nd had not only dictated a book on the subject which is still in print today, but established a wetland conservation area at theLaghi de Lesina near Foggia. Inevitably there is usual lack of academic unanimity over this, the local web site says the lakes were a hunting area, Martellotti (111) shows evidence that “Le sue reserve e I suoi luoghi di delizia erano ovviamente interdetti ai cacciatori” She furthercomments “egli incrementa come si è visto l’allevamento dei polli, e di altri animali da cortile, predisponenendo la construizione delle apposite strutture nelle sue case in Capitanata........Difatti il pollame constituisce il primo settore assai ampio dei cibi carnei....” all of which suggests that it was nothing more than the stupidity and stubbornness of the French ruling classes that stopped their chicks hatching. After all even if they didn’t want to learn from the Germans or Saracens, they could have asked one of their own peasants.
45
such clear glass windows set high in them that if you were to look through the
glass attentively, you could see everyone entering the hall and passing through
the door. The glass was stained with the most costly and refulgent colours one
could conceive of or create....The hall had some five hundred closed windows and
a hundred open” (Chrétien de Troyes “Parzival” ll 7539)
This is undoubtedly derived from Chrétien de Troyes and
though showing an obvious resemblance to Wolfram’s building
described previously, the lack of any overt Sicilian
connection has provided the Celtic fairie-faction an
opportunity to pursue their own goose chase, claiming that
“Verre” is a reference to the “Isle de Voirre”, (syn
“Gorre”) the Celtic wonderland which the festival-goers and
fairy fans of our own day like to identify with modern
Glastonbury61. Alas, the story appears to originate in a
sixteenth century Welsh text about St Collen, a Welsh hermit
who out-smarted the King of the Fairies on Glastonbury Tor,
thereby demolishing any attempt to establish a link between
Hesdin and Somerset62
Other features recorded at Hesdin suggesting a relationship
with Chrétien de Troyes rather than Sicily (or Glastonbury)
are the distorting mirrors installed by Robert’s daughter
Mahaut, the wooden hermit reminiscent of those who restored
61 see innumerable web sites. Also a note in the Kibler translation of Chrétien de Troyes 62 In Westwood and Simpson 643
46
the wits of Yvain and Perceval63, - temporary insanity
apparently being endemic amongst Chrétien’s heroes, a
deliberately collapsing bridge based on the “Pont evage” in
“The Knight and the Cart”” and the “thunderstorms” like those
conjured up at the magic spring in the same romance
Amidst all these indubitable Chrétien precedents are two
anomalies both of which suggest a hint of Araby, the
fountains and the turreted rose garden. The latter is
seemingly derived from the Roman De La Rose in which lines
3833 – 3867 describe a tower, whose construction is very
similar to the building process described in “The Knight and
the Cart”. Van Buren goes to some trouble to emphasise the
amorous aspect of the Hesdin garden “The romances all associate
gardens with human love and frequently have their lovers meet in a closed
garden”64 But this, if it is true, rules out the Roman De La
Rose as a precedent for Robert’s design for unlike most
Romances, this work was notorious for the misogyny
incorporated into the text from line 4059 onwards by its
second author, Jean de Meun. Admittedly Jean makes a few
complimentary remarks about Charles of Anjou, but as Van
63 The presence of a Christian hermit in a “Garden of Wonders” seems slightly anomalous, however if he is identified with Gornemant (Chrétiende Troye Parzifal ll 1947) he slots neatly into place and yet again confirms the association of Hesdin with northern romance64 Van Buren 131
47
Buren points out, this could have been no more than an
attempt to gain some patronage. It seems reasonable then to
assume that, like most of the other features, the walled
garden with its tower and crenellated walls is derived from
that in “The Knight and the Cart” or the one in “Erec and Enide” but
this proposition can not include Robert’s highly original
introduction of a garden specifically devoted to roses. This
is a truly remarkable precedent, seemingly unremarked by
other garden historians, possibly because “rose gardens” are
such a literary cliché that few have questioned whether or
not they really existed65. Is this the one feature which
Robert brought home from Italy, did he see Arab rose gardens
whilst crusading or was he indeed influenced by the “Roman
De La Rose”? His sister, Blanche Capet had firstly been
married to Henry, son of Thibaut IV of Navarre, the crusader
apocryphally credited with bringing back the Provins rose in
1240 and secondly to Edmund of Lancaster who had not only
adopted the white rose emblem of his mother, Eleanor of
Provence, but was also the brother of Edward Ist who, it is
suggested, introduced the Rosa gallica from the following
crusade66. Plenty of material there for the rosarian
fraternity to weave their stories around, but the truth is
that although roses had been continuously employed 65 Legendary and semi-legendary rose gardens abound in the literature ofNorthern Europe, those of Theoderic, Lauren, Charlemagne, Radegund, Childebert and the nuns of Romsey abbey immediately come to mind. Guerber though suggested in 1910 that at least some of these were horse paddocks, mistranslations of “Ross Gartens”66 Genders 296
48
medicinally and iconographically since the fall of Rome,
they were rather boring and evilly-spined plants thought to
give one a headache67. Prior to the thirteenth century,
given the economic constraints discussed earlier, the idea
of making an entire garden over to such under-whelming
plants would have been seen as an impractical act of gross
extravagance but their popularity was beginning to catch on
during the latter part of Robert’s life time. This is
attested by the establishment of commercial nurseries in the
late thirteenth century and roses frequent portrayal as
essential attributes of the Blessed Virgin Mary in fifteenth
century Books of Hours. None of this of course, answers the
question of why Hesdin should possess the first recorded
secular rose garden in Christian Western Europe. There is a
further possibility though; the reputation of the Artois-
Angevin family68 lends itself to speculation that it could
perhaps be connected with the fact that any medieval woman
inviting a man into a rose garden was expecting rather more
than a chaste kiss69. The date of this tradition is unknown
but it would be interesting to know if Robert was following
67 Liechtenstein Tacuinum sanitatis VII 68 Roberts third wife out-lived him by more than forty years, suggestingshe may have reintroduced the appetites of youth into his twilight years. His great niece and grand-daughters were all married to sons of the French king, their lovers were literally torn apart for lese-majeste. Charles II’s reputation for “pouncing on anything that breathedresulted in God punishing him with an anti-social disease69 Hoeniger 72. Hoeniger’s context is the illustrations of rose gardens in several versions of the Tacuinum sanitatis, originally an Arabic textand popular between the late eleventh century and the fifteenth.
49
a trend or initiating one.
As we have seen, the water features are almost invariably
used by commentators to justify linking the Hesdin gardens
to Araby, but is this necessarily a valid concept? The Latin
term “Fons”, the French “source” and Italian “Fonte” are all
applied to what the English call “springs” rather than the
symbolically priapic fountains installed by Louis XIV at
Versailles or the English in
Trafalgar Square. This has given
rise to confusion in
interpretation for whilst a
distinction should be made
between the utilitarian
“fountains” for watering
livestock and the ornamental
ones intended to impress his
visitors, their common factor is
that a lack of technical skills
ensured that Robert remained
faithful to his literary
precedents. This imperative can
be seen in the multiplicity of
illustrations based on the text from the Song of Songs.
IV:15 “a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters and streams” In these,
painted more than a century later, the waters of paradise
50
Medieval (dribbling) fountain
still dribble feebly over the edges of fonts or at best,
trickle from structures resembling the stalk of an
attenuated onion. Thus when it is written that Robert of
Artois installed drinking fountains at Hesdin for the park
livestock, these could have been little more than cisterns
surrounded by hard standing with water piped in from the
estate’s abundant springs. Obviously hydraulic machinery
existed to power the automata but this was inclined to break
down and needed constant manning so although something
similar to that illustrated by Villard de Honnecourt would
have been desirable if not essential, to keep the vast
household supplied with fresh water from the Canche, it
could have been only supplementary to the spring-fed
supplies70. Again, I question the supposition that Robert’s
“fountains” are based on anything seen at Palermo for unlike
the comparatively flat lands of Northern France, the city is
situated at the foot of the Conca D’Oro from whose springs
the water rushes down with sufficient pressure to power the
vertically-spouting ornamental fountains we normally
associate with the word today 71. Robert could, of course
have seen Arab machinery used irrigate the arid hinterland
of Calabria and Puglia and, once home, he did employ a large
number of outdoor Italian staff, but as none of these is 70 The plan shows a number of mills situated below the Chateau on the plain of the Canche. It does not make it clear whether these were water or wind powered.71 The fall from Monte Pellegrino is approximately 600 metres, so a spring originating even half way up would make for a spectacular fountain at street level
51
recorded as possessing a Saracen name, there can be no
justification for expecting them to have possessed hydraulic
skills72.
In tracing the evolution of the Hesdin artefacts from their
origins in twelfth century literature rather than Sicily, I
have so far omitted the role of the Hohenstaufens. The
dynasty which seized the island on the spurious grounds that
Henry VI was the closest surviving relative of William the
Good, had no obvious effects on the Hesdin garden and left
few material remains on the island except a few castles.
Despite this absence of tangible remains, the cultural
legacy of the Hohenstaufens, described below, was far from
ephemeral. Nevertheless, in setting their own stamp on
Southern Italy, it would appear that they permitted few of
their predecessors’ light-hearted water features to
survive. Instead, with Teutonic pragmatism, they built
sensible, but rather boring hatcheries for fish and birds.
This begs the question, sacrilegious to many garden
historians, as to whether, in the unlikely event that he had
visited Palermo during his regency, Robert found anything
there that he could re-create at Hedin. Gardens had
increasingly developed from small private refuges in to
expansive power-statements, as “Les Amis du Hesdin” put it72 This is scarcely surprising, Arabs frequently adopted occidental names either through compulsion like Negro slaves in Africa’s South or because their Northern overlords couldn’t pronounce their Arab names Salierno 162
52
“Le désir des princes de faire de Hesdin un havre de paix, une sorte de paradis
où tout est propice à l'enchantement” and “on trouve une volonté de la part des
princes de montrer leur puissance aux yeux des autres hommes. Un peu comme
si ces machines les aidaient à faire une démonstration de leur force et de leur
pouvoir. Le prince capable de créer la vie était assurément un grand
personnage”.
Thus to vandalize a garden was the ideal means of hitting a
ruler’s ego73, in which case it may have been a gesture of
symbolic malice that when Henry VI Hohenstaufen took Palermo
from the Normans in 1194, he destroyed the paradisal
Genoard74 but gave orders that Palermo should otherwise
remain inviolate75. The theory that the destruction of the
Genoard was a deliberately contrived act against Henry’s
natural instincts is supported by the fact that both his
father and his son were enthusiastic gardeners76 On the
other hand, it could simply have been that the destruction
of Roger’s great park and that of Hesdin itself in 1553,
were just the usual conduct of illiterate troops rendered
uncomfortable by aesthetics they couldn’t understand; a
73 The Italians set great store by the maintenance of their “Honore”, compare the trashing of gardens with the sacking of palaces during the quattrocento. Some writers, most frequently during discussions on Marcabrun, have equated the violation of gardens with that of women, butthis seems irrelevant to any debate on Hesdin74 Sevenko 7575 John Julius Norwich 385/676 Harvey 60 on the ambassadorial reports containing descriptions of gardens sent home from Araby to Frederick Ist
53
situation of which current Iraqi archaeologists are only too
aware. The German occupation was even less acceptable to the
Saracens than that of the Normans and they embarked on a
guerrilla campaign against the Hohenstaufens. Henry’s son
Frederick became exasperated and had them transported to
Lucera far to the North. As their involuntary exile took
place between 1224 and 1230 it is unlikely that sufficient
of them could have remained in Palermo to restore the
artefacts, said to have impressed Robert during his fleeting
visit. Apart from the formal water courses and perhaps the
odd fountain in the Zisa, only the great lake of Favara
survived more or less intact, but even this suffered severe
damage during the “Vespers” .
During his occupation, Henry’s son, Frederick IInd “Stupor
Mundi” rebuilt the life style if not the material effects of
his Norman predecessors and, importantly John Harvey credits
him with taking the Islamic idea of the “suspended garden”
back to Nuremberg. Leaving aside the matter that Schloss
Nuremberg’s own web site suggests Harvey has the wrong
Frederick77, I question this on the same grounds as I doubt
77 However, the Nuremberg web site argues, not entirely convincingly“ Onthe south side of the great hall, Emperor Friedrich III (1440-1493) had "hanging gardens" laid out in imitation of the gardens of the Oriental king Semiramis, which were supported on pillars and were planted with vines, flowers and small fruit trees. At the beginning of the 18th century, Johann Christoph Volkamer immortalized these gardens in his copper engraving "Nuremberg Hesperides". All the same one feels the Germans should know more about their own castle than a foreign writer
54
whether Hesdin benefited from any other purported “Sicilian
effect”. Firstly because it was necessary for there to have
been “Suspended gardens” in Sicily in the first place and
secondly, they would have had to have survived his father’s
destructive rampage. The improbability of this makes the
Emir’s garden in “Floire et Blanchflor” a more credible source for
the Nuremberg garden. A further possibility is that
Frederick’s “battlement garden” could have been based on a
misreading of the Roman De La Rose
Ele est dehors environee
d’un baille qui vet tot entor
si qu’entre le baille et la tour (3832)
sont il rosier espés planté
ou il a roses a plenté.
55
This theory would have been somewhat far fetched were it not
for the famous Flemish illustration with the roses planted
on the bailey and the tower rather than between them. It
would be interesting to
know whether Frederick
and the Flemish
illustrator were both
working from a text which
used a word other than
“entre” in line 3832
above. Cynics will say
that the roses are on the
battlements in the
Flemish illustration
because the spaces between the tower and bailey are full of
water, but romances do not lend themselves to such literal
interpretation, particularly since there is nothing in the
original text to suggest a number of moats. This once again
turns our minds to the vexatious question of the water
features, the “Giochi d’aqua”. Clearly if they had still existed,
Frederick, enamoured of all things Arabic and allegedly an
enthusiastic gardener, would have taken their design back to
Nuremberg with him, but there is no suggestion that he did
so. He may simply have found them childish, for his interest
otherwise in piscatorial matters can not be doubted; he is
said to have been responsible for transforming the natural
56
Castle of Roses in Flemish text
Lesina lakes in the Gargano into a game reserve and
commercial fish farm. He is also remembered for having
personally put a fish (carp?) into the Favara lake which was
fished out by the Elector of the Palatine in 149778 So
although neither Sicilian nor Arabic, the Lesina lakes stand
alone as the single undisputedly Italian feature Robert may
have adopted at Hesdin to enhance his vivaio and his
imaginative water works on the Canche and Ternoise
Whatever his lack of horticultural credentials, there can be
no denying the emperor’s considerable albeit indirect
influence on gardens. Poetry, music and science flowed in to
Palermo from Syria and Spain and were carried up to Rome as
though on a powerful convection current. From Rome,
travellers dispersed the skills and tales of Araby across
the breadth of Northern Europe79 and with Frederick’s own
courts centred on Germany and the Central Mediterranean,
traffic between them was continuous. By the time of Dante,
who wrote more or less contemporaneously with the Angevin
occupation of the island, “Sicilian” was de rigeur in all its
78 Martellotti 11379 Although dated and apparently changing his mind half way through, John Addington Symonds is particularly good on this process
57
aspects in the fashionable courts of Northern Italy. On the
literary front, he wrote “nam videtur sicilianum vulgare sibi famam
pre aliis asciscere, eo quod quicquid poetantur Ytali sicilianum vocatur”80 The
Pope didn’t much like the kudos accorded to the “Antichrist”
nor did he enjoy being squeezed between the Hohenstaufen
domains and twice excommunicated Frederick. Frederick
ignored this as a minor inconvenience and continued
spreading Arabic ideas into central Italy. It is
inconceivable that Boccaccio’s “Decameron” story tellers
could have got away with an unchaperoned house party with
their reputations untarnished had there not been a much-
envied Sicilian precedent. Clearly both the idyllic natural
and managed landscapes owed as much to Araby as did the
party’s eclectic education. At the same time a reaction had
already set in against the “sex in the garden ethos of the
Romances, what Marina Warner81 describes as the third stage
of the troubadour movement, promoted ironically, by Blanche
of Castile, grand daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine Womens’
status became so exalted that the “teasing woman” had become
the “unattainable woman” modelled on the Blessed Virgin
Mary. The ecclesiastical establishment leapt upon this as an
expedient for keeping women in their place and in
consequence saw Frederick as a dangerously subversive
influence Malaspina, the Papal lick-spittle described
Frederick as “dissoluto in lussuria, e tenne molte concubine, a
80 Martellotti 13281 Warner 147
58
mammolucchi a guisa di saracini, e ‘n tutti diletti corporali si diede, e quasi vita
Epicurea tenne, non facendo che mai fosse altra vita” For the time being,
the romances of chivalry remained potent within his Arabised
court so that when he died many claimed that they had seen
his knights plunge into the foaming sea off Taormina, whilst
he himself lies under Etna, waiting like Arthur, to return
in the hour of need82.
The third leg of the papal condemnation along with
fornication and consorting with the infidel was the
“Epicuria”. It is a cliché that no self-respecting
aristocrat between the fall of Rome and the publication of
Evelyn’s “Acetaria” in the seventeenth century would eat
“anything without a face” to rephrase the late Linda
McCartney. But this is to misinterpret the Sicilian diet,
which owed much to Byzantium. The Byzantines provided
continuity from the Greek concept that vegetables were
medicines, essential to the balancing of bodily “humours”.
The result was that whilst few if any, dedicated vegetable
gardens83 were laid down, medicinal gardens certainly were,
and raided to enhance the otherwise boring diets of bread,
meat, eggs and pasta. Thus in the recipe book of Frederik
82 Cohn 113, clearly a family tradition, his grandfather is supposed to be sleeping under the Kyffhauser83 Some may have survived the end of the Byzantine occupation, on Byzantine veg see Dalby, the overall impression though is that the Byzantines regarded vegetables, but not fruit, as extremely unwholesome
59
II84, we find employment for cabbages, onions, radishes,
peas, mushrooms and beans as well as the usual flavourings
like parsley, marjoram and saffron. It is true that some of
these could have been gathered from the wild, but it was
more convenient to have them growing in close proximity to
the kitchens. Frederick himself, unlike virtually every
other ruler until the twentieth century, ate a balanced diet
rather than embracing either obsessive asceticism or, more
usually, uninhibited gluttony. For this again, he was
condemned by the church who claimed that he was eating more
for the sake of his body in this world rather than for the
good of his soul in the next. It must have been somewhat
galling to the church therefore that unlike most of his
contemporaries, this arch-German fornicator died in bed
surrounded by the Foggia nature reserve he had done so much
to create. It was also very moving, when visiting his tomb
in Palermo Cathedral during April 2007, to find that at
least one previous visitor had left bunches of fresh
flowers.
There can be no denying that the Emperor’s holistic approach
was inherited indirectly from the Byzantines via Saracen
intermediaries and its precepts were warmly embraced, at
least in theory, in courts the length of the peninsular.
84 The extent of Frederick’s involvement in its compilation is discussedin detail by Martellotti whose theories have not yet achieved universal acceptance.
60
These were tabulated in the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a series of
tables explaining healthy eating written by Ibn Botlan who
died in 1068. The 1168 edition in the Venetian Marciana
bears a dedication to Manfred, Frederick’s son who did much
to popularise the text . The surviving illustrated editions
of the Tacuinum show gardens neatly planted with many of the
vegetables mentioned above. Although these illustrations
date from a period considerably after Manfred’s death,
medieval horticultural innovations were too few to
invalidate the theory that the holistic principles of the
Italian courts were derived from Hohenstaufen Sicily . With
both a pie and a text dedicated to him, Manfred was clearly
an exponent of the principles embodied in the Arabo-
Byzantine life style85.
Finally after decades of seditious meddling, the Papacy
found the champion it needed to unseat the Hohenstaufens in
the form of Charles of Anjou, uncle of Robert of Artois
Charles was the sort of maniac intent on world domination
frequently caricatured during the twentieth century, it was
unfortunate that his ambitions coincided with the election
of a run of French Popes86 who encouraged his aspirations
and shared his lack of scruples. It was no less bad luck for
the Angevins themselves that his aggression wasn’t matched 85 This is discussed in detail Hoeniger 5186 These included Hyacintha Pantaleon of Troyes who became Urban IV in 1261, Guy Foulques Le Gros de St Gilles elected as Clement IV 1265 and Simon de Brion as Martin IV 1281
61
either by good fortune or by competent strategic planning.
Having secured Southern Italy with papal connivance he
achieved universal revulsion by lopping off the head of 16
Year old Conradin, the last of the Hohenstaufens. He then
persuaded Louis IX, his foolishly malleable brother to raise
taxes throughout France ostensibly to fund a crusade in
North Africa which he thought would provide him with easy
pickings. Having deployed the resources for his own ends87,
the under-funded crusade was inevitably a disaster for which
the king received most of the blame and during which both he
and several members of his immediate family lost their lives
through dysentery. Thus it was that whilst he was escorting
the body of the dead king back to France, Robert caught his
first and probably only glimpse of Sicily88. By now, tightly
grasping the new piggy bank that was Sicily and having
purchased the throne of Jerusalem, Charles turned his eyes
toward Byzantium, the greatest prize of all. The original
plan had been that the failed crusaders should rendezvous in
Sicily and, after a brief rest to recover their health, sail
for Byzantium in an attempt to salvage something of their
mangled reputations. But it was not to be, for whilst a not-
87 Runciman 3 : 330, Leonard 106 puts a wholly different slant on the story88 Robert may have provisioned on the island during the outward leg of his journey to Africa but it would have necessarily been an extremely brief visit, far too short for him to have appreciated such delights of Araby as had survived the Hohenstaufens. Equally the corpses of the royal party which Robert was escorting home however well embalmed, wouldhave made his task more unpleasant had he gone sight-seeing at the height of the Sicilian summer.
62
particularly-formidable coalition of frightened rulers89
planned to thwart his plans, the hand of God, it was said,
did it for them when a storm wrecked his assembled invasion
fleet at Trapani. In his attempts to resurrect his invasion
force and fund his belligerent manipulations in the Balkans,
he bled Sicily white. Finally the abused Sicilians could
take no more and slaughtered the French occupiers to a man
during the Vespers. Thereafter his activities centred on
attempting to regain the island, but in 1284 his fleet was
once again destroyed, dashing his dreams of pan-
Mediterranean domination for ever. This time it was the hand
of avenging Ghibellines rivals rather than the Almighty who
scuppered his plans. Worse, during this action his heir
Charles IInd defied his orders and was captured by the
Neapolitans whilst performing an inane act of bravado
reminiscent of his uncle Robert Ist of Artois. Facing the
prospect of any spare cash being diverted to pay off his
son’s ransom rather than building empires, Charles died the
following year. Such had been his political meddling that
his importance to horticulture has been overlooked. Casting
aside his usual bigotry and prejudice he permitted Johannes
de Casamicciola, a Palatine Count who had been appointed
magister specialis in Naples during the Hohenstaufen era to
continue in office. Without Johannes’ approval no pharmacist
could practise but more significantly he was one of the
89 Michael VIII of Byzantium, Peter of Aragon and surviving Hoehenstaufen loyalists
63
first pharmacognosists in Western history, actually growing
the plants that others, more dependant upon their
imaginations than their observational skills, wrote about.
Charles’s son, the Prince of Salerno, had more time for
plants and gardens but was detested for razing Lucera to the
ground in 1300, completing what had been commenced during
the siege of 1269, although ascribed to Papal greed90, his
action in desecrating the Moslem cemetery and enslaving its
populace was certainly not lacking in vindictive symbolism.
Charles was thus contemptuously known to his subjects by a
name which may well be interpreted as “Hopalong Charlie” .
Nevertheless, he commanded sufficient respect for Pietro de
Crescenzi, a Ghibelline to dedicate one of the world’s most
famous gardening books Liber ruralium Commodorum91.to him. His
son Robert was similarly honoured in 1317 as the dedicatee
of Matteus Silvaticus’ “Pandette”, the famous medical manual
based on the plants grown by the writer. Later generations
of the family included Rene of Anjou who was to maintain
large and expensive gardens across France, but by the time
Charles died in 1309 the shadows were already beginning to
creep across Europe. Climate change, the Black Death, famine
and the Hundred Years war, the latter partially instigated
by Robert IIIrd of Artois, were to transform medievalism.
Amidst the havoc, gardens continued to evolve but as the 90 Leonard 533 n19091 Harvey hasn’t a good word for the book claiming that it’s no more than a plagiarisation of Albertus Magnus. However Crescenzi wrote an international best seller which is still in print and Albertus didn’t
64
four horsemen of the Apocalypse rode forth, superstition and
allegations of witchcraft increased. Mahaut, the rather
unpleasant daughter of Robert IInd, continued the
development of Hesdin and though she tried to buy
popularity, was much loathed by her subjects. Her daughters
married the two immediate heirs to the kingdom of France and
became the centre of a web of witchcraft allegations
involving the use of poisons and aphrodisiacs. Having failed
to wrest the estate from her hands in the courts, Robert
IIIrd then made a further attempt using a clumsily forged
document for which one of his accomplices was burnt alive
and during whose trial Mahaut herself was allegedly poisoned
in 1329. Clearly her father, Robert IInd was lucky to have
died at Coutrai, hailed as one of the most glorious
exponents of the chivalrous ideal. One can’t help feeling
that had he created a garden of “artifice, necromancy and
magic” twenty years later, he would have been burnt for his
pains.
Under his successors, the Dukes of Burgundy, the great
gardens of Hesdin were re-created on an even grander scale,
surviving until they were destroyed by Charles V.
Although my analysis has demonstrated that unlike Chrétien
de Troyes, Sicily had nothing to do with Robert’s dream, the
idea of a Sicilian origin continues to be vociferously
65
promoted by academics at conferences and on their web sites.
Conjecture and speculation are substituted for evidence and
hard facts. This must be inevitable given that Robert
brought back neither technical treatises nor human resources
from Sicily. In fact he had probably not spent more than a
few weeks on the island at most, but he had lived long
enough in the Islamic South to bequeath to the gloomy, god-
ridden rain-bedraggled land of his birth a sense of hedonism
without guilt, fun for the sake of it and enjoyment without
fear of ecclesiastical censure. It was a brief flowering and
one that could not have come about had not the magic of il
Meridionale acted as a catalyst to inspire Robert to combine
the tales of Celtic romance with the luxuriant ethos of the
Islamic pleasure. In what proportions family loyalty, love
of God, avarice and a naïve perception of himself as an
Arthurian knight amalgamated to form Robert’s character can
not now be assessed but undeniably Hesdin was a uniquely
personal dream which reflected the ideals of one of the most
decent members of a singularly unpleasant dynasty
NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS
1) Martorelli’s “Saint George” Painted a couple of
centuries after the creation of Hesdin, it clearly
shows how slowly gardens evolved not only in time but
also space. Although Martorelli was a Catalan, his
66
gardens show no hint of an Islamic influence. Instead
the gardens are the usual micro-plots of Northern
Europe, St George has had to leave the confines of the
castle to kill the dragon, partly because there was no
room in the gardens to manipulate his lance and partly
because being square, sin and disharmony, personified
by the dragon, couldn’t gain access to them.
2) Opera dei Pupi. This is possibly the most famous of the
Sicilian puppet theatres. Like the “second generation”
puppets of Hesdin, they are worked by levers but unlike
them, they are based entirely on Carolingian rather
than Arthurian legends. The programme can be read more
easily in the on-line version than in this hard copy
3) Girl and monkey. Both the Muscovite model and her
monkey are wearing an unusual amount of clothing,
making the serious point that cold kills, something
that Robert didn’t take on board. This is curious as
Van Buren (129) mentions the provision of warm water
for the herons, suggesting an awareness that not all
animals had identical requirements. But why, unless
herons is a mistranslation of the word for “flamingos”,
give them warm water when they live quite happily
without it? Allan and Hatfield (18) state that the idea
that God dumped the whole of creation down in Eden and
it thus flourished under identical conditions,
persisted until the Seventeenth century. This view was
67
not universal however, whether applied to animals or
plants, the Medici’s giraffe for instance, was choked
by fumes from the fires used to keep it warm and
Albertus Magnus is said to have built an early glass
house. The query about the failure of the birds to sit
(my page 29), indicates that no matter how well
intentioned the keepers at Hesdin, even after Robert’s
time, they remained extraordinarily ignorant of their
charges’ requirements.
4) The Gloriette of the Duc De Berry. The gloriette is
featured in the entry for March in the Limburg
brothers’ calendar. It stands at an intersection of
four tracks below the great castle of Lusignan where it
appears to serve no practical purpose whatsoever, in
fact it would actually obstruct vehicular traffic. Like
the fairy-dragon flying over the turrets, it may serve
some symbolic function which would be worth
investigating further. That we are not supposed to take
the picture at its face value is further emphasised by
the ploughman working at right angles to the field
boundary. A similar structure, described by Hattinger
as a “Montjoie”, forms the centre piece of “La
Rencontre des Rois Mages” by the same artists. Although
possessed of classical precedents, by the Middle Ages
Montjoies apparently only acted as way-markers between
Paris and St Denis and so they are no more likely to
68
turn up at Hesdin than at Lusignan. As the site for a
bird trap or shooting (with arrows) booth, it would be
ideal. I am however indebted to the Medieval gardening
forum for the suggestion that the “Gloriette” depicted
in “Les Très Riches Heures” was some form of memorial,
analogous to the “Eleanor crosses” erected more or less
during the same period in England
5) The dribbling fountain, obviously this one is working
under very low pressure and one asks how long it would
take for the water issuing from the little lions’ heads
at the top to fill the basin below (from which more
water seems to be flowing out than is flowing in) In
spite of the practical difficulties posed by a lack of
pressure during a dry summer, a fountain fed by a pipe
has the advantage over a spring in that the surrounding
ground wouldn’t get poached by human or animal feet,
dirtying the water and over a well in that it is less
likely to be accidentally polluted or deliberately
poisoned.
6) The Flemish Castle of Jealousy, in which the water-
filled moats and the roses assume equal prominence. The
landscape is Flemish, but the figure in the foreground
appears to be wearing a turban. Perhaps he is the
visual equivalent to the literary “trees of the
Alexandrines”
APPENDIX
69
A SUBJECTIVE ILLUSTRATED TOUR AROUND SICILY’S HORTICULTURALHERITAGE TODAY
It has been suggested thatthe text could be lightened by some photographs of my recent visit. However, as I explained above, virtuallynothing survives of Sicily’s horticultural heritage and in any case the zeal with which moderngarden owners protect their privacy extends to the use of photographs.
Fortunately, this makes the breakdown of my camera half way through the trip somewhat irrelevant. It kept going long enough to take this picture of the North West coast, under which, according to my “Rough Guide” the remains of the original Greek settlement and much of the later Sicilian history lie buried. That said, one of the most intriguing survivals is that of the Arab-based irrigation systems. We saw a domestic aqueduct on the surface outside Catania and the entrance to a more sophisticated albeit unexplored subterranean passage at the Villa Ingham. This was very similar to that in the illustration below, cribbed from a Sicilian web site.
The water features around the royal palaces, about which Islamic visitors wrote with such love and with which the medieval rulers demonstrated an aesthetic sense denied to most of their contemporaries, are now drained and
“developed” into a hideous mixture of slum housing and scrap yards. Apparentlythe canal within La Ziza has been restored quite well and it would have been good to have had a look at it. However as visitors to Italy know all
70
too well, arriving at the right hour on the right day of themonth and finding an attraction is open, is akin to landing on a number whilst playing roulette. So by the time I had walked to the puppet museum (closed) walked from there to the Cathedral and paid homage to Frederick “Stupor Mundi”, found the entrance (tiny wooden hut) to the Royal Palace (closed) and Chapel (breath-takingly magnificent but 60% obscured by scaffolding), there was no time to reach La Zizabefore the commencement of the puppet show. I admit to beingput off both by local architect Carlo Trabia’s comment
“Recently, however, a quasi-Arabic garden has beendesigned in front of the palace, on the northern sidefacing central Palermo and the coast. Structured aroundwhite stone, the fountains and cascades are veryordinary-looking and less than impressive, while thegarden itself is essentially a modern element rather thanan attempt at re-creating a medieval one. If they fail toaesthetically complement the Zisa itself, they at leastprovide welcome relief from the abandoned land andlow, ugly buildings which occupied this space fordecades”.
and another Sicilian guide saying that thepalace had been used as a repository forobjects contaminated by the plague “dopo unperiodo di abbandono, poi in deposito per gli oggetti contaminati dalla peste (XVI sec.)” The area today is undeniably more evocative of a plague pit than Ibn Qalaqis’ (see main text) sensuous moonlit evenings with the numinous white building reflected on the silent waters. Disillusionment would have been inevitable. Perhaps I might feel braver next time.
71
The next three pictures go together, the heftily-thighed goddess (below right) stands above the “Gymnasium”, the Botanic Garden’s originallecture theatre, looking downon this handsome avenue ofKapok trees. (below left) Oneof four deities representingthe seasons, she ispresumably Ceres/Demeter, theIsland’s tutelary Goddess. Herdaughter, the virginalPersephone was snatched byPluto from the Lago di Pergusa as she gathered violets and irises. Much piqued, Ceres visited famine upon the world as a punishment, so the landscape was probably already a lost
cause when Ovid described (Met 5 : 385) the swans singing around its shores (yes, really)and lost yet furtherwhen Milton (Paradise Lost 4 : 275) mentioned “thechild Prosperin” as a “fairer floure than that faire field of Enna”.
Never averse to giving their historical remains a good kicking, the Italians have built a motor racing circuit around the lake. Our visit to Castelbuono and the Palumbo Museum was an extraordinarily serendipitous eye-opener not only in its relevance to this paper but because it revolved around a person entirely new to me. Minà Palumbo was born in Castelbuono in 1814, qualified as a doctor in Palermo, completed his post- graduate studies in Naples and returned home in 1837. At this point he abandoned his orthodox medical training to become what we refer today as a “Natural
72
therapist”. From then on, he spent the rest of his life healing the poor and wandering about the Madrone looking at the plants and animals. If this makes him sound little better than some dopey hippy dropped through a time-warp, itwas an opinion shared by the director of the Catania BotanicGarden who expressed himself differently but no less scathingly “.... e qualcuno, come Francesco Tornabene, fondatore dell'Orto botanico di Catania, espresse qualche malizioso commento”, as the web site of the Palumbo museum puts it. This of course is an injustice to a man who was not merely born out of his time, but a century ahead of it. His work as as a semi-professional ecologist was internationally regarded during aperiod when ecology was virtually unknown as a mainstream science (As late as the early 1960’s, Yale offered but a single book for students to buy on the subject) and he was an ethnobiologist at least a hundred years before anyone hadthought of the term. Palumbo (below) carried on a correspondence with agronomists, physicians and horticulturalists across Europe and founded a comprehensive herbarium of local flora which researchers can access today.With his Neapolitan connections and more particularly in hiscorrespondence with scientists in Germany about the medicinal properties of the Sicilian flora, (his "Flora der Nebroden" was published in German by Gabriel Strobl in 1878),he was following in the footsteps of the Hohenstaufens. A direct continuity thus exists from the Salernitan doctrines expounded in the “Tractatus” of the early fourteenth century to Palumbo’s descriptions of the medicinal properties of those same South Appennine plants which he had studied in such depth on his home turf. It would be fascinating to knowthe extent to which he was influenced by the medicinal collection at Palermo92 compared with that of the medieval
92 According to the garden’s own guide leaflet, “...botany was being taught here in 1795.....This was to be the first botanical garden housing a collection of medicinal plants that could be used for teachingpurposes” (which will no doubt come as a considerable surprise to Padua). One has to admit that Palumbo would have learned precious littlefrom the medicinal collection as it exists today, but that’s what happens when a single curator (whose interest is trees) has to do the work of twelve gardeners as well as welcome visitors like me!
73
texts by Matteus Silvaticus and Matteus Platearius he would have seen in Naples. Either way, he clearly decided that phytotherapy made more sense than most of
the rubbish that had accreted about medicinein the centuries following their original publication. Clearly a great man whose work deserves to be better known.
Amongst the native plants hewould have encountered is Thapsiagarganica, (above left) rampant inthe hills around Castelbuono andwhose English name “Death Carrot”
excited much interest amongst the English visitors. The plant illustrated above, was identified by our guide from the University of
Palermo as the true species, but this is a young specimen and in the absence of a mature stem or any inflorescence, Iam personally confused as to how it differs from Ferula communis which grows abundantly in the same habitats. Is this the same plant illustrated in a sea of Sicilian marigolds? (above right) I hope that someone somewhere may one day read this and put me right, even better that someonewill write a definitive guide to the Umbellifers of the Mediterranean. Even at a juvenile stage, both of the plants shown here differ widely from my own specimens whose seeds were sold by a well known seed merchant as “Thapsia garganica”. As “a plant of economic importance” if only for
74
assassinating political opponents during the Middle Ages, itis desirable to have it properly defined in order to achieve historical authenticity in living collections.
The next interestingplant I encountered was this beautiful little pea, (left) absent from all my plant books, modern or medieval, and intriguing in its perfoliate leaves which make me hesitant about identifying it even so far as a Lathyrus
My third Sicilian plant is a Drimia aka Urginea, (below) which fascinated me purely on a subjective level. I had spent the previous six months wodering how to keep my own newly-acquired plants happy and so I was delighted to find it flourishing on this almost vertical hillside in the Madronie mountains. I have no idea whether Palumbo describedit or not, butmany of hisMediterraneanpredecessors andeven our ownWilliam Turnergave an accountof itsproperties.“it driveth awayslimy matterlike shavings ofthe guts. If itberoasted. ....it
75
is good for moulded heels” by which many of his readers musthave felt greatly reassured. “Squill vinegar” was apparentlyso well known in the middle ages, that the “Agnus Castus” author doesn’t even give a description of its uses, so it iscurious then that it doesn’t appear in the British Library “Circa Instans”
Finally no piece on Sicily would be complete without a picture of Etna. Apparently Avveroes reckoned Anacardium grew on the slopes of the mountain and Pietro D’Abano included it in his 1300 catalogue of toxic plants. I didn’tfind any, of course nor even any of Dioscorides’ self-illuminating Aster Amellus, but these were minor regrets in a trip which held such a plethora of delights for the medievalplantsman
SOURCESThe internet is now the ultimate source of “information” on everything, unfortunately it is also the optimum means of disseminating inaccurate, under-researched and plagiarised material to an enthusiastically
76
gullible populace. If this were not so, there would be no point to thispaper. Various sites were visited during its compilation, some were utter drivel, others are recommended particularly those of l'Associationdes Amis du site historique du Vieil Hesdin, The Bibliothècque Nationaleand Maria Segol’s at Purdue university, I do not however endorse all their conclusions unreservedlyThe Publications below are admittedly tertiary sources, the primary sources are unobtainable, the secondary sources, although abundant, demand access to a good university library, unlimited time and a knowledge of at least five languages including classical Greek and Arabic and so the following have been listed as being relatively easily available and in familiar languages. My main sources without which this paper could not have been written are in the first section and the second listing consist of those which have been quoted in passing, but nevertheless will probably need to be read by anyone wishing to expand on the medieval ”Garden of wonders” theme at greater length
Main sources
“AUCUSSIN ET NICOLETTE AND OTHER TALES Trans Pauline Matarasso Penguin 1971. The original text may found on the Bibliothècque Nationale web siteANDREAS CAPELLANUS “The Art of Courtly Love” Trans John Jay Parry Columbia University Press 1941CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES “Arthurian Romances” trans Kibler & Carroll, Penguin1991DANTE ALIGHIERI “Divine Comedy” trans Henry Longfellow, Routledge London1893DOLEZAL, MARY-LYON & MAVROUDI, MARIA in “Byzantine Garden Culture” Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard 2002DOUGLAS, DAVID “The Norman Achievement” Eyre & Spottiswoode 1969GRIEVE, PATRICIA E., “Floire & Blancheflor” Cambridge 1997HARVEY JOHN, “Mediaeval Gardens” Batsford London 1981HAUDEBOURG, MARIE-THERÈSE “Les Jardins Du Moyen Age” :Librairie Academique Perrin 2001KELLY, AMY “Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings” Harvard 1950LÉONARD, EMILE “Les Angevins de Naples” Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1954MARTELLOTTI, ANNA “I Ricetari di Federico II Dal “Meridionale” al “Liberde Coquina” Olschki Florence 2005
77
NORWICH, JOHN JULIUS “The Kingdom in the Sun” Longman 1970ROMAN DE LA ROSE, ed Lacoy, Champion, Paris 1974RUNCIMAN, STEVEN “A History of the Crusades” in 3 volumes Peregrine 1965SALIERNO, VITO, “I Musulmani in Italia” Capone editore, Lecce 2006SALTER, ELIZABETH in “Medieval World”, edited by DAICHES AND THORLBY Aldus London 1973SEVCENKO, NANCY in “Byzantine Garden Culture” Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard 2002STANNARD J in “GARDENS OF THE MIDDLE AGES” University of Kansas 1983SYMONDS, JOHN ADDINGTON “Renaissance in Italy, The Fine Arts” 1877 Reprinted Murray, London 1921THOMAS “Tristan” surviving fragment trans A T Hatto, Penguin 1960VAN BUREN, ANNE HAGOPIAN in MEDIEVAL GARDENS Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture IX 1986 WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH “Parzival” Trans & introduced by Helen Mustard & Charles Passage, Random NY 1961
78
Also consulted
ALLEN, DAVID E & HATFIELD, GABRIELLE “Medicinal Plants in Folk Tradition, anEthnobotany of Britain and Ireland” Timber Press 2004 BARTHELÉMY DOMINIQUE in “A HISTORY OF PRIVATE LIFE” Vol 2 ed Ariès and Duby, Harvard 1988BOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI “The Decameron” trans G H McMillan Penguin 1972 and 2003 BOVEY, ALIXE “Tacuinum Sanitatis, An Early Renaissance Guide to Health” Sam Fogg London 2005COHN, NORMAN “The Persuit of the Millennium” Secker & Warburg 1957COLLINS, MINTA “Medieval Herbals, the Illustrative Tradition” British Library 2000COMITO, T “The Idea of the Garden in the Renissance” Rutgers University Press 1978 CRESCENZI, PIETRO “Liber ruralium Commodorum” published as CRESCENTIO BOLOGNESE TRADOTTA NUOVAMENTE PER FRANCESCO SANSOVINO” 1550 Reprinted bythe Banca Nazionale dell’agricoltura, Perugia 1998. DALBY, ANDREW “Flavours of Byzantium” Prospect 2003FAIRBROTHER NAN, “Men and Gardens” 1956 republished Lyons & Burford NY 1997GENDERS ROY “The Cottage Garden and the Old-Fasioned Flowers” Pelham Books 1969GOUSSET, MARIE-THÉRÈSE “Jardins Médiévaux en France” Éditions Oeust-France, Rennes 2003GUERBER, H. A., “Myths & Legends of the Middle Ages” Harrap 1910HARVEY JOHN, “The Plantagenets” Batsford 1948HATTINGER, FRANZ “Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry”, Payot, LausanneHOENIGER, CATHLEEN in “Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200 – 1550” Ashgate 2006 HOLMES, GEORGE “The Later Middle Ages 1272 - 1485” Nelson 1962HUTTON, EDWARD “Giovanni Boccaccio” John Lane/Bodley Head 1910ISLAMIC GARDEN, THE ed Elisabeth Macdougall and Richard Ettinghausen, Dumbarton Oaks for Harvard University, Washington DC 1976
79
LE MÉNAGIER DE PARIS Trans Power 1928, reprinted as “The Goodman of Paris” by Folio Society 1992MATHON, CLAUDE-CHARLES & GIRAULT, PIERRE-GILLES in “Flore et Jardins” Cahiers de Léopard D’or, PARIS 1997MATTEUS SILVATICUS “Pandette Indice dei simplici” ed Luciano Mauro in “Mater Herbarum” Edizione Angelo Guerini e Associati, Milan 1995MÉNAGIER DE PARIS, LE Trans Eileen Power, Routledge 1928, republished bythe Folio Society 1992METLITZKI, D ,“The Matter of Araby in Medieval England” Yale 1977PEARSALL, DEREK & SALTER, ELIZABETH “Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World” University of Toronto 1973PLINY The ELDER “Natural History”, various translators Harvard Masachussets 1950 ROBB, PETER “Midnight in Sicily” Harvill Press 1998ROHDE, ELEANOUR SINCLAIR “The Old English Herbals”, Longmans Green and Co 1922ROMAN DE LA ROSE, trans Dahlberg; Princeton University Press 1971SONG OF ROLAND, Trans and commentated on by Robert Harrison, Mentor NY 1970WARNER, M “Alone of all her Sex” Quartet 1978 WESTWOOD, JENNIFER & SIMPSON, JACQUELINE. “The Lore of the Land” Penguin2005
INDEX
AAdelard of Bath....................7Africa..............5, 6, 24, 28, 33Albertus Magnus...............34, 36Al-Djazari.............6, 16, 17, 19Andreas Capellanus................13Angevin dynasty.....3, 8, 27, 33, 43Anjou.................14, 18, 26, 33Arabic tradition and influences.See
SaracensAragon............................10Argonauts.........................17Artois 10, 18, 19, 21, 22, 27, 33, 34
Aucassin et Nicolette....................8Augustine, Saint...................6automata. .15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 28
BBaghdad............................9Bernard of Clairvaux...............8Bianca of Castile.................12birds.....................24, 35, 36Blanche Capet.....................26Blanche of Castile................31Blessed Virgin Mary...............31Boccaccio.........................31
80
Borsa, Roger.......................7Byzantine Empire........6, 7, 12, 20Byzantines........................32Byzantium.............20, 32, 33, 44
CCairo.........................16, 19Calabria......................15, 28Caltabellotta.....................24Canche........................28, 30Castile........................7, 23Cefalù.............................4Chanson de Roland.....................9Chapelle de Verre”................25Charageat, Marguerite..........4, 19Charing Cross.................22, 23Charlemagne.............8, 9, 18, 26Charles IInd of Anjou.........21, 34Charles of Anjou..................24Chrétien.......14, 18, 22, 23, 25, 35Christians......................5, 8Comito, Terry.................10, 13Conca D’Oro.......................28Conradin Hohenstaufen.............33Constantinople....................20Continentale..........................4Coutrai.......................18, 34crusades and crusaders 5, 6, 13, 15,
17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 33
DDante.............................31De Montfort.......................24Dehaine...........................19Douglas, David..................4, 7dyes...............................6
EEden..........................10, 35Edmund of Lancaster.......See Edmund
PlantagenetEdmund Plantagenet............22, 26Edward Ist of England.............21Eleanor of Aquitaine 12, 13, 14, 15,
22, 31Eleanor of Castile................22Eleanor Plantagenet...........13, 15Elvira of Castile.................12engins.........................16, 18
England 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 21, 22,36, 44
Erec and Enide.......................26essences...........................5establishment, ecclesiastical 5, 13,
31, 32Etna..........................15, 31
Ffalconry..........................24Favara........................29, 30Flanders.......................9, 14Floire et Blanchflor. .5, 8, 10, 16, 17, 30food...............................6fountains.............17, 19, 25, 27Frederick "Stupor Mundi" 24, 29, 30,
31, 32Fulk the Black....................13
GGalicia............................5gardens...........12, 14, 26, 27, 29
"of marvels"....................20Andalucian.......................7hanging.........................29Islamic..........................3literary........................12medieval.....................3, 11northern...................5, 7, 9physic...........................9pleasure.............8, 10, 11, 12Sicilian......................3, 4vegetable.......................32
gastronomy.....................5, 32Gawain............................23Genoard...........................29Ghent.............................11Giraldus Cambrensis...............13Gloriette.....................22, 36Goddesses..........................4Granada............................5Greece.............................5Greek language. .See Byzantine EmpireGreek population See Byzantine EmpireGuiscard...........................7Guissin...........................19
HHaroun.............................9
81
Harvey, John 4, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16,18, 22, 23, 29, 34
Haudebourg, Marie-Thèrese. .7, 20, 21Henry IInd of England...........13, Henry Ist..........................7Henry of Saxony...................14Henry Plantagenet.See Henry IInd of
EnglandHenry VI Hohenstaufen........28, 29Heron of Alexandria.......16, 17, 19Hesdin 3, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 36, 42
Hohenstaufen dynasty 24, 29, 31, 32, 34
Holy Land...................5, 6, 13household, Medieval................6hydraulics........................16
IIberia............................16Ibn Al-Razzaz al-Jazari of Diyarbaki”..See Al-
DjazariIbn Qalaqis....................8, 38influence
Arabic..........................31Byzantine.......................32Castilian...................22, 23Cistercian..................14, 20Greco-Byzantine.................32Hohenstaufen....................31Marie de Champagne's............14Northern romance................22Oriental........................17Sicilian....................16, 29
Isabelle de Vermandois............14Islamics................See SaracensIsle of Avalon....................15
JJerusalem, throne of..............33Joanna Plantagenet............14, 15Johannes de Casamicciola..........34John of Gaunt.....................23
KKelly, Amy................13, 14, 15Kenilworth........................23Kent...........................6, 22Kibler, William...................14
LLa Zisa.......................20, 29Leeds.........................22, 23legends
Celtic...........9, 15, 16, 25, 35Sicilian........................15
Leonard, Emile G..............33, 34Les Amis du site historique du Vieil
Hesdin...........................3Les Très Riches Heures..........22, 36, 44Lesina........................24, 30Liber ruralium Commodorum........34, 44libraries, Anglo Saxon.............8Limburg brothers..................36literature.....5, 11, 12, 23, 26, 28
Egyptian.........................8London
Tower of.........................7Trafalgar Square................27
Louis IX..........................33Louis the Pious....................9Louis VII.............12, 13, 14, 24Louis XIV.........................27love....8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 26, 31, 35Lucera....................19, 29, 34Lusignan..........................36Lusitania.........................16
MMafia..............................3Mahaut of Artois.............25, 34Malaspina.........................31Manfred Hohenstaufen..............32Marcabrun.........................29Margarita of Navarre..............12Marie of Champagne................14marionettes..See puppets and puppet
shows, See Martellotti, Anna.................24Mary, Virgin......................26materia medica.........See medicinesMatilda Plantagenet...............14Matteus Silvaticus................34Mazzara............................4medicines...................6, 7, 32Menagier de Paris.................24mercenaries........................6Metlitzki, Dorothee................4Michael VIII of Byzantium.........33Miller, Naomi.................19, 23Mongibel..........................15
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monkeys...........................18Moslem......................7, 8, 34Moslems.................See Saracensmurder.........................6, 24music......................5, 18, 31
NNaples.............9, 18, 19, 34, 43nature.................6, 16, 20, 32Normandy........................6, 9Normans........5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 29Nuremberg.....................29, 30
OOutremer..........................21owl, talking..................17, 20
PPaladins, Carolingian..............3Palaeologi........................20Palermo........4, 19, 28, 29, 31, 32Pandette........................34, 44Paradise...........................8
Persian..........................7Parzival................14, 23, 25, 43Perceval................See ParzivalPeter of Aragon...................33Peter Peregrinus..................19Petrus Alfonsi.....................7pharmacognosy.....................34Philippe IV Le Bel................13Philippe of Flanders..........13, 14physicians.........................7Pietro de Crescenzi...............34Plato.............................13Pliny..............................6poems..................See literatureProvence.......................5, 26Puglia............................28puppets...........................17puppets and puppet shows......16, 18
Carolingian.....................17Egyptian........................17Oriental........................17Sicilian........................16Spanish.........................16
Pyrenees..........................13
RRadegund.......................9, 26Renaissance............6, 10, 43, 44Rene of Anjou.....................34Robb, Peter.......................18Robert IIIrd of Artois............34Robert of Artois. 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10,
11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 36, 45
Robert, Duke of Flanders...........9Robert, Duke of Normandy...........7Roger II of Sicily..........5, 7, 12Rohde, Eleanour Sinclair...........8Roman De La Rose............10, 25, 30romance. 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 21, 22,
23, 25, 26, 30, 31, 35Romance of Troy......................21roses and rose gardens 23, 25, 26, 27Runciman, Steven...........7, 21, 33
SSalerno............................7Salierno.......................8, 20Salter, Elizabeth.............12, 15Saracens. .7, 9, 10, 11, 15, 19, 24,
29, 30Segol, Maria......................16Sex.........................See loveSicilians......5, 10, 12, 16, 17, 33Sicily 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15,
16, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35
Song of Songs.....................27St Collen, Welsh Saint............25Stannard, Jerry............8, 11, 12Strabo.............................9
TTacuinum Sanitatis............26, 32, 44Tafalla...........................16Talos.............................17Taormina..........................31Ternoise..........................30textiles.......................6, 11The Arabian Nights....................17The Knight and the Cart.............25, 26The Knight and the Lion.............18, 22theocracy, Norman..................8Theophilus........................20
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Thibaut IV of Navarre.............26Thomas the Breton.............15, 17tower.............22, 23, 24, 25, 30trade.............................11
alum............................10Latin...........................20textile.........................11
Traité des automates...............17, 19Trapani...........................33Tripoli............................5Tristan.....................14, 15, 43Tristran.................See Tristantroubadours....................5, 11Two Sicilies...................8, 17
VVan Buren, Anne Hagopian. 4, 11, 18,
19, 20, 26, 35Venantius..........................9
Venetians.........................10Vespers....................3, 29, 33Villard de Honnecourt.........20, 28
WWales.............................15walls......................5, 25, 26Walter de Fontaines...............14Warner, Marina....................31William 1st of Sicily..............12William IInd of Sicily............14William VIII of Aquitaine..........9wind chimes.......................16Wolfram Von Eschenbach............25
YYsolt.............................15Yvain.............................25
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