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

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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

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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

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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”

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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.

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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”

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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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