How to Slay a Dragon Page 18

No matter how majestic your castle, its great hall can still look greater. You can’t go wrong by covering the walls with multicolored tapestries of elaborate designs or mythical scenes—the classics never go out of style. The best feast-design committees (yes, committees) transported guests to another universe, like with Camilla and Costanzo’s night sky ceiling-carpet. Their decorations also drew on the well of romance and imagination. The couple had their walls blanketed entirely with thick ornamental greenery (cut fresh for each day, naturally), evoking the literary role of forests as their own world of magic and mystery.

  Table decorations blurred the lines between décor and entertainment and between décor and food. Small flowing fountains and ship sculptures might have sufficed for Charlemagne and his sons in the ninth century. (Fountains maintained their popularity, but not on tabletops. At Philip’s 1454 “Feast of Pheasant,” the fountain structure took the shape of a human woman, and guests could refill their glasses from the red and white wine pouring constantly from her… right.) But in fifteenth-century Italy, you couldn’t even get away with a gold-covered pig belching fire. You needed gorgeous, exotic, wildly expensive peacocks with their tails grandly arrayed—and, yes, covered in gold—to spit the fire. Or models of castles and Crusader battles constructed out of wood and pastry dough.

  Pro tip: Don’t eat the castle. You don’t want splinters.

  4. INDIGESTION

  The feast following the coronation of Queen Katherine in 1421 England (who had married one of the less deadly Henrys) featured only three courses. Don’t sigh in relief. The third course alone consisted of dates covered in a syrup of powdered escargot and colored cream, roasted porpoise, fried prawns, lobster slathered in sauce, a dish of dates, prawns, red shrimp, great eels, roasted lamprey, white escargot, and a meat pie apparently decorated with four angels. One course did not mean one food.

  Camilla and Costanzo’s twelve courses start to seem a little more impressive now. Especially since they were so elaborate, the introduction to each course merited speeches by two characters dressed as Greek gods.

  5. THE BURNING QUESTION OF WHAT TO DO WHILE YOU DIGEST

  Early and high medieval Scandinavia kept it drunk and participatory. Poets—sometimes the lords themselves—sang epics and drinking songs. Late medieval Mali upped the game to multiple types of poets assigned specific types of praise and historical songs, plus ceremonial costumes often resembling animals.

  By the time of Camilla and Costanzo’s wedding in 1475, food was almost the least important part of a feast. (Hence guests coveting the bleacher seats, not just the wedding couple wanting to show off to as many people as possible.) In addition to the table centerpieces, you’ll need to have skits and displays (hilariously known as “subtleties”) at the end of each course, skits and displays between courses, entrance parades for the entire town to partake in, and events between the different meals of the feast.

  Frequently, the tabletop Crusader battles were accompanied by men reenacting (the death- and defeat-less parts of) the battles in the performance area. Maybe it was 1454, and a high-ranking courtier dressed up in a white satin robe with a black coat to personify Lady Eglesia—the Church as a gorgeous woman. He (or she) was led into the hall riding on a giant mechanical elephant draped with silk. (Or so the courtier in question claimed in his extensive chronicle entry about the feast. The other chroniclers agree there was a Lady Eglesia and an elephant. Only the courtier claims he got to sit atop an elephant.)

  In between the meals themselves, you’ll have to stage footraces, jousts, and above all, dances. Get ready to move all those tables out of the way and then put them back. Multiple times. And, most important, be sure you have large vats of wine and that the ladies in attendance are wearing very long skirts.

  Not for the reason you’re thinking. (Well, that one, too.) In 1393, French king Charles VI hosted what is likely the most infamous feast in the entire Middle Ages, which featured a masquerade ball whose tragedy had nothing to do with assassinations by poison. As a joyful surprise to guests, a group of dancers dressed as wild men sprang into the hall and began running about as wild men do. Their costumes were covered in linen, then tar, and then shaggy flax, and it was nighttime, and all the light in the hall was supplied by torches.

  The masquerade’s name of Bal des Ardents—Ball of the Burning Men—tells you everything you need, but don’t want, to know.

  Four of the dancers died in agony. One survived by jumping into a vat of wine. The final one survived when a teenage onlooker rushed over and pushed him underneath her skirts. The dancer was the French king. Duchess Jeanne of Berry was the only person brave enough to try to save him and smart enough to succeed.

  (Be like Jeanne, not Charles.)

  6. FEASTS WERE ALSO—ROLL WITH IT—FUN

  The word “banquet” began life as an extra meal tagged onto a feast, usually hosted sometime late in the evening. Unlike other meals, banquets were served buffet-style. And, more important, they included serve-yourself wine in more than ample amounts. In the Islamic world, the equivalent of banquets was the only time alcohol was publicly served to those who wished to partake. Those who did also had the option to enjoy foods meant to slow the rate of intoxication so they could drink more.

  Which is to say: the Middle Ages turned late-night drunk snacking into a formal meal.

  Even if you prefer not to drink, you’re going to have some great gossip for the next morning.

  The WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

  The mysterious stranger thuds the book closed. Their eyes are bright. “What do you think?”

  You trace the letters at the top of the cover, familiar from the carvings you see in religious art. D-E D-O-M-I-N-I-S D-R-A-C-O-N-U-M. “Um,” you say, “actually I just meant the title.”

  The stranger blinks. “Oh,” they say as the sun’s first rays appear on the horizon. “It says Concerning the Masters of Dragons.” They hold out the book. “It’s for you.”

  So, patch your boots, grab your sword, and take one last look at your village. You’ve got dragons to slay.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  If this book occasionally reads like A Fantasy Hero’s Guide to Fifteenth-Century Germany and Tenth-Century Cairo, it’s a shining tribute to John Van Engen and Olivia Remie Constable, brilliant scholars and my mentors at Notre Dame. As fifteenth-century Germans would say, ane sie laufft niht.

  But as for every author and every book, my “without whom, nothing” spans a group so large, thanking them all would require a book so long that even my dog couldn’t eat it all at once. In particular, though: Mark Evans is somehow always there for me in exactly the way I need at that moment, and knows that always includes making me laugh. Although he would deny it, Pat Werda is the best listener I know. When I don’t have the answers, I know I can always turn to Juan Sebastián Lewin.

  Caitlin Smith, Anna Munroe, Bobby Derie, Johannes Breit, Roel Konijnendijk, Will Knight, Hunter Higgison, Adam Barr, Brad Groundwater, Cassidy Percoco, C. D. Marmelle, Dan Howlett, Dominic Webb, Fraser Raeburn, Hannah Friedman, J Porter, JaShong King, Jenn Binis, Jeremy Salkeld, Jonathan Dean, Kyle Pittman, Lisa Baer-Tsarfati, Max MacPhee, Mike Siemon, Nathan Kasimer, Rob Weir, Ruairi McGowan-Smith, Sarah Gilbert, Sihong Lin, Simon Lam, Stefan Aguirre Quiroga, Thomas Lobitz, Tim Byron, Travis Warlow, Tyler Alderson, and Xavier Cortes have been to Scarborough Fair and back with me far more often than they deserve. Ron James has shown me the beautiful and terrible power of storytelling that is the soul of all histories. Through his wisdom and friendship, he reminds me every day why I do this.

  The library staff at Saint Louis University and the University of Notre Dame have worked miracles for me in obtaining sources that otherwise might as well have been lost in dusty codices for all time. My parents, Jeffrey and Kathleen, continue to slay my own dragons so I will never have to. The soundtracks to Civilization VI and Europa Universalis IV have never let me down.

  I had somehow never realized that “writing a book” involves a lot more th
an the writing part. Ronnie Alvarado, my editor, has walked me through this painful realization while somehow knowing my writing better than I do. Bruno Solís is no illustrator; he’s an artist and an inspiration. Patrick Sullivan and Jenny Chung clearly used some pretty strong maleficium to turn my little Word document into an actual book.

  Most of all, though, not a single word of How to Slay a Dragon would exist without the entire AskHistorians community—flairs, inquirers, readers, and above all, my fellow moderators. As Mechthild of Magdeburg would say (in thirteenth-century Germany this time), they shine into my soul like the sun against gold.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Cait Stevenson earned her PhD in medieval history from the University of Notre Dame. She concentrates on breaking down the barriers and hierarchy among academic and popular history. As sunagainstgold, she moderates AskHistorians, the internet’s largest public history forum, where she also writes on topics ranging from medieval inheritance laws to whether seventeenth-century children playing with toy guns said their equivalent of “pew, pew, pew.” She is proud to live and work in St. Louis, Missouri.

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  SELECTED SOURCES

  In addition to the translators and authors cited below, I am indebted to a long list of scholars whose research lies beneath so much of How to Slay a Dragon. They include, but are by no means limited to, John Van Engen, Dan Hobbins, Claire Jones, Olivia Remie Constable, Brad Gregory, Hildegund Müller, Paul Acker, Anna Akasoy, Judith Bennett, Karl Bihlmeyer, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Albrecht Classen, Karin Graf, Monica Green, Ulrich Haarmann, Barbara Hanawalt, Lars Ivar Hansen and Bjornar Olsen, Geraldine Heng, Tamar Herzig, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Nehemia Levtzion and Jay Spaulding, Kathleen Llewellyn, Bernd Moeller, Tom Shippey, Gerald Strauss, and Werner Williams-Krapp.

  Bailey, Michael. “From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle Ages.” Speculum 76, no. 4 (2001): 960–90.

  de la Brocquière, Bertrandon. Le Voyage d’Outremer de Bertrandon de la Broquière, ed. C. H. Schefer (E. Leroux, 1892), 22.

  El Daly, Okasha. Egyptology: The Missing Millennium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings. UCL Press, 2005.

  Fanger, Claire. Rewriting Magic: An Exegesis of the Visionary Autobiography of a Fourteenth-Century French Monk. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.

  Fröhlich, Walter., trans. and comm. The Letters of St. Anselm of Canterbury. 3 vols. Cistercian Publications, 1990.

  Haarmann, Ulrich. Introduction to Das Pyramidenbuch des Abu Ga’far al-Idrisi. Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991, 1–94.

  Heller, Sarah-Grace. “Angevin-Sicilian Sumptuary Statutes of the 1290s: Fashion in the Thirteenth-Century Mediterranean.” Medieval Clothing and Textiles 11, edited by Robin Netherton and Gale R. Owen Crocker (2015): 79–97.

  Mulder-Bakker, Anneke B. The Dedicated Spiritual Life of Upper Rhine Noblewomen: A Study and Translation of a Fourteenth-Century Spiritual Biography of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg and Heilke of Staufenberg. Brepols, 2017.

  Radner, Joan N., trans. Fragmentary Annals of Ireland. University College Cork CELT Project. 2004, 2008. https://celt.ucc.ie/published/T100017.html.

  Riley, Henry Thomas, ed. Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis. 3 vols. Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860.

  ———, ed. and trans. Memorials of London and London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries: Being a Series of Extracts, Local, Social, and Political, from the Early Archives of the City of London. Longmans.

  Smith, Martyn. “Pyramids in the Medieval Islamic Landscape: Perceptions and Narratives.” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 43 (2007): 1–14.

  Tlusty, B. Ann, ed. and trans. Augsburg During the Reformation Era: An Anthology of Sources. Hackett Publishing Company, 2012.

  FURTHER READING

  Bennett, Judith. Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600. Oxford University Press, 1996.

  Brink, Stefan, with Neil Price. The Viking World. Routledge, 2008.

  Constable, Olivia Remie. Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

  Corfis, Ivy A., and Michael Wolfe. The Medieval City under Siege. Boydell & Brewer, 1999.

  Cortese, Delia, and Simoneta Calderini. Women and the Fatimids in the World of Islam. Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

  Daston, Lorraine, and Katherine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. Zone Books, 1998.

  Freedman, Paul. Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. Yale University Press, 2009.

  Herrin, Judith. Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium. Princeton University Press, 2001.

  Madigan, Kevin. Medieval Christianity. Yale University Press, 2015.

  Magnusson, Roberta. Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries, and Waterworks after the Roman Empire. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

  Medieval West Africa: Views from Arab Scholars and Merchants, edited and translated by Nehemia Levtzion and Jay Spaulding. Marcus Wiener Publishers, 2003.

  Naswallah, Nawal. Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens: Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq’s Tenth-Century Baghdadi Cookbook. Brill, 2007.

  A Renaissance Wedding: The Celebrations at Pesaro for the Marriage of Costanzo Sforza and Camilla Marzano d’Aragona, 26–30 May 1475, edited and translated by Jane Bridgeman with Alan Griffiths. Brepols, 2013.

  Sumption, Jonathan. Pilgrimage: An Image of Medieval Religion. Faber and Faber, 2002.

  Truitt, E. R. Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stevenson, Caitlin, author.

  Title: How to slay a dragon : a fantasy hero’s guide to the real Middle Ages / by Cait Stevenson. Description: First Tiller Press hardcover edition. | New York : Tiller Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2021003899 (print) | LCCN 2021003900 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982164119 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982164133 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Civilization, Medieval. | Middle Ages. | Quests (Expeditions)

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21 (print) | LCC CB353 (ebook) | DDC 909.07—dc23

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  ISBN 978-1-9821-6411-9

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