How to Slay a Dragon Read online

  Of course, geography alone won’t tell you anyone’s religion or skin color. The Islamic regions of Iberia were home to Muslims, Jews, and Christians; to Arabs, Berbers, blond-haired and blue-eyed Muslims, and at least one man who dyed his red hair black to fit in better. (So much for the Christian writers who described all Muslims as “black.”) Thirteenth-century German artists, who had probably never left their hometowns, could carve sculptures of saints whose skin color and features made them look exactly like the people Arab merchants lived near in Islamic sub-Saharan Africa. Jewish merchants from Islamic Cairo joined in the Indian Ocean trade, and Greek Christian women married Muslim or shamanist Mongol khans.

  And you probably don’t need a geography lesson—or any guidance at all, really—to know that Christians (and very occasionally Muslims) could turn on their neighbors of other faiths with sudden, swift, bloody brutality. People, after all, are people.

  tl;dr:

  Medieval people could be nice

  Medieval people could be pretty darn evil

  Dogs are cute

  Explicit capitulum infodumpium

  Finally, you can’t take it anymore. You snatch the book out of the stranger’s hands. “No!” you practically shout as you flip it open and slice your hand down toward the first page of text. “I know plenty about the world! I can’t understand the words. I’m part of the 94 to 99.9 percent of the peasantry who can’t read!”

  “Yet,” says the mysterious stranger, ignoring your tone. “You can’t read yet. That’s all right. I’ll read it to you. How else will you learn how to undertake a heroic quest, have adventures, slay a dragon, defeat the forces of evil, and save the world?”

  They take the book back and smooth down the first page reverently. The stars sparkle in the pure blackness above your head, unbounded by air or light pollution. Torchlight and shadows dance across the parchment as the stranger starts to read.

  “Here begins…”

  Incipit Liber de Dominis Draconum

  PREPARING for YOUR QUEST

  HOW to FIND the CHOSEN ONE

  When you were born, did it rain serpents? Did the sun rise in the west and set in the east? Did your mother casually let slip that your father was a demon in disguise?

  Answer yes to any of the above? That’s not good. The first rule of being a hero is that you don’t want to be the chosen one. And those three were all signs of it.

  Strictly speaking, being the chosen one in the Middle Ages didn’t have to be bad. The three great religions of the medieval world around the Mediterranean—Islam, Judaism, and Christianity—all looked forward to God’s chosen one, who would redeem them from suffering (which is a polite way to say viciously slaughter their enemies). In practice, however, the most popular chosen one by far was Christianity’s favorite anti-messiah, the evil Antichrist, who was prophesied to be locked up by Alexander the Great behind the gates of Gog and Magog. The eventual defeat of the Amazons who guarded the gates would free him to unleash the apocalypse and the ruin of the world.

  Ruining the world is not heroic.

  But the second rule of being a hero is that you are the chosen one. Which means that the beginning of your quest revolves around two key questions: How will the forces of good or evil find you? And when they find you (because they will), can you fight fate as well as dragons? Three possible solutions present themselves.

  FATE AND FIGHTING IT #1: VISIONS FROM THE GODS

  A giant wheel burns in the sky, its outer rim made of fire and a thousand swords. The wheel is suspended from the heavens on thirteen chains, with only thirteen angels preventing its flames from lighting the earth on fire and annihilating all of humanity.

  And then the whole sky is made of fire—fire that falls to the earth. Terrified people run to the deepest caves, but they find no hiding place down there. Only those who had heeded the earlier signs survive—and only if they never look back.

  Is that the future you fought for?

  If you don’t want this vision to come to pass, it’s a good time to start trusting divine revelations, even if they identify you as the chosen one. Medieval Christian women would certainly have hoped that you would.

  The Church in the Middle Ages banned women from preaching and teaching religion in public. Starting in the twelfth century, however, some women figured out that they could do just that anyway if they convinced priests that God was speaking through them. Feeling left out, men consoled themselves by reasoning that if women were the physically and spiritually weaker sex (according to medieval medicine, which is famous for its accuracy), then of course God would find it easier to speak through them.

  The chances of large- or even medium-scale success were tiny. But the women who did succeed often did so dramatically—both in terms of their visions and in what they did with their resulting authority. Abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) became a celebrity throughout Europe as a composer, theologian, advice columnist, and apocalyptic prophet. Men wrote prophecies using her name in order to give them credibility. Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. 1292), who chose to forge her own form of religious life outside monastery walls, made Church leaders so angry that they threatened to burn her book—the first step toward burning her. Peasant and political activist Marie Robine (d. 1399), who saw visions of the burning wheel of a thousand swords, got quite rich and decided to live in a cemetery.

  Of course, Hildegard’s prophecies of the end of the world didn’t come to pass. Mechthild’s didn’t come to pass. And somehow, Marie’s burning wheel failed to fall from the sky, and humans failed to flee to caves.

  But all that lack of apocalypse doesn’t prove that you can’t trust oracles and visions to identify the chosen one. It just means you have to choose the right one to find the right chosen one. In this case, that would be Elisabeth Achler von Reute.

  Von Reute (1386–1420) was a religious sister and future saint, but that’s not why you want to trust her prophecies. Your expectations should be based on the miracles she worked, which included locating a new well so her community wouldn’t have to haul water all the way from the river in the dead of winter. And your evidence should be in the outcome: she correctly prophesied that the Great Schism tearing apart the western Church would end at a council in Constance.

  Granted, her visions didn’t tell her anything further. Granted, the only record of her prophecy was written down several years after the fact. Granted, it was recorded in a book that was 50 percent propaganda.

  Still! Visions work.

  At least, the ones that don’t say anything useful.

  FATE AND FIGHTING IT #2: FORTUNE-TELLING

  Swords, crystals, mirrors, the shoulder blades of sheep… perhaps you would gain more confidence in identifying the chosen one by looking closer to the (unburned) earth. The medieval world wasn’t exactly hurting for surfaces on which to know the present and read the future. People lived in a universe where everything flowed out from God and was set in its terrestrial and cosmic place by God. To almost everyone, objects and living creatures pointed to the secrets of time just as smoothly as they did physics and chemistry.

  There were always, of course, a few naysayers who thought trying to discover those secrets inevitably meant flirting with demonic powers. Unsurprisingly, people sought those secrets anyway, and people taught those secrets anyway.

  The medieval elite were actively uninterested in preserving peasants’ voices, so the folk traditions of palm reading, astrology, and divination are all but lost. Good thing those scholars did, however, record traditions that blended academic knowledge with the “popular” practices they grew up with.

  And they recorded them in abundance.

  Want to investigate the underlying natural processes that allow cow bones to display the outcomes of battles or how many women don’t want to marry you? Don’t care about why it works, but hoping for diagrams and tables that explain how to interpret your observations of the aforementioned skeletons? Excellent. You can look at the contents of books in Arabic,
Hebrew, Latin, and medieval Greek; in books that originated in ancient Greece or Rome; and in books that claimed to originate in ancient Greece or Rome. And you definitely want to look at multiple books, because divinatory books liked to disagree.

  In one untitled and anonymous book from around 1300, for example, you could read that men with small hands might seem nice initially, but will turn on you. Women with small hands, however, are uninterested in men and don’t want to have sex. In one (also untitled and anonymous) contribution from the 1350s, you could learn that if one of the three major lines running across your palm ends at your ring finger, you will “die in water.”

  Or consider the lines that form a triangle between the outside edge of your palm, the space between your index finger and thumb, and more or less the base of your palm: If you’re a hero, that triangle pretty much has to be equilateral—which means you’re trustworthy and capable of becoming famous. If the top line is longer, you’re a thief. Oh, and if any of the lines are “pale,” then congratulations, you’ll die on the gallows.

  You’d better get some black ink and start drawing that triangle.

  FATE AND FIGHTING IT #3: ANCIENT VERSE

  Go relax with a quart of beer at a fifteenth-century Nuremberg inn or with a barrel of wine at a thirteenth-century Cairo street party. When it comes to fulfilling ancient prophecies written in a forgotten codex, fate has already fought and lost.

  If you’re a medieval Muslim, the thought of ancient verse prophecies probably never even crossed your mind. Islam and its major prophet were born in the Middle Ages. To you, ancient verse is pagan poetry from the era before God’s revelation, preserved so its Arabic can provide insight into interpreting the Qur’an.

  If you’re a medieval Jew, you’re probably snickering at the Christians who believe some peasant in Galilee fulfilled your messianic prophecies—and snickering harder because no matter how often those Christians persecute your people for knowing they’re wrong, Christians “somehow” never defeat God’s chosen people.

  If you’re a medieval Christian, the nonbiblical “ancient” verses you’re treating as prophecy stand a good chance of being very medieval, with authors who pretend their verses are older so readers will be more interested.

  So, whether you’ve got divine messages, fortune-tellers, or ancient poems pointing to you as the chosen one of the medieval world, you can relax. Fate has already fought itself, and fate has lost.

  But when you enjoy that quart of beer or barrel of wine, be sure it’s weak enough to be an everyday drink. You might have figured out how not to be the chosen one, but you’ve still got a dragon to slay.

  It’s time to be your own kind of hero.

  HOW to NOT MARRY the PRINCE

  So, you’re off to slay a dragon, steal a throne, and maybe end a reign of evil or two. But would you also like to turn sheep into locusts? How about being smarter than the fifty best scholars in the world? Maybe you’d just like to kill your abusive father with lightning.

  If so, it might help to look to the examples of extra-holy religious women. It’s true that Margaret of Antioch, Barbara of Nicomedia, and Katherine of Alexandria were all brutally tortured and murdered, but they also were not real people. Nevertheless, medieval Christians cherished the legends of these “virgin martyrs,” because they knew one thing above all: if you’re going to be a hero(ine), you can’t marry the prince.

  English noblewoman Christina of Markyate, who was a real person and lived from about 1096 to 1155, certainly knew it. She was a teenager when the bishop of Durham (who couldn’t marry) sought to make her his concubine. Afraid she wouldn’t be able to fend him off physically, she locked him inside the room where he “proposed” and then fled. It didn’t stop her parents and the spurned bishop from betrothing her to a nobleman closer to her own age. With no choice but to escape, Christina hid behind a tapestry, clinging to a nail on the wall so her feet wouldn’t be noticed as her husband-to-be and his conspirators searched the room by torchlight. She was well prepared—she had time to flee through another door, jump out a window, scale a fence, and run. At that point, there was nothing to be done except find her own conspirators, put on men’s clothing, and ride as fast as she could to a hermitage.

  Oh, and then defeat an infestation of toads by singing religious songs.

  It’s a tad unrealistic, yes. (What gave it away—the toads?) This lone record of Christina’s early life is called a hagiography—designed to shape the details of the subject’s biography to signal their holiness to a Christian audience. Christina’s adventures may or may not have happened, but they were “authentic” to their readers, telling the audience that she was a saint the same way that the presence of armor, mud, and Vikings tell you it’s the Middle Ages.

  Now, the chroniclers of Fatimid power broker Sitt al-Mulk needed no such religious motivation to tell her story.

  This behind-the-scenes “adviser” was born in the Fatimid dynasty’s abandoned Tunisian capital and lived out her life in its thriving Cairo headquarters. Sitt al-Mulk had brains from birth and gained political savvy from her adolescence at court as the caliph’s granddaughter. After all, what’s early medieval politics without some power struggles? (Nothing. Sometimes literally.)

  As a young woman, Sitt al-Mulk played her suitors against one another. She expertly elevated her family’s position and power while building up her own political networks. To be clear, those networks included a large military division, as well as enslaved advisers who acquired vast wealth and power of their own. In 995, her brother al-Hakim inherited the throne at age ten, while his chief advisor-general Barjawan inherited the real throne in his capacity as regent.

  Sitt al-Mulk prudently used this time to continue not to marry, to acquire more allies, and to ply her brother with extravagant gifts. So when one of those allies assassinated Barjawan (who knows why?) in 1000, al-Hakim was ready to listen to his sister. The result? Cairene cultural life flourished, and the Fatimids’ international profile grew dramatically.

  During the next seventeen years, say the chroniclers, Sitt al-Mulk was responsible for the caliph’s good internal decisions, which helped maintain the loyalty of far-flung provinces. Because her own allies carried out many of those orders, it’s rather likely that Sitt al-Mulk was involved in these decisions. Another sign of her influence? Negligent leaders like the ruler of Tinnis, a wealthy city near Alexandria, paid their royal taxes and tributes… to Sitt al-Mulk’s private coffers.

  Al-Hakim didn’t enjoy playing second fiddle to his sister (maybe one of the reasons he later banned music). In the dangerous world of the Fatimid court, his primary methods of disproving his own impotence were (1) assassinating his sister’s high-ranking supporters, and (2) making financially and politically disastrous decisions. (To be fair, it’s hard to make wise choices when a large number of people think you’re divine, and you may or may not agree with their assessment.) These choices included designating two heirs in 1013, neither of whom were his sons, and attempting to assassinate his own children and their mothers. He also exercised his possible godhood by forbidding women to leave their homes, seizing the property of the Coptic Christians who had been among his biggest supporters, and banning music and wine. Which made him exactly as popular as you would think.

  In 1021, al-Hakim disappeared.

  Sitt al-Mulk took the lead in accusing one of her brother’s enemies of being his murderer. She also led a coup d’etat, assassinated one of al-Hakim’s chosen heirs and exiled the other, declared one of her underage nephews the true heir, and claimed the role of regent for herself. Princes need not apply.

  But Sitt al-Mulk was a Fatimid princess, you say. Christina of Markyate was a saint. They found ways not to marry, but they aren’t me. I could never be them. Well, consider this: Around 1200, men who write hagiographies of women saints will start adding a disclaimer for their readers and listeners—a change from how they were supposed to understand earlier hagiographies. She, they say, should be admired, not imi
tated.

  Christina’s hagiography was most likely written somewhere around the middle of the 1100s. In other words, you don’t have to be a princess or a saint to spurn marriage and be a hero. Imitate away.

  HOW to FIND YOUR MENTOR

  What hero ever saved the world without a mentor to learn from, surpass, and watch die in a noble self-sacrifice to convince the hero to stand on their own? You already know what you’re looking for. Old guy, white beard. Tall, pointy hat (some of the time). Robes, of the scholarly sort. Pretty good with magic. Also, son of a demon and buried alive in a rock.

  Maybe you don’t want Merlin after all.

  Fortunately, the Middle Ages still provide two large groups of people who are eager to be your mentor, even if you aren’t a legendary British king named Arthur and you didn’t inherit a mentor who brought about your birth by disguising your father as your stepfather in order to rape your mother. (Merlin’s résumé: the gift that keeps on giving.) You’ve still got saints, and you’ve still got teachers. All you have to decide is which category you prefer, and you’re all set for your mentor to find and choose you.

  So sit back, relax, and listen to the saints and the teachers argue their cases for why they will do the best job nurturing you and guiding you to success on your specific quest.

  CONTESTANT #1: SAINTS

  The natural, logical choice for a mentor in the Middle Ages is a saint.

  Christian saints were the one-stop mentor shop of late medieval Europe. They were eager to help out, there were so many of them that even the Church couldn’t keep track, and you could trust that they wouldn’t turn out to be secretly evil. Most important for heroes, they could do the impossible. Saints were supernatural microphones. People could call on saints to feel closer to a God who was already everywhere. Saints would make sure that God answered the prayers of Christians who asked them to intercede, even though God only does what God wants.