What doesn't suck in the Early Middle Ages in Europe? Hint: They’re slimy.

 Well, not as much as one might think and certainly nowhere near as much as in the late 1700's to the 1800's.[1]  In the Early Middle Ages, about 500 CE to 1000 CE or so, leeches were not very popular in European medical practice according to the medical texts of the time.  Leeches appear in medical writing in this period in three main ways.  Some writers thought that leeches were just plain bad news.  Others would include leeches as an ingredient in a recipe.  And yes, they were used for bleeding too.

 Leeches could and still can pose their own risks.  Leeches can become lodged in the part of the throat that meets the nasal passages and cause unexplained bleeding of the nose and throat.[2]  Dioscorides, who wrote in the second half of the first century CE, recommended vinegar, on its own or mixed with silphium, as a gargle to remove the leech inconveniently lodged in the throat.[3]  

Ferula tingitana, related to the now extinct Silphium.

Leeches could be useful for far more than just their annoying habit of sucking blood.  Most commonly it was the ashes of leeches burned alive that were used.  The leeches were reduced to ash by being sealed in a rough ceramic jar and placed on a fire.  In a text called The Medicine of Pliny, dated to the third century CE, the author suggested that roasted leech mixed in vinegar and applied to the skin would inhibit hair growth.[4]  This same recipe idea is related in a poem that was popular in Carolingian (c.750-900 CE) manuscripts and attributed to Quintus Serenus. The Book of Medicine related various remedies in one thousand lines of hexameter, the meter of epic poetry. Here is the one for preventing hair (the plucked wood) from regrowing.

nec non e stagnis cessantibus exos hirudo

sumitur et vivens Samia torretur in olla:

Haec acidis unquit permixta liquoribus artus

evulsamque vetat rusus procrescere silvam [5]

“And also, the boneless leech is taken up from the resting pools and living, burned in cheap pottery in oil: This mixed thoroughly with bitter liquids anoints the limb and prevents the plucked wood from growing larger.”[6]

Medicinal leech by Karl Ragnar Gjertsen.

And finally, leeches were used for bleeding.  Blood as one of the humors, the four substances which controlled disease, blood, bile, choler, and phlegm, could be out of balance and cause disease.  The most common type of bloodletting in this period was through the cutting of veins and many Latin texts concerning bleeding survive from the Early Middle Ages.  The texts describe how to draw blood, how much blood to draw and which veins to use. Bleeding was also controlled by the cycles of the moon and special Lunaria or moon calendars suggested when it was best to bleed patients.  Bleeding in specific places treated specific symptoms.  Another way to draw blood was using cupping.  Caelius Aurelianus, who wrote On Acute and Chronic Diseases in the fifth century in Northern Africa, suggested that leeches could be used for bleeding if there was not enough room for the required cups or if the cups were not adhering properly.[7]  Again our friend Quintus suggests that among other options for treating patients suffering from spleen, that the river leech may benefit by sucking gore (proderit exsucto fluvialis hirudo cruore).  

Chapter on Curing those Suffering from Spleen
St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 44, p. 312

In Quintus Serenus' poem, Book of Medicine, leeches are mentioned only three times and blood letting was the reason only once and then then only for the treatment of patients suffering from spleen.

If healers were using leeches more than the texts suggest, there is no way to know.  It may be useful to think about why leeches may not have been popular in the Early Middle Ages.  At the height of the popularity of leeches, they were hard to get in England and expensive.[8]  This should come as no surprise since leeches require bodies of water to live in and must be collected from those bodies of water and transported to where they would be used.  Apparently, they could live for two months packed in straw. Still not a huge window of time considering the length of winter.  In the early medieval period, leeches would have been seasonally available north of the Alps and even then, only depending on certain environmental factors.  The two types of leeches typically used for medicinal purposes are most active at about 21 degrees Celsius water temperature and often will not swim at all below 19 degrees.[9] Weather could affect water temperature and the presence of active, breeding leeches. Local availability and weather could certainly explain why leeches were cited as an option rather than the preferred course of action.  This also explains the use of burned leeches.  The burned remains, if kept dry, could be stored for much longer than a live leech.

 So, while leeches were one of the tools an early medieval doctor could turn to, early medieval doctors chose leeches much less frequently than their nineteenth-century counterparts.[10]

 

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[1] Roy T. Sawyer, “History of the Leech Trade in Ireland, 1750–1915: Microcosm of a Global Commodity,” Medical History 57, no. 3 (July 2013): 420–41, https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2013.21.

[2] Wei-Chih Chen et al., “Nasal Leech Infestation: Report of Seven Leeches and Literature Review,” European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology 267, no. 8 (August 1, 2010): 1225–29, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00405-009-1188-0.

[3] Lily Y. Beck and Dioscorides Pedanius, De Materia Medica, Third, revised edition, Altertumswissenschaftliche Texte Und Studien, Bd. 38 (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 2017), 340–41.

[4] Yvette Hunt and Kai Brodersen, eds., The Medicina Plinii: Latin text, translation, and commentary, Scientific writings from the ancient and medieval world (New York, NY: Routledge, 2019), 100–101.

[5] Quintus. Serenus Sammonicus and Friedrich Vollmer, Qvinti Sereni Liber Medicinalis, Corpus Medicorum Latinorum, II 3 (Lipsiae et Berolini: in aedibvs B. G. Tevbneri, 1916), 33, ll. 670–674,  http://cmg.bbaw.de/epubl/online/cml_02_03.php.

[6] My translation.

[7] Caelius Aurelianus, Israel Edward Drabkin, and Soranus, On Acute Diseases and On Chronic Diseases (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1950), 447–49.

[8] Sawyer, “History of the Leech Trade in Ireland, 1750–1915.”

[9] U. Kutschera and Joy Elliott, “The European Medicinal Leech Hirudo Medicinalis L.: Morphology and Occurrence of an Endangered Species,” Zoosystematics and Evolution 90(2) (November 18, 2014): 271–80, https://doi.org/10.3897/zse.90.8715.  This article also talks about modern pressures which are leading to a large decrease in the medicinal leech population in Europe.

[10] For more about medicinal leeches please read Robert N. Mory, David Mindell, and David A. Bloom, “The Leech and the Physician: Biology, Etymology, and Medical Practice with Hirudinea Medicinalis,” World Journal of Surgery 24, no. 7 (July 1, 2000): 878–83, https://doi.org/10.1007/s002680010141; and N. Papavramidou and H. Christopoulou‐Aletra, “Medicinal Use of Leeches in the Texts of Ancient Greek, Roman and Early Byzantine Writers,” Internal Medicine Journal 39, no. 9 (2009): 624–27, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1445-5994.2009.01965.x.

Pssst! Charlemagne is Santa Claus!

Charlemagne is Santa Claus

St Nicholas depicted in a medieval Book
 of Hours, LUL MS.F.2.8, from University
of Liverpool Library

I don't want to start a conspiracy theory (or maybe I do) but I was having a conversation with my mom about Charlemagne.  My mother grew up in Germany and learned about Karl der Große, and apparently his red mustache in grade school.  "RED?" I gasped, "How would they know what colour his hair was?"^[1]  This after reading much about the Carolingians and their correctio and emendatio as part of my fields preparation.  I don't want to think about how things might have gone had that question come up.  So, while still on the phone I leafed through to Einhard's Vita Karoli and found a description.  A description so evocative, that as I read it aloud to my poor, captive-audience mother I burst out, "It's Santa Claus!"

“His body was large and strong; his stature tall but not ungainly, for the measure of his height was seven times the length of his own feet. The top of his head was round; his eyes were very large and piercing. His nose was rather larger than is usual; he had beautiful white hair; and his expression was brisk and cheerful; so that, whether sitting or standing, his appearance was dignified and impressive. Although his neck was rather thick and short and he was somewhat corpulent this was not noticed owing to the good proportions of the rest of his body. His step was firm and the whole carriage of his body manly; his voice was clear, but hardly so strong as you would have expected.”[2]

Santa Clausy, right?  Well compare this to the description in the famous poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas, by Clement Clarke Moore, which is better known by its opening line, ‘'Twas the night before Christmas'.  Clement writing for his children gave a very careful description of Santa Claus,

His eyes--how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!

His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!

His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,

And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow;

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,

And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath;

He had a broad face and a little round belly

That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf...[3]

On closer examination, Santa is portrayed as a happy, genial fellow, and no one alive or dead would refer to Charlemagne as an 'elf' but look at some of the comparisons. Like Santa Claus, in the English version of the Vita, Charlemagne's hair is described as white, however, in Latin Einhard used the phrase 'canitie pulchra' beautiful grey or greyish white hair.  I think perhaps there may be some ageism on the part of the English translators who cannot imagine beautiful hair being any shade of grey and so translate it out to white.  Maybe Einhard would have agreed. 

Both writers spend time on small details highlighting features that I bet most people, or just me, hardly pay attention to.  Charlemagne's eyes are very large and piercing, while Santa's are

Coronation of Charlemagne, Grandes Chroniques
 de France. Bibliothèque nationale de
France, Français 2813, fol. 85v. 14th Century

twinkling.  Both descriptions imply lively intelligence and the ability to quickly assess any situation.  Santa must know whether you are naughty or nice.  Santa is a 'right jolly old elf' while Charlemagne was 'brisk and cheerful'.  Both had noses worth noting, Charlemagne's large and Santa's like a cherry, but neither were mundane run-of-the-mill noses. Both are a tad corpulent, though only Santa's belly shakes like jelly.  Oh, the rhymes! Both are described in physical terms which create the sense of good natured, physically and mentally capable older men who enjoy a good chuckle, the older fun uncle who tells great stories at Christmas, not that other one, you know, who drinks too much and wants to talk about politics. Certainly, neither description is frightening or intimidating.

Therefore, Santa is Charlemagne and Charlemagne is Santa.  You have never seen them in the same room, have you?  Charlemagne, sadly, is nowhere reported to ascend or descend chimneys.  That would have clinched it. 

So why might these two characters, and I use the term purposefully, have similar appearances, or more precisely appearances crafted in this specific way?  The reason that I call both men 'characters' is not to say that Charlemagne is not a real person, of course he was.  This description of him though was written at some time after he died.  Einhard (c. 770 - March 14, 840) the biographer who penned the Vita Karoli, had served in Charlemagne's court and by his own admission owed the king much.^[4]  Since the life describes Charlemagne's death, it had to be written after 814, but exactly how long after is not known.  Also not known is how accurate Einhard could have been, had he wanted to be accurate? What is known is Einhard's very Carolingian habit of using other texts as models for his work.  Models which lent phrases and an organizational structure to the Vita.  One text in particular offered Einhard a a way of organizing the biography and also a way to frame Charlemagne so that his biography could stand as a shining example to his son, Louis the Pious (778- June 20, 840).^[5]  This text was the De vita Caesarum, About the lives of the Caesars, by Suetonius, written sometime in the late first to second centuries.  Life under Louis the Pious was turbulent, just as the period in which Suetonius had lived.  Both writers were offering their readers examples of proper, peaceful rule.  Minjie Su makes this argument when they compare the parts of Suetonius Einhard used and what he did not.  The white hair and the perfect proportions ascribed to Charlemagne are lifted almost directly from De vita Caesarum.  Equally important, Einhard left out many violent episodes from the Royal Frankish Annals.  Perhaps Einhard hoped that highlighting Charlemagne's less violent methods might help to guide Louis's choices.^[6]  So one can say that Einhard took the best parts of Charlemagne and reflected them in his biography, carefully crafting the greatness in Charles's persona and person.

Now Santa Claus, on the other hand, is a fictional character; sorry Virginia.  And so, Santa as the focus of scholarly attention might surprise you.  While some of that attention serves as a foil to pursue other avenues of intellectual debate, as when Justin Barrett submitted the jolly old elf to the test for godhood; he fails.  Likewise, the computational dilemma of getting Santa ready to go on Christmas Eve is known as the Santa Claus Problem^[7], which was solved by Mordechai Ben-Ari in 1998.  These studies underline how deeply entrenched Santa Claus is in North American culture, and to varying degrees in Europe. 

Santa Claus has become a secular icon, but he did not start out that way.  In 1809, Washington Irving removed St. Nicholas's mitre and bishop's clothes and gave him 'a low-brimmed hat, a huge pair of Flemish trunk hose, and a pipe that reached to the end of the bowsprit.'  Washington was writing a tongue in cheek history of New York City under the pseudonym of Dietrich Knickerbocker.^[8]  The Knickerbocker came from a term used to describe New Yorkers of Dutch origins.  Maybe a not so nice term?  And viola! St. Nicholas, the fourth century saint from Myra, was firmly on the path to Santa Claus. But this was not the first step in the saint's progression from religious intermediary to shopping mall fixture.  Jeremy Seal traces the personified saint through this journey by taking his own.   When discussing the mid-nineteenth-century success of Santa, he suggests,

            "Santa had proved a enormous success among Americans; it was striking how closely he had mirrored the achievements of St. Nicholas though their worlds lay centuries apart.  The truth was the Harper's [Bazaar] and hagiographies, parades and saints' plays, Coke ads and frescoes served the same purpose in those different worlds.  Santa and saint had always been interested in the same thing, which was to spread their names among the widest audiences.  It was true that they had come to be associated with different values, but they still shared an essential notion of generosity that was the core of their appeal to children and their parents alike. ^[9]"

Coca-cola just spurred things along when they claimed the now unambiguously named Santa Claus; the name had taken awhile to settle.  The image that was Santa in the Coke ads may have reflected a collective memory of sorts, but the Coca Cola image of Santa was a formidable force in the development of a single, accepted vision of what the term Santa Claus represented by way of a physical description.^[10]  So, despite our having no frame of reference for what Clement Clarke Moore was describing as Santa Claus we all fill in the red suit wearing overweight white haired man we have come to know and instantly recognize.  So how is Santa Claus Charlemagne?

I would refer again to Seal's summation that generosity is as the heart of who Santa is.  I would add that generosity comes from a generous spirit, which cannot grow so easily in difficult times.  Santa and Charlemagne are both portrayed as men who aged reasonably well.  Einhard does describe Charlemagne's health problems in the year before his death, but he was already the cheerful, slightly paunchy, white-haired man by then.  If we think back to the turbulence of Einhard's days when he was writing the Vita and think that the text was encouraging behaviour that would lead to peace, we realize that that is the message of the image.  Charlemagne was at peace.  Santa, St. Nicholas, can be generous because he is at peace.  And even if you have no religion, you have to recognize that peace is part of the central message of Christmas, after all the cards say, "Peace on Earth!"  An old man grown fat in peaceful times can be generous.  Perhaps that is why Santa is so successful, children love the toys he brings, and parents want to grow old in peace and well being, able to shower future generations with generosity. It's what Einhard wanted for himself and his kingdom and what he crafted in his image of Charlemagne.

Therefore, Charlemagne is Santa Claus.  I wish you all Peace and Joy this holiday season!

---

^[1] Germanic tribes are noted to have coloured their hair red, but in pre-Carolingian times. The Carolingians represented a turn away from hair as a symbol of power. For more on the hair habits of the barbarians, see: Paul Edward Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age, 1st ed, The New Middle Ages (New York, N.Y: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 9.

[2] There are many translations of Einhard’s Vita Karoli, however, this is the one I found while on the phone, so it is this translation which started the ball rolling. Einhard, A. J Grant, and Notker, Early Lives of Charlemagne, (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966), chap. 22.

[3] Clement Clarke Moore, “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” The Sentinel, December 23, 1823; There is some debate as to who actually wrote the poem, for more see: MacDonald P. Jackson, Who Wrote “The Night Before Christmas”?: Analyzing the Clement Clarke Moore vs. Henry Livingston Question (McFarland, 2016).

^[4] Notker The Stammerer and David Ganz, Two Lives of Charlemagne., 2008, 17; For the most recent scholarship on Charlemagne, see: Janet L Nelson, King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne (London: Allen Lane, 2019).

^[5] Su (2019), Nicoll (1975), Kempshall (199Minjie Su, “Profile of An Emperor: Reading Vita Karoli Magni in Light of Its Sources and the Socio-Political Context of Its Composition,” Ceræ : An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 5, no. 1 (April 17, 2019), http://openjournals.arts.uwa.edu.au/index.php/cerae/article/view/135; W. S. M. Nicoll, “Some Passages in Einhard’s ‘Vita Karoli’ in Relation to Suetonius,” Medium Aevum; Oxford 44 (January 1, 1975): 117–121; Matthew S. Kempshall, “Some Ciceronian Models for Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne,” Viator; Berkeley, Calif. 26 (January 1, 1995): 11–37.

^[6] For a less negative take on the rule of Louis the Pious see: Rutger Kramer, Rethinking Authority in the Carolingian Empire: Ideals and Expectations during the Reign of Louis the Pious (813-828), The Early Medieval North Atlantic 6 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019).

^[7] Mordechai Ben‐Ari, “How to Solve the Santa Claus Problem,” Concurrency: Practice and Experience 10, no. 6 (1998): 485–96, https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1096-9128(199805)10:6<485::AID-CPE329>3.0.CO;2-2.

^[8] Jeremy Seal, Santa: A Life (London: Picador, 2005), 192.

^[9] Seal, 231–32.

^[10] Cara Okleshen, Stacey Menzel Baker, and Robert Mittelstaedt, “Santa Claus Does More than Deliver Toys: Advertising’s Commercialization of the Collective Memory of Americans,” Consumption Markets & Culture 4, no. 3 (January 1, 2000): 207–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2000.9670357.