Mos Teutonicus

Yesterday I raised the question of how a body was treated, such as that of  Louis IX of France dying on Crusade, when immediate burial was not an option. The answer is rather grisly.

Consider the situation: a person has died far from home and the family burial plot, what are the attendants to do? Raw flesh decays, and by the time the corpse is brought home it will be a mass of putrefaction, attracting swarms of flies and feeding masses of maggots. How is it possible to fulfill an obligation to deliver the deceased person's remains for proper burial?

One clue to the solution is the word "raw." Cooked meat does not decay immediately. What if we "cooked" the body? Well, not exactly. They did not deliver "roast king" to his final resting place. There was a strong belief, however, that for the Christian "resurrection of the body" in the end times the skeleton was the most crucial element, because it denoted an intact body. I posted ten years ago about "de-fleshing" a corpse, and a little later about other attitudes to treating corpses.

The practice was referred to as mos Teutonicus, Latin for "German custom." It was considered a proper way of handling the corpse of a high-ranking person under difficult circumstances. The Viking custom of a funeral pyre or any form of cremation was outlawed by Charlemagne, who thought the soul was destroyed along with the complete destruction of the bones.

When the Crusades started, it was deemed inappropriate for Christian nobles to be buried in Muslim territory. It was a Florentine professor and historian named Boncompagno da Signa (c.1165 - 1240) who coined the term mos Teutonicus, linking the practice to the German nobles on Crusade.

mos Teutonicus was more hygienic and cost effective than embalming, which still required a certain amount of "violation" of the body, since the entrails were removed and disposed of, and the heart removed. The heart, of course, was considered special, and often delivered for burial a a location important to the deceased or the family—the heart of Richard I, for instance.

Exactly how mos Teutonicus was carried out, the later backlash against it, and its usefulness in the present day are topics I'd like to save until next time. See you soon.