The Yellow Badge

King Henry III's Statute of Jewry demanded (among other things) that Jews wear a badge conspicuously on their clothing. This was not a new idea. Designating "others" by a badge was already common in the Middle Ages. The Muslim and Christian worlds both found ways to distinguish those not of their faith.

In 717, Caliph Umar II ordered that non-Muslims (dhimmi) wear distinguishing marks on their clothing. The Pact of Umar, attributed to his father, had many injunctions against non-Muslims. In 847-861, Caliph Al-Mutawakkil had Christians wear honey-colored patches, on both the front and back of their clothes. In 887, the governor of the Emirate of Sicily had Jews wear special hats and yellow belts.

The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 said Jews should at all times be denoted by their clothing, and in 1222, Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton ordered English Jews to wear a white band. Distinguishing marks were ordered for Jews by the Synod of Narbonne (1227), by James I of Aragon (1228), and by Alfonso X of Castile (1265).

In 1274, King Edward I in England enacted a second Statute of Jewry, which ordered a badge of yellow felt six inches long by three inches wide to be worn. The yellow color was used in 1315 for the Jews of Granada, in 1321 by Henry II of Castile, and decreed in 1415 by a bull of Antipope Benedict XIII (men wore it on their breast, women on their forehead).

Jews in Venice wore yellow, but in 1528 a special dispensation was given to the physician Jacob Mantino ben Samuel to wear a regular black doctor's cap instead of anything yellow.

In 1710, King of Prussia Frederick William I abolished the mandatory yellow badge in Prussia. This was not an act of charity: he required 8000 thaler (the equivalent of over $75,000 today) from each person who wished to no longer wear the badge.

So what was the deal with Jacob Mantino ben Samuel? I'll explain next time.

Gascony/Aquitaine

North of the Pyrenees in what we now think of as southwestern France is an area the Romans called Aquitania from the Latin aqua, "water," because of the many rivers flowing from the Pyrenees. We think. The people living there were the Ausci, mentioned by Caesar (whose men conquered it in the 50s BCE), and so the name of the land might have come about to mean "the land of the Ausci."

Skipping a few centuries and some Roman name and border changes, we find the Royal Frankish Annals refer to the "Wascones" in the area. The w=g linguistic link (William=Guillaume, warranty=guarantee, warden=guardian) that we find suggests that the Wascones turned into Gascons; hence the name Gascony.

In 1152, Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine. Aquitaine was by this time a much larger area that included the Duchy of Gascony, and was now in the hands of the kings of England. Henry's grandson, Henry III, personally went to the Duchy of Gascony to look into mismanagement by the not-always-faithful-to-Henry Simon de Montfort. While in the area, Henry arranged the marriage of his son Edward (later King Edward I) to Eleanor of Castile, half-sister of Alfonso X who had been making claims on Gascony, since it was adjacent to his own territory. Alfonso renounced his claims as part of the marriage contract, and aided Henry in dealing with rebels living in the Pyrenees.

Even today Gascony is France's most rural area; then it was so little populated that Edward I decided it needed peopling, and he sent his men to create villages called bastides so that the land was not going to waste.

In 1328, when King Charles IV of France died, his nearest male relative was the son of his sister Isabella, King Edward III of England. Having the English king inherit the throne of France—although perfectly legal according to Salic Law—did not sit well with France, and so they ruled against it. Edward objected, the Hundred Years War began, and in 1453 Gascony became permanently French.

I want to offer a brief biography of Edward I next.

Conradin

The Hohenstaufen family came from unknown origins to be Holy Roman Emperors from 1138 to 1254 (with a break of four years between 1208 and 1212). Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV made Frederick of Hohenstaufen a Duke of Swabia from 1079 until his death in 1105. Duke Frederick married Henry's daughter Agnes; their sons were heirs to the Empire when Henry's son Henry V died childless in 1125.

On 25 March 1252, Conrad IV of Germany and Elizabeth of Bavaria had a son, Conrad. When his father died two years later, the child became Duke of Swabia, King of Sicily, and King of Jerusalem.

Regents held Swabia for him. Jerusalem was managed by a relative in Cyprus. Sicily was handled by his father's half-brother Manfred, who usurped the throne for himself in 1258. The child, being raised by his uncle the Duke of Bavaria and called by the diminutive Conradin, didn't have the resources to hang onto Sicily.

Because of his tender age, Pope Alexander IV forbade him becoming Holy Roman Emperor—even though Hohenstaufens were Guelphs, supporting the authority of the pope over that of the Holy Roman Emperors—giving it instead to Alfonso X of Castile. His other royal titles were respected, however. The Guelphs of Florence invited him to come and re-take Sicily from Manfred, but his uncle refused the invitation since his ward was still a child. Manfred was killed by Charles I of Anjou, who then tried inserting himself further into Italian politics. Envoys from Italy were sent to Conradin, asking for his help against the Angevin incursion. Having just become a teenager, Conradin accepted the offer, crossed the Alps, and declared his intention to reclaim Sicily.

He received moral and military support from many quarters, and in July 1268 his fleet defeated that of Charles. In August, however, at the Battle of Tagliacozzo in central Italy, Charles proved a more clever commander and defeated Conradin's army of Italian, Spanish, Roman, Arab, and German troops. Conradin escaped capture, fleeing first to Rome and then to Astura, where the lord of Astura, Giovanni Frangipani, offered him refuge. Giovanni was not his friend, however; he turned Conradin over to Charles, who had him beheaded on 29 October 1268. He was the last Hohenstaufen, so with his death the dynasty ended.

What happened to his titles, since he left no heirs? Sicily was gone. Swabia was claimed by Frederick, the son of Conradin's Aunt Margaret on his father's side. (Frederick also "claimed" Sicily, but that was not going to achieve anything.)

The "Kingdom of Jerusalem" was a more complicated situation—as it always had been. Let's go there next time.

Mortgaging Children

This is the story of Philip of Courtenay (1243 - 15 December 1283). He was one of the Latin Emperors of Constantinople—the empire was established after the disastrous and mis-guided (literally) Fourth Crusade—even though the Byzantine Empire had re-established control in 1261. Technically he was an "Emperor in Exile."

He was born in Constantinople, the child of Baldwin II and Marie of Brienne. Baldwin was the last of the Latin Emperors who actually ruled from Constantinople. The difficulty with the "Latin Emperors of Constantinople" was that they didn't have the resources they would have enjoyed at home. They weren't landowners living off rents. Baldwin's "territory" was essentially the city itself, and he did not have the resources to control the country around him, where life just went on.

Baldwin went westward to beg for money, asking Rome and France to help support him financially. One plan was to supplant the Marchioness Margaret of Namur (a sometimes independent state, now basically a city in Belgium) to have the Namur revenues. It didn't matter to him that Margaret was his sister. Baldwin didn't stay to manage Namur, however, and after it was invaded by the Count of Luxembourg, Baldwin sold the rights to his cousin, Count Guy of Flanders.

Baldwin left Marie and a regency council behind while he traveled Europe begging. In 1238 they sold the Crown of Thorns to Venice for 13,134 hyperpyrons. Around that time Baldwin got money from Louis IX of France in exchange for some other relics, of which Constantinople had many.

But this is about his son, Philip, and you can guess where this is going. Baldwin and Marie borrowed 24,000 hyperpyrons from Venetian merchants. The mortgage, the surety for this loan, was their son, Philip of Courtenay. Philip was five years old at the time. He was sent to Venice to live in the household of two merchant brothers. He was there from 1248 until he was 17, in 1260, when the mortgage was paid with the help of Alfonso X of Castile.

Mortgaging your child seems like a cruel act by a desperate parent. As difficult as it is to argue with that, as usual, medieval sensibilities were different from ours, and never more so than in the idea of a hostage. In fact, the meaning and practice of "hostage" is my next topic.

Toledo School and Language

The previous post refers to John of Seville being the chief translator from Arabic into Castilian; this is an important linguistic distinction.

The Iberian Peninsula at the time contained several different kingdoms. The Toledo School of Translators was in the southern part of Castile. Navarre and Aragon were eastward, and the Catalan Counties further east. Galicia and Leon were westward, and also Portugal (much smaller than it is today). Southward was all Muslim-held. All these territories had their own dialects; not only was there no "Spain," there was no "Spanish." Into this situation stepped King Alfonso X of Castile.

Alfonso (1221-1284CE) was King of Castile, León, and Galicia. His court was a melting pot of Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and he encouraged the translation of scholarly works from Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin into the Castilian vernacular. He wanted more works put into a language that was llanos de entender ("easy to understand") and would therefore reach a wider audience, not just the highly educated. They used a revised version of Castilian that would become the foundation of Spanish.

The method of translation changed as well as the target language. In the first phase of the school, a native speaker would read aloud the work to a translator who would dictate Latin to a scribe. Under Alfonso, a multi-lingual translator would translate from the original language to Castilian, which he would dictate to a scribe. The resulting text would be checked by editors for accuracy. Sometimes, Alfonso himself would proofread the text.

Alfonso of course dealt with other affairs besides scholarship. He had a civil war, for instance, but it's nice to focus on something other than politics in a king's reign. For instance, he organized about 3000 sheep holders into the Mesta to ensure a coordinated supply of wool. Someday I may return to Alfonso, the Mesta, and why it and his other policies were economically disastrous for him. For tomorrow I want to look at the very first translation in Castilian to come out of Alfonso's revised school, a book of fables.