Abstract
Riding a horse in imitation of the triumphant Christ, leading a people in lamentation around their city walls, affecting the garb of a king on Easter Saturday: the eleventh-century archbishop and ruler of Milan cast himself in the central role of a ritual theatre richer than almost any other in the Christian world. Only Rome and Constantinople could boast a more complex ceremonial life.1 Milan’s citizens performed in and witnessed church processions which unceasingly marked the turning of time across a city in the midst of frenetic transformation. These performances had the power to project the authority of the archbishop’s government across a rapidly expanding and increasingly fragmented population. They also sanctioned the redistribution of wealth and resources to city churches. At the same time, they provided a possible grammar of resistance for those who rose up against the city’s elites.
This essay uses an unexploited liturgical source, a twelfth-century order book by the Milanese cleric Beroldo, to illuminate the logic and behaviour of the largest and most radical popular movement in Europe during the central Middle Ages, the Pataria of Milan, during a pivotal moment of urban change. The Pataria fought in the pulpit and on the streets for the sexual and economic purity of the clergy. It had roots in Milan’s rural hinterland, but first erupted in the city—during a liturgical parade.2 Stirred up by the preaching of two charismatic clerics against married priests, on 10 May 1057 crowds of women and laymen turned a candlelit procession for the local saint Nazaro into a riot of anti-clerical violence.3 The conflict between radical supporters of religious reform on the one hand, and the archbishop and his aristocratic court and clergy on the other, continued until the Patarines’ decisive defeat in 1075. Before then, Patarine violence provided a recurring counterpoint to the beat of liturgical time, tearing priests from their altars, overturning solemn processions, treading holy oil into the ground.
The historian R.I. Moore has pointed to the Pataria as a watershed moment of radical social change in European history. For the first time in Latin Europe since Antiquity, the eleventh century saw a newly populous and mobile urban world which made mass, collective activism by non-elites possible.4 Nowhere was this truer than in Milan, the region’s fastest-growing city. In an important recent article, Shane Bobrycki acknowledges this turning point, while reminding us that medieval rule before 1000 depended on the stability of regular popular assemblies for legitimacy and income. If such early medieval crowds rarely confronted elites openly on the street, their popular ‘misdirection’, in assemblies outside regulated boundaries in times and space, threatened to subvert the reproduction of elite power.5 We can add that such behaviour could persist alongside the growth of the activist crowd, rather than fading in its wake.
Moore and others are right to identify mass-crowd activism as, in part, a product of eleventh-century demographic change. Documentary and archaeological evidence reveals rapid population growth in Milan, which makes it difficult to follow some historians who dismiss contemporary accounts of crowds as describing rhetorical ghosts rather than real bodies.6 At the same time, much of the character and logic of medieval crowds remains to be uncovered.7
This article argues that to understand the Pataria, and popular collectives in medieval cities more broadly, we need to appreciate the city’s liturgical landscape. We can then see two things: first, how group behaviour was patterned by liturgical norms and expectations, which regularly summoned people on festival days to gather in their streets and churches, where they experienced shared community alongside dramatic displays of hierarchy; and secondly, how processions, which were often central to strategies of urban government, became increasingly unpredictable, and open to disruption and subversion by new popular movements.
Just as was the case for early modern ‘rites of violence’, however, medieval crowds fought not to eliminate the role of Christian liturgy in everyday life, but rather to preserve and purify it against the corruption of powers deemed to be illegitimate.8 Patarine ritual resistance against local elites mobilised the most radical ideas of contemporary religious reform movements, with their explosive social and economic implications: that married men and those believed to have bought their way into church office could not be priests; that their hands would pollute and nullify the sacraments which opened the way to salvation.9
This struggle depended on the ability of liturgy to communicate meaning, to represent not just cosmology but also relations of power. The sacrificial feast of the mass, or the watery rebirth of baptism, were profound attempts to understand humanity’s place in the world. At the same time, as the anthropologist Maurice Bloch observed for rituals more broadly, liturgy was a social technology which was reproduced and recontextualised by actors in historical time. Over time, ruling elites centralised local rites and associated their own status with pre-existing religious mysteries, dramatising links between their identity and the eternal temporality evoked by ritual, which here we can call ‘liturgical time’.10 Such practices had developed in Christian liturgy since Antiquity. Relics of the special Christian dead had inspired popular veneration before early medieval bishops fought to bolster their authority by becoming the impresarios of saints’ cults.11 The rite of baptism had accrued rich meaning over centuries before Italian city governments sent armed officers to open the portal to Christian rebirth, joining together civic and spiritual initiation.12
Ideology is also always a material phenomenon, something which must be performed and embodied.13 Patarine ritual violence therefore disrupted both a means of symbolic communication and a liturgical economy—that is, the conspicuous flow of commodities needed to materialise religious life: silver treasure, but also fuels to light sacred places, holy oils to anoint bodies, wines drunk before the altar. To follow the ways in which rites remade and responded to the city and its crowds, this article first introduces Milan and its dramatic expansion in the eleventh century. It then surveys Beroldo and other Milanese liturgical sources, and their value as witnesses to the symbolic significance of performances and spaces in the later eleventh century. After then providing a picture of the liturgical landscape and the social and political relations it sanctioned, the article analyses how and why Patarine violence contested rites from 1057 and 1075, reaching crescendos on major festivals of the liturgical year. The decision to disrupt processions is our best evidence that these rites had real power, and that the stakes around their performance were high, at times even fatal. As will become clear, urban liturgy provided both elites and their opponents with a forum and a means for conveying politics and ideology. But in a populous cityscape, the very thing that gave ceremony its legitimacy was the same thing which made it unstable: the crowd.
This essay uses an unexploited liturgical source, a twelfth-century order book by the Milanese cleric Beroldo, to illuminate the logic and behaviour of the largest and most radical popular movement in Europe during the central Middle Ages, the Pataria of Milan, during a pivotal moment of urban change. The Pataria fought in the pulpit and on the streets for the sexual and economic purity of the clergy. It had roots in Milan’s rural hinterland, but first erupted in the city—during a liturgical parade.2 Stirred up by the preaching of two charismatic clerics against married priests, on 10 May 1057 crowds of women and laymen turned a candlelit procession for the local saint Nazaro into a riot of anti-clerical violence.3 The conflict between radical supporters of religious reform on the one hand, and the archbishop and his aristocratic court and clergy on the other, continued until the Patarines’ decisive defeat in 1075. Before then, Patarine violence provided a recurring counterpoint to the beat of liturgical time, tearing priests from their altars, overturning solemn processions, treading holy oil into the ground.
The historian R.I. Moore has pointed to the Pataria as a watershed moment of radical social change in European history. For the first time in Latin Europe since Antiquity, the eleventh century saw a newly populous and mobile urban world which made mass, collective activism by non-elites possible.4 Nowhere was this truer than in Milan, the region’s fastest-growing city. In an important recent article, Shane Bobrycki acknowledges this turning point, while reminding us that medieval rule before 1000 depended on the stability of regular popular assemblies for legitimacy and income. If such early medieval crowds rarely confronted elites openly on the street, their popular ‘misdirection’, in assemblies outside regulated boundaries in times and space, threatened to subvert the reproduction of elite power.5 We can add that such behaviour could persist alongside the growth of the activist crowd, rather than fading in its wake.
Moore and others are right to identify mass-crowd activism as, in part, a product of eleventh-century demographic change. Documentary and archaeological evidence reveals rapid population growth in Milan, which makes it difficult to follow some historians who dismiss contemporary accounts of crowds as describing rhetorical ghosts rather than real bodies.6 At the same time, much of the character and logic of medieval crowds remains to be uncovered.7
This article argues that to understand the Pataria, and popular collectives in medieval cities more broadly, we need to appreciate the city’s liturgical landscape. We can then see two things: first, how group behaviour was patterned by liturgical norms and expectations, which regularly summoned people on festival days to gather in their streets and churches, where they experienced shared community alongside dramatic displays of hierarchy; and secondly, how processions, which were often central to strategies of urban government, became increasingly unpredictable, and open to disruption and subversion by new popular movements.
Just as was the case for early modern ‘rites of violence’, however, medieval crowds fought not to eliminate the role of Christian liturgy in everyday life, but rather to preserve and purify it against the corruption of powers deemed to be illegitimate.8 Patarine ritual resistance against local elites mobilised the most radical ideas of contemporary religious reform movements, with their explosive social and economic implications: that married men and those believed to have bought their way into church office could not be priests; that their hands would pollute and nullify the sacraments which opened the way to salvation.9
This struggle depended on the ability of liturgy to communicate meaning, to represent not just cosmology but also relations of power. The sacrificial feast of the mass, or the watery rebirth of baptism, were profound attempts to understand humanity’s place in the world. At the same time, as the anthropologist Maurice Bloch observed for rituals more broadly, liturgy was a social technology which was reproduced and recontextualised by actors in historical time. Over time, ruling elites centralised local rites and associated their own status with pre-existing religious mysteries, dramatising links between their identity and the eternal temporality evoked by ritual, which here we can call ‘liturgical time’.10 Such practices had developed in Christian liturgy since Antiquity. Relics of the special Christian dead had inspired popular veneration before early medieval bishops fought to bolster their authority by becoming the impresarios of saints’ cults.11 The rite of baptism had accrued rich meaning over centuries before Italian city governments sent armed officers to open the portal to Christian rebirth, joining together civic and spiritual initiation.12
Ideology is also always a material phenomenon, something which must be performed and embodied.13 Patarine ritual violence therefore disrupted both a means of symbolic communication and a liturgical economy—that is, the conspicuous flow of commodities needed to materialise religious life: silver treasure, but also fuels to light sacred places, holy oils to anoint bodies, wines drunk before the altar. To follow the ways in which rites remade and responded to the city and its crowds, this article first introduces Milan and its dramatic expansion in the eleventh century. It then surveys Beroldo and other Milanese liturgical sources, and their value as witnesses to the symbolic significance of performances and spaces in the later eleventh century. After then providing a picture of the liturgical landscape and the social and political relations it sanctioned, the article analyses how and why Patarine violence contested rites from 1057 and 1075, reaching crescendos on major festivals of the liturgical year. The decision to disrupt processions is our best evidence that these rites had real power, and that the stakes around their performance were high, at times even fatal. As will become clear, urban liturgy provided both elites and their opponents with a forum and a means for conveying politics and ideology. But in a populous cityscape, the very thing that gave ceremony its legitimacy was the same thing which made it unstable: the crowd.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | cead048 |
| Journal | English Historical Review |
| Early online date | 4 May 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 4 May 2023 |
