Language and Foreign Lands

Sources

Skepticism. Language was definitely both a means and a barrier to communication between different lands. The activities of political alliance, religion, and schooling each had an important linguistic element. For both trade and war, language was almost an ancillary form of communication. Numeracy was far more important than literacy within the medieval trade sphere. The introduction of Arabic numerals into Europe in 1202 could have afforded much-eased interaction in becoming the numerus francus between traders of different lands. The numerals themselves were, however, identified with the translation movement centered in Toledo, Spain, so strongly in fact that they were known as toletanae figurae (Toletan numbers), and European regimes interpreted the use of the Arabic import quite hostilely. In Florence an edict was issued in 1299 forbidding bankers from using Arabic numerals instead of the cumbersome Roman numerals they had gladly abandoned.

The Route of War. As for the sphere of war, there is no better means to communicate aggressive intentions than direct action. To exchange ideas or information, however, even between hostile parties of different lands, language worked as well in the Middle Ages as it does today. Examples of the rhetoric of war abound in connection with the Crusades. Stories of Turkish cruelties against pilgrims fueled the anger of Christian Europe. One example of a direct exchange between the two sides illustrates the use of language as war propaganda. Two Muslim emissaries queried the patriarch of Jerusalem as Crusaders besieged the town of Caesarea in the thirteenth century: “Why do you tell your people to invade our land and kill us, when your religion says no one must kill anyone made in the image of your God?” The patriarch replied: “Well, this town is not yours. It is Saint Peter’s whom your fathers chased away. We want to get back his land, not take your property. As for killing, whoever fights to destroy God’s law deserves that. Give up the land, and you can go unharmed with your goods. If not, the sword of the Lord will kill you.”

Political and Linguistic Limits. In the context of exchanges among antagonists of different lands in the Middle Ages, one might rightly wonder whether they shared a common language. In the medieval period, the notion of different lands went virtually hand in hand with distinct tongues. In the case of the Carolingian dynasty, fraternal conflicts over one kingdom took on irreparable seriousness as the warriors for the two parties could no longer understand one another in the same Frankish dialect. Among their other lacks, the Carolingians had neither the transportation system nor the administration to govern their empire for long, but it was raw conflict between the grandsons of Charlemagne that led to the partition of his Empire into Western, Middle, and Eastern kingdoms. At the battle of Fontenay in 841 Lothar, one of three brothers, was defeated by the other two. In 842 at the city of Strasbourg Charles the Bald and Ludwig or Louis the German swore oaths in league against Lothar. As recorded by Nithard, grandnephew of Charlemagne and historian of the later Carolingians, the oaths took a parallel form in two vernacular languages: lingua romana (Old French) and lingua teudisca (Old German). By 870, at the Treaty of Mersen, most of Lothar’s Middle Kingdom was split between the Eastern and Western kingdoms, and the future outlines of Germany and France had begun to take shape.

Religious Communication. The same phenomenon seems to have played itself out in the religious sphere as well. Once an acceptable Latin translation of the Bible was completed and Latin became officially adopted as the language of western Christianity, the divisions between the eastern half of Christendom using Greek and the Latin-speaking western half became profound. The ensuing schism of the Western Church from the Eastern turned not in small part on impasses in communication stemming from Christendom’s lack of a shared language.

Law. Latin was for much of the Middle Ages the language of pan-European communication. It served as the means for all parts of the Church and the highest levels of government to communicate across regional boundaries. One of the greatest medieval boons to its strength as a universal secular language was the late-eleventh-century rediscovery of the Corpus Juris Civilis, a huge compilation and refinement of Roman law, completed five centuries earlier under the direction of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. Centered on the University of Bologna, established in 1119 in northern Italy, generations of law scholars would produce a vast literature in Latin commenting on and expanding Roman civil law, inspiring countries as well as the Church in Rome to refine legal codes.

Language of Learning. Latin was the medieval language of learning. For many centuries it was the language into which many pre-medieval or non-Western works were translated, providing a bridge of understanding to the past and other contemporary cultures. For learning to be reborn again in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, people had to begin to read more than the books of their own creation. They had, however, through the upheavals in education and livelihood, lost touch with the

skills of reading other languages. As books came to be collected from different parts of Europe and the Middle East, they were translated into Latin to allow for them to be understood in medieval Europe. Works translated from Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek were among the most influential in the Middle Ages.

Works of Muslims and Jews. Al-Andalus was famous for its scholars, such as Averroes and Maimonides. Both men were notable practitioners of medicine, a field in which Europe realized it had much to learn from its neighbors. The works of the Islamic expert, Averroes, born Ibn Rushd in Córdoba in 1126, were the result of thirty years of study. They presented a stimulating yet troubling collection to Christian scholars. An educated person from the Middle Ages brought up in the Christian tradition saw the world and humankind as the whole point of Creation; therefore, Averroes’s arguments that both the creation of the world by God and personal immortality were impossible were strikingly strident to Latin Europe. Based as they were on his interpretation of Plato and Aristotle, Averroes’s ideas served, for the Latins, as an intermediary to Greek philosophy. The great Jewish thinker Maimonides also was born in Córdoba, although a period of intolerance there forced him first to Morocco and ultimately to Cairo. There he codified Jewish law in his Mishne Torah and wrote in Arabic his classic Guide to/for the Perplexed, whose linking of religion, philosophy, and science influenced medieval Christian scholarship.

Authors. In literature, the Arabic world gave the West the popular stories from Thousand and One Arabian Nights, stemming from the reign of the Abbasid ruler Caliph Harun al Rashid, in Iraq and Iran, around 950. Great literary works, including the poem the Rubáiyát by Omar Khayyam, also made their way through translation into the West. Arab poets were earlier than Christians to sing of their loved ones, and their poetry, often set to music, flourished in al-Andalus. Samuel Halevi, later known as Hanagid, typified the many-sided society of Arabic Spain. A Jewish boy of Córdoba of the eleventh century, he was pushed to leave by local violence, even though it was between Arabs and Berbers, not directed against Jews. He made his career in Granada. In 1027 he was named, or named himself, nagid (prince or governor) of al-Andalus’s Jews. Service to successive Muslim kings led in 1037 to his appointment as grand vizier of Granada and, for most of the years until he died in 1056, leader of troops in battle. He was a poet and a scholar as well. His verse, suffused with his rabbinical learning, drew on both Arabic and Jewish cultures and is one of the gems of Hebrew literature.

Latin and Vernaculars. Through the competition of vernacular languages, politically powerful regional interests, and a lack of secular higher education in Latin, the common language of the Church was slowly becoming less important in the interaction between people from different lands. Translation into the different vernaculars of medieval Europe was definitely on the rise by the middle of the twelfth century. Books collected from different parts of Europe and the Middle East were translated into many vernacular languages, medieval forms of Italian, English, Spanish, and French. Even before the development of the printing press in the mid fifteenth century, religious works and Latin and Greek authors were translated into regional vernaculars. In this way, more and more people could read a work in a tongue closer to their own regional language, which presumably improved communication.

Roger Bacon and Ramon Lull. A few scholars saw in the tendency of letting translators do the linguistic interactive work the dawning of a new era of language barriers. Both Roger Bacon and Ramon Lull. lamented not giving language instruction in Greek, Latin, and Arabic an honored place, because lack of linguistic ability reduced access to the ideas of other cultures. An English scholar and scientist, Bacon carried out research into optics, but he was also extremely interested in the acquisition of foreign languages. While his own linguistic skills were not as high as his ideals for others, his curiosity and scientific/alchemical interests led to attributions to him of all kinds of adoptions from manuscripts in Arabic, including the first recipe for gunpowder in 1249. The Spaniard Lull in 1276 founded a monastery on Majorca with the main purpose of training churchmen for interaction with Moorish and Arabic Muslims in the Arabic language.

Translations. Translation was, however, to win out largely over language mastery in the Middle Ages. Boeth-ius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which, when originally written in Latin in 526, went unmentioned by any of the author’s contemporaries, became the most widely copied work of secular literature in Europe from the Carolingian epoch to the end of the Middle Ages. A nonreligious work in monastic libraries, it was a religious work within secular collections where it appeared frequently in translation. The Consolation of Philosophy made its way into every one of the strong medieval vernaculars: into Old English by the graces of King Alfred, into Old French by Jean de Meun, and into Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer. Despite the fact that a popular pastime among students was to gather at taverns to drink and compose vernacular songs, of which the Carmina Burana collection has rousing examples, the number of vernacular works written in the Middle Ages was smaller than the number of works that were translated from an earlier language into a medieval vernacular. Throughout the Middle Ages, works were imported from Byzantium, but by the middle of the period every foreign port was seen to be a source of written works to be translated.

Nontranslation. A multiplicity of languages on religious and political fronts definitely spelled disunity, if not disharmony, in medieval interactions between peoples of different lands. Europe was abandoning forever nontranslation, the use of communication in a common language on the level of the continent or large geographic area. In so doing, Europeans were also shifting the space in which translation was not needed out of the geographic sphere and into the intellectual. Only those who did not require translations because they were multilingual, intellectuals in cathedrals, courts, and classrooms across Europe, had occupied translation-free space during the Middle Ages. That rare community would by the thirteenth century become so small as to consist almost exclusively of translators.

Translators. Translators were the more cosmopolitan members of medieval society, but they were also among its finest intellectuals. Translating was by no means an uncreative function. In twelfth-century Spain, John of Seville and Abraham bar Hiyyâ both translated and wrote original scientific works, the latter highly colored by their own efforts in translation. Medieval translation involved the creation in the vernacular and in Latin of virtually a new language, particularly for scientific works, where Arab scientists had vastly enlarged the range of observational data and hence descriptive vocabulary, and incorporated mathematics, particularly algebra. Although various translators from Arabic into Latin worked alone, the usual process was for two scholars to work in tandem, with one scholar translating aloud from the Arabic text into the vernacular and a second translating from the vernacular into Latin. As John of Seville noted on the translation of the De Anima of Avicenna (ibn Sîna): “The book … was translated from Arabic, myself speaking the vernacular [Castilian or Catalan] word by word, and the archdeacon Dominic converting each into Latin.” Thus, ibn Dâwûd worked with Gundisalvo; Abraham bar Hiyya probably with Plato of Tivoli; and Gerard of Cremona with a Mozarab named Galippus.” Some intermediary translations into the vernacular were committed to writing, particularly in the period of Alfonso the Wise of Castile, who in the late thirteenth century assigned an additional scribe to translating sessions to write down the Castilian draft as well. There was a welcome place for Jews in this translation practice, since many were trilingual, knowing Hebrew, Arabic, and a Romance language.

Missionaries. Medieval conversion activity also illustrates that language was both a means and a barrier to communication in the interaction between peoples of different lands. If the interaction was from the East, the converted land was subsequently connected to the Greek linguistic sphere. If, however, the missionaries had derived from the West, subsequent interaction between the Christian groups would be in Latin. Initially, however, the missionaries had

to learn the converts’ vernacular languages, to explain the great truths in them and to deal day by day with the fierce Slav or the high-spirited Celt. Frequently, religious works were translated into the vernacular. The earliest samples of Anglo-Saxon literature are nearly all ecclesiastical. The oldest long piece in Old German is the Heliand, or paraphrase of the Gospel. The only preserved work in the old Gothic tongue, the foundation of German philology, is the translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible by Bishop Ulfilas or the communiques of Saint Columbanus and his Irish missionary companions to convert the Arian Goths of Lom-bardy. The first Irish missionaries in Germany, Saint Gall and Saint Kilian (both died in the seventh century) spoke to the people both in Latin and in German, and it is believed that they compiled the first German dictionary to help with daily interaction and preaching.

Cyril the Missionary. Eastern Christian or Byzantine missionaries were led in the ninth century by two brothers sent to convert the Slavs. In 862 Cyril and Methodius worked as Christian missionaries in the newly founded Slavic state of Moravia (830). While they learned the language of the Slavs, the missionaries found its lack of a written form an impediment to furthering Christian education. Cyril therefore adapted the Greek alphabet to the Slavic tongue; it became known as the Cyrillic alphabet after its adapter. In 990–992 Poles and other western Slavs converted from the Eastern to the Western (Roman Catholic) Church, while the remaining Slavs stayed within the Eastern (Greek Orthodox) Church. In 1035 Poland became a fief, or subject state, of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1278 Bohemia and Moravia became estates of the Holy Roman Emperor.

Viking Converts. In the case of the conversion of the Vikings, Western missionaries’ approach to the language difference was far less accommodating than that of Cyril in the East. During the reign of King Canute of Denmark, who ruled an empire covering Denmark, England, and part of Sweden and Norway from 1018 until 1035, English missionaries converted the Danes to Christianity. Although it is clear that the Vikings incorporated pictures symbolic of Christian belief into their stone carving, it also seems that any knowledge the missionaries had of the Viking tongue, which did have a written form in runic letters, was not transmitted into the dominating Latin linguistic culture. Rune stones have been found decorated with both Christian symbols and runes, the Viking letters, but no Runic Bible is known to have been produced.

Norman Christians. Conversion and new language acquisition also went together for the group of Vikings who settled on the continent. By the early tenth century the Danish Vikings who had attacked Paris in 895 had settled at the mouth of the Seine River, under their chief Rollo. The Frankish king, Charles the Simple, had given him and his followers Rouen and its surrounding land on condition that he swore the king allegiance, defended the land from other Viking invaders, and became a Christian. With Rollo and his men’s willingness to adopt Christianity, the Archbishop of Rouen baptized them, and Rollo was made Duke over Normandy, known in Latin as terra Normanorum, the land of the Northmen/Norsemen. Their shared religion and close proximity to the lingua romana of the western Franks led these Northmen to learn both Latin and French. This linguistic shift would accompany them across the English Channel in 1066, when their local duke, William, led them to claim the English crown. Although it was clearly a land grab, that foreign invasion was not bad for educational standards and linguistic fertilization. The soldiery, which brought the Norman French tongue to England, was followed soon by a flood of Latin scholars and documents. Among the resident Angles and Saxons, whose land the Normans had come to exploit, there was a slow increase in the number who read and wrote Latin while speaking Anglo-Norman. They had new access to interaction with all corners of the European continent.

Means of Interaction. Upon the basic skills of interaction, talking and walking, the medieval people built multiple spheres of communication and mobility. While communities defined themselves predominantly through social exchanges and activities close to home, war, political alliances, trade, travel, and schooling brought contact between different peoples of different lands. Religion was undoubtedly the major catalyst to interaction among people in the Middle Ages. The Latin of the Church and ecclesiastical translations into vernacular languages provided an initial formal dimension to both spoken and written medieval languages. Travelers and explorers also pushed the bounds of the Roman Christian legacy, spreading active modes of expression and empirical appreciation of the world.

Sources

Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood, translated by Robert Baldick (London: Cape, 1962).

Charles Burnett, “The Translating Activity in Medieval Spain,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden & New York: E. J. Brill, 1992), pp. 1036–1058.

Norman F. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993).

Carlo M. Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).

Georges Duby, A History of Private Life, translated by Arthur Goldham-mer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800, translated by David Gerard (London: N.L.B., 1988).

Daniel A. Frankforter, The Medieval Millennium: An Introduction (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999).

Francois Gamier, Le langage de l’Image au Moyen Age, 2 volumes (Paris: Leopard d’or, 1982–1989).