King Ludwig II of Bavaria

140 years ago today, on the evening of June 13th 1886, the body of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and that of one of his doctors were found floating close to the shore in the waters of Lake Starnberg. Four days earlier the Bavarian government had ruled that the King was unfit to rule and appointed his uncle, Prince Luitpold as Prince Regent. Thus ended the reign since 1864 and the life of the Wittelsbach ruler who was only in his forty-first year.

King Ludwig II

A photograph from 1865 of the young monarch

Image: neuschwanstein.de

To most people he is “Mad King Ludwig”, the patron of Wagner and builder of fantasy palaces and castles in Bavaria. His dramatic death has, of course, fuelled conspiracy theories about both his diagnosis and his death.

Today, with greater knowledge of mental health and of personality disorders, there is doubt as to whether he was “mad”, even if clearly not average in his makeup. The point that in the nineteenth century and indeed the twentieth that being eccentric was the prerogative of the affluent and being mad the curse of the poor is not entirely irrelevant here.

King Ludwig’s enthusiasm for the music of Wagner - and indeed without his patronage much of the later works of the Bayreuth Opera House might not exist - and his enthusiasm for spending his own money, and what he was given or could borrow, but not that of the state on his amazing building projects was in one sense excessive. In another it was brilliant, and ensured his enduring fame. Supporting Wagner and creating and planning his palaces was wonderful, not mad if by that word is meant anything less that highly cultured and visionary.

King Ludwig II at the time of his accession in 1864.

He is wearing the riband of the senior Bavarian Order, that of St Hubert

Image: neuschwanstein.de

As a monarch whose actual realm was being drawn into the new German Empire with the concomitant constraints his cult of King Louis XIV and of medieval, and oriental, concepts of monarchical rule may well have been a reaction against his own times. Nonetheless he appears to have dutifully conducted his business as a constitutional monarch, even if he was largely absent from Munich. So too did Queen Victoria at Balmoral or Osborne rather than London.

The King in the middle years of his reign

Image:thefamousbirthdays.com

The good Wikipedia biography sets out the evidence well, with links to recent articles about the circumstances of his death through the footnotes as well as their links to other articles on their website.

The biography can be read at Ludwig_II_of_Bavaria

There is a short illustrated biography in English with some telling quotations from the website of Neuschwanstein which can be accessed at Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung | Neuschwanstein Castle | King Ludwig II

I think the King’s cousin, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who knew him better than most, was right in her assessment that he was not mad but an eccentric who sought to live in a world of dreams.

King Ludwig II as Grand Master of the Order of Knights of St George 

The painting was completed in 1887 the year after his death

Image:Wikimedia

The man who sought to be an enigma as be became more reclusive lost the elegant good looks that that had impressed many, including Wagner, at his accession and in his later years appears heavier, almost ponderous whilst still in his mid to later thirties. Maybe the never-ending pursuit of his vision of himself and his kingship, of high art and culture was at the same time literally weighing him down and making him prematurely middle aged and depressive. 

His life is one of initial outward promise, inner demons, circumstances he could not control, and the pursuit of artistic visions that never fulfilled his craving for more of the wonders he had helped create. A lonely life, and a sad story, a tragic story, and one that does not deserve the epithet “mad”. Nevertheless his legacy in the buildings he commissioned and the incredible music he supported is one that endures and enriches us all. Visionary would be not just much gentler, but also a far more accurate summary.

Please pray for the repose of the soul 

of King Ludwig II

Medieval cooking ingredients

I came upon an interest post on Substack from The Fake History Hunter which sets out to show the wide variety of foods available to medieval people before the introduction of modern staples from the New World. The list includes some items that definitely belong to the world of the social elite, but it is nonetheless very impressive and given that society was not as rigidly differentiated as popular presentations might suggest would allow, one way or another, for considerable or occasional variety.

The post can be read at Food & ingredients available in Medieval Europe before contact with the Americas

Reading through the list of foodstuffs I felt I wanted the much lamented and irreplaceable Two Fat Ladies to roar into view on their motorcycle and sidecar and set to creating an extravagantly inviting feast.

Discoveries from ‘The Gribshunden’

Yesterday I attended online a most interesting set of lunchtime lectures at the Society of Antiquaries about the ongoing archaeological investigation of ‘The Gribshunden’. This was the flagship and floating command centre of King Hans of Denmark which sank off the coast of what is now southern Sweden, but was then still part of the Danish kingdom whilst sailing to an important meeting with the Swedish nobility at Kalmar in 1495. The King was hoping to reinvigorate the 1397 Union of the crowns of Denmark, Norway together with that of Sweden proclaimed at Kalmar in that year.  

A reconstruction of the Gribshunden at sea 

Image: Wikidata

The ships appears to have sunk in relatively shallow water following a possible explosion - it was heavily armed - but the waters of the Baltic are favourable to preserving rather than devouring ship timbers, as most notably with the Vasa in Stockholm harbour.

 

I have posted before about the Gribshunden in A fifteenth century King’s flagship.

I also wrote in Late fifteenth century Scandinavian Court cuisine and in More on the spices from the Gribshunden about the spices which had survived in the remains of the ship, and what they indicate about the life of the King and his courtiers

and the place of the Danish court in the international trade of the time.

There are two accessible, very detailed articles about the ship from the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology at The Danish Griffin: The Wreck of an Early Modern Royal Carvel from 1495 and from the Society for Combat Archaeology at Gribshunden: Significance and Preliminary Investigations

The Society of Antiquaries lectures are wide-ranging in their subject matter and free to watch online via their website and they also have recordings of previous lectures available. Yesterday’s set of talks by four experts working on different aspects of the project demonstrated the rich variety of discoveries already made from excavations of only a small portion of the ship. The vessel was about four-fifths the size of the Mary Rose but has already revealed comparable finds. Its potential, as is explained, is very considerable not just in terms of the development of ship building but also about life at the time and the links to the wider European culture of the end of the fifteenth century as well as to trading links on the other side of the world.

The lectures, which are only an hour in total but well illus, can be accessed at  https://www.youtube.com/live/UJtId-NdG1E?si=plZkOuZsfOT5gac-

A reconstruction technical drawing of the Gribshunden by Mats Vänehem

 Image: Wikinedia

Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales

Today is the 650th anniversary of the death of Edward, Prince of Wales in 1376. He was a week short of his forty sixth birthday, the national hero laid low by almost a decade of illness. His death was the passing also of the mid-century era of English military success in France and of a particular culture of chivalric behaviour. 

The effigy of Edward Prince of Wales on his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral

Image: berkhampstedcastle.org.uk

Popularly known as the Black Prince since the sixteenth century for reasons which are far from clear, he was in his lifetime and in the following years seen as an outstanding exemplar of medieval chivalric culture. Later centuries also subscribed to that view, but in recent decades his reputation been discussed by historians and popular writers. There have been a number of biographies, and debate over his actions in 1370 at the sack of Limoges became something of an academic battleground. That debates perhaps revealed more about misconceptions amongst some people today about the past than it did about the past itself. The current consensus appears more favourable to him.

The effigy of Edward Prince of Wales in Canterbury Cathedral

Image: World History Encyclopaedia 

Despite his public role as military leader and victor in notable battles, notably Crecy, Poitiers and Najera, his decade of rulership in Aquitaine, and the near contemporary accounts by the Chandos Herald and Jean Froissart, less emerges about him as a personality than his younger brothers, John, Edmund and Thomas. The superb effigy at Canterbury commemorates the public Prince but reveals little of the man, and that seems true of so much of his life. He appears to have been devout, with a particular devotion to the Trinity, which may well suggest an interest in theology akin to that of his nephew, the future King Henry IV. Very appropriately he died on Trinity Sunday. Having requested burial in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Undercroft at Canterbury it was deemed more appropriate to bury him above that chapel in the vicinity of the shrine of St Thomas in the Trinity Chapel. 

  

The Prince kneels in prayer before the Holy Trinity 

Image: mediastorehouse.com

His private life with at least two illegitimate sons born marriage is probably typical of his age. After talk when he was a small child of marrying him to the daughter of King Philip VI of France marriage to Margaret of Brabant was being actively discussed in the years 1339-45 but nothing came of it. As it was he married late, and initially secretly, to his relative Joan “the Fair Maid” of Kent, acquiring thereby a family of stepchildren. It is, perhaps, more than somewhat reminiscent of the marriage just over a century later of King Edward IV to Elizabeth Woodville. Joan’s sons the Hollands were again not altogether dissimilar to the Woodvilles and Greys.     

Joan, Princess of Wales

Image: A Royal Heraldry 

That Edward and Joan’s marriage was a love match seems clear, but their elder son died as a child and the future hopes of the couple and the dynasty were centred henceforth on the younger son, the future King Richard II.

 

The Prince at prayer from the remains of the painted decoration of St Stephen’s Chapel Westminster 

Image: luminarium.org

The Prince at prayer with his ostrich feather badge on the wall behind.

Image:mediastorehouse.com

The fact that he was eight years older than his next brother to reach adulthood Lionel, ten years older than John and twelve years older than Edmund, let alone twenty five years older than his youngest brother Thomas, born when Edward was himself already a father, must have affected the dynamics of the family and the way it worked as part of King Edward III’s system of governance. 

King Edward III creates his son the Prince of Wales as Prince of Aquitaine in 1362

Image: luminarium.org 

The Prince’s last years were overshadowed by illness, by the gradual loss of the military initiative and territory to the French, and the decline of his father King Edward III. His difficulties in Aquitaine reflected not only the significant financial consequences of his Castilian campaign - where he was given what is now his eponymous ruby - but also the long-standing traditions of local autonomy on the parts of the Gascon lords and which could be easily exploited by the French crown. In that respect he faced the type of problems that had confronted Richard Coeur de Lion almost two centuries earlier.The Gascons might well love a ruler based in London over one closer at hand in Paris, but an energetic Duke or Prince based in Bordeaux was too close for comfort.

The Oribce’s signet ring found at Montpensier in Auvergne in 1866.

Image: Wikipedia 

In his last months the Prince appears to have been seen by those opposing his father’s ministers as their supporter, but his participation is unclear. Family bonds still bound the Plantagenets closely, even if there was always the potential for differing views and policies between the monarch and his team, and those of the heir and his entourage. That had been present in the 1269s and was to be in the early fifteenth century, and, of course, a principal factor in politics from the seventeenth century onwards. It is a seemingly inevitable part of any dynastic system. For Edward his tragedy was that he was dying in the spring of 1376 and was never able to show how he might have ruled as a putative King Edward IV.

 

Later generations, and apparently, some contemporaries imagined a new reign would have brought new or reinvigorated policies, and see a divide between him and his next surviving brother, John, Duke of Lancaster. The evidence of Edward’s rule in Aquitaine suggests he would have been tough rather than merely amenable as king, and his knight and apparently close friend Sir Simon Burley was to be a major influence the young King Richard II and a principal object of the Appellant’s vengeance in 1388. A Whiggish view of the Prince does not work.    

 

His military triumphs and relatively early death loomed to a greater or lesser extent over the reign of his son, with the inevitable speculation as to what might have been. In that he was like his great-nephew King Henry V in the reign of his son. Victories like Poitiers and Agincourt opened up possibilities for both men which they were never able to achieve before death claimed them, and which their sons and their advisors could never fulfill.

The Prince’s great helm and shield from his achievements set over his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral 

Image: World History Encyclopaedia 

 

The arms in full heraldic display 

Image: A Royal Heraldry- Wikipedia 

The replicas of the Prince’s achievements 

Image: trc-leiden.nl

There is an article with additional information about the Prince’s surcoat at Jupon of the Black Prince

There is a video from a BBC series from 2018 about creating a faithful reproduction of the surcoat using the same fabrics as the original which can be seen at https://share.google/2kORvchUKkHyE3Teq

Wikipedia has a quite detailed biography which gives a good narrative of his life, considerable detail and discussion of chivalric culture, as well as a good bibliography but whose interpretation at times unfortunately relies on old-fashioned views from the old DNB entry. The illustrated article can be seen at Edward_the_Black_Prince

   

There is another quite detailed biography from Luminarium which can be accessed at Edward, the Black Prince of Wales (1330-1376)

I have previously shared articles about conservation and research work on the funeral achievements and the tomb at Canterbury. LiveScience has a 2021 article on the work on the effigy which can be seen at Tomb effigy of the 'Black Prince' was likely medieval propaganda to bolster his son's failing rule

I am not sure I fully agree with the argument about the intention of the tomb commission but the article is worth perusing.  

 

The effigy and tomb of the Prince at Canterbury 

Image: A Royal Heraldry - churchmonunentssociety.org

Pray for the repose of the soul of Edward Prince of Wales and of Aquitaine

 

Understanding medieval marginalia

I am sure we are all familiar with the illuminated marginalia in medieval manuscripts, especially those from the thirteenth century onwards. The bizarre world they create of knights fighting giant snails of rabbits, doing the comeuppance to a whole of a variety of opponents, grotesque creatures that are strangely deformed, to a variety of risqué subjects are a delight, and frequently used in book illustrations, on postcards from great library bookshops and so on. The Internet disseminates them far and wide.

We are amused, and quite probably bemused by them, not being sure what their meaning is, and perhaps being inclined to dismiss them as ‘doodles’.

Substack has an interesting piece which starting from the ‘doodle’ idea sets out to demolish that really implausible idea and to show that the marginal illuminations do relate to the text within the margins - and that is an important point - and should be understood as a commentary or aide memoire for the reader.  

The article from Weird Medieval Guys makes a good case for taking the humour of these illustrations seriously, and thereby enriching our understanding of what we are looking at.

The illustrated article is well worth reading and can be accessed at How to interpret medieval marginalia 101

The Vatican and SSPX - scholarship seeking resolution

The always scholarly and informed website Rorate Cæli has two new articles which are both important contributions to the debate about the proposed episcopal consecrations for SSPX.

The first looks at the modern, post 1870, understanding of Papal authority. In doing so it draws upon a range of historical material. I was particularly interested to see the writings of Augustinus Triumphus (1243-1328) cited. I recall reading Michael Wilks book about his very advanced theories of Papal power in Oriel library during one Long Vacation. That his ideas can be seen underlying contemporary concerns is, to put it mildly, interesting.

The article can be read at "The Performative Contradiction of the Society of St. Pius X" - Guest Article by Vigilius

The second article is by Bishop Athanasius Schneider and sets out to examine the fundamental issues in respect of the reception of the ideas of the avowedly “non-dogmatic” Second Vatican Council. The bishop makes a series of excellent points with clarity and coherence. He displays a wide and generous understanding of the history of the Church. He is clearly anxious to see a peaceful resolution of this matter in the interests of the whole Church. That must be commendable.

Bishop Schneider’s article can be read at "TRUTH: The Core Question Regarding the SSPX" - by Bishop Athanasius Schneider 

More reflections on the Vatican and SSPX

 

Corpus Christi, with its emphasis on the liturgical Presence of the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord seems a not inappropriate day on which to reflect further on the tension between the Vatican and the SSPX over the intention of the Society to consecrate four new bishops without Papal mandate on July 1st.

I wrote about this issue last month in a post which can be seen at The Vatican vs SSPX  

It is a subject about which I continue to pray.

Since then a number of online features have caught my eye and I think them worth sharing.

 

For those not aux fait with the background there is a suitably neutral account from ReadyToHarvest about the conflict going back to the years immediately after Vatican II ended and which can be seen at Will SSPX Schism? What's Going On?

Shortly after my post I came across links to an open letter to the Pipe from Bishop Athanasius Schneider which the faithful could also sign expressing the hope that the Holy See would approve of the consecrations to avoid further rupture. This can be accessed at Bishop Schneider backs urgent appeal asking Pope Leo XIV to support SSPX consecrations

I signed the letter.

Subsequently I came upon a lengthy article on Substack which was a commentary on the letter. It is by a monk of Le Barroux and has some important references to history and canon law in respect of Papal powers. It can be read at We Do Not Save the Faith Against the Pope

 

The very well-informed website The Pillar had further thoughts on what might happen on July 2nd if neither side backs down - and there is nothing so far to suggest either will. That article, written by a leading member of a team who are well versed in canon law, can be found 

at Excommunication communication: What if the SSPX does a schism?

I have never attended an SSPX Mass other than watching a handful online during Covid. A friend, who does have contact with members of SSPX, opined that whereas in 1988 excommunication or the threat of it was a sobering thing today, as a legacy of the actions of Pope Francis, it is seen as no threat and enhances the resolve of the Society.

It would be difficult for either side to step back. For SSPX it would be a negation if so much, if not indeed all rhey have professed. For the Vatican, which clearly includes in the College of Cardinals very considerable disparity on the liturgy, the most obvious point of difference, and for the Pope, only a year into his pontificate, to give way in the point would be severely disabling.

 

That is to look at the clash in political terms. During the lead up to last year’s conclave several commentators but not perhaps enough - lamented the way in which the life of the Church was being presented in terms of secular, entrenched, adversarial,party politics. Maybe we must pray that this matter is not just resolved in charity but in a Christian charity that is worthy of the Body of Christ. 

Corpus Christi

Today is the Solemnity of Corpus Christi.

As a feast and day of devotion it is one of the high points in the Catholic calendar and in the Church year.

  

Image: Catholic Diocese of Little Rock

 

The Worship of the Lamb

The Ghent altarpiece 

Jan and Hubert van Eyck

Mid-1420s  - 1432

The feast originated two centuries earlier in the same region

Image: Catholic Diocese of Little Rock

Corpus Christi originated as a liturgical celebration in what is now Belgium and was officially established by Pope Urban IV on August 11 1264 in the bull Transiturus. However the Pope died a few weeks later on October 2, and for all that he had commissioned St Thomas Aquinas to compose the propers, the new feast languished. Only a few places observed it. It was not until 1317 when Pope John XXII published a compilation of new papal decrees assembled by his predecessor Pope Clement V in the Clementines that the celebration became widely known and made part of regular liturgical observance. The fact that this was the first feast mandated by the Papacy may have meant that its novelty meant that many thought it only applied in Rome. 

One the 1317 text reached its audience the new feast became not only widely observed but also very popular. So in England the day was marked with processions, religious con fraternities or guilds of the great and the good, as well as more humble members, and the staging of Mystery Plays by the trade guilds.  

Corpus Christi is a quintessentially later medieval feast, a living link to the piety of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries created in the solid foundation of that of the thirteenth century.

Alas, in England the events of the mid-sixteenth century swept that all away, despaired some attempts to continue or revive the plays in the Elizabethan era.

One of the longest established Corpus Christi processions is in the historic city of Toledo, the ecclesiastical capital of Spain. Here one can see, and if you are fortunate enough to be there, no doubt sense the religious milieu not just of late medieval Castile but of late medieval Christendom. Church, city and State combine to celebrate, with the astonishing early sixteenth century shrine for the monstrance being borne through the streets.

That is how religious worship should be confident, devout, traditional.

There is an online introduction to the celebration, linked to promoting visits to this great artistic and cultural centre, at Corpus Christi (Toledo, Spain) 2026

    

The beginning of the Procession 

Image: pillarcatholic.com

 

The Corpus Christi procession in Toledo

 

Image: Corpus Christi on X

There is a quite detailed history of the origins and development of the feast available on Wikipedia at Feast_of_Corpus_Christi

I wish a solemn, holy and joyful feast of Corpus Christi to all my readers