Purple Parchment and the Cave of Smoo

In the year 997, the excommunicated archbishop of Reims sent the Holy Roman Emperor a kingly gift: a copy of Boethius's On Arithmetic written in gold and silver inks on purple parchment. It had the desired effect. As I wrote in The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages, my biography of that archbishop, the 17-year-old emperor summoned Gerbert of Aurillac to court with the plea, "Pray explain to us the book on arithmetic." Archbishop Gerbert became the emperor's tutor, friend, counselor--and ultimately, through the emperor's influence, Pope Sylvester II, the pope of the Year 1000.

Earlier in this blog, I described how parchment and ink were made in the Middle Ages. (See "How to Make a Medieval Book, Part I" and "How to Make a Medieval Book, Part II.")

But purple parchment? How did they color the parchment purple? I hadn't given that much thought.

Then the other day, researching something quite unrelated--the Viking settlements in northern Scotland--I stumbled upon the answer.

In 1992, a team of archaeologists led by Tony Pollard excavated four neighboring caves in a narrow inlet in Sutherland, one being the famous Smoo Cave. (See the great website, from which these photos of the cave were taken, at www.smoocave.org) In 2005, Pollard posted their report online at www.sair.org.uk/sair18.

"Smoo" comes from the Old Norse word smuga, which Cleasby-Vigfusson, the classic Old Icelandic dictionary, defines as "a narrow cleft to creep through, a hole." The related verb is smjúga, "to creep through a hole" of which the past tense is smaug. Bells are now going off in the heads of all Tolkien readers--but I won't be following that digression any farther.

Back to Smoo Cave. Surprisingly, I had visited the cave in 1995. Two balding Scotsmen with rat tails and earrings took me on a river raft under a low stone arch, across a pool into which a sun-sparkled waterfall fell. In the dark cave, it was a real surprise. We disembarked in the dry inner reaches of the cave and had a geology lesson. The outer, larger cavern was made by the sea: the hole, wider at the bottom than the top, is a blowhole. The inner caverns were made by an underground river that feeds from a large lake. The waterfall only runs when there’s been rain—today’s fall is last night’s rain.

As Pollard points out, Smoo Cave has been a tourist attraction since at least the early 1700s. One practical-minded traveler described it as "stretching pretty far underground with a natural vault above." Inside, "there is room enough for 500 men to exercise their arms." (I'm imagining jumping jacks here--but maybe he means to practice their shooting?) There's "a harbor for big boats" at the cave's mouth, a pool full of trout, and "a spring of excellent water."

Earlier visitors also valued the cave for its usefulness--not its surprising bright waterfall. Pollard and his crew of archeologists found signs that Vikings had used Smoo Cave as a fishing camp, as well as a place to sit out a storm and repair a boat. They may have stopped here on their way from the Orkney Islands to Dublin. They butchered animals and cooked them. They ate dried fish they'd brought with them. They ground grain. They carved pins and knife handles and other useful objects out of antler and bone.

But the most interesting thing the Vikings did at Smoo and its neighboring caves was collect and crack open whelks. These were not just any whelks, but Nucella lapillus, also known as Purpura lapillus, the source since antiquity of a purple dye. These whelks are not edible, and they were not used as fish bait, Pollard says. "It is clear that purple dye was being extracted from the shells recovered from the cave."

The whelks, Pollard writes, "had been split from the second and third whorl and also split from the shoulder to the base.... This would have facilitated the removal of the animal from its shell to extract the ink."

In 1895, archaeologists found "Purpura-mounds" in Connemara, Ireland. The shells in the mounds had been broken exactly like those in Smoo Cave, though in Ireland there were many more of them. One heap measured 165 by 45 feet. In one square foot, the researchers counted two hundred whelks. Purpura-mounds have also been found in Cornwall, England, but Smoo Cave is the first record from Scotland, although the whelk is common there.

To learn how to make the dye known as Tyrean purple, Pollard refers the reader to the 1919 book, Shells as Evidence of the Migrations of Early Culture by J.W. Jackson. Like Pollard's own report, Jackson's book is available online. (Historical research is so easy these days!)

Jackson, in turn, cites the first-century Roman writer Pliny to explain that "the precious liquid was obtained from a transparent branching vessel behind the neck of the animal and that at first the material was of the colour and consistency of thick cream."

Several kinds of whelks produced purple dye. Small ones were smashed together in a mortar; if large, "the animal was taken out entire, usually by breaking a hole in the side of the shell, and the sac containing the colouring matter was taken out, either while the animal was still alive, or as soon as possible after death, as otherwise the quality of the dye was impaired." The sacs were salted, allowed to sit for three days, then boiled and frequently skimmed. Exposed to the sun, the fluid (smelling like garlic) slowly changed color, from creamy to yellow, green, blue, and finally a purplish red. After ten days, the dye was ready to use.

To dye wool, a clean fleece was dunked into the boiling dye pot and left to soak for five hours. It was taken out, cooled, and the wool plucked off and carded, only to be "thrown in again, until it had fully imbibed the colour" (still smelling like garlic--one reason the wearers of royal purple robes wore so much perfume, suggests Jackson). It took between one and two pounds of liquid dye to color a half-pound of yarn.

To turn parchment purple, Jackson says, the dye was used as a paint, applied with a brush. The "magnificent and expensive style of writing" on purple parchment with gold and silver inks was mostly confined to sacred texts. Jackson cites an English Bible and a Gospel book, another book of the Gospels commissioned by Louis the Pious, king of France from 814 to 840, and a Book of Prayers, "bound in ivory and studded with gems" owned by his son, King Charles the Bald.

It's significant that Gerbert of Aurillac, who would become "The Scientist Pope," owned a mathematical treatise made in this "magnificent" style. The book still exists in the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg in Germany, where it is catalogued as MS Bamberg Class. 5 (HJ.IV.12), but we don't know how it came into Gerbert's possession. Like the gem-studded prayer book, On Arithmetic was commissioned by King Charles the Bald in about 832. But the dedicatory verses apply equally to the young emperor Otto III as to King Charles, and scholars long thought Gerbert (known as a poet) had written them. Otto III may have thought so too, for he answered the gift with a verse.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

Choosing a Pope in the Viking Age

As ABC News reported, "The Italian media is portraying the Vatican political culture as being equally depraved, drenched in ambition, wine and pheromones [as Italian president Sylvio Berlusconi's reelection campaign]. … The Rome papers are full of reports that sound like the plot of Dan Brown novel, starting with a shadowy Vatican dossier supposedly detailing a gay sex and blackmail scandal involving the curia."

All I can say is that it was worse a thousand years ago. Much worse. I wrote The Abacus and the Cross because I wanted to know what popes were like in the Viking Age, especially around the year 1000. What I learned surprised me. In addition to all the positive things I chronicle in the book, I found enough depravity, ambition, and pheromones circling around the representative of Saint Peter to support the Italian media's current view. I also found astonishing brutality, and violence equal to anything the Vikings are said to have done.

Tenth-century popes were not the powerful religious leaders of today. They were political pawns, not elected (there was no college of cardinals in those days) so much as backed by the biggest army. For much of the century the papacy was influenced by the mercurial Roman noblewoman Marozia. She was mistress of Pope Sergius III (904-11), murderer of John X (914-28), and mother of John XI (931-35).

Her grandson, John XII (955-63), was both pope and Prince of Rome until he double-crossed Otto I, whom he had just crowned Emperor. At a synod in Rome, John XII was accused of sacrilege, simony, perjury, murder, adultery, and incest, and deposed. He excommunicated the members of the synod, and when he caught three of them, he flogged one, cut off another’s right hand and the third’s nose and ears. Otto I's army marched on Rome, but before they arrived John was “stricken by paralysis in the act of adultery” and died.

Otto’s candidate to be the next pope, Leo, wasn’t even a priest. The Romans chose Benedict, a deacon, who was well qualified. He was “attacked by Leo, aided by the emperor,” a contemporary wrote. “Besieged, made prisoner, and deposed, he was sent in exile to Germany,” and Otto appointed John XIII, a bishop and, incidentally, Marozia’s nephew. He was captured by a rival faction, but escaped. The emperor hanged the conspirators, and John XIII went on to have a successful papacy and a natural death.

His successor, chosen by Emperor Otto II, was strangled by supporters of his rival, Boniface VII. When Otto invaded the city, Boniface fled (first robbing the Vatican treasury), and Otto oversaw the appointment of John XIV. He lasted only until Emperor Otto II died in 983. Then Boniface returned from exile and and threw John XIV into the Castel Sant’Angelo where, according to one report, he starved to death. When Boniface VII himself died a year later, his body was dragged through the streets of Rome by a mob.

The nobles of Rome replaced him with a Roman nobleman. This John XV reigned 11 years by carefully balancing the desires of Crescentius of the Marble Horse, Prince of Rome, with those of the empresses Theophanu and Adelaide, then regents for the child-emperor Otto III.

John XV died suddenly (though naturally) while the teenaged Otto III was on his way to Rome to be crowned Emperor. Otto quickly nominated his cousin to become Gregory V in 996. Four months after Otto III took his army back to Germany, Gregory was chased out of Rome by a mob.

The antipope who replaced him was John Philagathos, abbot of Nonantola, archbishop of Piacenza, and chancellor of Italy.

Philagathos’s fate was the one that made me wonder why the Vikings got the reputation for being bloody barbarians. They were no bloodier or brutal than their peers in Rome or throughout the Holy Roman Empire in those days.

Philagathos had joined the imperial court before Otto’s birth. Some sources say he was Otto’s godfather, others that he tutored the boy in Greek. In 994, Otto sent him to Constantinople to find him a royal Byzantine bride, and so he was not at hand in 996 when John XV died and Otto appointed his cousin as pope.

Returning less than a year later, Philagathos felt unjustly overlooked. His traveling companion, Leo of Synada, whom the Byzantine emperor had sent to continue the marriage negotiations, agreed. Meeting in Rome with Crescentius of the Marble Horse, the two ambassadors urged him to appoint a new pope. So he did. Gregory was chased out of town in September 996. Philagathos was acclaimed John XVI by the citizens and senate of Rome  and anointed in February 997. He would last until Otto III arrived.

The emperor's army, led by Gregory V’s father, cowed Rome into surrender after one skirmish. Philagathos fled. Crescentius walled himself up in the Castel Sant’Angelo and held out for two months, until Otto’s siege engines broke through. Crescentius was beheaded and hanged by the feet from the castle walls alongside twelve of his companions.

Philagathos was captured by Berthold, count of Breisgau. “Fearing that if they sent him to the emperor, he might depart unpunished,” say the Annals of Quedlinburg, Gregory V’s German partisans took matters into their own hands. 

Leo of Synada gleefully tells the story: “Now you are going to laugh, a big, broad laugh, my dear heart and soul,” he begins. Philagathos, whom Leo clearly never liked, has fallen:

And why shouldn’t I tell you, brother, openly how he fell? Well, first, the Church of the West dealt him anathema; then his eyes were gouged out; third, his nose, and fourth, his lip, and fifth, that tongue of his which prattled so many and such unspeakable words, one by one, were all cut from his face. Item six: He rode like a conqueror in procession, grave and solemn on a miserable little donkey, hanging on to its tail.… Finally, for his refreshment, they threw him into prison.

I think of this every time someone says the Vikings were brutal.

Pope Gregory V was reinstated, but died of malaria in 999, at the age of 28. Then Emperor Otto III nominated as pope his own tutor, the leading mathematician and astronomer of his age, Gerbert of Aurillac, subject of my book The Abacus and the Cross.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world. And don't forget to enter the raffle for a free, autographed copy of Song of the Vikings. Details are in last week's post or click here.