Monsters and Christian Enemies

Western medieval Christians saw many monsters, both living and imaginary. Although very real to believers, demons and the elusive ‘Monstrous Races' did not really exist; but Jews, Muslims, Mongols, and Black Africans - all deemed 'monstrous' by the Christian majority - actually did. But not every monster was necessarily bad; holy persons and even God himself were sometimes represented as ‘monsters'. Highlighting what these disparate groups had in common from the Christian viewpoint helps explain what being a ‘monster' meant in the later Middle Ages.

The imaginary Monstrous Races, may be defined as malformed, mal-contented and misbehaving creatures believed to inhabit the periphery of the known world, primarily India, Ethiopia, and the far North. The race of Panotii, for example, whose name means ‘all ears' were believed to possess ears so large they could sleep in them. The Cynocephali, or Dogheads, communicated only by barking. The Blemmyai were headless and had their faces on their chests. The Sciopods, although one-legged, were very swift and used their single large feet as parasols.

Much of the lore concerning the Monstrous Races was inherited and expanded during the Middle Ages from classical Greek sources, especially Pliny's Natural History. We know from medieval sources such as the Book of Monsters and the that the Monstrous Races were elusive, either very aggressive or very shy, and often cannibalistic. Their truly unifying feature, however, was their physical abnormality, which may be explained through recourse to various ancient scientific theories, attributable to Hippocrates and Galen, among others. For example, application of climatic theory suggests that the Monstrous Races were physically abnormal owing to the hostile climates they lived in, as harsh environmental conditions were believed to affect physical form in adverse ways. Or, if one follows the implications of classical physiognomical theory, which states that external appearance is a visual manifestation of inner character, the Monstrous Races were malformed owing to their various moral shortcomings.

In fact, it was the ‘Christianisation' of physiognomical theory that inspired many interpretations of the Monstrous Races by medieval moralists, who recognised their potential as effective symbolic vehicles. In collections of moralized tales, such as the Gesta Romanorum and other exempla used in medieval sermons, the particular physical deformity of a given race is interpreted under the assumption that it signified a particular sin or moral shortcoming. For example, the Panotii were said to use their huge ears to hear evil, while barking Dogheads were compared to bad preachers. The Blemmyae, with their heads on their chests, were compared to gluttons; and Pygmies who fought cranes were said to be ‘short' with respect to a good life.

Not all of the Monstrous Races were interpreted as signs of vice; in certain contexts, some were viewed as signs of virtue. Hence, the sheltering foot of the Sciopod was the virtue of love, which allows swift gains in the heavenly kingdom. The sharpshooting Maritimi had one each of his four eyes on God, the world, the devil, and the flesh; in order to live rightly, flee the world, resist the devil, and mortify the flesh.

No roster of medieval monsters would be complete without demons, arguably the most well-developed concept of evil and moral bankruptcy ever devised. Images and descriptions of demons reinforced the medieval Christian belief that once Lucifer was kicked out of heaven for his excessive pride, he transmogrified permanently into the dark and hideous Satan and relentlessly sought revenge for his lost status by seducing and destroying human souls with the aid of his numberless minions.

Like the Monstrous Races, devils were considered aggressive, murderous and malformed, but they were not especially elusive. On the contrary: they were always around and eager to snare the souls of good Christians. The thought of encountering an angry, club-wielding Blemmyae doubtless inspired fear, but being captured by the devil was a much graver threat, as this might well result in eternal torture and suffering in hell.

Such was the threat posed by demons for St Guthlac, according to Felix's eighth-century Life of St Guthlac, as illustrated in the thirteenth-century Guthlac Roll. In an especially harrowing episode, the saint is seized by bestial demons, who torture him and attempt to hurl him into the menacing hellmouth below. The Guthlac Roll artist was clearly inspired by Felix's wonderfully lurid description of demon physiognomy:

For they were ferocious in appearance, terrible in shape with great heads, long necks, thin faces, yellow complexions, filthy beards, shaggy ears, wild foreheads, fierce eyes, foul mouths, horses' teeth, throats vomiting flames, twisted jaws, thick lips, strident voices, singed hair, fat cheeks, pigeon breasts, scabby thighs, knotty knees, crooked legs, swollen ankles, splay feet, spreading mouths, raucous cries. For they grew so terrible to hear with their mighty shriekings that they filled almost the whole intervening space between earth and heaven with their discordant bellowings.

In the image, note the contrast between the grotesque devils with the elegant beauty of St Guthlac and St Bartholomew (who is handing his fellow saint a scourge for self-defence). In many artistic and literary contexts, just as distorted physical form signifies moral corruption, beautiful form signifies divine virtue.

So much for imaginary monsters. What of actual living groups also characterized as ‘monstrous'? Black Africans, or 'Ethiopians', are one such group. Ethiopians were considered one of the Monstrous Races and are described alongside the Blemmyai and Sciopods in medieval sources. The Ethiopians are distinguishable in pictorial imagery by what appear to be the naturalistic physiognomical features of dark skin, tightly curled hair, thick lips, and broad noses. A dark blue Ethiopian shooting an arrow at a white Sciopod in the margins of the thirteenth-century Rutland Psalter gives a good idea of this physical type.

Interestingly, Ethiopians were often idealised as a pious and 'blameless' people in the writings of the ancient Greeks, such as Homer. But in European Christian eyes, Ethiopians were monstrous principally owing to their black skin, which was considered a demonic feature. Black was a colour associated with the evil, sin and the devil especially in patristic writings. For example, in another vivid Christian application of the physiognomical theory, St Jerome stated that Ethiopians will lose their blackness once they are admitted to the New Jerusalem, meaning that their external appearance will change once they become morally perfect.

On a far less spiritual plane, black African physiognomical features were considered ugly by white European Christians, who often compared black people to apes or demons. For example, Marco Polo, writing near the end of the thirteenth-century, had only this to say of the inhabitants of Zanzibar:

They are quite black and go entirely naked except that they cover their private parts. Their hair is so curly that it can scarcely be straightened out with the aid of water. They have big mouths and their noses are so flattened and their lips and eyes so big that they are horrible to look at. Anyone who saw them in another country would say they were devils.

Marco's description points up the fact that in addition to physiognomical strangeness, another characteristic of the monstrous outsider is a lack of civilization, expressed often in pictorial art and narrative descriptions by nudity or scanty dress. Ethiopians, like many of the other Monstrous Races, are often depicted wearing loincloths or less, as a sign of their extreme barbarity.

Another aspect of Ethiopians that condemned them as monstrous was their habitat. During the Middle Ages, Ethiopia was more of an idea than an actual place. It was generally considered a marvellous region whose flora, fauna, and inhabitants were aberrant, strange, and fearful, and was positioned at the edges of the earth on many of the world maps. Ethiopians therefore took on the characteristics of their exotic landscape, especially prior to contact between black Africans and Latin missionaries in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. There were hardly any black Africans living in Europe before the twelfth century, which left Europeans free to formulate the nature of Ethiopians almost entirely in the abstract.

In medieval parlance, the term ‘monster’ was also applied specifically to non-Christians, all of whom shared a common monstrous flaw: the failure to embrace the true Christian faith. So even though they possessed an extremely well-developed set of monotheistic beliefs which provided the infrastructure for Christianity itself, the Jews were viewed as idol-worshipping, demonic pagans, principally owing to the Christian conviction that they were responsible for the death of Christ.

The thirteenth-century Salvin Hours contains typically monstrous portrayals of Jews in a representation of Christ before Caiaphas, the high priest. The Jews are instantly recognisable from their grotesque physiognomy, featuring dark skin, hooked noses, and evil grimaces. Some also wear pointed caps, which in this type of image have pejorative associations.

A representation of the betrayal and flagellation of Christ in the twelfth-century Winchester Psalter emphasizes the depravity and physical ugliness of the Jews. In addition, the Black African physiognomy of one of Christ's tormentors indicates that by this time, Ethiopians functioned as general figures of evil, and found their place in works of art alongside Jews as co-representatives of moral depravity.

The conventional Christian line on the Jews - that as the killers of Christ, all Jews are forever damned - fuelled paranoid accusations of ritual murder, blood libel, and plots to overthrow Christendom made against Jews throughout the later Middle Ages, especially in England, France, and Germany. It also provided useful ideological ammunition for those whose hatred of Jews stemmed from economic conflicts. Many ecclesiastics, kings, and Christian merchants were indebted to and dependent upon Jewish moneylenders for funding important political and social projects, from the building of churches and monasteries to the financing of the Crusades. When the borrowers had to default on their loans, they blamed the Jews for their misfortune, and condemned them as ‘usurers', claiming that to profit from money-lending was a grave sin. This helps to explain why later medieval images of Jews not only represent them as physically ugly but also sometimes show them clutching money-bags.

Pejorative images of Jews abound not only in illuminated manuscripts but also in public art, including monumental sculpture, wall painting, stained glass, and liturgical objects. It may be assumed, therefore, that nearly everyone saw this imagery, which formed part of a much larger literary, political, and theological propaganda campaign designed to discredit both Jews and Judaism. Anti-Jewish sentiment culminated in the actual physical expulsion of the Jews: from England in 1290; from France in 1306, 1322 and 1394; from Spain in 1492; and from many German principalities and towns during the later Middle Ages. Jews were also expelled from Italy towards the end of this period: by the mid-1500s, there were practically no Jews left in western Europe.

The Jews were not the only threat to Christendom. During the period of the Crusades, other groups were also targets of Christian hatred, mainly the Muslims, who opposed the Crusaders' attempts to regain control of the Holy Land. Muslims are referred to as ‘Saracens' in medieval sources. Like the Jews, Saracens were viewed (with equal error) as idol-worshippers, or as heretics. The Prophet Muhammad was declared an agent of Satan, a precursor of Antichrist, or - as Pope Innocent III asserted - Antichrist himself.

The destruction of the Saracens fits conveniently into the larger Christian notion of Holy War, which maintained that knights could redeem their sins and help to bring about the triumph of Christianity by crushing the pagan infidel. Consequently, Saracens are often depicted as pagan devils and monstrous, archenemies of Christendom in works of art and literature, such as the Song of Roland and other chansons de geste. Like the Ethiopians, Saracens are often described as black, and sometimes they are also repellent giants. They typically demonstrate very loose morals and evoke their pagan gods on the battlefield.

A depiction of Saracens warring against Christian knights from a fourteenth-century copy of the Romance of Godefroi again reveals the consistency with which Christian artists portrayed non-Christian enemies with distorted physiognomy and dark skin as a sign of their rejected status. The Saracens in this image are identifiable by their characteristic headbands. Their shields and trappers feature profile Ethiopian heads and wild boars, which to contemporary viewers were equally evocative of wild savagery.

However, not all Saracens were portrayed as ugly and demonic in the chansons de geste. In fact, many Saracens were lauded for their military heroism and even their physical good looks. Tellingly, however, these ‘good’ Saracens inevitably converted at the end, thereby explaining their virtue and beauty as latently Christian. Conversely, however, the ugly, evil, and unconverted ones, were always slain, as a symbol of the ultimate failure of non-Christian religions and perhaps also as aluminous warning to their adherents.

An even more terrifying political enemy were the ‘Tartars', a pejorative term referring to the combined central Asian peoples, especially the Mongols, who overran much of Asia and eastern Europe during the thirteenth-century. The Tartars were dreaded owing to their shocking ruthlessness in war. Slaughtering Christians and Muslims alike, they ranked among the most thoroughly monstrous of contemporary Christian enemies. In his Chronica majora, Matthew Paris gives a vivid, albeit embellished, contemporary account of the Tartar ravages of 1240:

The Tartar chief, with his dinner guests and other (cannibals), fed upon their carcasses as if they were bread and left nothing but the bones for the vultures.. The old and ugly women were given to the cannibals...as their daily allowance of food; those who were beautiful were not eaten, but were suffocated by mobs of ravishers in spite of all their cries and lamentations. Virgins were raped until they died of exhaustion; then their breasts were cut off to be kept as dainties for their chiefs, and their bodies furnished an entertaining banquet for the savages.... (The Tartars) have hard and robust chests, lean and pale faces, rigid and erect shoulders, short and distorted noses; their chins are sharp and prominent, the upper jaw low and deep, the teeth long and few; their eyebrows grow from the hairline to the nose, their eyes are shifty and black, their countenances oblique and fierce, their extremities bony and nervous, their legs thick but short below the knee....

In this passage and in the accompanying image, the Tartars are maligned in the traditional way, as physiognomically distorted, vicious, cannibalistic savages.

As they moved across eastern Europe during the 1240s, the Tartars unleashed such horrors that they became identified with Gog and Magog, the ferocious, monstrous hordes described in the biblical Apocalypse. According to medieval legend, Gog and Magog were locked up by Alexander the Great behind a gate in the Caspian Mountains. But at the end of time, Gog and Magog were expected to burst forth from behind the gate and under the leadership of Antichrist, unleash a mighty attack on all of Christendom.

By the thirteenth century Alexander's Gate functioned as a handy ideological vehicle to enclose not only Gog and Magog, but also contemporary enemies of the Church. In a complex genealogical manoevre, the tradition of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel was merged with the idea of Gog and Magog, from whom it was said that the Tartars themselves claimed descent. Medieval artists had further expanded the concept of Gog and Magog to incorporate even the Monstrous Races. That Gog and Magog, Jews, Tartars, Ethiopians, and other Monstrous Races were all at various times locked up behind Alexander's Gate points up another important element of the medieval view of monsters: the desire to isolate and to contain them.

Not all monsters represented despised enemies of the Church; some actually represented its most sacred membership. One especially impressive example is an image of the Trinity, prefigured in the Old Testament episode of Abraham before the three angels, depicted in a thirteenth-century English psalter. If monstrosity signifies moral degeneracy and evil in medieval thought, then what can we make of this image? On the one hand, a three headed Trinity is a creative means of visualizing the doctrine of the simultaneous unity and separate aspects of the Godhead, as well as the idea of Three Persons of equal rank (although the centre head differentiated by the orange halo does suggest a measure of primacy). But in spite of its conventional theological meaning, this type of image was somewhat problematic precisely because the visual result was monstrous - a bit too closely related to portraits of Cerberus, for example.

Besides the Trinity, other revered Christian figures were represented with monstrous features during the later Middle Ages. For example, according to the eastern version of his legend, St Christopher originally was a Doghead. He was known as Reprobus before his conversion to Christianity, and was identified as a Giant of the Race of Cynocephali. Dogheaded St Christopher portraits are fairly common in Byzantine art, but in the West there is only one known example. But even without his dog head, St Christopher was never entirely dissociated from the Monstrous Races, in that he was almost always depicted as a Giant, often carrying the Christ child across a river. Giants were a very popular Monstrous Race who are characterised in the Old Testament and in later medieval commentaries as wholly evil. How is it, then, that one of the most popular of medieval saints was identified with two known monsters of such bad repute?

Clearly, a broad definition of medieval monstrosity is required in order to accommodate its application to both the holiest of Christian figures and the worst enemies of the Church. Apropos the enemies, most of the written and pictorial sources examined here reveal that a monster is a metaphor for unacceptability. More specifically, in certain contexts, a monster represented the antithesis of the Christians' view of themselves, which means that descriptions and images of the Monstrous Races, demons, Ethiopians, Jews, Muslims, and Tartars clarified by negative example what it meant to be a good Christian. This was done by attributing to the monsters those traits considered most abhorrent to Christians, such as idolatry, savagery, cannibalism, and rejection of Christ. This theory also has a flip-side, which is the possibility that this type of monster, based as it was on a perversion of good Christian values, was also an expression of what could go wrong with the faith. For example, it is possible that the fear of Christian conversion to Judaism or to Islam helped motivate Christian theologians and artists to portray these groups as monstrous and as rejected by God.

Monstrous portrayals of Christian divinities are quite puzzling given that monstrosity was such a familiar way of characterizing non-Christian outcasts. But the fact that the holiest of figures are sometimes rendered as monsters casts doubt on the notion that monstrosity is necessarily a negative state. That is, it is clear that some of the same visual signs used to denote monstrosity in a negative sense can also be used to convey notions of virtue or even divinity. In these cases, the monster must be considered something positive, a visual metaphor for holiness. This theory might explain the portrayals of a Giant or dog-headed St Christopher, or of a three-headed Trinity. In the latter case, monstrosity is also a way of signalling the entirely different substance of God himself. During the later Middle Ages, other monstrous depictions of holy figures may be observed, such as St John the Baptist ‘wildmen' and Ethiopian magi or priests. That monstrous features can be signs of divinity accords very well with the strain of medieval moralisation that interprets the physical abnormalities of the Monstrous Races as signs of virtues rather than vices. In the end, investigating the problem of monstrosity highlights what is perhaps the only consistent feature of symbology in medieval art and literature: its inconsistency, and it also underscores the medieval love of the duality believed to be inherent in any given idea.

Dr Debra Higgs Strickland is Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh.