It also earned him brownie points with the Church, which had been actively encouraging colonialist crusades since Pope Nicholas V’s 1452 bull Dum Diversas first exhorted the kings of Spain and Portugal to “invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property [...] and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery.”

To commemorate these glorious victories, four monumental tapestries, each measuring 12 by 36 feet, were commissioned from Flemish weavers in Tournai, Belgium. Begun just a few years after the battles, Landing at Asilah, Siege of Asilah, Assault on Asilah and The Conquest of Tangier were woven from the finest wool and silk and depict the Portuguese conquest as the epitome of chivalric heroism.

Probably produced under the direction of Passchier Grenier, tapestry merchant, Tournai (Belgium), 1470s, Landing at Asilah, 1475-1500, wool and silk, 144-7/8 x 436-1/4 in., Diocese of Sigüenza-Guadalajara and Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, Pastrana, Spain. © Fundación Carlos de Amberes. Photograph by Paul M.R. Maeyaert.

Their advanced age, immense size, intense colors and riot of details would make these tapestries rare and marvelous by any standard, but they are also some of the earliest tapestries to depict a contemporary event instead of the allegorical, mythological and religious subjects covered by the vast majority of Gothic tapestry.

Probably produced under the direction of Passchier Grenier, tapestry merchant, Tournai (Belgium), 1470s, Siege of Asilah, 1475-1500, wool and silk, 168-1/2 x 424-7/16 in., Diocese of Sigüenza-Guadalajara and Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, Pastrana, Spain. © Fundación Carlos de Amberes. Photograph by Paul M.R. Maeyaert.

The Flemish weavers, amazing geniuses though they obviously were, weren’t so clear on what North African cities and people looked like, so Asilah and Tangier look remarkably like North European cities, complete with flora that are characteristic filler material in Tournai weavings. They were familiar with the Portuguese, however, so Afonso’s forces are depicted in accurate detail, leaving us an incredibly rare encyclopedic visual record of 15th century military regalia.

Probably produced under the direction of Passchier Grenier, tapestry merchant, Tournai (Belgium), 1470s, Assault on Asilah, 1475-1500, wool and silk, 145-1/4 x 432-11/16 in., Diocese of Sigüenza-Guadalajara and Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, Pastrana, Spain. © Fundación Carlos de Amberes. Photograph by Paul M.R. Maeyaert.

All of this beauty might have been lost along with so many other Portuguese treasures during the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the tsunami and fires that devastated the area in its aftermath. What saved the Pastrana tapestries is what gives them their name: by the time of the earthquake, the tapestries were kept in a parish church in Pastrana, Spain. We don’t know exactly how they got there, but one prominent theory is that they were given to Philip II of Spain in the late 16th century during the period of Iberian Union, when the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal were joined under Philip’s sole rule.

Probably produced under the direction of Passchier Grenier, tapestry merchant, Tournai (Belgium), 1470s, The Conquest of Tangier, 1475-1500, wool and silk, 157-1/2 x 426 in., Diocese of Sigüenza-Guadalajara and Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, Pastrana, Spain. © Fundación Carlos de Amberes. Photograph by Paul M.R. Maeyaert.

In the remote Church of Our Lady of the Assumption at Pastrana, the tapestries remained safe for centuries. They were only removed briefly during the Spanish Civil War to keep them from danger. Still, after hundreds of years, the tapestries were caked with dirt, snacked on by moths, faded from light damage and from the natural deterioration of the dyes. In 2008, a number of organizations worked together with the Fundación Carlos de Amberes to raise money for a complete conservation of the tapestries.

All four tapestries were sent to Belgium, their land of origin, to be conserved by the experts at the Royal Manufacturers De Wit in Mechlin. By all accounts they did a stupendous job. The conservation of the tapestries received a 2011 Europa Nostra Award.

Thus restored to their former splendor, the tapestries have been traveling since 2010. Brussels, Lisbon, Toledo and Madrid got to see them first; then they went overseas to the United States. The exhibit, The Invention of Glory: Afonso V and the Pastrana Tapestries, first stopped at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. from September 18, 2011 through January 8, 2012. The tapestries are now at the Meadows Museum in Dallas until May 13, 2012. Then they move on to the San Diego Museum of Art from June 10 to September 9, and lastly to the Indianapolis Museum of Art from October 5 to January 6, 2013.

The National Gallery of Art website has a pdf version of the exhibition wall panels which explain the overall action in each tapestry and pull out some salient details.

This particular barn design, a long nave with a high roof supported by rows of posts, requires a great many internal braces to ensure the wind doesn’t knock it down. Those exposed buttresses and the central nave with side aisles and bays give the structure a cathedral-like look, and in fact the construction techniques required to build this barn were also used in the building of cathedrals at that time. It’s likely that Master Kypping’s crew included experienced cathedral builders. No wonder, then, that Poet Laureate and passionate historical preservation advocate Sir John Betjeman dubbed Harmondsworth Great Barn the “Cathedral of Middlesex.”

The building used to be even bigger, but a north wing was demolished in 1774. It had a close encounter with a German bomb during World War II, but survived with just a few roof tiles askew. The barn was granted Grade I listed building status — the same grade as Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament — in 1950, and then designated a Scheduled Ancient Monument on top of that. It continued to be used for agricultural purposes until the 1970s when the encroaching sprawl of London made it the only Medieval barn in the area to survive its absorption into the west London suburbs.

In 1986, the barn was purchased by property developers the John Wiltshier Group who planned a full restoration. When the John Wiltshier Group went into receivership in 2006, the receiver offered the barn to the National Trust, English Heritage and Hillingdon Council for a token £1, but amazingly all three declined to purchase, probably intimidated by the daunting process of dealing with a Scheduled Ancient Monument (every change, even necessary repairs to a leaking roof, say, requires a literal act of Parliament) and the large sums of money they’ve had to spend every year to maintain such venerable carpentry.

Instead, in 2006 a shady anonymous offshore trust registered in Gibraltar and named Harmondsworth Barn Ltd. purchased the barn for £1 and proceeded to do nothing at all to it. They let it rot and closed it to the public except for one open weekend a year. English Heritage wrote them increasingly concerned letters about the condition of the barn, even going so far as to offer them grants to help fund necessary repairs. Harmondsworth Barn Ltd. didn’t respond. It seems their sole interest in the property was how a proposed expansion of Heathrow Airport would bring a new runway just yards away from the barn. If the Heathrow build had gone through and the barn had been damaged or demolished, then the owners would have been due compensation.

The airport expansion plans were abandoned. Obviously the “investors” didn’t exactly spend big money to buy the property and they certainly had no interest in spending the tens of thousands of pounds a year required just to keep a 15th century barn from falling apart. Finally last year English Heritage got the barn delisted as a Scheduled Ancient Monument smoothing the way for them to step in and save the day. Those dirty offshore rats actually had the testes to protest the delisting because they preferred to keep their £1 investment in a state of increasing decay.

English Heritage immediately spent £30,000 on emergency repairs, primarily to the roof which had holes in it from slipped and broken tiles. They also did some repair work to the weatherboard siding, most of which is also original, a very rare thing for barn siding.

Once the worst holes were plugged, EH took Harmondsworth Barn Ltd. to court to recover the public moneys they were forced to spend. Again the offshore corporation protested and rejected any attempts to settle out of court. Almost a year later, a settlement has been reached: English Heritage pays £20,000 to Harmondsworth Barn Ltd. and becomes the new owner.

Last week, English Heritage, which sees the purchase of the Great Barn as a welcome victory after a long series of drastic cuts in its budget, told the Independent that the building is “a supreme example of late-medieval craftsmanship – a masterpiece of carpentry containing one of the best and most intact interiors of its age and type in all of Europe”.

English Heritage will be handing over the running of Harmondsworth’s Great Barn to members of local campaign group The Friends of the Great Barn at Harmondsworth. It is expected to be open to the public from this April.

I can’t help but resent that those land speculator groinpulls managed to convert their single pound into 20,000 despite their shameless and deliberate neglect of the place. I bet English Heritage wishes they’d fished through their couch cushions for that pound back in 2006.

University of Cambridge researcher Dr. Britt Baillie has a new theory on who they might have been. Based on further analysis of the bones and on documentary research, Dr. Baillie posits that these Vikings were an elite force of mercenaries executed not by Saxons, but by other Viking mercenaries, perhaps even at the behest of English King Aethelred the Unready.

Mass executions from the medieval period are not common finds, and there have been several other discovered from Aethelred’s reign. Aethelred had been paying tribute (the Danegeld) to Danish kings since they defeated his forces at the Battle of Maldon in 991. The Viking raids didn’t stop, though, and by 1002, Aethelred was sick of it. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the king’s councilors told him the Danes would kill them all and steal his kingdom so he ordered all Danes in England be slain on St. Brice’s Day, November 13, 1002. The St. Brice’s Day Massacre, as it would become known, saw Anglo-Saxon mobs tear through their communities, killing Danish settlers.

The Dorset mass grave, however, was not the work of a mob. It was a deliberate execution and decapitation only of men of fighting age, and most interestingly for Dr. Baillie, these men weren’t decapitated by a blade to the back of the neck. They were decapitated from the front, just like the captured warriors in the Saga of the Jomsvikings, an Icelandic saga about a quasi-legendary fighting force of Viking mercenaries who were reputedly the fiercest of all Viking warriors.

The captured Jomsviking in the saga is glad to make sweet love to death’s steely blade, but only face to face. “I am content to die as are all our comrades. But I will not let myself be slaughtered like a sheep. I would rather face the blow. Strike straight at my face and watch carefully if I pale at all.”

While historians will probably never agree conclusively about who the men were, Baillie’s analysis draws her to the conclusion that they may have been Viking mercenaries who modelled themselves on, or behaved in a similar way to the legendary Jomsvikings – a brotherhood of elite killers whose strict military code involved never showing fear, and never fleeing in the face of the enemy unless totally outnumbered.

Allegedly founded by Harald Bluetooth, the Jomsvikings are thought to have been based at a stronghold called Jomsborg on the Baltic coast. At a time when Vikings were feared across Europe, they were known as perhaps the fiercest of them all – a reputation which even earned them their own saga.

“The legends and stories of the Jomsvikings travelled around the medieval world and would almost certainly have been indicative of some of the practices of other bands of mercenaries or may even have been imitated by other groups,” Baillie said.

One of the victims had filed teeth, a rare Scandinavian practice which might have been an indication of high status or a way to look extra scary while making a war face.

So even if the Dorset Vikings weren’t Jomsvikings, they may have been modelling themselves after them, and their executioners apparently respected that, hence the theory that they were Vikings as well. Since Aethelred was in the practice of pitting different bands of Danes against each other, even ones he had hired himself, that’s certainly plausible.

The discovery of the grave and analyses of the human remains are documented in a National Geographic special that aired in the US in December. It was luridly titled Viking Apocalypse for the sensation of it, I suppose, but despite that and the tedious shouty reenactments, it was actually fairly science-heavy. Sadly there’s no video available on the website any more, but the show is still airing in the UK. You can catch it next on Sunday, January 29 at 7:00P.M.

Here’s a short clip from the beginning of the show with some excellent footage of the mass grave.

One letter, known as the Safe Conduct or the Wallace Letter, was written on November 7th, 1300 by King Philip IV of France to his representatives in Rome. Wallace had left Scotland for France in the fall of 1298 after his defeat at the Battle of Falkirk and his resignation as Guardian of Scotland in favour of Robert the Bruce. Written in Latin, the letter commands that the King’s ambassadors ask Pope Boniface VIII to agree to Wallace’s requests.

Here’s a translation of the letter:

Philip by the grace of God, king of the French, to his beloved and loyal people appointed at the Roman Court, greetings and favour. We command you that you ask the Supreme Pontiff to consider with favour our beloved William le Walois of Scotland, knight, with regard to those things which concern him that he has to expedite. Dated at Pierrefonds on the Monday after the feast of All Saints [7 November 1300]. [Endorsed]: Fourth letter of the King of France.

So it’s not really a safe conduct so much as a King asking a third party to support his ally. The reason it’s called the Safe Conduct is that English records note that Wallace was carrying three safe conducts when he was arrested, one from the King of France, one from the King of Norway and one from the King of Scotland. It was last referred to in an inventory of English records in 1323, then faded in the mists of time until the letter was discovered in the Tower of London in 1820.

We can’t know with certainty that this document is the French safe conduct taken from William Wallace after his arrest. It could have been intercepted by spies, for instance. However, the letter does indicate that Wallace was going to appeal to the Pope in person so it makes sense that he would have carried it on him rather than Philip sending it directly, and given that it was found in the Tower, it makes sense that it was confiscated from one the Tower’s most famous residents.

The second letter is known as the Lübeck Letter and is the only surviving document we have that was written by William Wallace himself. Attached to this letter is also the only surviving example of Wallace’s personal seal. It has a Scottish Lion rampant on the front and a strung bow with arrow on the reverse.

After Scottish forces led by William Wallace and his northern ally Andrew de Mornay (aka Andrew Murray) won the Battle of Stirling Bridge on September 11, 1297, Wallace wasted no time trying to get the Scottish economy back on track. The British had captured Scottish ports the year before and severely curtailed trade. Exactly a month after Stirling Bridge, Wallace felt secure enough to write to the Hanseatic League towns of Hamburg and Lübeck alerting them that Scotland’s ports were open for business again. (Mornay was mortally wounded at Stirling Bridge, although it appears he lived for a short time afterwards and Wallace continued to include his name in correspondence until his death.)

Andrew Moray and William Wallace, leaders of the army of the Kingdom of Scotland and the Community, to their worthy and beloved friends, the Mayors and citizens of Lübeck and Hamburg, greeting. We have been told by trustworthy merchants of the Kingdom of Scotland that you are giving help and favour in all business concerning us and our merchants for which we thank you. We ask that it be made known among your merchants that they will now have safe access to all ports in the Kingdom of Scotland, since Scotland, blessed be God, has been rescued from the power of the English by force of arms. Given at Haddington in Scotland, on the 11th day of October in the year of grace one thousand two hundred and ninety seven.

The Hamburg letter was destroyed in World War II. The Lübeck Letter survived secreted away in a Hanseatic League archive in a Lübeck museum. It is now kept in the National Archives of Lübeck who have loaned it to Scotland for the exhibit.

The Scottish government has long yearned for both letters. Members of Parliament have requested that the National Archives in Kew and Lübeck donate the letters to Scotland. That hasn’t happened, although Kew has agreed to a long-term loan of the Safe Conduct letter. Since both documents are extremely fragile, they will be exhibited for a short time only. The exhibition is free and will be open from August 10 to August 31, 2012 in the Scottish Parliament Building’s Main Hall.

Pope Innocent VIII’s Summis desiderantes affectibus bull of 1484 specifically singles out Germany as a nest of Satanic witchcraft, rife with impotence, sores, and both human and livestock abortions.

It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without afflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships, territories, districts, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Tréves, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother’s womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pasture-land, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage the Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very many.

Innocent further laments that the Inquisitors he has dispatched to address the dire state of German souls, two Dominican theology professors named Henry Kramer and James Sprenger, are being prevented from doing their holy duty by local clergy and power brokers who insist against all evidence that their towns are free of the stain of witchcraft and thus the Inquisitors have no legal right to ply their trade.

In fact, Kramer and Sprenger had been kicked out of the Tyrol earlier that year where the local bishop called Kramer a senile old man. The bull insists that Kramer and Sprenger be given every power their black hearts desire and that every knee shall bend or else face excommunication/the interdict.

Two years later in 1486, Kramer and Sprenger wrote the Malleus Maleficarum (the Hammer of Witches), a book detailing how to identify witches, counter their magic and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. The text of Innocent’s bull was published as the preface.

Now retired Protestant minister and witch trial expert Hartmut Hegeler is reclaiming that early tradition of running witch hunters out of town. He and a group of history buffs/activists are working with municipal governments to posthumously exonerate the witches who were unjustly put to death. So far they have succeeded in getting eight cities to absolve convicted witches of whatever they were accused of, and the trend is picking up steam. Five of the eight cities exonerated their witches just this year and people are reaching out to Hegeler from cities all over the country.

Recently he has been in contact with Green Party officials in the Rhineland town of Rheinbach, where they have reportedly proposed the rehabilitation of 130 witches who were burned at the stake in the area around 1631. The city plans to address the motion next week, according to regional daily Express. But no particular party claims ownership to the cause, and inquiries and support have come from officials across the German political spectrum, Hegeler says.

Early this month, Hegeler also filed a request with the city of Cologne to rehabilitate Katharina Henoth, who was strangled and burned at the stake there in 1627 for allegedly causing a plague of caterpillars at a monastery. He has also contacted the office of Cardinal Joachim Meisner, the archbishop of Cologne, in hopes that the Catholic Church too might make a public statement to acknowledge the unjust execution. While city and municipal courts were generally responsible for witch trials, church forces often spurred their progress, Hegeler says.

There are some towns that refuse to engage the issue. The town of Aachen recently rejected an exoneration request for a 13-year-old girl who was executed for witchcraft in 1649. Another city, Büdingen, said they had bigger fish to fry too, although word on the street is they didn’t want to piss off a local noble family which was deeply involved in the witch trials and still has enough local influence to ensure the town does not delve into their witch blood-stained past.

Four of the largest witch trials were held in Germany — Trier (1581–1593), Fulda (1603–1606), Würzburg (1626–1631) and Bamberg (1626–1631). Three hundred and sixty-eight people were killed at Trier, the largest mass execution in peacetime Europe. Between 300 and 600 died in Bamberg. I think Hegeler should work on the big ones instead of going witch by witch. A little reverse mass hysteria, if you will. Edit: He is working on the big ones! Hegeler has been tirelessly advocating that cities including Bamberg exonerate the victims of witchcraft trials.

Read more about Hartmut Hegeler’s witch exoneration efforts in this pdf file he has compiled.