The Humanisation of Nature in the

To paraphrase the creators of the term ‘Middle Ages’we could place it , as regards the man- nature relationship betweeen the ancient, supersticious worship of nature and the modern, lay one of technological advance. Two beliefs which- in the ‘middle’ centuries- overlap and intertwine with a third one, typically medieval: the worship of God as maker of nature.

Marvellous nature

Animism is an inheritance which Middle Age men receive in different degrees depending on their previous level of Romanisation and the transition circunstances both from pre-historic cultures and Roman paganism. It consists in endowing life to natural objects- inanimate we would call them- and, in particular, spiritual life starting with the soul of things³, either organic or inorganic, up to the powerful deities of the pantheon in Rome.

In the 6th century, Martín de Dumio writes, in Swabian Galicia, De correctione rusticorum, ‘for the amendment of peasants who still⁴ persist on the ancient superstition of paganity, worshipping demons instead of God’⁵. He denounces that men after forsaking God ‘some adored the sun, some the moon or the stars, others the fire, undergound waters or watersprings in the belief that all these things had not been created by God for men to use but had been born out of themselves , and they were Gods’. More precisely, he adds, [they adored] devils , angels expelled from Heaven, who demanded sacrifices ‘ in the high woodlands and the thick forests, some by the names of Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Neptune, Nymphs y Dianas⁶. Mixing the primitive surperstitions with the pagan Roman beliefs (both animisms come up against Christianisation in the High Midlle Ages) Martín de Dumio insists on claiming that the devil is worshipped by ‘lighting candles by the stones, the trees, the wellheads and at crossroads. . . ., by adorning tables and putting laurel branches’ or by paying attention, thus renouncing to the sign of the cross, ‘to other signs of the devil by the mediation of birds, sneezes and many other things’⁷.

Roman pantheism survived in the Medieval West in the names of the days of the week⁸, the exception being precisely the case of Portugal, the adoptive land of the Bishop of Dumio (Braga, the ancient bracarense Galicia), and to an even greater extent, survived the ancient superstitions across the Middle Ages⁹ -despite the medieval rationalism of the 12th century -and even of the Renaissance¹⁰ élites¹¹-.

The Fall of the Roman Empire results in the recovery of Germanic or pre-Roman religions and the upsurge of magic, astrology and alchemy. Prodigies, premonitions by means of signs in the sky and and other signs of nature are widespread in medieval chronicles from Idacio¹² to Carlos V¹³ .In some specific instances these signs orient the human actions of both ‘ grandees’ and ‘commoners’. For ancient animism, nature is sacred. For medieval animism, the Christianised, synthetic nature is not to be considered sacred in itself but as creation and representation of a higher power, the divine power. It remains, however, marvellous, subject to prodigies ,a ‘deposit of symbols’¹⁴.

Medieval Christianism has swung from a complete opposition to magic culture to the adaptation and compromise,which will finally impose. The former is the (official) line held by Martín de Dumio¹⁵, which is frequently quoted in medieval synods¹⁶ and opuscules against all-time superstitions¹⁷.But the real church had little trouble in subtly but firmly adjusting to popular religious practices: blessing the sacred places of pre-Christian religions¹⁸; vying for the control of commonly admitted natural prodigies¹⁹; dividing, in short, supersticious rituals into good and bad, legitimate and ilegimitate²⁰, white and black magic, depending on who the intermediary was , either the Church or pagan sorcerers and astrologists.

The victory of the Church over magic and superstition demanded that it should take over their functions ‘Everything that can be naturally done is done by God’ writes a legislator in the 12th century and by the same token ‘God can make the dead alive’ which is known as ‘miracle, because when it occurs it is something astonishing for men and people’ because it is not natural ‘ as people see every day the deeds of nature and thus when something is done that goes against it, they are astonished’. ‘Miracle is something we behold but whose origin we ignore. That this is what the common people understand’. But it is different for the élites : ‘ Wise and learned men, however, know very well that whatever nature or the intelligence of man cannot perfom can only come from God and not from other’²¹.To summarise, the Church appropiates the extraordinary, miraculous phenomena of nature, competing with wizards and devils, when it considers it suitable as evidence of the power of God. It accepts therefore, a marvellous nature of divine origin but never a self-sufficient, god-like nature.

Medieval religiosity is therefore a consequence of the syncretism between the Catholic Church and a culture of ancient surperstitions,which not only existed among popular classes. It will not be until the Ancien Régime when elitist culture and popular culture come apart, the latter becoming the only refuge for animism and other superstitions²².

The Middle Ages shares with pre-Christian cultures the understanding of man as inseparable from his natural environment²³, or in other words, the failure to distinguish between subject-man and object-nature, considering nature as a subject. It will not be until modernity that we will come across the ( external) view of nature as a landscape which delights our senses. Since humans belong in this landscape like the rivers and the rocks, it is not strange that we endow natural elements with characteristics of living beings, and even with supernatural characteristics. This makes any action against nature a sin²⁴. The reason why nature is protected in civilisations based on harvesting or in subsistence husbandry is to be found in the deeply-rooted, automatic and conservative drives implicit in a mentality which considers as kin ( mother, father, brother) all the beings that share nature ²⁵ with men .

The mystic of spiritualist poverty of Franciscans in the Middle Ages provides continuity and new muscle among the élites to that Christian animism which ,at the same time, is fought by scholastic rationalism, the hallmark of the new social system and the feudal culture, the crisis of which corresponds with the heyday in the 14th and 15th centuries of mendicant orders and their ‘heretic’conception of nature.

In the Cántico de las criaturas, Francis of Assisi calls the sun, the moon, the stars, the wind, the water and the fire bothers and mother to the earth ‘ which breeds and holds and governs us and yields us fruits such as colourful flowers and herbs’ ²⁶. His biographer, Tomás de Celano, assures that Saint Francis ‘ also blamed himself for the negligence of having up to then ignored the fowls in his preaching’ and proving a conservationist of the creatures of the Lord, ‘ to the brothers who collected wood he forbids to cut the whole tree, so that it might sprout again’²⁷.

Franciscan animism goes from the medieval view of nature as ‘deposit of symbols’ to acknowledging it as a set of natural realities alive to such an extent that they need preaching to be saved, like their brother-men ( thus going further than the Old and the New Testament ²⁸). Unlike primitive religions, Franciscanism ( radical nominalism) does not make the Pantheist mistake of confusing God and the world²⁹. Natural beings as living subjects, gifted with knowledge, are also present in lay literature³⁰ and, of course, in popular culture - the main target of the Franciscan message of return to evangelic poverty.

Dominated nature

The medieval heyday is also the zenit of the social and cultural influence of the Church, which plays a decisive role in the shaping of feudal mentalities. The three- order system (defenders, prayers and labourers) regulates the relationships among classes and social groups, together with a new man-nature relationship which replaces the worship of nature by the worship of God, thus favouring the development of agriculture and, consequently, upholding the three-functional system in an attempt - incidentally not very successful- to push animism into the margins of the traditions mentality, oblivious to the appearance of Christianism and Feudalism.

Thomas Aquinas gave validity and difussion to the philosophical mutation inherent to Christianism when he places God not as organiser or regulator of the world but as its creator³¹. God becomes, consequently, an absolute value whereas nature becomes a relative value ³², and an antromorphic value for that matter. God creates man in his own image: He explicitly places man at the centre of the natural universe, created to dominate the animals ³³. In such a way that, without separating man from nature, micro and macro cosmos, Christianism introduces an imbalance in relationships - parallel and intertwined with that derived from the three-functional system , which breaks with the traditional animist egalitarianism which, as we have seen, will be later circunstancially recovered by Franciscanism. A necessary imbalance so that man to dominates nature through technology ( and not through magic or astrology). It is not by chance that scholastics - the relative desacralisation of nature by means of Thomist Rationalism- coincides with the ploughing surge and the expansion of cities at the height of the Middle Ages . Yet, labour is still- in the collective mind- the penance deserved because of the original sin³⁴.

Medieval Europe inherits from Greeks and Romans the notion of ‘egalitarian natural state’ golden age when all men were equal and it was not necessary to work (it was enough with reaping): ‘ Earth herself without disturbance or action of the hoe, without being wounded by the plough, yielded everything for free’ (Ovid)³⁵. From this state of innocence, identified in the Bible with the Garden of Eden, we proceed- because of the original sin - to the state of ‘fallen or corrupted nature’ ( Saint Bonaventure) where animals are divided into ‘ burden beasts and livestock’ to provide mankind with food, clothing and entertainment and ‘ wild, damaging beasts’ to punish, keep alert , defy or teach man³⁶. In both cases beasts serve man according to divine design, and if some of them are hostile it is because they belong to the fallen nature ( like man): they have rebelled against man, after the latter had rebelled against God.

Economic historians have underscored the ocupation of land during the central centuries of the Middle Ages as a key phenomenon in history , only comparable to the neolitic revolution as a sucessful victory in taking over the natural environment which brought about the retreat of the woodlands , the taming of beasts and the dominance of space ( road links)³⁷. It is thanks to the technical advances that take place in the Middle Ages that Europe will later conquer technological leadership, which, among other things, will enable maritime expansion from the 16th century onwards³⁸. This technological expansion, which not all authors assess correctly, is related to a change in attitude towards manual work ( promoted from the 6th century onwards by the Benedictine Order) and nature, where the appropiately reminded divine mandate of dominating nature so as to feed and clothe mankind is complied with. However, we should not take the argument too far because medieval tools are not able to fully substitute human muscular strength yet. They are merely an accompaniment³⁹.

Werstern farming landscape is undoubtly the ultimate consequence of the Middle Ages⁴⁰, which nevertheless, has not broken the essential ecological equilibrium because of technical shortcomings - we are far from the great commercial and industrial revolution - and what is more important - far from the mentality of a time characterised by a natural law and economy, and by an all-powerful church which perfectly fulfils its social and ideological function , desacralises nature so that man may work it but which does not fail to sanctify the inexplicable, extraordinary and marvellous natural phenomena, cleverly combining reason and faith, elitist and popular culture.

The leap from the hermit monk to the resettling monk takes place within a system of natural economy. It is highly significative that subsistance economy, which produces for consumption, is described as ‘ natural’, although medieval ecomony was acquainted with craftmanship,commerce and the city while remanining essentially rural and self-sufficient in character. The natural economy has evident limitations as regards the domination and degradation of nature, which will be irreversible when the land and its products become goods and machines substitute muscular strength. As long as this does not happen, man lives in ( relative but enough) harmony with his environment . The more technology and commerce advance and man’s dependance on nature decreases, the more aggressions against it will take place.

The medieval man does not mingle with nature like in primitive societies, nor does he confront it as in modern and contemporary societies, but he mantains his non-differentiation from the natural environment⁴¹. It is for this reason that the medieval man calls ‘ natural law’ to the basic legal rules that regulate his life in society. Natural law rules for men and animals; is an eternal law and a natural instinct ; is above the rights of people, the positive law and the laws that men dictate for themselves, because it comes from God and follows man’s leaning towards goodness ‘ to natural law belong all provisions which contribute to preserving the life of man’(Saint Thomas)⁴². Let’s compare this with what major 19th rationalists propose: ‘ Human sociability does not come from nature nor consequently from God but from a free social pact of individuals and this is its effective cause’⁴³

Feudalism is - as we have already noted - an ecologic form of production : it is able of making nature the object of its technological action and at the same time of seeing and feeling it as the subject of its economy, its law and its religion. What for a modern mind strikes as contradictory for the medieval man - cultivated or not, is perfectly coherent: he marvels at nature while he ‘wounds’ it with the plough; fears the woodlands and the wild beasts while befriending burden and hunting animals; exercises his free will while abiding by the natural law. In all this, he follows, to conclude, the Biblical discourse recovered, updated and spread by scholastics in accordance with their time.

Hostile nature

In the same way that the harmonic replication of the three-functional system implies inequality (workers), sin (prayers) and violence (defenders), the new medieval relationship with nature demands- if it is to work out correctly: inequality (man/nature), sin (corrupted nature) and, of course, violence. Both the violence which the hostile nature exerts against man and that which man exerts against the natural environment. By regulating how ‘ people may conquer the land by force... when it should not be possible through expertise or skill", the legislator equals the violence of man over nature with the violence of man over man, and both are called ‘war’⁴⁴: a) "they should have the resolution to defeat things by force and strength either when breaking huge rocks or boring great mountains or levelling out the high places and raising the low ones, or by killing the wild beasts ... hence such a conflict is called war’; b) "and if this they must accomplish, against all these aforesaid things they have to struggle, much more so against men when they were their foes ... by coveting their lands or by spoiling them’⁴⁵. It amounts to saying that if man must force nature to humanise it ‘ much more so’ he should prove violent against other men to ‘protect what it is his’ and ‘conquer that of his foes’⁴⁶: in the first case to dominate the land, in the second to defend it. This medieval approach to human life as a constant struggle- both internally and externally - to control nature makes quotidian and non-contradictory both the violence which man exerts over nature and the violence which nature exerts over man : a hostile nature is therefore a necessary factor for the balance of medieval life and mentality.

Middle Ages historians polarise their assessment on the man/ nature relationship depending on their field of work: economy historians stress how man manages to dominate nature (Fourquin, White, Fossier⁴⁷), and the historians of mentalities speak rather of how nature subdues man out of his lack of technical implements to master it (Bloch⁴⁸, Le Goff⁴⁹, Fumagalli⁵⁰, the exception being Delort⁵¹). Obviously there are empirical data that support both readings, coertion works both ways. Although the medieval innovation does not lie in the hostility of nature, apparent in preceding societies, notably in the most primitive , but in the power that man adquires over his environment at the height of the Middle Ages. A global approach should be able to account for the ostensible imbalance between a primitive mentality and a relatively advanced economy.

The hostility of nature is a consequence of its active function as subject and previous requirement for its humanisation. If nature offered its fruits without struggle what sense would human labour make? Does not the fear caused by the wild unknown imply a kind of protection against human violence ? Does not the very fear caused by the earthly powers unleashed lead man to the lord that unleashes them, remaining faithful to a God who rewards the fair with the fruits of the earth and punishes the unfair with plagues⁵²? To be sure, other hidden powers, gods or devils, control- according to popular belief - the natural powers, but under no circunstances do they contemplate the medieval notion of work ( consequence of sin ) and the medieval notion of reason ( ultimately conditioned by God).

Official medieval Christanism places on man the main responsibility of confronting nature, leaving for supernatural powers ( God and the saints) the control over the extraordinary, inexplicable and marvellous nature, ( for the human knowledge of the time). What man does not dominate through his effort, skills or the medieval science, he does it by means of a monotheist, syncretic and anthropomorphic religion.

The second way, therefore, to humanise the medieval nature, corrupted by the sin of man, is by remembering that God has made man the centre of the world .

Genealogist Aponte tells, at the beginning of the 16th century of a 15th century feudal nobleman from Galicia (Pedro Álvarez de Soutomaior, "Pedro Madruga"): ‘He was one of the most uncomplaining labourers in the whole of Spain because were it raining, snowing, freezing or were there the worst blizzard ever, he would not fail to do what should be done’⁵³. Another gentleman, however, Álvaro Pérez de Moscoso, not so likeable for the author, is the protagonist of a very different story with thirty armed men: they sought to steal the treasure of Coruxa Cave but they ‘took so much fright’ of some birds that attacked them and of a river that ran through the cave that they stepped back and the ‘ poisonous air’⁵⁴ brought their deaths within a year⁵⁵. Depending on the subject of action , a hard-working gentleman in the first case and nature zelaous of its treasures ( superstitious fears protects it ) on the second case, so is the resultant of the action : dominated or dominating nature.

The great revolution that takes place in the 11th -13th centuries as regards man - nature relationship consists in imposing a double direction : nature acts on human society , like in the ancient and Roman world but at the same time - and here lies the first innovation - human society acts on nature both directly ( technology) and indirectly ( clerics instead of wizards: second innovation) without destroying the ecologic equilibrium (third innovation as opposed to postmedieval world⁵⁶). In other words, we are before a double subject : humanity and natura , which since they are inseparable are bound to take turns in the action of fighting each other : man invokes providence when he finds himself in a weak position (great disasters ). So as to make this double, alternating (object/subject) role of mankind possible, the Church introduces two practical and / or theological innovations when it updates its message, which coexist in the medieval minds, but which are hardly understable for the modern rationalist: scholastic rationality in high circles ( savante culture ) and white magic in low circles (popular culture), although any high/low distinction in practical terms should be seriously qualified.

The double approach to nature which derives from medieval sources, both malleable and fearsome, baffles the contemporary observer, the professional historian included . One more medieval paradox . These ostensible contradictions are not such if we place them in their concrete context, if we delve into our analysis and stay away from anachronisms.

Let us look at the double use that the medieval man makes of nature, ambivalent but not ambiguous in four concrete cases ( woodlands, animals, storms and Black Death) depending on the subject of action ( man/nature) and on the means of action ( reason / magic).

The forest played a most relevant role in the Middle Ages : it encompassed everything . Fundamental in husbandry as provider of fuel ( wood) , as pastureland (swine) and of noblemen’s entertainment ( hunting) and religious life ( ermits and monasteries), it suffers the action of agriculture in the central centuries of the Middle Ages, the ploughing- robbing it of a territory which to a certain extent recovers in the Late Middle Ages crisis⁵⁷. The medieval man transforms the woodland into a familiar, frequented place⁵⁸. The image of the forest offered by the sources is, however, that of a feared place inhabited by bandits, beasts and wizards, linked with darkness and home of the fierce wolf. Bloch y Le Goff highlighted this two-faced medieval forest both repulsive and desirable⁵⁹, something which certainly applies to the medieval nature as a whole.

Two-faced view, which strangely enough, in the case of animals is triple. On the one hand we have those animals which useful for men, like oxen, horses and lambs. They have positive connotations⁶⁰. They are necessary for work, war or hunting. And on the other hand wild beasts, representing the anti-human side of nature which has rebelled against the sinner. The former -like men- abide by natural law and their taming bears witness to the dominance of mankind over nature, although it is not this what the sources of the time stress. They portray animals mainly as a threat⁶¹, ‘wild animals’ which must be killed - especially wolves, the hallmark of the Middle Ages because of their number, strength and contact with men⁶². Yet , they seldom symbolise the devil.

The clash between man and wolf steems from the struggle for survival . It is not religious but practical. It is defensive hunting, not the scapegoat for human sin. To represent evil, the Devil, the medieval man has a third type of animals: the cat⁶³ and even other domestic animals⁶⁴, which were not necessary for labour and were inoffensive enough to be among men, thus embodying the hidden power of the enemy. A role which neither the cow, for instance, or the wolf can adopt because the former is necessary for man and the latter is not compatible with him. The practical sense of the medieval man keeps the marvellous, divine or devilish away from economic or survival activies , and in this he is radically different from the primitive man. Medieval men believed to the letter in transcendence , but they reserved an important part of their everyday life to economy and the struggle for survival, without that implying a radical change in mentality.

The wolf and the wild beasts at large are useful⁶⁵ to medieval society in two ways: a) common interest⁶⁶, defensive hunting⁶⁷, where the three classes must take part: clerics, gentlemen, and peasants⁶⁸, which clashes with the medieval tradition of (offensive) hunting as the business of noblemen b) punitive tool of human justice for plebeian convicted of gross offences, who were punished with the death penalty, ‘if he were serf, he should be given to the wild beasts to meet his death’⁶⁹. This identification of the serf with wild beasts⁷⁰ is indicative both of the state of domination in which nature should be and of the inhuman image that the prevailing culture may have of the feudal serf⁷¹. The paralelism between the representation of society and the representation of its relationship with nature is again apparent. The serf , if he be docile is beneficial and lives among (noble) men, and if he should be ‘wild’ he must die like an animal, even better, in its claws: bad animals are , thus, useful to punish bad men. A way of closing the circle dominating / dominated nature which contributes to mantain the social and natural medieval system stable.

The medieval man manages to establish a new balance with nature, which religion and nature endorse and hide. He responds to violence with violence , but has no qualms about using the violence of wild animals to mantain social cohesion. The alternance in the action of man and animal, of man and nature at large is at the foundations of the harmomy of feudal relationships in the rural environment , but it is asymetrical: the great catastrophes and epidemies show up ( as -to be sure- contemporaries believed), that medieval nature is eventually stronger than men. Emergency situations are too common to forget them , they wipe away laboriously achieved economic feats , and only religion - in combination with superstition - may account for them and appease them . It is thus how the ‘ backward’ - from the point of view of modern rationalism- medieval mentality dominates socially and economically. The instrumental reason is subordinated to the supernatural.

The consequences of storms and other natural disasters on the medieval survival economies are catastrophic .The inability to understand the natural causes of these phenomema and the lack of a protective state that compensates its social consequences only makes the problem more serious and leaves the solution in the hands of God , the devil or the stars.

At the beginning of the 16th century , Pedro Ciruelo- in his struggle against superstitions- reminds us that Aristotle and the classical philosophers ‘ knew’ ‘ the natural causes’ of thunders , lightning and hail, which had nothing to do with angels or devils , thus makings spells⁷²unnecessary. The medieval church competed successful - at least partially - with ‘ sorcercers of storms’ to appease the unleashed nature , to the expense of forgeting the classical philosophers and pointing to divine wrath⁷³ as the origin of storms and other disaters⁷⁴. Ciruelo himself is forced to admit -despite everything - that one in ‘one hundred thousand storms’ is caused by devils : ‘ but this God permits only very seldom, because He wants His creatures to make their movements in common’⁷⁵.Which will not take place until the ‘ Enlightment frees man of the ‘ darkness’ of magic, superstition and religion: enlightment which brought about great advantages and some disadvantages , as we know only too well for humankind.

The divine wrath symbolised by a hostile nature is recovered in favour of ‘ social cohesion’, sometimes against the serfs (identified with wild beasts) and Jews ⁷⁶, more often than not in order to strengthen the role of prayers in medieval society .

The medieval man was very far from from the Stoicism of Pliny the Elder during the eruption of the Vesuvius ( 79 A.D.),which kills him⁷⁷. Neither does he despair helpless before the earthly apocalipse⁷⁸, nor does he take refuge in a temple awaiting God’s mercy⁷⁹: he acts, through go-betweens, usually clerics⁸⁰, who have curates strike the bells against hail ⁸¹, or by participating directly in processions and rogations⁸² or by making individual iniciatives such as placing frying- pans and pots skyward when there is a storm⁸³. The Christianisation of ‘ gentile’ rites results in a Christianised white magic⁸⁴ which, from the 16th century onwards, confined to folk culture, will be prosecuted by the Inquisition⁸⁵.

Now then, depending on divine reason or, even better, on superstitious-divine reason does not mean that human, instrumental, everyday reason does not count. What can the common man do - or his institutions for that matter - against natural disasters? For one thing, he may try to palliate the material consequences of the catastrophe provoked by God or the Devil ( with God’s permission), which amounted to contradicting the religious viewpoint , since it exonerated men of the responsibility of sin : God punished and the secular power took practical measures. It corresponds , under the provisions of the Partidas, to the lord and not to the vassal who pays the taxes, to take upon himself the losses ‘ by fire or earthquake or flooding’⁸⁶. The king accepts after the 1348 Black Death a revision of royal taxes since ‘ out of the deaths and the bad blizzards and the great disasters that have occurred . . . [commoners] cannot comply or pay the amounts they use to’⁸⁷ and , again, in 1425, the tax on coins is abolished for a five-year period in Murcia and its lands because of the bursting of river Segura , ‘ which wiped away up to six hundred houses and had destroyed all the wheat, barley, wine, oil and chattels’⁸⁸. The socio-economic sphere and the mentality operate, as always, at different but compatible levels in the medieval mentality : Were not those who asked for and obtained exemptions from taxes the same that participated in rogations to the Lord so that the blizzards would stop or rain come ? Middle Ages man succeeded, without much difficulty, used as they were to mixing the imaginary with the real, in giving rise to what are complex paradoxes for the current observer so that the spiritual beliefs and the material interests did not clash.

The weakness of medieval rationalism is precisely that it finds it extremely difficult to relate causes and ends, to be properly rational. The failure to know the natural causes of natural disasters and the lack of knowledge about nature at large make astrology, magic and religion essential, as providers of the fundamental certainties that man needs to live and die . The case of the Black Death is telling. God punishes sinning mankind with the plague but how does the plague reach mankind? Today we know that bacillus Yersinia pestis (isolated in 1894) comes from rats which transmit the disease to man through fleas and lice, which is facilitated during wet and hot periods . In the Middle Ages the transmitting agent was wrongly identified with foul air ( hypochratic thesis developed by Galen and Avicena), which tied in well with the convertent explanation of astrology and religion : the fouling of air was induced by the conjunction of planets / or God’s wrath ,or is it not the clean air an element which receives "pure the light of the sky’⁸⁹? Both the responses and the measures to be adopted have to do with this certainty. It was believed ⁹⁰ that the climate by the end of summer facilitates the fouling of air, like the unburied corpses and the dejecta in the channels and the streets, whereas it is advisable to bury the corpses, be hygenic⁹¹, make fire to purify the air and give off pleasant smells . Some of these hygenic measures contribute indirectly to getting rid of rats, lice and fleas, while others - such as avoiding contact with women or penitent processions - have a direct incidence on guilt and sin as main causes, although common sense also imposes other types of iniciatives such as locking city gates to prevent the entrance of fleeing plague victims ( for instance, Alcoy in 1489)⁹². Little else can be done, except invoking the Almighty to find the remedy when the source of the evil they are suffering is unknown.

The medieval man is rationalist in so far as his scientific, philosophical and mental development allows him. He has learnt to profit from his ambivalent relationship with nature to the point of integrating the hostile nature in his mental and social system. But this control over nature, direct or indirect, has its limits as regards the great disasters. It is then that the Christianity -magic symbiosis direct thought and human action in such a way that they provide the whole medieval thought, predisposed to the marvellous by inheritance, with its hallmark .

The man- nature relationship offers a different perspertive depending on who the main subject of action is . Economic historians, as we have remarked above, view the medieval man as a producer of goods , a trader, a builder and deduce that he dominates nature ; the historian of mentalities comes across a view of the medieval world which subordinates man to an active, harrowing and man-dominating nature, driven by the supernatural. It is not just that medieval economy is scarcely developed , neither are philosophy or mentality if our reference is the modern world ( although the best reference to understanding the Middle Ages is the Middle Ages itself). The humanisation of nature during the Middle Ages is a real, irrefutable historical fact but it is a humanisation limited by the skills and the onmipotent power of a providence whose foundations are in the power of nature (divine natural law) . In other words, a controlled humanisation, with its positive and negative consequences . Negative in that man is not fully free to advance and conquer welfare. Positive in that nature, and ultimately man, mantains under control the use humans make of it.

Friendly nature

Medieval economy produces goods only indirectly . It does not aim at profit as it is understood in a capitalist economy. Medieval economy produces mainly for consumption and its ruling classes seek above all to ‘increase their states’, that is to say, to increase their lands and vassals - as it is them who produce -via taxes- the lords’ incomes- through donations ( Church) or war ( gentlemen). In this context of natural economy, the human pressures on nature are of a lesser signicance in comparison with what will come later, but perceptible nonetheless because of the technological advancement in farming and fishing, which will give rise to protective measures for the natural heritage. These measures are imposed by a common ( non-productivist) sense and ultimately by an animist-providencialist view of nature . Both motives are intertwined . Economic sources, however, do not reflect the superstitious motivations whereas narrative sources seldom speak of ecomony . It is the task of the historian to attempt such synthesis, to make global history.

The three-year shift in crops is the most outstanding farming innovation during the Middle Ages . A third of the lands is left fallow, another third is devoted to winter cereals and the remaining third is reserved for spring cerceals. Previously, with the two-field system, half of the field remained unploughed each year. The increase in productivity was remarkable , because lands were worked most of the year and there was a reduction of unploughed surface⁹³. Saint Francis ‘ exorts the farmer to leave the sides the orchard unworked so that the green of the grass and the beauty of the flowers hearld the beauty of the Father of all things’ ⁹⁴. This administration of the farming resources to prevent their exhaustion is based on need and common sense - which will disappear with technological advancement, let us not forget it,- and it is favoured - and ultimately determined - by religious animism , which never entirely disappeared and will will be offically acknowledged by Franciscan spirituality.

‘How should the King protect his lands?’ promulgate the Partidas-, by making sure that ‘villages or other places do not die away . . . . and also by ensuring that trees, vineyards or any other thing man that lives on is not felled, burnt, or damaged in any way, not even out of spite’⁹⁵.

This protection of productive means and life is a staple in medieval economic documents. The medieval man cares for the nature which provides him with a living and for the means of working it : the land, the aminals and the plants that yield fruit . ‘ Neither oxen nor cows nor other ploughing beasts’ may be pawned ( neither the plough nor the serfs), the same as the ‘ sacred things’ and unlike the fruits of ‘ cattle, trees and inheritances’⁹⁶. Cattle may neither be pawned nor left as security⁹⁷, nor stolen (capital punishment)⁹⁸. The protection measures for beneficial animals even encompass pigeons⁹⁹ and falcon and partridge eggs ¹⁰⁰. "Trees or vines, or vineyards are things which must be most protected because the fruit they yield is profitable to mankind and cause much pleasure and consolation when they are seen ’¹⁰¹. However, this love (with a supersticious and religious veneer to it ) of living beings and nature points out that their defence does not limit to a mere utilitarian attitude and is able to look beyond the here and now ( which is no little achivement).

The felling of fruit trees¹⁰² is, therefore, prosecuted. It is ordered that those which ‘were brought down or dried up’¹⁰³ were replaced and likewise ‘ two trees yielding fruit’ must be planted within three months for every aranzada (4,47 m²)¹⁰⁴. Protection measures even apply for products elaborated from trees : thus the de Fuero Viejo of Vizcaya (1452) punishes with death the intentional spilling of cider from casks ¹⁰⁵, a penalty typically applied to gross offences against people and properties . For the medieval mentality, the cattle, the trees and their fruits could be as important as people. After all, the medieval man saw himself as insepareable from living nature.

So as to understand the relationship of man with his ecological environment in the Middle Ages, it may be particularly useful to pay attention to the forest , which as late as the 19th century still covered 40 per cent of the lands of Saint-Germain-des-Près Abbey, a particularly advanced area as regards agriculture¹⁰⁶. As a general rule, in late medieval Europe forests cover the great mayority of lands and the peasant’s economy depended on them for survival . In the 12th century, the first remark on the Códice Calixtino about the Galician land is that ‘ it is rich in forests’¹⁰⁷ and, four centuries later, another traveller, Fernando de Colón, shows his amazement at the miles of oak and chestnust forests that envelop its villages¹⁰⁸.

How has the advancement of agriculture affected these medieval forests ?

The upsurge in forest ploughing (and in building) during the central centuries of the Middle Ages breaks, according to commonly admitted opinion, the late medieval balance between ploughing lands, pastures and forests resulting in an imbalance which - for some authors -will be one of the causes of the late medieval crisis¹⁰⁹. The inmediate consequences of forest retreat will be soon evident: social conflictivity in an attempt to control the forest, increased aggresivity of wolves¹¹⁰ and other wild animals; bursting of rivers as trees do not retain rain ¹¹¹ and, what is more revelant for us here, the tightening of measures to protect forests . Such measures will enable, together with the late medieval crisis, the recovery of the forest in the 14th and 15th centuries¹¹². Evidence of this is the fact that in 1457, Enrique IV, by request of Guipúzcoa councils, is forced to order that the plantation of oaks, walnuts, chesnuts, ashes and beeches be kept at sixteen feet of ploughed land¹¹³. The final balance of this advance-retreat-advance process is undoubtly favourable for the conservation of medieval forests.

Protection measures, therefore, arise when they are necessary¹¹⁴. They defy the utilitarian sense and, more importantly, the medieval men’s animist feeling of nature . It is, from the late 12th century onwards, when the new form of production is consolidated . Men begin to grant forests with a special protection: ‘in the 12th century the forest became a sort of protected cultive of trees’¹¹⁵. The social struggles for forest control became a staple; in the 13th century communities ( use and reaping ) and lords (hunting) lodge complaints because of forest retreat ¹¹⁶and , by the mid-fifteenth century, Castillian Courts protest because lords would not stop cutting wood freely; because their neighbours occupy their forest; or because royal guards appropiate them¹¹⁷.

The advancement of cultivable land, the fellings and the fires are dangers that loom over medival forests .The 1351 Courts denounce that ‘ five or six pines are brought down to make three or four torches which are worhtless’ and that ‘ those living in counties rich in pinewoods and groves fell and burn them to sow and thus everything is destroyed’. The king’s response cannot be harder and indicative of the new scenario. He claims the death penalty: ‘ whoever felled or uprooted pines in the pinewoods or holm trees in the groves of local councils, as it is claimed, with intention of sowing must be killed for it and shall furthermore lose all his properties’¹¹⁸. The very farming crisis, aggravated and sharpened by the Black Death provides new muscle to forest protection measures¹¹⁹, whose recovery will soon enable (1380) the Monarchy to authorise fellings¹²⁰ ( the preceptive authorisation is indicative of the existing control). In the 15th century there will be an alternance between the habitual protectionist measures¹²¹ with occassional measures intended to promote agriculture¹²², always within a framework that that makes mandatory the authorisation of the local council, the lord or the King to fell trees or make fires which may be a potential threat to the forest.

In the 13th century, Alfonso X prohibits all uncontrolled fires ¹²³, and punishes with death those who burn the forests: ‘The king orders that fire must not be set to forests, and should anyone be caught doing it, he must be thrown into the fire, may he not be aprehended, all his possesions be taken’¹²⁴. Measures against potential forest fires and against those who breach them are issued later in the 14th¹²⁵ and 15th ¹²⁶ centuries, despite the lack of information about great provoked fires like those which currently devastate our forests.

The great deforestation of pre-industrial Europe does not take place during but after the Middle Ages from the 16th to the 17th centuries¹²⁷. New advancements in crops ( corn and potato) and the upsurge in the building of houses and ships are linked to the demographical increase, which demanded more wood and had more mouths to feed . This, together with a decrease in ecological corncern led to a huge retreat in woodlands and to the substitution of autochtonous species . In fact, the Industrial Revolution utilises as basic energetic supply solid fuel ( vegateal coal) and not wood from the forest, whose definitive and irreversible crisis can be located in late 18th and early 19th centuries ¹²⁸.

A prolonged social conflict, which stretches -with ebbs and flows - from the 15th century up to the 20th century( very relevant ecologically¹²⁹), is that of fishing nest in Galicia.Wall fishing as an industrial way of fishing¹³⁰ as opposed to more traditional handicraft methods like those used in sardine fishing ( known locally as sacada, espinel and xeito). The main argument , which both sides use in the discussion, is ecologic, despite the evident social and economic implications of the conflict , which results in the opposition of ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ groups of fishermen and the villages were they ply.

In the exchange of accusations, it is claimed of the contrary fishing tackle that: a) ‘ kills and destroys any spawing"¹³¹; b) “ ‘infects’ sea water’¹³²; c) disturbs‘ the tranquility’ of fish¹³³. The first argument corresponds with the habitual medieval protectionist argument whose concern is to guarantee reproduction as opposed to maximising the explotation of resources in the short run. The fear of ‘ infecting’ water reminds us that of fouling the air which transmitted the plague¹³⁴. The polluting of the air and the waters kills living beings: this medieval certainty, which seldom had an objective basis, takes us directly to animinst superstitious mentality which homologates all natural elements as living entities, liable to corruption and ailing. Finally, that perceived necessity of mantaining the sardine ‘quiet’ so that it does not escape from the ria¹³⁵, does it not attribute fish an excesive degree of ‘ consciousness’?

To summarise, so that the sea offers its products to man we cannot break its biological development, nor pollute its waters, nor disturb excessively maritime creatures. An abusive, inconsiderate exploitation is avoided, not because there is scientic knowledge about causes and effects but because the reaction of nature is feared and the responses by living beings are intrepreted superstitiously as active subjects of a bidirectional relationship with mankind. The limit to utilitarism is set, therefore, by a friendly nature ready to metamorphose into a hostile nature and deny man of his upkeep, the function assigned by the Holy Scriptures, which also use nature to mantain man subdued.

In the other man-nature relationship we have analysed, the symbiosis pragmatism- superstition ,the controlled character of the humanisation of medieval nature by mankind¹³⁶, the dominating- dominated nature, friendly / hostile nature interfaces are not so clearly perceived as in the case of fishing. Why? Because neither the land nor the trees have the capacity to act as true living subjects, they cannot escape, like fish if they are badly-treated ( without the due respect to creatures which are also of God). Hunting animals do not have such a massive relationship with men as hunting is ( except for defense) a privilege of the nobility in the Middle Ages¹³⁷.

Urban pollution in the Middle Ages is a common feature that accompanies the creation of walled cities. In the 13th century several measures were promulgated ¹³⁸ which nonetheless will not be enforced until mid- fourthteen century. Firstly because the Partidas are not mandatory until the Ordenamiento de Alcalá in 1348¹³⁹ and, secondly, because it is the Black Death, also in 1348, what sparks awareness about the need for greater domestic and collective hygene¹⁴⁰, when dirt is associated religiously and superstitiously with and the fouling of air, land and bodies . The corruption of nature has in the Middle Ages the double sense- equivalent and interrelated but not very explicit in the sources- of sinful nature of man on the one hand and on the other of nature physically stained by the dirt and the stench.

In 1367, the king- under the threat of heavy fines- orders not to litter the backyard of the Church of Santa María la Mayor in Zaragoza: " showing no respect to the divine offices which are celebrated in the aforesaid church . . . . they throw rubbish, relieve themselves, and leave there carcasses among other things, ... an unbearable stench during the religious services’ . The Councils’ prohibitions continue - along with the problem into the 15th century¹⁴¹- and by the end of the 16th century remained unsolved¹⁴².

Modern nature

The transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age brought about a new approach to nature by man fuelled both by a bourgeoisie of traders in an essentially rural economy and the city, in an esssentially rural society . The development of the city is a challenge to nature, a proof of the capacity of man to dominate it¹⁴³. In the city, the man lives free from the tyrany of nature , the oppresion of the cold, the night, the famine. Of course, it is exaggerated to make the city into a sort of Garden of Eden¹⁴⁴, but it is true that the medieval city introduces remarkable transformations in mentality. There is a loss of intimacy with nature, which is now beheld from a window, with greater psychological distance , replacing the magic- marvellous medieval vision by aesthetic enjoyment and a desire to study it empirically to dominate it better¹⁴⁵.

Later it will be society as a whole that will share this new attitude towards the natural environment whose main charactistic is to seek the irreversible separation of man ( subject) from nature ( object) . From now on, irrational creatures are subject to to no law (Francisco de Vitoria, 16th century)¹⁴⁶. Superstitious mentality and medieval religiousity, which were felt as something alive, are energically fought - more succesfully so in learned circles than in popular ones- thus objectively holding down the absolute domination of nature through technology to ensure man’s advancement. The concern to keep the natural environment, typical of the Middle Ages, is pushed into the background. Rationalism and the Enlightment thus prepare the path for the Industrial Revolution, the great protagonist of the most significantive ecologic restructuration ‘of the natural environment history in our planet’, the most outstanding consequence of the substitution of religion by science and economy; of God by the market in the man-mature relationships¹⁴⁷.

Naive notions such as indefinite progress or ilimited natural resources underlie the new ideology of the conquest of nature, which will have a profound ecological impact in Western societies. The iniciatives against the deforestation of Europe and America,which go back to mid-nineteenth century, have had little success: the plundering of natural resources and the rise in pollution get diversified at an ever-increasing rate¹⁴⁸. Modern science implies an astonishing development in our knowledge of nature, but a similarly astonishing backward step in our understanding of the ecological consequences of our actions: ‘ religion and tradition as resources utilisation ideologies are perharps better adapted to face a situation of imperfect knowledge than one of ostensible ‘scientific’ management’¹⁴⁹.

The quick, ever-increasing deteroration of the natural environment has given rise -over the last years- to a strong ecologist movement which questions whether there was an ecologic awareness in the past . It is disappointing to see how some writers anwser this question negatively ¹⁵⁰, in oppostion to the natural environment historians mentioned in this paper.

If by ecological awareness we understand being aware of the risks that human activity imply for the environment and consequently being prepared to protect nature, then that kind of mentality not only has existed but, in this sense, any past period has been better than the Contempary Age, especially the Middle Ages and generally speaking, any non- predator society or society regulated by natural economies. It has been said that the reason why, in the Middle Ages, the ecological impact was so moderate is to be found in the lack of technical means to provoke an ecologic disaster. There lies the heart of the problem. We project our current economicist, hiper-rationalist mentalities onto the past without realising that the medieval man thought not so much in economic terms as in religious and magic terms, however hard it is for us to understand it.

The man-mature interface in the Middle Ages has more to do with mentality than with economy. This is also true for the scholastics. That is why the historian of mentalities does not find traces of human domination over medieval nature ( the image of nature that emerges from the sources remains that of dominating rather than dominated factor) . Such traces are not valued because they are seen as quotidian, intrandescent. Nature was much more than a plot of land or a stretch of sea used by peasants or fishermen to earn their daily bread. It was the work of God and inseparable from man. It had a soul, and it yielded marvellous things. How would be possible to attack it with impunity? What purpose would it serve if it yields, by divine mandate, its fruits to man? To be sure, man-nature relationships were not idyllic, but was this not what God had disposed on expelling Adam and Eve from Paradise ? and, likewise, were the relationships among men not conflictive ( feuds, war and revolts)? Man was the friend-foe of man in the same way that he was the friend-foe of nature. Did not they make up a unique ecosystem? The protection of nature on the part of the medieval man stemmed from a powerful instict of self-preservation. Will the men and women of the 21th century be able to recover it mutatis mutandis ?