Lemberg Castle - Life in the Middle Ages

Lemberg Castle

Life in the Middle Ages The dark epoch The Middle Ages lasted approximately a thousand years, from the time of the Migration of Peoples until the Reformation. Humanists at the end of the 15th century called this period the “dark epoch”, for them the Middle Ages were characterised by the decline of education and culture. The Middle Ages were indeed sinister, there are many things which confirm this image: religious delusion, crusades, the pogrom of the Jews, persecution of peoples who thought differently, appallingly brutal tortures like breaking somebody on a wheel, to quarter somebody, tarring and feathering, frequent feuds and military conflicts, serfdom, epidemics and famine - a period of horror. For the simple rural population life was indeed miserable, sparse and hard, we still don’t know a lot about their life conditions. The documents and source material that do exist relate largely to the lives of those in power, the nobility and the clergy. These social classes often indulged in luxury, their lives were clearly ordered according to the code of knightly honour under the fundamental ideology of high courtly love.

The population grew rapidly A rapid increase of urban population around the turn of the millennium shows that a real population explosion had started. In this period the number of people in Middle Europe had at least doubled. The development of farming technology could hardly keep up with the urbanisation, this lead to increasingly frequent periods of famine. The population was not sustained very long, the plague from 1348-49 and the 30 Years War from 1618-48 caused a huge decline. Castle boom The pressure of population increase consequently lead to the cultivation of new areas, deforestation, and organized farming. New power systems developed, the king gave land tunures, fiefs, to his nobles. To control their fiefs these nobles created new centres, for example castles in geologically favoured areas. Accordingly in the Pfalz most of the castles were built in this period. The sandstone cliffs towering from the forest offered excellent views over the region and could be extremely well defended. At the end of the 12th century the Pfalz was one of the centres of the Holy Roman Empire of Germania. For a certain time the imperial insignia, crown, sceptre, sword, were kept on the Trifels Castle.

The noble knight The male nobility, the knights, lived according to their code of bravery, courage, honour, loyalty, justice and protection of the weak. The sword and the battle were central to a knight’s existence, frequently proven and displayed at tournaments. Loyalty was the most important virtue, it was the base of the feudal oath between sovereign and subject and the whole power system. Breaking the knightly oath was considered a betrayal of the whole knightage. As there was no oath sworn between knights and the common people their behaviour showed the contrary, dishonesty and betrayal. High courtly love High courtly love determined the spirit of the knighthood. Ideally a knight was constantly in love, but a love which remained unattainable, as it was generally held for the wife of somebody else, often higher nobles and therefore forbidden. The constantly amorous state was intended to make the knight more polite. In every castle the minnesinger’s love poems were the main entertainment at tournaments and festivals and on long winter evenings.