Charles The Bold, Last Duke of Burgundy (pt. 1)

Traditional historiography long followed the “Great Man Theory”- that historical events were propelled by the actions of Great Men who shook up the old order and remade the world in their image, until a new Great Man came along and did it all over again. Today, historians are more suspicious of this idea, but it isn’t difficult to call to mind some of history’s greatest movers and shakers even if one believes, as Gibbon said, that “history is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” Alexander the Great, Qin Shi Huang, Genghis Khan and Napoleon all dramatically reshaped the world to their desires but there’s a different sort of “Great Man” who is almost equally interesting if perhaps less remembered. Instead of changing the world to match their own image, these men failed. And they died. And in dying, they changed the world more than they ever could have in life.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary is the most obvious example of course, whose idealistic vision of a modernized empire was brought to an end 100 years ago today on June 28, 1914 on the streets of Sarajevo with a bullet that would pierce the brittle dikes that had held back the mounting tensions simmering throughout Europe’s long 19th century, a relative peace that had lasted 99 years that came to an end in an orgy of idiot nationalism and senseless bloodshed. But the roots of history are long, and a small part of World War I’s causes extend back 450 years to the death of another one of these ill-fated Anti-Great Men, a French Nobleman named Charles the Bold.

The story of Charles’s untimely death and its momentous consequences for European history begin with the ascendance of his family, the House of Valois-Burgundy and involve as much high drama, political maneuvering and bloody warfare as any story in history could be asked to have. In 1363, Philip the Bold, 21 years old and the fourth son of King John (Jean) II of France was granted the title of Duke of Burgundy by his father for bravery during the Battle of Poitiers. The Hundred Year’s War between England and France had temporarily ended three years earlier after more than twenty years of intermittent warfare. Edward III was both King of England and Duke of Aquitaine and while in the first capacity he was at the top of England’s feudal pyramid, in the second capacity he was vassal to the King of France, Philip VI which was a source of longstanding tension between the two monarchies. These tensions were exacerbated by Philip’s ascension to the throne. Philip was the first cousin of the previous French king, Charles IV who died without an heir. Charles IV’s nearest male relative was his nephew Edward III of England, the son of Charles’s sister Isabella, but the French nobility ruled that the inheritance of the throne could not pass through any female line, disbarring the English king from inheriting the French crown. Although nominally this decision was nothing more than a strict interpretation of Salic Law, it isn’t difficult to see the French nobility making their decision out of contempt for the prospect of being ruled by a foreigner, even if that foreigner was a French-speaking Duke of France descended from a line of French nobility who had quite cheerfully ruled England as foreigners for three hundred years.

Thus in 1328 the French monarchy instead passed to Philip, Count of Valois, whose quiet and unremarkable life up to this point would earn him the posthumous nickname Philip the Fortunate. Rules of inheritance in medieval Europe were informal which often led to bloody inheritance struggles like the civil war in England two centuries earlier that had brought Edward III’s dynasty, the Angevins, to power, whose fierceness had led later writers to give it the sensationalistic name “The Anarchy.” But what could have been another vicious struggle appeared to be a non-starter as Edward III declined to push his claim on the French throne. Europe momentarily breathed a sigh of relief.

The peace however did not last. Over the next twelve years tensions rose over diplomatic slights, France’s alliance with England’s longstanding rival Scotland and Edward’s indignation at paying feudal homage to Philip. In 1340, Edward declared himself the rightful king of France and one of the longest conflicts in history had begun.

Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy

We return to Philip, Duke of Burgundy twenty three years later in 1363. Twenty years of war had been an outrageous disaster for France which had been devastated by the Black Death and the destruction of the marauding English army led by Edward III’s son, the English folk hero Edward The Black Prince.  France’s alliance with Scotland had proved useless as Scottish military power had been knocked out early in the war at the battle of Neville’s Cross and the English had won a major victory at Crécy. The war stretched into its second decade as war-weariness and the Black Death curtailed both kingdom’s military capability, but by the mid-1350s the war had resumed. In 1356 the Black Prince led the English to another major victory at Poitiers where John II, Philip VI’s son and now king of France, was captured by the English army. John II was eventually ransomed back to the French government but in his absence the crown’s authority collapsed under the weight of war debt, political infighting and the tremendous loss of life among France’s populous caused by both plague and war. Desperate to restore order, Charles IV, dauphin and regent during his father’s captivity agreed to the Treaty of Brétigny, ceding huge portions of northern and southwestern France to the English crown and paying a large ransom for King John II’s return. John returned to France in 1360 but as the indebted French crown had not yet paid his full ransom, several hostages remained in England in the king’s place, including his second son Louis. The king returned to his kingdom in shambles and in 1364 when his son Louis escaped captivity the king chivalrously returned to London, conveniently leaving the management of the state to his sickly son Charles V. King John II died shortly thereafter in London where he was given a sumptuous and well attended funeral.

It was under these difficult circumstances that Philip the Bold, so named for his teenaged valor on the field of Poitiers, was granted the Duchy of Burgundy. The Duchy has been vacant a ruler since the death of Philip of Rouvres in 1361. Both Philip of Rouvres and his wife Margaret, Countess of Flanders had each inherited huge parcels of feudal land in eastern France and the Low Countries respectively, largely by virtue of outliving their siblings in an era of unimaginable loss of life from both war and plague. But that good luck could only last with one of them. Wed as children, the two never reached adulthood before Philip of Rouvres was killed by plague; their marriage was never consummated. Without an heir, Philip of Rouvres’s substantial possessions passed to his stepfather, King John II of France who in 1363, before his flight from responsibility back to comfortable captivity in London, granted these possessions to his fourth son, Philip the Bold.

While King John II may have lacked certain qualities of kingliness that might have otherwise prevented his kingdom from collapsing he knew the value of having someone you trust administering your kingdom. In the pre-modern era, European kings lacked the infrastructure and authority to maintain large kingdoms with any degree of centralized state power. Instead, they relied on the feudal obligations of subordinate aristocrats such as Dukes, Counts, etc. to administer justice, raise armies and collect taxes. This was all well and good for kings as long as the systems of obligation and loyalty that kept feudalism running remained strong, but if the aristocracy no longer respected the king’s authority they tended to do things like strongarm the king into signing documents to curtail his power, fight bloody civil wars or chop off the king’s head and replace him.  The French monarchy would spend most of its history intensively centralizing power under the monarch at the expense of the aristocracy; by the 18th century, France’s kings were the most powerful men in Europe, leading to nearly a century of warfare between France and most of its neighbors as they constantly attempted to stymie French power. At the time of the Hundred Year’s War, however, the French monarchy was still much more limited. The king ruled a great deal of territory directly but this centralization of power at the expense of the many small aristocratic territories also allowed what duchies and counties that remained to centralize and expand themselves. Thus, by the 14th and 15th centuries, the French aristocracy was composed of only a handful of very powerful families. The death of Philip of Rouvres gave King John II a tremendous opportunity: by giving this huge territory to his fourth son he could curtail the rise of an internal rival within the aristocracy by relying of family loyalty to keep the wealthy and populous territories of Burgundy on the side of the crown while still delegating management of the territory to a cadet branch. The plan couldn’t fail (it would fail).

The lands ruled by the Duke of Burgundy were unique: like many feudal holdings they were composed of several, non-contiguous parcels of land. But these lands did not only lie within France but also included the entirety of the Low Countries (the modern states of The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg) which were not ruled by the French king but by the Holy Roman Emperor. The Holy Roman Empire, as Voltaire later quipped, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, but rather a collection of a huge number of German duchies, principalities, bishoprics and other states, all nominally ruled by an elected king called the Holy Roman Emperor (a title inherited from Charlemagne many centuries earlier). The actual power of the Emperor varied throughout time; during certain periods he had little measurable power and at other times in history he was the most powerful man in Europe. The kingdom of France and the HRE were the two most powerful feudal entities in Western Europe at this time, and by controlling huge, wealthy parcels of each the Duchy of Burgundy was poised to become extremely influential. In different times the Dukes of Burgundy would go on to hold tremendous sway over the French court, upset Europe’s balance of power, make war against the French monarchy and eventually create a Franco-Austrian rivalry that would dominate European politics for 500 years and set the stage for all the madness and atrocities of the 20th century. But we’ll save that for next time!

May Day

Today is May Day, an old fashioned holiday associated with the beginning of spring, new growth, fertility, rebirth… and the international labor movement. Here in New England, spring is in the air bringing with it warm weather, budding leaves (a little late I might add) and of course huge deluges of rain. To us modern folks, the passage of the seasons is a rather humdrum affair but to ancient people who relied on subsistence farming for their survival the natural rhythms of the world and their attendant astrological phenomena were both of tremendous practical importance and imbued with supernatural awe. Pagans observed holidays celebrating the coming of spring throughout Europe, including the Celtic Beltane, German Walpurgisnacht and Roman Floralia. With the Christianization of Europe ancient holidays such as these were often secularized or folded into official church holidays (which is how Easter got its name and its associations with eggs, rabbits and other springtime follies; the holiday’s themes of rebirth serendipitously coincided with those present in nearby pagan springtime holidays). May Day is the successor to these ancient holidays, traditionally celebrated with a variety of cryptopagan sexual imagery and nature-themed merrymaking, such as Morris dancing, maypole follies, the choosing of a May Queen, decorating with spring flowers and the giving of treats in May Baskets. These traditions, inherited from European ones, were widely practiced in the United States well into the 20th century and are still practiced (even if in a significantly depleted scope) in Europe.

May Day’s decline in the United States is multifaceted. The rise of industrialization and urbanization and the attendant decline in modern people’s connection to agriculture and natural rhythms rendered the holiday first a quaint piece of pastoralism and then an irrelevance. But another important factor is at play and it has to do with American society’s view of Labor rights.

On May 1, 1886, in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, a large group of Industrial workers gathered for a peaceful demonstration in an attempt to make the eight hour day law. At this time, factory workers were required to work 60 hours a week on average and the eight hour day (eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for what we will) had become the common cause of the Labor movement throughout the United States and the world. Chicago was a modern multicultural city home to immigrants from throughout Europe, many of whom came to the United States as anarchists or socialists. The “red menace” of “The European Anarchist” became the focus of a multifaceted backlash that encompassed racist nativism, puritanical American revulsion at the traditions of Europeans, bourgeois resistance to non-capitalist economic models, anti-Catholic sentiment and the attempts of the wealthy to maintain their legal ability to mistreat the workers they employed. For a decade, America’s nascent labor movement had struggled under the oppression of police brutality, Pinkerton thugs and strikebreakers and a rule of law which protected the wealthy at the expense of the poor. This tension came to a head in Haymarket Square when an unknown assailant threw a homemade bomb that killed several policemen.

The resultant media frenzy categorized this event as a vengeful riot on the part of the strikers and the state of Illinois quickly convicted eight anarchist organizers (six of them ethnic Germans) for “conspiracy,” though none were ever even attempted to be blamed for throwing or manufacturing the bomb. Four of the organizers were killed by the State of Illinois and a fifth committed suicide rather than face the gallows.

The Convicted Organizers

American public opinion following the Haymarket incident turned even further against unions and labor activists, but internationally the “martyrs of the Haymarket” became a rallying point for the world’s Labor Movement and four years later in 1890, the first International Worker’s Day was held as a global protest for the eight hour day. Today, May Day is recognized in many countries as Labor Day and it remains one of the most important commemorations in the International Labor Movement.

In the United States, opinion would eventually soften towards the organizers put to death for the Haymarket bombing. Gradually, little by little and at the cost of much bloodshed, unions would win rights such as the eight hour day, child labor laws and safe working conditions. But American opinion, in the shadow of Sacco and Vanzetti, Joseph McCarthy and the long Cold War against the Soviet Union, remains largely opposed to organized labor despite the many rights that unions and labor organizers have ensured for every person. Thus, while the rest of the world celebrates May Day both to herald the height of spring and to salute the contributions of organized labor, Americans have discarded the holiday.

As for me, I like May Day. Its springtime festivities are quaint, yes, but in our modern lives of constant anxiety and post-industrial angst a little bit of twee pastoralism and leaf-touching is a welcome change. And the sacrifices made by those workers of the past so that you and I could have the right to work in a safe, humane and healthy environment cannot be understated. So today enjoy the spring weather, put flowers in your hair and support your local unions for helping to safeguard our standard of living for us and for every generation to come.

Wachusett: Thoreau, Bahia and the “Phantom Reef”

“The American West,” my brother once told me, “is like a Doors song. It’s vast and empty and mawkish and awe-inspiring.” The West’s huge open skies, towering mountains and sheer, jaw-dropping bigness are not only beautiful but an integral part of the American identity and the core of American mythmaking. So its no surprise that all the wonder and glory of the American West can make the eastern U.S. seem rather humble.

Such is the case in my home state of Massachusetts, a tiny state of modest geography and cramped, labyrinthine cities that would look not unlike a model maker’s exercise when places next to the sprawling cities of the Great Plains and the towering summits of the Rockies. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of natural beauty to observe in the woods of New England where a century of agricultural decline and urbanization have allowed the Northeast’s once clearcut forests to reclaim the fields and pastures that dominated the landscape. Here, great multitudes of cautious white-tailed deer and flocks of brazen turkeys are commonplace, as are porcupines, opossums, beavers and foxes. Coyotes, themselves transplants from the West, have moved to New England and ably replaced the gray wolves sadly driven out by farmers centuries ago; even black bears, moose, lynx and fishers prowl the woods. The chickadee, our state bird sings its songs from every treetop and in the summer the forest comes alive with the sounds of titmice, nuthatches, cardinals, goldfinches, bluejays and clever grackles, mourning doves and the ubiquitous dialect of the American Crow. The forests are full of life, tranquil and tremendously beautiful.

Photo by Cyndi Lavin – source: http://www.why-not-art.com/digital-pathways.html

It was these forests that inspired the transcendentalists, a group of writers and philosophers concerned with nature, spirituality and a dabbling of phrenology, some of whom you were likely forced to read in high school. The most famous is Thoreau, who spent his considerable leisure time traveling the wild and semi-wild places of early 19th century New England. The best known of these works is Walden, the account of his two years spent on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts but more interesting to me (and hopefully you, considering its the subject of this post) is his 1843 essay, A Walk to Wachusett.

Mt. Wachusett

Mount Wachusett, where Thoreau walked to from Concord in 1842 is a mountain in central Massachusetts (lying on the border between Princeton and Westminster, MA) and the most prominent physical landmark near my home. Rising just over 2000 feet above sea level with a prominence of about 1000 feet, Wachusett is about 1/7th the height of Pike’s Peak in Colorado and about 1/5th its prominence; bluntly, it isn’t much of a mountain. Still, it is taller than any of the rolling hills that lie between it and the coastal marshland of Boston, 40 some miles to the east; in fact, it is the tallest mountain in the state to the east of the Connecticut river, being surmounted only by a few peaks in the far western Berkshire range (actually the southern end of Vermont’s Green Mountains) and Taconic range, most notably Mt. Greylock in the state’s far northwestern corner. Thoreau called Wachusett “the observatory of the state,” and the title is deserved: from its summit one can see New Hampshire’s Mt. Monadnock, distant Mt. Greylock, the skyscrapers of Boston (you know, the four of them) and the hills and towns of five states. Today Wachusett is best known for its ski area but its long been a tourist destination. Beginning in the 1870s, rail traffic from Boston and New York brought visitors looking to escape the city and enjoy the (relative) Arcadian bliss of Worcester county’s rural farms and woodlands. A hotel survived at the summit for nearly a century before burning down in 1970.

The name Wachusett comes from the Natick language of Massachusetts Indians; reports on its meaning are conflicted, but amount to something like “place near the mountain,” or “the great hill.” It was an important landmark for Native Americans and for the earliest European settlers; during King Philip’s War it would have loomed over the proceedings during the Redemption of captive Mary Rowlandson (an important landmark for colonial historiography which I won’t be able to resist covering in further detail in a later post;) indeed, it was long painted on the rear wall of my elementary school auditorium stage for a (no doubt thrilling) dramatization of just that story.

Today, Wachusett is still visited by throngs of people every summer. Like Walden, its status as a protected natural place and its proximity to Greater Boston give people who would otherwise not have access to natural places the opportunity to experience the quiet joy of New England summer in the heart of the woods. But historically, Wachusett had an outsized influence relative to its size, especially in the realm of seafaring.

Historically New England was the beating heart of the United States for fishing, whaling, shipbuilding and maritime trade. Codfishing and rum distillation from triangle trade Caribbean sugar where the most important industries for Colonial Massachusetts, whose indented coastline includes well protected deep-water harbors where ports such as Gloucester, Newburyport and New Bedford could thrive. New Bedford in particular would become the heart of the whaling industry; its from there that Melville’s ill-fated Pequod sails in Moby-Dick. Massachusetts was also a center for shipbuilding and in 1861 the USS Wachusett was launched from the Boston Navy Yard. It would go on to serve in one of the strangest theaters of the American Civil War.

USS Wachusett

The USS Wachusett was a Union sloop outfitted for war and it spent its first campaigns off the coast of Virginia, first participating in the blockade of the Southern states and then in several maritime battles and sieges. In late 1862 the ship would be made part of a task force assigned to hunt down Confederate “commerce raiders,” privateer warships largely built in British shipyards and sold to the Confederacy to sink and capture United States merchant ships and whalers. The USS Wachusett was tasked with capturing two commerce raiders operating in the Caribbean, the CSS Alabama and the CSS Florida. After two years of fruitless searching, the Wachusett tracked the Florida to Bahia, Brazil. The Confederate ship had taken shelter in Bahia harbor; neutral Brazil warned the two ships that if a confrontation were to occur the Brazilian Navy would retaliate against whoever fired the first shot. After several rounds of terse negotiations between the two American vessels, the Wachusett launched a night attack within the Brazilian harbor and captured the Florida and quickly escaped with its prize before the Brazilians could substantively retaliate. A diplomatic row between the Union and Brazilian governments ensued which ended in little more than the Wachusett‘s captain being temporarily removed from duty. Following the conclusion of the Civil War, the ship was sent to the China to hunt the infamous commerce raider CSS Shenandoah which was still operating in the Pacific. The two ships never met; the Shenandoah eventually surrendering in its de facto home port of Liverpool where, in a bizarre twist, it was sold to the Sultan of Zanzibar. The Wachusett would end its career guarding American economic interests in South America during the 1879-1883 War Of The Pacific between Chile, Peru and Bolivia.

CSS Florida captured by USS Wachusett

The final maritime anecdote I’ll leave you with involves a curious object indeed: a nautical landmark which appears on maps printed to this day and that has never existed. This is “Wachusett Shoal,” named for the New Bedford Whaler that recorded its location in the south Pacific, thousands of miles from land in 1899. The captain recorded its location and wrote that it was a coral reef or shoal, 500 feet wide and 5 fathoms deep but no return voyage has ever found evidence that such an object exists. Wachusett Shoal is only one of several “phantom reefs” recorded in this area, including “Maria-Theresa reef,” “Jupiter reef,” and “Ernest Legouve reef.” There is no compelling evidence that any of them ever existed. One has to wonder what inspired this rash-this epidemic-of bogus reef discoveries. One thing for certain is that once something is put on a map you can expect every other map to keep it there too, even if its location was misplaced or debunked decades before, a cartographic habit which led to California being drawn as an island on maps for a century longer than contemporary navigational expertise would warrant. Thus, Wachusett Reef and its ilk still appear in this atlas published in the 1980s and internet reports suggest it appearing on maps as late as 2004.

As a final note, I’d be remiss if I didn’t try to tie this whole darn blog together and talk about comestibles. And so while Mount Wachusett has given its name to many local landmarks (and a few maritime oddities), it has, in the tradition of hinky craft brewers everywhere, given its name to a local beer. Wachusett Brewing, based out of Westminster, MA, makes several fine varieties of beer. They’re famous for their Blueberry Ale, though my favorites are the Green Monsta (a mild IPA or Bitter Pale Ale), the Summer Ale (a citrusy wheat beer) and the Octoberfest (a truly delightful red Marzen that blows local beer-king Sam Adams’s Octoberfest offering out of the water.)

If you’re ever in Massachusetts, go ahead and visit Mount Wachusett to enjoy the humble grandeur of New England’s forests and rolling hills. You won’t be disappointed.

Trona Pinnacles

While driving through San Bernardino County, California on the way to Death Valley in the spring of 2012, my father and I saw an unusual sign. It appeared to be a sign for a park or monument but it didn’t seem to point to any road and it said only one word:
“PINNACLES”
Confused, we stopped the car and looked around. We saw an unusual rock formation by the side of the road. Were these the pinnacles?

Pinnacles?

A little bit of research revealed that the real pinnacles were much stranger and more beautiful than I ever would have guessed. And on a recent return trip I had the pleasure of seeing them up close.

Trona Pinnacles

The Trona Pinnacles are a geological oddity situated in a bleak stretch of the Mojave Desert outside of the town of Trona, California. Over 500 strange limestone formations, some over a hundred feet tall rise abruptly from the uninterrupted plane of a huge mineral flat. These strange rock towers are so otherworldly that they’re used as a stand-in for alien worlds in film and television every year. But where did they come from?

Trona, CA

The nearby town of Trona sits on the edge of the cruelly and deceptively named Searles Lake, a large dry lake bed that is a remnant of an age when southeastern California had a considerably different climate than today. Much of southeastern California is composed of “basin and range” topography which is distinguished by a series of valleys divided by narrow mountain ranges. In the southwestern United States these basins (and ranges) are arranged roughly north to south, making huge swaths of this country not unlike a very large washboard. This physiography is caused by tectonic movement which I won’t pretend to fully understand but which involve fault lines pulling apart and cutting deep valleys into the earth while leaving spectacular twisted and diagonal strata throughout the region. Searles Lake lies at the bottom of one such basin (Searles Valley) which also lies in the enormous endohreic region of the United States called the Great Basin.

The Great Basin is a collection of endohreic watersheds, meaning areas of drainage which do not flow to the sea but rather dry up in arid regions, seep into underground aquifers or collect in salt or alkali lakes. Searles Lake is an alkaline flat, a huge playa where minerals collect from mountain runoff that evaporates in the bottom of the valley. Trona was founded as a company-owned town to house workers for a borax mining operations. Today the town’s economy still relies on mineral extraction from the lake bed. The chances of Searles Lake ever receiving enough rain to become permanently wet are basically nil; the basin and range physiography creates a series of successive rain shadows with each mountain range that block moisture from reaching the interior, creating a permanent imbalance between the area’s enormous evaporative potential and its tiny annual rainfall. But things were not always quite so dry in San Bernardino County. In fact, a mere 20,000 years ago Searles Lake was one of many inland seas throughout the Great Basin, including nearby Panamint Valley and Death Valley and extending all the way north to distant Mono Lake. (As an interesting sidenote, Death Valley’s former body of water, called Lake Manly, left behind more than a few traces to this day, including a species of fish which still survives in Death Valley’s Salt Creek, the Death Valley pupfish.) This ancient body of water is the source of Trona’s enigmatic Pinnacles.

The Pinnacles are composed of tufa, an unusual mineral formation. Tufa is calcium carbonate, also known as limestone but which has formed in an unusual way. Tufa spires form under alkaline lakes where groundwater high in calcium seeps into the lakebed. The calcium in the groundwater reacts chemically with the carbonate in the lake and precipitates over eons to form strange unearthly deposits which we call tufa pinnacles. These pinnacles remain invisible beneath the surface unless the water is drained, as it was in Mono Lake during the 1970s. Mono Lake was largely drained to feed Los Angeles’s water needs, which revealed tufa pinnacles beneath the surface much like those in Trona. Conservation efforts wisely saved Mono Lake from total destruction but even today its tufa formations are visible and make the lake an oddity and tourist attraction.

Tufa formations in Mono Lake, CA

Searles Lake gradually dried out at the end of the Pleistocene leaving several successively smaller groups of pinnacles behind as the water vanished. By the time humans came to Searles Lake it was only a dry expanse of caustic minerals, but these strange stone towers have served as a monument for California’s inland seas ever since. Enjoy some pictures of these strange and beautiful formations.

The German Beer Purity Law of 1516

Photo credit – http://bythepint.com/features/german-beer-drinkers

German beer is highly regarded throughout the imbibing world for its flavor and its august traditions. Today its hard to separate beermaking from Germany and most international brewers, from states as far-flung as Mexico, China, Japan and the United States were either founded by German immigrants or brew beer derived from German recipes. But what makes German beer so beloved? Could it be that a five hundred year old price-control law is responsible for the greatness of German brewing? In all likelihood, no; history is rarely that simple. But what this ancient law can tell us about history, economics and beermaking is fascinating enough.

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Anyone who’s had a bottle of German beer has probably seen an unusual phrase on its label:
“brewed in accordance with the German Beer Purity Law of 1516,” (or something to that effect.) The law in question is today known as the Reinheitsgebot (pronounced something like Rhine-heights-ge-boat, and literally meaning “purity-order”) which was passed in 1516 in the German Duchy of Bavaria. The law originated in a 1487 decree by Duke Albrecht IV which stipulated that beer was only to be sold under controlled prices and it was only to be brewed using three ingredients: water, malted barley and hops.

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As far as brewing goes, this list is somewhat restrictive. Many beers are brewed using other grains (chiefly wheat and rye), fruits for flavoring, adjunct sugars to alter the specific gravity of the brew or low cost filler like rice and maize. In pre-modern brewing, the list was even longer. Hops are a relative newcomer to brewing, only becoming widely adopted in the 1200s. They have many beneficial qualities including a pleasant aroma and bitterness that balances the sweetness of beer’s malt but most importantly in early brewing hops have antibacterial qualities that kept beer safe to drink even where local water was not. Before the adoption of hops beer was flavored using local herbs that were combined to form a bitter flavoring called a “gruit.” All this variety in beer ingredients made for a diverse spectrum of local beer styles but it also could-and did- lead to brewers cutting corners by adding cheap and potentially dangerous substances to their beers.

Albert IV, Duke of Bavaria – Posthumous portrait by Barthel Beham

Though we remember it today for being a “purity law,” that probably wasn’t Duke Albrecht’s chief concern. More important where the prices of bread and beer. Beer was considered a staple of the German diet and in an era before modern sanitation beer was often much safer to drink than water. And while the section of the decree on brewing ingredients might not appear as such at first glance it too is a price control measure. Wheat and rye are both used in certain styles of beers but Albrecht feared that brewers would drive up prices for these higher-status grains which would thereby drive up the price of bread. This was an extremely tumultuous time in European history, where the rising power of the bourgeoisie had thrown the feudal social order in chaos and where waves of plagues, most notably the Black Death had killed untold millions and upset the traditional economies that had existed since the fall of Rome (with the added irony of decreasing sanitation and cleanliness throughout Europe as contemporary science believed that cleanliness lead to disease). With all this (and the coming religious anarchy that would be unleashed by the Protestant Reformation) causing upheaval among the lower classes, the last thing Albrecht needed was a peasantry who couldn’t afford to buy beer and bread. (As a sidenote, peasant rebellions would come to Bavaria shortly thereafter, first in localized protests during the Bundschuh movement from 1493-1517 and then in the largest revolt to ever seize Europe up to this point, the German Peasant’s War of 1524)

Albrecht Durer’s “Monument To The Peasant’s Revolt”

Albrecht IV’s decree would become Bavarian law thirty years later at a Meeting Of The Estates in the city of Ingolstadt in 1516 called by Duke Wilhelm IV and Duke Ludwig X, Albrecht’s sons and reluctant co-rulers of his duchy due to the foibles of feudal inheritance. While it wasn’t the first law among the German states to stipulate the use of certain ingredients, it was the longest lasting; it existed first as Bavarian law and later as law throughout Germany for nearly 500 years.

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As centuries passed the Reinheitsgebot exemplified regional conflicts throughout the German states. Northern Germany, with its greater number of merchants and craftsmen had its own regulations on beermaking which often began in local guilds. Northern brewers, who cultivated regional styles using wheat, fruit and other non-Reinheitsgebot ingredients balked at the restrictive Bavarian law. Nevertheless it saw greater and greater adoption throughout German Europe until 1871. Bavaria, now a powerful German kingdom, found itself caught between Austria, which had been chief among the German states for centuries and the rising northern powerhouse of Prussia. Prussia, under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, had consolidated control over all of Northern Germany and had waged a successful war with Denmark over contested areas of the Jutland peninsula. Diplomatic disputes concerning this war provided Austria and Prussia casus belli to go to war and settle the question of who would take the helm of German rulership. Ludwig II, king of Bavaria (a fascinating figure who deserves an entry all his own) did not bow under Prussian pressure and maintained his alliance with Austria, who was soundly defeated by Prussia’s much more modern army. In the years following, Prussian-Bavarian relations warmed so that by the time of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, a mere four years following their defeat in the Austrian-Prussian War, Bavarian troops fought under the Prussian flag. France’s defeat in 1871 was a stinging embarrassment to French national pride made worse by the German army forcing the French to sign their surrender in the mirrored halls of Versailles. It was there, with the support of Ludwig II, that King Wilhelm I of Prussia was crowned Kaiser of the new German Empire. The French would not forget this humiliation and their resentment towards Germany would come to a head 40 years later at the beginning of World War I. But for the story of the Reinheitsgebot, the most important facet of German unification was Bavarian insistence that their beer purity law become the law for all of Germany.

Radeberger, a German Pilsner – Photo credit: http://alcoholandaphorisms.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/tasting-notes-radeberger-pilsner/

German nationalism and beer went hand in hand for much of the world as German immigrants traveled to all corners of the world, bringing with them German brewing techniques informed by the Reinheitsgebot. In the United States where cider and corn whiskey had long been the most popular beverages (and the cause of Europeans’s perception of Americans as backwards drunks) German immigrants changed the landscape of drinking by popularizing the pale lager or pilsner, a style of beer invented in Pilsen, Bohemia (today Plzen, Czech Republic; while the Czechs are not Germans their history and brewing are intimately tied to Germany). Indeed, “Budweiser” originally referred to a beer brewed in such a style in the nearby city of Budweis. Today, all major international beers (excepting a few founded following the craft beer revolution of the 1990s) are pale lagers, and most international breweries from the USA to Mexico to China were founded by Germans.

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The Reinheitsgebot survived in Germany through World War I, the Third Reich and Germany’s division during the Cold War. But in 1987, five hundred years after its original ducal decree, the law was struck down by the high court of the European Union. In 1980 under relentless (and often ruthless) economic liberalizers such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet and Deng Xiaoping, the philosophy of Economic Neoliberalism emerged from obscurity to become the international consensus of best economic practice (where, for better or for worse, it remains today). The German Beer Purity Law, which forbid the importation or manufacture of beers which did not follow its specifications was deemed a form of protectionism and abolished.

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In 1993 Germany passed a new, slightly more lenient brewing regulation. Yeast, not discovered until the 19th century by Louis Pasteur, may now be used in German lagers (which, considering yeast is by far the most important ingredient in beer, is a good thing) and German ales may now be brewed using a wider range of adjuncts and grains. Thus while German beers may still claim to be brewed under the Reinheitsgebot they do so only as a matter of pride and tradition. Still, as the longest standing food safety  regulation in history, this strange little law has changed the world.