Merlin and the Franciscans: The Growth of Prophetic Authority
By: Talia Zajac
As Bernard McGinn states in his anthology of medieval
apocalyptic texts, Visions of the End, in “any
late medieval list of prophetic authorities three names
are unavoidable—the Sibyl, Joachim, and Merlin.” Both
the Sibyl and Joachim
of Fiore were prophetic authorities that developed on the
Continent and were inextricably linked with the Christian
tradition of apocalyptic literature. The growth of Merlin
as a prophetic authority, especially among the Franciscans
of Italy, is a curiosity, however. Until the dissemination
in the twelfth century of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The
History of the Kings of Britain, Merlin was but an
obscure figure of Welsh poetry. The growth of Merlin as
a prophetic authority on the Continent is therefore firstly
connected with the dissemination of Monmouth’s extremely
popular text, and secondly with the interest in prophecy
in the Franciscan order. The Franciscan interest in prophecy
was spurred by the writings of Joachim of Fiore and rendered
more urgent by the apocalyptic polemics written during
the struggle of the Papacy with the Emperor Frederick II
and his House of Hohenstaufen, as exemplified in the circa
1275 Franco-Venetian text, Les Prophécies de
Merlin. Clearly, the political and historical and
not just literary context led to the reception and evolution
of Merlin as a prophetic authority among the
Franciscans of Italy. In order to examine the evolution of this unusual prophetic
character in these circles Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophecies of
Merlin (contained in the seventh book of his History) and the
Franco-Venetian Prophécies de Merlin, provide two symbolical “bookends”.
Before Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, the character of Merlin was practically unknown to Western literature. A group of obscure Welsh poems about a certain “Myrddin,” which survive in the oldest Welsh manuscript of poetry, The Black Book of Carmarthen, describe him as a poet-prophet. In one poem he goes mad upon the death of his lord Gwenddoleu at the battle of Arfderydd, and begins to lament under an apple tree, a locale with Celtic otherworldly connotations. The connection of a prophetic vision provoked by the battle of Arfderydd planted the seeds for Merlin as a seer somehow especially connected to secular, political matters.
The second important pre-Monmouth Merlin figure is that of the seer in Nennius’ early ninth-century Historia Brittonum in which a child-prodigy called Ambrosius predicts that the British king Vortigern will never be able to build a tower until he digs up the pool beneath it. The king does so, releasing two fighting dragons—red and white—which Ambrosius interprets as the British and Saxon peoples, respectively, and predicts the eventual triumph of the red dragon. The tale of the battle between the two dragons is directly incorporated into Geoffrey of Monmouth’s text, and the child-prodigy becomes “Merlin, who was also called Ambrosius,” thus fusing the two pre-existing traditions and introducing an almost entirely new character into his narrative.
According to the dedicatory letter to his patron at the beginning of the seventh book of the History of the Kings of Britain , Geoffrey of Monmouth broke off his account to write about Merlin’s prophecies: “Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, my admiration for [you]…leaves me no other choice but to translate the ‘Prophecies of Merlin’…into Latin, before I have finished…the deeds of the kings of Britain…” It would seem then that copies of Merlin’s Prophecies travelled separately from the rest of The History of the Kings of Britain ; this hypothesis seems substantiated by the fact that the prophecies are cited by Orderic Vitalis in his Ecclesiastical History in 1135, whereas the earliest witness to the whole of the History of the Kings of Britain is the recording of its appearance in 1139 at Bec Abbey in Normandy.
It was Monmouth’s text that introduced Merlin as an authority of political prophecy. His Prophecies of Merlin begin with the fairly straight-forward symbol of the red and white dragon representing the fighting of the British with the Saxons, but then continues, in highly obscure, coded language that describes struggles of cosmic proportions, reminiscent of the Book of Revelation: “After that the German Worm shall be crowned, and the Prince of Brass will be buried…For a hundred and fifty years he shall remain in anguish…and then for three hundred…he shall sit enthroned.” Animal imagery is used to predict a series of kings: “Two more Dragons shall follow, one of which will be killed by the sting of envy…The Lion of Justice shall come next, and at its roar the towers of Gaul shall shake…” Finally, after a series of very obscure prophecies connected to animals, Merlin becomes a truly apocalyptic seer by prophesying about the end of time: “Jupiter shall abandon its pre-ordained paths…In the twinkling of an eye the seas shall rise up…. The winds shall do battle together with a blast of ill-omen, making their din reverberate from one constellation to another.”
The very obscure, animal, tensive symbolism employed by Geoffrey to discuss rulers gave the name “Galfridian” to this “…vaticinal method…for it is used extensively for the first time by Geoffrey of Monmouth…” It was by means of this coded language that Geoffrey of Monmouth could directly comment on his present-day situation. Ironically, the obscure symbolism allowed for him to write in a more direct way than in any other part of his History, which deals otherwise with pre-Norman Conquest Britain , and from which therefore one can only make comparisons with twelfth century politics at a distance. For example in the Prophecies, “…the Eagle of Mount Aravia…[usually is thought to refer to] the marriage of Henry [I]’s daughter Matilda to Henry V (1114) or to her subsequent marriage to Geoffrey of Anjou.” The last historically dateable event in the Prophecies is the Sinking of the White Ship in 1120 in which Henry I’s heir was drowned. Merlin then switches from ex eventu vaticinia to prophesying about future rulers, until he comes to the End of Time.
The Galfridian method of prophecy proved an extremely useful method for framing contemporary events as the fulfillments of long-awaited divine prophecies, and to discuss them by using animal imagery as its primary veiling method. For example, the thirteenth-century Italian text The Sayings of Merlin, quoted by the Franciscan Fra Salimbene among others, uses such coded language that imitates Geoffrey of Monmouth’s style exactly: “The first F, a lamb in his shorn hair, a lion in his mane, will be a destroyer of cities. In the midst of a just resolve he will die between the crow and the crow. He will survive in H who will die at the gates of Milazzo.”
The fact that Merlin would appear a hundred years later as a prophetic authority in Italy is somewhat surprising, but The History of the Kings of Britain and the Prophecies of Merlin were copied and distributed fairly quickly after their initial composition. Though the name “Merlin” is recorded in connection with an endowment to the monastery of San Salvatore in Taone as early as 1128, suggesting perhaps some contact with the character through oral transmission into Italian, this is a rare instance, and full-fledged Merlin narratives or prophecies are all dated to post-Galfridian influence. Of the over two hundred copies of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s manuscript which survive, about seventy-six are from the twelfth or early thirteenth century. Written in Latin, both the History of the Kings of Britain and the Prophecies would have been understandable to any cleric living on the Continent, allowing for widespread dissemination. A copy of the Prophecies was even translated into Icelandic “by Gunnlaug Leifson, who died in 1217 or 1219”.
Geoffrey’s tale of Arthur and his knights captured the imagination of Western Europe , but as has been seen, the Prophecies of Merlin also circulated independently, thus establishing Merlin as a prophetic authority separate from the tales of the Arthurian court that would be later taken up by the writers of Romance literature. Since, as had been mentioned, a copy had reached the Benedictine Abbey of Bec by 1139, it is likely that from there the History was recopied throughout France . The Prophecies were known in Provence in the early thirteenth century, from which they may have spread to Italy . Another possibility is that “members of Richard the First’s crusading army spread the prophecies or news of them during their stay in Southern Italy .”
The enthusiastic reception of Merlin as a prophetic authority in Italy , and in the Franciscan order may be attributed to a powerful second factor outside of the literary success of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. The turn of the thirteenth century also marked the death in 1202 of the influential visionary Joachim of Fiore, whose complex and often controversial life and writings are difficult to summarize. In constant search for the perfect life, Joachim began as a layman who experienced a conversion, entered the Benedictine monastery at Corazzo, incorporated it into the reforming Cistercian order, and finally around 1190 founded his own house, San Giovanni in Fiore, the mother-house of the Florensian order.
One of the most important of his works was the Liber Concordie, the Book of Concordances, which worked out a theory of history based on the Trinity: the Two Testaments, “give the pattern of…two great eras of history governed by Two Persons…when the procession of the Spirit is added, the pattern of twos can become a pattern of threes.” By applying the mystery of the Trinity to history, Joachim believed that he was endowed by a “ spiritualis intellectus or intelligentia” which allowed him to understand Holy Writ’s hidden meanings, including the application of the Trinity to a mystical understanding of history, whereby in the concordance of these numerical patterns, Joachim, “claimed to be able to find events of past, present and future clearly manifest in the Scriptures.”
In another one of his key works, the Expositio in Apocalypsim, Joachim wrote of the coming of a third and final status of history, a time characterized by the Holy Spirit and the order of monks, just as the first two stati were characterized, respectively, by the Father and the married state, and the Son and the preachers. In this third status that would see a renewal of the Church before the onslaught of Antichrist, Joachim foresaw a special role for these monks, the, “ viri spirituales, two groups of religious, one of preachers, the other of contemplative hermits.” In 1215, Joachim’s views on the Trinity were denounced, and his movement therefore became somewhat suspicious in the eyes of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. But his works were not entirely condemned until 1255 when the Franciscan Gerald of Borgo San Donnino had proclaimed that the collection of Joachim’s teachings (which Gerald had named “the Eternal Evangel”) would replace the Old and New Testaments with the coming of the third status.
Until 1255, therefore, the Joachite movement had not yet reached the level of radicalization that would follow, especially in the later struggle of the Franciscan Spiritual and Conventual parties on the question of Absolute Poverty from 1280 to 1330. In the 1240s, “a Florensian abbot sought refuge in a Pisan convent of the Minorites [Franciscans], bringing with him the works of Joachim, which were thus introduced into the Order.” The Dominicans, but especially the Franciscans, identified themselves as the viri spiritualis whose creation Joachim had foretold. For the Franciscans, “St. Francis’s Testament had the imprimatur of the Holy Spirit….,” indicative of the new status of the Third Person of the Trinity that was about to enfold under their leadership.
The sense of an imminent end and the dawning of a new plane of history made contemporary thirteenth century political events especially charged with eschatological meaning. Joachim as prophet of history was a natural political authority to which Franciscan authors attributed texts; in his own lifetime Joachim had met and prophesied to “Richard the Lionhearted, the Emperor Henry VI, the Empress Constance, Pope Innocent III and the young Frederick II.” The “earliest Italian chronicle referring to Joachim shows that prophetic words of his concerning the Emperor Henry VI…were circulating soon after his death…”
At the same time in the early thirteenth century, the political prophecies of Merlin were also circulating in Franciscan circles. It was therefore not much of a stretch for pseudonymous texts to connect the two great seers of political events: Joachim of Fiore and Merlin the Seer, as was indeed the case with the pseudo-Joachite text The Exposition on the Sybils and on Merlin, written probably by a Franciscan in the 1250s: “This text…is interesting for its combination of the three most potent names in thirteenth-century apocalyptic.”
The imperial-papal crisis of the thirteenth century made the need for political-prophetic authorities all the more crucial, where the Emperor Frederick II was often identified by the pro-papal party as the Antichrist. Both the thirteenth-century texts The Exposition on the Sibyls and on Merlin and the Sayings of Merlin (cited above) focused on the career of Frederick II, now imbued with a new significance by the Franciscans in light of the coming third status of history. “Frederick II (1194-1250) tried to unite Sicily, Italy, and Germany into an imperial unit, but…[the] popes, eager to carve out their own well-ordered state in the centre of Italy, could not allow a strong monarch to encircle them.” Frederick II’s grandfather, Frederick Barbarossa, had married his son Henry VI to Constance of Sicily, thus narrowly enclosing the Papal States in the middle of a growing Germanic empire. Pope Gregory IX excommunicated the emperor in both 1227 and 1239, and his successor Innocent IV formerly deposed the emperor in 1245 at the Council of Lyons. The invectives against the House of Hohenstaufen continued after Frederick II’s death in 1250 until the death of his descendant Conradin, executed in 1268, though many prophetic sources continued to associate the House of Hohenstaufen with the Antichrist well into the 1270s, especially in Joachite Franciscan circles.
As the apocalyptic discourse flew back and forth, with both the imperial and papal side accusing their enemy of being allied with the Antichrist, if not being the Antichrist himself, the Franciscans for the most part took the papal side. The Franciscan Fra Salimbene, for example, called Frederick II “an evil and accursed man, a schismatic, a heretic, and an epicurean…” Prior to the Scandal of the Eternal Evangel in 1255, the Franciscans and the Papacy had been closely allied, as indicated by papal support for the Franciscans holding teaching posts at the University of Paris, despite the protests of the previously established masters there. It was natural therefore for most Franciscans to take up the papal cause in its struggles with Frederick II, and to identify Frederick II as the enemy in pseudo-Joachite-Merlin prophecies, such as the Sayings of Merlin . But even after the condemnation of Joachim of Fiore’s writings in 1255, most Joachite-influenced Franciscans continued to uphold the papal cause against the Emperor in their pseudonymous texts attributed to Merlin.
Les Prophécies de Merlin , a “work composed between 1272 and 1279” is a good example of the final crystallization of the character in Italy as a prophetic authority, from his inception in the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Likely written by a Franciscan Venetian in a “Franco-Venetian dialect,” the work purports to be a translation from the Latin into the French by a Master Richard of Ireland on the orders of Frederick II. However, as Merlin prophecises to various clerks who record his words, it becomes clear that the work is in fact written much later, and reflects the thirteenth century Joachite-Franciscan view of Frederick as the enemy of the papacy and of Christendom: Merlin calls Frederick the “champion who will die in contumacy [of the papacy.]”
The prophecies of Merlin are interwoven with tales of Arthurian Romance and moral warnings, tournaments and enchantments, indicating the intent of the work as one of edifying instruction and popular appeal. At the same time, however, Merlin also prophesies about “une re[li]gion de moinnes qui iront preechant [sic] parmi les pais [sic] et parmi tout le monde,” saying elsewhere, “Et sachies [sic] qu’il [vendra] encore une religion en terre, qui se commencera si povrement [sic] que bien fera a loer [sic] son abit [sic], and maint en seront saint homme”; words which recall the belief by Joachite-influenced Franciscans that theirs was a special order, destined to bring about the peace of the Church before the coming of the End. In this apocalyptic context, Les Prophécies de Merlin called for the renewal of the Church and the restoration of the ideal of poverty to the Franciscan order, drawing upon the more affective, humanistic Franciscan theology where Christ is the friend of man and the guide through the path of life. From the mysterious child-prodigy of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Merlin thus gradually became a theological expert, and Les Prophécies de Merlin have him take communion at Notre-Dame and, when questioned by the priest, reply that the communion wafer contains “le Pere [sic] et le Fil [sic] et le Saint Esperit [sic]”: a perfectly irreproachable, orthodox answer.
The struggles between the Empire and the Papacy and the dissemination of Joachim of Fiore’s writings and later pseudonymous texts attributed to him, all contributed to a rise of interest in political prophecy in thirteenth-century Italy . The identification of the Franciscan order as the viri spiritualis prophesied by Joachim meant that they would play a special role in ushering in the idyllic final status of the Holy Spirit before the end of history. It was in order to validate their own role in this apocalyptic schema and to contrast their message with the enemies of the church, crystallized in the House of Hohenstaufen, that the Franciscans turned early in the thirteenth century to other political prophets besides Joachim: the Sibyl and Merlin. Merlin, as a relatively new and obscure character in European literature was in some sense the perfect tool for ex eventu vaticinia . As a character without a long tradition in literature, but already established as a prophetic authority in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain , he could easily be incorporated in any narrative to “foretell” current political events. The late thirteenth century text, Les Prophécies de Merlin , serves as a good example of this new use of Merlin in Italy , as one who lends meaning and purpose to the rising and falling fortunes of the Franciscan order and of the struggles of the Papacy with the House of Hohenstaufen.
WORKS CITED
Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Tradition in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 180.
With new Christian prophecies attributed to this classical figure, the Sibyl became a Christian prophetic authority around the fourth century A.D; Ibid, p. 43. A discussion of the role of the Sibyl in thirteenth century prophecy is outside of the context of this essay.
This would seem to be the original Welsh spelling of the name, before its latinization in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s text; Philippe Walter, Merlin ou le savoir du monde ( Paris : Editions Imago, 2000), p. 16.
Ibid, p. 16. Though the manuscript is dated to circa 1250, and may thus be influenced by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the material in The Black Book is generally thought to reflect older, oral tradition.
Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, “The Arthur of History” in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 1.
Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England (Lancaster, Pennsylvania: Columbia University Press, 1911), p. 8.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain , Trans. Lewis Thorpe (England: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 169.
Ibid, p. 170. Monmouth’s claim that his work is a translation from British into Latin has never been substantiated and is thought to be a mere conceit of the author, probably to lend his work more authority.
Taylor , Political Prophecy, p. 9.
A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature: 1066-1422 (Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 44.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, History, p. 173.
Ibid, pp. 184-5. ‘Galfridus’ is the Latin of ‘Geoffrey’.
Taylor , Political Prophecy, p. 4.
Michael J. Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. George D. Economou (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994), p. 65.
As cited in McGinn, Visions of the End, p. 183.
Taylor , Political Prophecy, p. 41.
Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, p. 44.
Julia C. Crick, Historia Regum Brittannie, Volume III: Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts, (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), pp. 4-318.
Taylor , Political Prophecy, p. 138.
McGinn, Visions of the End, p. 126.
Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 19.
McGinn, Visions of the End, p. 127.
A status is “no simple division of a certain number of years’ duration…[and] none of Joachim’s schemata are merely chronological”; Bernard McGinn, “’Take the Book and Eat it’: Joachim and the Apocalypse” in The Calambrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1985), p. 153.
McGinn, Visions of the End, p. 129.
Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy, p. 3, pp. 59-60.
McGinn, Visions of the End, p. 203.
Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy, p. 35.
Saint Francis (lived circa 1182-1226) was the founder of this new order, abjuring material possessions, while preaching and caring for lepers; Barbara H. Rosenwein, A Short History of the Middle Ages, Volume II: Circa 900-1500 (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004), p. 240.
Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy, p. 175.
McGinn, Visions of the End, p. 127.
Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy, p. 40.
McGinn, Visions of the End, p. 181.
Paul Zumthor, Merlin le Prophète : Un Thème de la Littérature Polémique de l’Historiographe et des Romans (Lausanne, Suisse: Imprimeries Réunies, 1943) , p. 100.
Rosenwein, A Short History of the Middle Ages, p. 221.
Ibid, p. 221. Henry VI is the ‘H’ referred to above in The Sayings of Merlin.
McGinn, Visions of the End, pp. 168-169.
The Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam, trans. and ed. Joseph L. Baird, Giuseppe Baglivi, and John Robert Kane, Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies 40 (Binghamton, 1986), p. 5 as cited in Rosenwein, A Short History of the Middle Ages, p. 221.
Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy, p. 60.
Cedric Pickford, “Miscellaneous French Prose Romances” in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: a Collaborative History, ed. Shermon Roger Loomis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 352.
McGinn, Visions of the End, p. 182.
Pickford, “Miscellaneous French Prose Romances”, p. 352. The fiction of “translation” to increase authority has already been seen in the case of Geoffrey of Monmouth, above.
Trans. Peter Dembowski from L.A. Paton, Les Prophécies de Merlin 1 :142 a s cited in McGinn, Visions of the End, p. 184.
“…a religious order of monks who will go preaching among countries and among all the world”; Lucy Allen Paton, Les Prophécies de Merlin, Volume One (New York: D. C. Heath and Company; London: Oxford University Press, 1926) Prophecy CXCIX , p. 242.
“And know that there will come again a religion order on earth, which will begin in such poverty that it will do well to borrow its [religious] habit, and many will become holy men”; Ibid , Prophecy XLVIII, p. 106.