Stars of fortune

The great increase in the study of astrology during the 12th century can only be understood in the context of contemporary beliefs. For medieval man the supernatural world was ordered and meaningful, while human existance was disorderly and could be predicted only in terms of God's intentions. When Arab texts descibing a direct relationship between the movements of the stars and events on earth poured into the West during the 12th century, they were readily received by Europeans. Genethliac astrology, interpreting the positions of the heavenly bodies at the moment of an individual's birth, particularly interested people at this time. Astrologers were in permanent residence in royal palaces -- in 1228 Michael Scot completed his great encyclopedia of astrology at court of the Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen.

Astrologers were tolerated by the Church, as were popular preacher-prophesiers, as long as neither stepped beyond the canons of orthodoxy. But there appeared some strange messianic figures in the popular religious movements of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries -- Fulk of Neuilly, for example, a fiery preacher who made a series of evangelistic missions in the 1190s and who was particularly concerned with converting prostitutes from their sinful ways. In 1198 he began to arouse popular fervour for what was to become the Fourth Crusade. He was an ascetic miracle worker with the alleged power to heal the blind and dumb, who wanted -- and raised -- and army only of the poor; he set hordes of people in motion and they perished on the coast of Spain.

Joachim of Fiore, a Cistercian abbot from Calabria living as a hermit (between 1190 and 1195), worked out a highly popular, complex, revolutionary theory of history that made present and future comprehensible. Man was moving through a succession of ages culminating in the Last Judgement. In 1190-1 Joachim met Richard the Lionheart en route for the Third Crusade, and prophesied that, since Saladin was the identifiable sixth of seven persecutors of the Church, he and his armies would soon fall. Richard would be the instrument of this inevitable event.

Top left The signs of the zodiac, still used
in casting horoscopes, are shown in an
11th-century manuscript.

Above The four elements of fire, water,
earth and air were used to foretell health
and fortune, and in prescribing medicine
for illness or other disorders..