The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [23]
“You who read this, go to be washed in the baths of Apollo, which I did with my wife; I would wish to, if I still could.”
—Epitaph from Lugdunum, now Lyon, second or third century
These privileged enclaves were far from representative of their society as a whole. In Italy and the western part of the Byzantine Empire in general, the Lombardic invasions in the mid-sixth century led to a period of confusion and breakdown. After the Goths disabled the Roman aqueducts in 537, the thermae never recovered. Even if the aqueducts had been repairable, Rome was in too much disarray to manage the complex operations that furnished the thermae with water. That still left more than eight hundred balneae in the city, simple neighbourhood baths of perhaps three rooms, and it is possible that they carried on for some generations. So, undoubtedly, did smaller baths all over the Byzantine Empire.
Although the invading Germanic tribes admired many Roman institutions, the baths were not among them. Their preference was for a manly dip in a stream, at least in warm weather. (The Romans thought the invaders smelled vile, in part because they dressed their hair with rancid butter.) By the eighth and ninth centuries, mistrusted by the Christians and neglected by the Germanic conquerors, the baths in the West had fallen into disrepair and were finally abandoned. Extraordinary achievements in engineering, architecture, public health and city planning that stretched from Italy to Britain to North Africa, they mostly lay in ruins for centuries. Some, as at Bath in England, later returned to full use; others, like the Baths of Caracalla, were never restored.
The baths lasted longer in the eastern part of the Byzantine Empire. In sixth-century Alexandria, one-third of the city’s budget was spent in heating the baths. In the eastern provinces of Syria, Judaea and Arabia, places of cross-fertilization between Christian, Roman and Islamic traditions, the bath, usually a small one, evolved into a Roman-Islamic hybrid. The exercise yard disappeared, and the room with the cold plunge pool became much smaller and less important. In its place, a large social hall developed, a combination of changing room and lounge. Ultimately that hybrid, adopted by the Turks as they encountered it in Byzantine cities across Asia Minor and in the Arabic-Islamic baths in Egypt and Syria, became the Turkish bath, or hamam. Except when the hamam was built at the site of mineral springs, customers at a Turkish bath washed at basins rather than in communal pools, and attendants gave them an energetic soaping and rub-down with a coarse-fibred mitten instead of the Roman oiling and strigiling. But the hamam remains the only living descendant of the Roman bathing tradition, and it was via the hamam that the Roman custom would return to medieval Europe.
No bathtubs have survived from the early medieval period, but large wooden ones were probably used in monasteries and infirmaries. Letters and diaries, songs and epic poems, chronicles and other official records from the time rarely refer to people’s dirtiness or cleanliness. We don’t know how and how often people washed, but given the difficulty of procuring water and an apparent unconcern about cleanliness, the plausible estimates are “not thoroughly” and “seldom.”
The early medieval hygiene we know most about was that practised by monks, who were not only literate but eager to document the monastic life, which was something new under the sun. Besides, a monastery had to provide healthy living conditions for sometimes hundreds of men, and monks were in a better position to understand the Romans’ engineering feats than most. They devised complicated, gravity-based water systems, which could, in the case of some English monasteries, deliver water from a distance of several miles, through pipes of lead or wood. Controlled by taps, the water flowed into kitchen sinks, laundry tubs and the basins or stone troughs that were de rigueur for washing hands and face before meals. (Such a trough