The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [25]
A MIKVEH AT FRANKFURT IN 1705
In the cold tub, “twenty Women watch to see, that she, who baths herself, Plunges over Head and Ears into the Water; for their ancient Laws ordain that every Hair be purified. However that be, I am sure one can’t stay long in this Bath without perishing; for we but just looked into it, and were almost frozen with Cold.”
—Jean de Blainville, Travels
But far more than the Jewish quarter or the best-equipped monastery, the cleanest corner of early medieval Europe was Arab Spain. Unlike in Christianity, cleanliness was an important religious requirement for the Muslim, and a ninth-century observer described the Andalusian Arabs as “the cleanest people on earth.” While the Christians in the north of Spain “wash neither their bodies nor their clothes which they only remove when they fall into pieces,” a poor man in the Arab south would reportedly spend his last coin on soap rather than on food. Arab Spain sparkled with water—in pools, fountains and hamams. Every neighbourhood had its public bath. When the Christians recaptured Cordoba in 1236, the city had three hundred hamams as well as hot and cold water in private bathrooms.
In Moorish Spain the sexes always bathed separately. The town bath in Teruel, in Aragon, for example, followed a typical pattern, being reserved for men on three days of the week, for women on two and for Jews and Muslims of both sexes at different hours on Friday. The admission fee was low, and children and servants bathed free.
Healthy and progressive as these arrangements sound, to the Christians they were decadent and damnable. There had been a time, during the Roman period, when the Spaniards had had their own popular hot baths. Martial, the poet laureate of the baths, was born in Spain and retired there at the end of his life, to a small farm in Aragon; it is impossible to imagine Martial leading a life without baths. But when the Visigoths conquered Spain in the fifth century, they entertained the familiar suspicions that lolling about in hot water made strong men effeminate, and they demolished the baths.
Only when the Moors invaded the country in 711 did baths return. But now the Spaniards associated washing with the hated Moors’ heretical beliefs, and their own dirty ways with the True Faith. Historians have connected what they see as a long-standing Spanish tradition of distaste for water and washing to ancestral memories of the Moorish baths. According to Richard Ford, a nineteenth-century English traveller who knew Spain well, “The mendicant Spanish monks, according to their practice of setting up a directly antagonistic principle [to the Arabs], considered physical dirt as the test of moral purity and true faith; and by dining and sleeping from year’s end to year’s end in the same unchanged woolen frock, arrived at the height of their ambition, according to their view of the odor of sanctity, the olor de santidad. This was a euphemism for ‘foul smell,’ but it came to represent Christian godliness, and many of the saints are pictured sitting in their own excrement.” One of the Spaniards’ first actions during the Reconquest was to destroy the Moorish baths.
But the hamam had a robust longevity. The Crusaders were about to discover it and return it to its European birthplace.
A STEAMY INTERLUDE
1000–1550
The thirteenth-century Old French poem The Romance of the Rose is full of advice for lovers, from the achievement of mutual orgasm (“One should not abandon the other, nor should either cease his voyage until they reach port together”) to the strategic use of fakery (“If she