Transcription
It's probably not news to anybody that fighting in incredibly brutal hand-to-hand combat for hours at a time, crushing guys' heads with maces, seeing your homies get impaled or beheaded, and then just kind of sitting there to deal with it in the aftermath probably had some seriously damaging long-term psychological effects. But it might actually be worse than we could even imagine, especially because the medieval mind was, of course, anatomically the same as ours, but spiritually was way different.
PTSD as a clinical diagnosis didn't exist until 1980, and it was essentially invented to describe what was happening to Vietnam veterans. To sum it up super simply, PTSD is a fear disorder with flashbacks and hypervigilance. It's basically like your central nervous system is stuck in the "on" position at all times. When you look through the medieval sources, you don't always find that kind of thing. And I think applying modern terms to the medieval past can sometimes be a stretch, which is a hilariously ironic thing for me to say, but anyway, what we can find in the medieval sources is something even deeper.
There was an 11th-century French warrior named Rogo, who had gotten pretty seriously injured in a battle. He somehow survived, but his right arm was totally paralyzed, and there wasn't really a lot that medieval doctors could do for that kind of thing. Rigo ended up falling into a deep depression when he got home, and according to a contemporary chronicle, he wanted to die rather than drag out a disgusting and useless life with his body in such a shameful state. The injury obviously had forced him to give up his life as a soldier. But in medieval society, that was his role. He was one of those who fought, and now he was nothing. If you keep on reading the chronicle, Rio just keeps going deeper and deeper into this downward spiral and even stops doing the things that used to make him happy, like riding horses. For a red-blooded, testosterone-filled medieval man to not want to zoom around on a steed, something had to be seriously wrong.
We can look at another example from the 11th century, which is recorded in a Viking saga called the *Gretus*. There was a Viking warrior named Onand, and he lost his lower leg in a brutal battle in the late 9th century. Maybe you can already see where this is going. When he gets home, he's fitted with a wooden prosthetic leg. And in typical medieval fashion, everybody starts calling him Onand Treeleg, which in terms of medieval nicknames is actually much better than Noter the Stammer or Louis the Fat. Eventually, his leg healed up as much as it could, and he could walk around with the prosthetic, but mentally he was never the same. Someone asked him why he was so down all the time, and Onand replied, "In eyes of fighting man and fame, my strength and manhood are but vain. This is the thing that makes me a joyless man."
If you've ever seen PTSD portrayed in movies or TV shows, it's always something like a veteran coming back from war and he takes his family out to the fair or something, and then like a car backfires in the parking lot, and all of a sudden he's back in Fallujah again. But that's not what we're seeing here. These medieval men have their identities completely tied up, not only in their combat abilities, but also in their ability to physically contribute to the community. Once that's gone, it's like they're just a burden, and they become these ghosts.
Now, all of this isn't to say that PTSD didn't exist in the Middle Ages. And if you've ever clicked an article or watched a YouTube video about medieval PTSD, they're probably talking about cases like Sir Peter Bayern, who the French chronicler Jean Fosar mentions in his retelling of the Hundred Years War. Peter doesn't have any physical injuries from all the combat experiences he's lived through, but from what Fossar tells us, Peter is clearly pretty mentally damaged. When he gets home from the war, his marriage breaks down. His wife leaves him, and of course takes the kids. He starts having these lucid nightmares, and he develops this fear of sleeping alone. Fosar specifically notes, "Sir Peter has a habit when he is asleep at night of getting up and arming himself. He draws his sword in fights, but he does not know with whom."
So, we've got guys like Peter who don't have any physical injuries, but they're mentally scarred. Then we've got guys like Onan Treeleg whose physical injuries are also causing some kind of emotional injury that forces them into this downward spiral. There was an understanding in medieval medical theory that traumatic injuries could lead to long-term depression. And an English frier aptly named Bartalus Anglicus actually wrote a lot about depression and had a shockingly modern understanding of it. He wasn't examining mental health for soldiers specifically, but when he talks about treatment options, he recommends having the person taken out of their stressful environment, giving them comfort and encouragement and music therapy, along with these small, easy tasks to keep the mind occupied while they get back on their feet.
I know I'm beating a dead horse in my videos at this point, but the popular conception of the Middle Ages is that it was a thousand years of savage darkness and backwardness. But here is a 13th-century frier recommending essentially the same treatment that a modern psychiatrist would. I think this is because medieval physicians understood that they were actually treating something that we've only recently come to rediscover in the 21st century, which is the concept of moral injury. PTSD is tied to fear and an overactive nervous system, but moral injury is usually more associated with guilt, shame, regret, betrayal, a loss of meaning or identity. So, someone with PTSD might constantly be thinking, "I'm not safe." But a person with a moral injury might be thinking, "I'm not a good person," or "The world isn't the way I thought it was."
Also, if you've ever watched any of my videos, you know that medieval people had a very specific conception of how the world worked and what their individual place was in it. And it was a much more concrete conception than what we have now. So, that's really important to understand and remember. If this conception got shattered, the consequences could be totally disastrous.
The term moral injury was actually coined by the psychiatrist Jonathan Shea in his book *Achilles in Vietnam*, which I highly, highly recommend if the topic of this video interests you. Although it focuses more on mental trauma in the classical world, it's still very relevant. Sheay says that veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they get home and they start reintegrating into civilian life, provided that what they think of as right hasn't also been violated. So basically, you can survive the terrors of war, but what leaves the real lasting damage is when you survive doing something or watching something be done that violates everything you believe about how the world is supposed to work.
So just think about a knight going on crusade who exists in this moral framework of the church and the code of chivalry and the feudal bond and the whole concept that this war he's fighting in has been blessed by God. I have to stress that these guys were really fighting for something they believed in. And I have to stress again that everything was so specific in the medieval mind. The system they lived in told them exactly what they were fighting for, what the rules were, what it meant to violate those rules, etc., etc. So when that whole system broke down, my question is, does that knight's whole idea of reality break down with it? Well, thank the good lord above, we have a perfect contemporary chronicler to answer this exact question, and his name was Jean Dean Vio. Jean wasn't a career soldier. He was a regional lord and really more of an administrator than a fighter, which I actually think makes his account even more interesting to us.
In 1244, the French king Louis the 9th, who would later become St. Louis, started organizing the Seventh Crusade. At this point, the crusades still loomed really large in the European imagination, even though the returns had been diminishing for quite a while. And Jean joined up partly out of a sense of feudal duty and also because his father had gone on crusade 35 years before against the Albagenzians. Long story short, the Seventh Crusade was a complete disaster in pretty much every sense of the word. The basic strategy was to cross the Mediterranean, invade Egypt, and then take the army and march up into the Holy Land from the south. It didn't work out that way at all. The army pretty much immediately got cut off from its supply lines. Tons of soldiers died from dysentery or scurvy, and then whoever could still fight was crushed by the Mammluks at the Battle of Almansura in 1250.
Jean's account of the battle is actually incredible. And forgive me for getting hyped up about this, but this is the kind of thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. All I want to do is to reach across the centuries and put myself in the shoes of someone 800 years ago. What did it smell like and taste like? Give me the texture. I love this because Jean doesn't describe the battle as this sequence of heroic actions, which is what you would get in epic poetry from the Middle Ages. He narrates it as this mishmash of these close calls and then this general insanity and chaos, but then a few moments that stick in his brain. He says, "Well, I was on foot with my knights, wounded, as I have already told you. Up came the king with his own division. There was a great shouting and a tremendous noise of trumpets and kettle drums. He halted on a raised roadway. Never have I seen so fine a man in arms. He towered head and shoulders over his people, a gilded helmet on his head, and in his hand a sword of German steel. When he had halted there, the good knights of his household hurled themselves into the midst of the Turks. You must know that this was a great feat of arms, for there was no shooting of arrows nor bolts on both sides. It was a fight with mace and sword."
Let's just take a second to talk about what's happening psychologically here. So Jean is wounded. He's on foot. He's surrounded by chaos. And the detail that burns itself into his memory is the image of the king. This is actually how traumatized memory tends to work. Everything is this crazy blur, and then one or two images crystallize and stick. It's like the brain has to cling to something stable when everything else is falling apart.
Somehow, miraculously, Jean survived all of this and managed to get back to France in one piece, although presumably he was pretty shaken from the whole experience. 20 years later, King Louie tried to get the boys back together for another crusade. And shockingly, a lot of people said yes, even though the last one had been a complete catastrophe, but Jean put his foot down and said no. He had gone on the Seventh Crusade with this enthusiasm and this idea that God had willed it, and they were going to capture the Holy Land from the godless heathens. But then the actual reality was that the whole thing was kind of pointless, and the flower of the French nobility along with the rest of the army pooped themselves to death or had their flesh rot off from gangrene before they even got to fight the enemy.
Now, it's important to mention here that Jean is writing all this, or actually dictating it, about 50 years after the events he's describing. So, he's an old man at this point looking back at his life. When you read his account, you can tell he's trying to recreate this world of the holy crusading king that no longer existed in the France he lived in. But at this point, King Louis is dead. His fellow veterans are dead. The Crusades were all a failure. And Jean is sitting there thinking the same thing that a lot of American veterans have found themselves thinking in the past few decades. What were we even doing there? What was the point of all this suffering? We'll never know if he had any symptoms of PTSD, but we can certainly tell that he's carrying an injured soul and that his entire worldview was crushed by this event he lived through in his early 20s.
But like I said before, Jean wasn't a career soldier. He kind of just tagged along on the crusade out of a sense of Christian feudal duty to his holy king. I want to look at a career soldier. What about the guys who did this kind of thing constantly? What kind of psychological effect did it have on them?
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Back to the video.
Well, there's a really convenient narrative connection for me here, because Jean Dejuan V's grandson, Jeff Desani, is exactly the guy we're looking for. He grew up hearing his grandfather's stories about the Crusades, and he ended up going to war himself, and then he basically came up with this whole philosophical system to try and make sense of all the suffering. Jeff was the third son in his family, which in the Middle Ages meant he inherited absolutely nothing. That really sucks. But what's cool for us is that it meant he had to become a tournament fighter and earn money and honor by messing people up. Eventually, he graduated to real warfare during the Hundred Years War, and got captured and ransomed by the English twice.
There's also this story about Jeff where he apparently once tracked down a man who had betrayed him, dragged him out of bed, decapitated him, and mounted the body parts on the town gates. Eventually, he was appointed the job of bearer of the Oriflam, which was the sacred battle standard of France. This was a ridiculously dangerous job, because you're the guy holding this incredibly important ceremonial flag, which means everyone on the other side is going to notice you and try to kill you immediately so they can steal the flag, because that type of thing was huge for medieval battlefield morale. He actually did end up dying at the Battle of Poatier in 1356 with the flag still in his hands, surrounded by five English soldiers who he had apparently taken with him.
Jeff was, of course, very much respected by every dude in the realm, and sometime before his heroic death at Poatier, he actually wrote a book called *The Book of Chivalry*, which for about a century afterwards was basically the operating manual for French knighthood. What's interesting about the book is that Jeffa is pretty blunt about the reality of war. It's not like some flowery ode to fighting or whatever. He talks about the hunger and the thirst and the sleepless nights, battling for days at a time, watching your friends die. The point of mentioning all this stuff is because he wants the reader, who's presumably a young knight, to know what's coming. There's this part where Jeff talks about a certain point on a military campaign where you feel like, and I quote, "even nature is going against you." If you look at the context, it seems like he's doing his best to describe this sensation of your own body becoming alien to you, something that we would label today as disassociation. Of course, his solution to this is to push through it, but the fact that he even acknowledges it in a 14th-century book is actually pretty insane. You don't really find that kind of thing a lot.
Another idea that Jeff touches on frequently is terror, which definitely means the fear of death, but more importantly to him and to the chivalrous French mind, the fear of shame. The whole late medieval western ethical system that he exists in is built on a single idea, which is that the worth of any deed is measured by how much it costs you to accomplish it. Jousting is good. Tournament fighting is a little better, because it's more like war. Real war is the best of them all, because it actually destroys you. The suffering is what makes it worth anything. You see this idea a lot in medieval thinking. Like imagine monks finding God through fasting and wearing hair shirts so they're constantly uncomfortable or in pain.
So basically, what we've ended up with here is a system where the psychological wounds of war aren't really something to be avoided or even necessarily treated. There's something that you have to earn and then endure, but then you convert them into your identity. At least that's what Jeff did. You're not allowed to not be damaged, because being damaged is proof that you were there. Also kind of ironic, or maybe actually heroic depending on how you look at it, that he wrote a book about what it looks like to be destroyed by war and to keep going anyway. Okay. And then he died, proving that point. There's a reason he's remembered as one of the coldest knights who ever lived.
Let's go a little more local for a second. Medieval people witnessed way more violence in their day-to-day lives than we do. So, it's worth exploring how that impacted their mental health in a broader communal way. To do that, we have to look at one of the most incredible surviving documents from the late Middle Ages: a canonization inquest from 1363 in Provence, southeastern France. A canonization inquest was basically a papal legal proceeding to determine whether or not someone should be a saint. And in this case, the candidate was a noble woman named Countest Deline de Pu Michelle. She had passed away about 3 years before the inquest, and a bunch of people in the local community believed that she had maintained some kind of mystical direct line to God during her life. So 68 witnesses came before the two papal representatives, and they testified about Deline's miracles and their own experiences. What does any of this have to do with PTSD or moral injury, you ask? Stick with me. I'm leading you on the beautiful, sensual dance of history.
The witnesses in the inquest had all survived the Black Death, mercenary invasions, and Civil War in a 20-year window between 1343 and 1363. That's a lot to try and process in such a short period of time. These people ran the spectrum of medieval society. You have merchants and soldiers and servants and noble lords and local nuns and future cardinals, but they all give a similar description of what Deline was best at healing. All the stuff that they had gone through in the last few decades had left them with these internal emotional wounds that they couldn't really explain or properly describe, but she was able to somehow make them go away. So these are 14th-century people in rural France explicitly articulating that war and violence produce a different kind of wound than physical illness, which means it requires a different kind of healing.
Let's just pull an example from the inquests and see what we can see. One of the witnesses is a local lore named Ferrarius of Kukaron. In May of 1358, he's ordered to lead his troops in an attempt to retake the walled town of Kukuron from a mercenary company that's been terrorizing the area. Before the battle, he's all messed up. He visits Delphine and he tells her about the whole situation. What he says is that he's afraid of going into battle, but he's also afraid of not going, because retreating would bring this unbearable shame on him and his household. Ferius is trapped here. This medieval honor code has kind of forced him into a position where both of the available choices absolutely suck. If he fights, he's probably going to have to kill somebody, which the church understood as a wound to the soul, or he himself could die. Then if he doesn't fight, that's cowardice, which messes with your identity and your social standing. Deline, of course, tells him not to go, but he tells her he can't follow her advice because, and I quote, "He did not dare to follow her warning because he would be shamed and reproached for timidity." So Delphine makes him a promise, which is that he won't kill anyone, and she'll somehow intercede directly with God on his behalf. She's basically doing her best to try and manage his moral injury before it even happens.
Now, miracles happen pretty frequently in the Middle Ages, and I personally believe miracles still happen now, but were just too distracted and overstimulated to notice them. Everything Deline told him ended up coming true. Both of his horses went lame. He was forced to leave the battlefield. His men charged ahead without him, right into an ambush, and they get slaughtered. But he escapes unscathed with his honor and his soul still intact. Boom. Not bad.
When the papal commissioners question Ferrarius about this, they ask him directly, "If the horses hadn't been injured, would you have ridden with your men?" It is kind of a loaded question because he's testifying in a cathedral in front of a bishop and an archbishop. So, he wants to look like a good Christian, but he still answers honestly. Yes, he would have ridden. Of course, he would have ridden. He's a knight, for God's sake. His fear of shame would have overridden his fear of death. He would have been in that ambush, and he would have died right alongside his men.
Let's just sit and let this marinate for just a second. This man came before a papal court and admitted publicly that he had been afraid. This shimmerous Catholic warrior had been afraid. He admitted that he had literally needed divine intervention to survive with his honor intact. The inquest basically gave him a structured communal space to tell that story. And in telling it, he was able to process it. It's the same way that Jean Dejuanve was able to process his trauma by dictating it all out loud to ascribe 50 years after the fact. This is a civilization that understood, at some level, what moral injury required for healing. They built something—the inquest, the penance, the community, the saint—that basically functioned as a structured space for doing the work that moral injury requires: confession, narrative, and public witness and communal reintegration.
But let's put the finishing touches on this medieval masterpiece. I'm not saying that medieval soldiers didn't suffer from PTSD. I mean, they almost certainly did. Even Jeff Wade Charie in his book on chivalry mentions that something knights will have to deal with when they come home from war is, I quote, "being beset by great terrors." So clearly, this was a thing. What I'm really trying to say is that we've spent the last 100 years or so treating combat trauma as a strictly medical problem. And the solutions are usually prescriptions or cognitive behavioral therapy. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't. But I think what's important for us to understand is that moral wounds are very real and need to be treated as such.
I know I say this in every video, and I've already said it in this one, but everyone thinks of the Middle Ages as this brutal and chaotic time where nobody knew anything. But just look at the evidence I've laid out here. Clearly, in some ways they understood the nuances of mental health better than we do. But what do you think? Is there something to this, or do we have a better approach now? Let me know in the comments. As always, I'm John. This has been the medieval mindset. And remember, the past isn't gone. It's simply waiting to be rediscovered.