Iconography bears out the textual inconsistencies without, unfortunately, revealing local or chronological patterns. In general, European monks were expected to cut their beards, but not too closely and not too often, and not all of them did so.137 Byzantine monks were not so concerned about this aspect of monastic comportment and completely beardless eunuchs could become monks or priests.138 What was strongly discouraged was religious men paying too much attention to their hair or letting it grow so long that gender distinctions might become confused. While the general picture of Roman-rite monastics and churchmen cutting their hair and beards and Orthodox-rite equivalents growing theirs is probably correct, individuals or communities could easily defy these “dictates.”
An angry passage by Eustathios, the archbishop of Thessalonike, who in 1185 was an eyewitness to the sack of his city by Normans from southern Italy, applies to clerics (victims) and soldiers (perpetrators) and should not be construed as referring to laymen in general:
And even when leaving us alone in other respects, they [the Normans] concentrated their schemes against the heads of each of us, showing an equal dislike both for our long hair and for our long beards. It was not possible to see a man or a boy of any station in life who did not have his hair cut short all around, like the proverbial Hektor’s crop I suppose, or cut short in front in the manner of Theseus, whereas their hair previously used to be worn in the opposite manner, like the Abantes, and not like these Latins, who wore theirs cut round in a circle and were, so to speak, hairy-crowned. And in paying attention to our hair, the Latins made use at one moment of a razor, at another of a knife, and the more hasty among them used a sword; and then a man who had been shaved in this way would also be relieved of his beard. It became a rarity to see in any place a Greek whose head was still untampered with. The situation was the reverse of the saying, “Not a hair of our heads shall be touched.” For our many sins, for which we have “paid the penalty early” in the words of the one who declared that he would early slay the wicked of the land and would destroy the wrongdoers from the city of the Lord, brought disaster reaching as high as our very own hairs, so that we were completely exposed to the cold, with even our heads stripped bare. And if any man’s beard escaped and hung down in an orderly manner in accordance with nature, then these wretched barbers grabbed it with one hand, and the hair of his head with the other, and said that all was well with the latter hair but not with the former, jesting over matters which were not fit for mirth.139
Hyperbole is a time-tested rhetorical device and such an exaggerated account should not be taken at face value. The real reasons for Norman aggression against Byzantine bodies in 1185 had little to do with opinions about hair and beards and much to do with anger over Byzantine attacks on Europeans three years earlier in Constantinople.
Is the prostrating Nicholas at Miggiano an Orthodox or a Roman-rite monk [73.A]? His hair curls down to the nape of his neck but is hardly the unshorn hair one might have expected from Eustathios’s description. “Long” and “short” are relative terms, as are “shaved” and “tonsured.”140 His name is no help, as Nicholas was extremely popular regardless of the holder’s religion. Yet because he is identified in Greek in a site that has exclusively Greek tituli and Orthodox iconographic details, I think he is likely to be an Orthodox monk—just like his beardless companion Leo.141 The priest named George at Vaste [157.G], kneeling upright next to the Virgin and Child in 1379/80, has a tonsure, and he or his father was an oblate of Saint Stephen, an office that did not exist in the Orthodox world. Was George then a Roman-rite priest despite his supplication in Greek? I argue the contrary in Chapter 8, where Vaste emerges as a paradigmatic work of cultural translation.
Laymen’s Hair
Because most of our painted human figures are laymen, we need to ask whether a bearded/Orthodox versus unbearded/Latin distinction held for this group. For these men the dictates of fashion were probably even more mutable than the inconsistent directives for priests and monks, so the caveat about generalizations and exceptions applies even more strongly. In the first half of the eleventh century beards were fashionable in Europe; by the second half most men shaved, and this continued into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as recorded in both Greek and Latin sources.142 Italian men alone seem to have revived the full-bearded look in the early fourteenth century,143 but this proved of short duration.
In Byzantium, as elsewhere, churchmen attempted to influence male fashion. A contemporary of Eustathios, Archbishop Michael Choniates of Athens, criticized the fact that (some) members of his flock were shaving: “Whoever puts off the manly hair of his chin has unconsciously transformed himself from a man into a woman … shame indeed it is to don a unisex appearance like the hermaphrodites of ancient Greece!”144 Yet the reality was that some men were cutting their hair despite what the bishop had to say, and if they were doing it in Athens they were surely doing it in the Salento as well. In addition, a text produced in Otranto in the thirteenth century indicates that “among the Hellenes” (παρά
The figures shown on the so-called dancers’ capital now in Brindisi probably reflect in some degree the appearance of real Normans. All eight of the men have short hair and (probably) no beard [19]. While the pavements at Taranto (1160) and Otranto (1163–65) cannot be said unequivocally to depict contemporary men, the males generally have short hair and are beardless. But this does not mean that Normans in general were short-haired like the soldiers who ravaged Thessalonike. We should listen to the Norman historian Orderic Vitalis when he tells us, in 1142, that “effeminate men had dominion throughout the world.… They parted their hair in the middle, they let it grow long, as women do, and carefully tended it, and they delighted in wearing excessively tight undershirts and tunics.” He goes on to criticize pointed, curving shoes, unnecessary trains, and long, wide sleeves; in short, these men “rejected the ways of heroes, ridiculed the counsel of priests, and persisted in their barbarous style of dress and way of life.”146
In later medieval narrative scenes that had less of a moralizing ax to grind, variety in hairstyle was eminently possible. We see this in the thirteenth-century Betrayal of Christ scene at Casaranello, where several soldiers have a short beard and mustache [33.sc.1].147 In the early fourteenth-century Last Judgment scene at the Roman-rite Santa Maria del Casale, the saved cleric farthest to the left has a tonsure and a beard [28.A]. The reason was surely the desire to communicate a range of ages, rather than the explicit presence of “Easterners” and “Westerners.”
In fifteenth-century monuments a bowl-type haircut is favored, as at Nardò and Galatina (1432) [47.D]. Laymen followed fashion, and most European men in the thirteenth century had short hair; priests and monks were not their follicular role models. Just as men might change their names to fit into a new social hierarchy, they could easily change their hair for the same reason. Hair was as much a part of a man’s situational identity as hair coverings were for women. The public setting of depicted devotional figures meant that their clothing and hairstyle needed to be in the realm of the recognizable, conventional, and acceptable. Yet like the clothing on display, the hairstyle might still be more idealized and symbolic than descriptive.
Saint Peter’s Hair