We're told in the middle ages European monarchs would only

it was a baroque thing

>>302292

Charlemagne built his palace in a irrelevant spa.
The moar you know.

>>302317
The Byzantines mistook Charlemagne's palace for a horse stable

>>302329

It was being built.
The moar you know.

>>302292
Bathing was normal in Europe until the late middle ages, then people started to associate cleanliness with clean clothes.

>>302292
Isabel swore to not bath until all Iberia was under christian rule. So I supposed she did bathe before?

>>302292
>middle ages
Not really, people stopped to bath with revival of humorism so it's more during the XVI and XVII centuries.

Yes, most people did bathe. General how-to books from that time period stressed the importance of removing dirt and grime, especially from hands, hair or anything that might touch other people.

I wonder if the myths of "people from (older time period) only had 1 bath a month!!" etc., stem from misconstruing records from the time, in addition to people from every age having a superiority complex about the previous age. People bathed regularly by washing themselves with rags/sponge bath-style, but most people didn't "take baths" too often because it was a time consuming, difficult process. So, you might only take a single bath a month--but that didn't mean you weren't scrubbing yourself clean at night.

"The 16th-century Iberians inherited that pan-European fear of water, but they had an additional, peculiarly Iberian aversion to cleanliness. Like every other part of the Roman empire, they had had their own well-patronized bath-houses. But when the Visigoths conquered Iberia in the 5th century, they scorned hot baths as effeminate and weakening, and they demolished the bath-houses. By the time the Moors invaded the country in 711, the Iberians had lost the old, bath-loving link. At that point, they saw the Moors’ well-washed ways as part of their heretical convictions, and their own dirtiness as a Christian virtue. (Some early Christians had regarded cleanliness as a dangerous luxury, along with good food, wine and sexual enjoyments, and tried to abstain from it; Iberia continued in this austere tradition longer than most.)

Arab Iberia sparkled with water, whether in fountains, pools or hundreds of bath-houses. Christians in the north of Spain, not under Arab rule, continued to revel in their squalor, washing ‘neither their bodies nor their clothes which they only remove when they fall into pieces,’ according to a contemporary observer. The more their Arab conquerors washed, the more suspicious, decadent and un-Christian the practice seemed to the Iberians, and their dislike endured long after the Arabs had left".

"Richard Ford, a 19th-century English traveler who knew Spain well, spoke for many when he connected a centuries-old Spanish distaste for washing with the Moorish occupation. He wrote:-

>>302476

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.

Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros, himself a Franciscan - wrote Ford - persuaded King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to close and abolish the Moorish baths after their conquest of Granada. They forbade not only the Christians but the Moors from using anything but holy water. Fire, not water, became the grand element of inquisitorial purification.

Sure enough, one of the first things the Spaniards did during the Reconquest was to destroy the Moorish baths (just as the Visigoths had destroyed the Roman ones). Even after that, suspicions remained: Moors who converted to Christianity were forbidden to bathe. During the Inquisition, one of the worst things that could be said about Jews as well as Moors was that they were ‘known to bathe.’ As Richard Ford noted, these attitudes were still current in the 19th century. He tells the story of the Spanish Duke of Frias, who visited an English lady for a fortnight and ‘never once troubled his basins and jugs [on his washstand in his bedroom]; he simply rubbed his face occasionally with the white of an egg.’ This, Ford assures us, was the only ablution used by Spanish ladies in the time of Philip IV, and apparently it was good enough for the Duke."

>>302476
>>302479
That sounds like a load of bullshit

>>302476
>>302479
Moor propaganda detected
Your kind are not welcome in here 1492 best year of my life

>>302479
>The mendicant Spanish monks, according to their practice of setting up a directly antagonistic principle [to the Arabs]

>Invaders are not the villains
I really, really hate this meme.

>>302646
You cannot at the same time dislike the moors and like anglo saxons, since they pretty much did the same thing with much better success

>>302292
It was probably way more often but not really that much. Queen Elizabeth bathed once a month and that was 1600s.

>>305066
Was she not considered to be obsessed with cleanliness for that by her contemporaries?

So what about Scandinavian monarchs? Scandis had widespread bathing culture that included bathing every Saturday.

File: 1419909888329.jpg (3MB, 5000x5000px) Image search: [Google]

3MB, 5000x5000px

>>302476
>Christians had regarded cleanliness as a dangerous luxury, along with good food, wine
>wine
>catholic europeans
>not liking wine
>europeans
>not liking wine

>>305090
Yeah but because moors didn't like wine they reveled in it.

This thread makes me glad I live in modern times.
Just how fucking disgusting were people back then?

File: Santa Maria del Naranco analisis_espacial_funcional_02.jpg (112KB, 640x480px) Image search: [Google]

112KB, 640x480px

Meanwhile in the real Medieval Spain:
>Excavations revealed baths in one of the loser rooms

>>302646
>>305090
It's not bullshit but i think it does just apply to edgy Spaniards.

>>305268
When you can only heat water in hours and invertign a large sum of money for fuel, baths became a luxury. Sponge wash and etc tough were common place.
>>305473
In medieval Spain bathshouse (than were public like Roman ones) were notorious for the prostitues and were considered a kind of brothel, so they had a bad fame. All the same they were very popular.