In the archives of a medieval monastery we would expect to find charters, bulls, books of hours and hymns, illustrated codices, and a wide variety of administrative and religious documents. What is unlikely to be on the list is what historians suspect they have discovered in the sump of the monastery of San Salvador de Celanova in the province of Ourense. There they found a document that, more or less covertly, appears to describe a gay marriage in rural Galicia in the 11th century, a suggestive phrase that has intrigued many scholars in the last decade.

How Pedro Díaz and Munio Vandilaz reemerged from the mists of the Middle Ages 900 years ago to play a role in the fascinating mystery of Galicia.

A gay wedding in Ourense of the XI? Such is the question that José Miguel Andrade, professor of medieval history at the University of Santiago de Compostela, put as the title of his latest article. Speech.

The question is fascinating. Both for the story it proposes to us, starring two men from the 11th century, Pedro Díaz and Munio Vandilaz, and for what it tells us about early medieval society and Galicia around 1,000 years ago. Andrade himself argues, in his article, that the Middle Ages had little to do with the dark image that had settled in the collective imagination.

A traditional document? At the heart of this intriguing question posed by Andrade is a legal document signed in 1061, written in Latin and not overly extensive, and still available today through the Consello da Cultura Galega. The text, preserved on the visiting card of the monastery of Salvador de Celanova, is essentially an act by which two men, Pedro Díaz and Munio Vandilaz, undertake to share the administration of the house and church of Santa María de Ordes. The Andrade slide corresponds to a neighborhood still named today, Rairiz de Veiga, in the A Limia district of Ourense.

The fact that two lay people agree on how to manage the property we consider religious today may not bother us in the 21st century, but it may not have bothered us in the 11th century, recalls the professor from Santiago. “The churches and monasteries were part of the inheritance of the most economically wealthy families, and they decided with complete freedom and autonomy what to do with it,” he recalls: “The Church did not yet have the power and capacity to demand autonomy in the management of its assets.”

The importance of details. So far nothing extraordinary. Another medieval agreement preserved for centuries in the dusty files of an ancient monastery. The fascinating part comes from reading the text carefully, paying attention to the details. First, the fact that Pedro and Munio do not share surnames, so everything points to them being two friends, a fact that is made clear in the text itself.

Another interesting point Andrade points out is that the agreement states that Pedro and Munio are “equal owners” of the church in question, and lists in detail the functions that each of them undertakes, ranging from looking after guests to tending to the servants or the gardens.

“Full of loyalty and integrity”. Again, up to this point the document is interesting, but still unexceptional, and there is no indication that Pedro and Munio could be more than good partners. But as the reading progresses, Andrade notes, the text “begins to take on a less conventional tone.” Among the formalities, the document states that both will honor the agreement day and night “as good friends, full of loyalty and truth” forever.

The expert admits that “it is these emotional expressions, which we can consider to go beyond the purely documentary formalism, that have led some historians to see in this agreement more than a new example of this artificial brotherhood.” He is not the first to point this out. He himself recalls that the famous American historian of Yale University, John Boswell, mentioned the Galician incident in his 1996 article “The Wedding of Similarity”, where he spoke precisely about homosexual unions between Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

A suspicion that has persisted for decadesAndrade notes that the American medievalist singled out the document preserved in the cards of the Ouresan monastery “as one of the documents that, according to his hypothesis, concealed an emotional and marital union between the two men.” Although it was Boswell who led the way, another historian, Eduardo de Hinojosa of Granada, had previously noted the curious style and peculiarities of the treaty signed in Ourense in the mid-11th century.

His interpretation is somewhat different, although Andrade recalls that De Hinojosa, a legal consultant who was a member of the Unión Católica, lived between 1852 and 1919, a period when “mental standards” prevailed and were “not the most appropriate standards to enter into history”, as he recalls “emotion, gender or homosexuality”.

Since the time of De Hinojosa, other researchers, as well as John Boswell or Andrade, have considered the possible meanings of the agreement signed between Pedro and Munio. The Galician philologist and historian Carlos Callón, in his work ‘Amigos e sodomitas’, published in 2011, refers to the 1061 text and reflects on the existence of romantic relationships between people of the same sex in public during the Middle Ages.

“Artificial brotherhood”. Although the Galician contract has been suggestive enough to attract the attention of many researchers both inside and outside Spain since the 19th century, Andrade reminds us that at least part of its content can be framed in a broader context: “artificial fraternity”. A formula that established a close bond, including a contract, between people of different families and that spread to other countries.

“It is found in different characters and forms in every period of history,” an article in the magazine explained. Archives, Libraries and Museums Journal—. This bond is generally established by contract between persons who are not united by any other relation of kinship, and who agree to consider themselves as brothers, either to protect and defend each other, or to possess and exploit property in common, or for both purposes at the same time. .

The importance of detailsIn his newly published article Speech, Andrade insists that “artificial fraternity” is “a legal formula traceable throughout much of the early medieval European world” and accepts that the agreement between Pedro and Munio addressed a property shared by the two men; but the USC expert joins previous writers in emphasizing the features of the document preserved at Ourense.

The key, he insists, is in the details, in the expressions, in the “emotional expressions” that sometimes seem to reveal more than “mere documentary formalism”. For the time being at least, theories and hypotheses are forced to remain in this realm, that is, in the realm of speculation. Ten centuries later, it is not easy to go any further.

A complex task“The task of interpreting the original document is not an easy one,” Andrade admits. The aim of the Treaty of 1061, he says, is to dispel the idea that the Middle Ages were a period of barbarism. “It is far from being the dark, reactionary and savage age that some still imagine it to be,” he stresses.

“It is important to remember that in these central centuries of the Middle Ages, even homoerotic literature emerged, which tells us about a certain tolerance and recognition in emotional and sexual relations between people of the same sex.”

The question remains whether the secret but intriguing pact signed by Pedro and Munio 963 years ago is an unlikely glimpse into how two men could live a life similar to heterosexual marriage in 11th-century Galicia.

Images | Wikipedia and Darío Álvarez (Flickr)

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