[28.D; Plate 4]. An earlier panel there [28.V; Plate 7] reveals that two of the five figures kneeling behind Nicholas de Marra have short beards, one has a mustache, and several have blond hair to the shoulders. Thus the scant evidence for both longer hair and beards is skewed to the late period. The absence of these features in the earlier medieval centuries reflects the paucity of early devotional figures in general; it does not tell us that the proportions of bearded to nonbearded men differed at opposite ends of the Middle Ages. On the basis of imagery from outside the region, however, we know that fashions in men’s hair changed continuously.
The meanings of different hairstyles depended on cultural and historical contexts and varied according to such factors as a man’s age, status, profession, and state of mind. Hair could be simultaneously magical, sexual, and social.125 In many cultures facial hair was a metonym for masculinity or worldliness: Byzantine monks “cast off the hair of the world”126 when they received their tonsure. We find these notions addressed in eighteenth-century collections of proverbs in the Salentine dialect. Some of these date to the early modern period, but others are probably much older:
Bbarba d‘ommu e ccuta de cane, guàrdale e nnu lle tuccare.
Beard of man and tail of dog, look but don’t touch.
Bbarba janca, specchiu de morte.
White beard, mirror of death.
La bbarba nu fface l‘ommu.
The beard does not make the man.
Guardati da femina barbuta e da uomo senza barba.
Protect yourself from women with beards and men without.127
That the topic of hair and beards resonated in the medieval Salento is proved by a short treatise produced in the 1220s and copied at least four times in the thirteenth century alone. Περὶ Γενείων, On the Beard, deals with the hair and beard preferences of “the Greeks” as expressed by Nicholas-Nektarios, the learned abbot of one of the most important Orthodox monasteries in the Salento, San Nicola at Casole, which had been founded under the patronage of the Norman rulers in 1098/99.128 The bilingual (Greek and Latin) treatise was appended to Nicholas-Nektarios’s Τρία Συντάγματα, Three Constitutions, which dealt with topics of cultural disagreement that will be discussed in later chapters. It is worth translating the text in full:
It is not necessary for us to write or collect in this treatise about beards or even about some other things held by custom, but because of some of the ignorant who boast especially in shaving but despise those who heed the [true] form of man, we will write a little about these, by way of a separate note outside of our treatise.
The faithful must not shave, as one finds in the first book of the Apostolic Constitutions, chapter three [1.3.11], which forbids this. It says the faithful must not corrupt the hair of their beard and change the form of man against nature. For the law of Moses [Lev. 19:27] says you will not pluck your beards. For God the Creator made this seemly for women (sc., to have smooth faces). He ordained it unfit for men. But you by so doing, because of an allurement, oppose the law and become abominable in the eyes of God who created you in his own image. So if you wish to please God, refrain from all that he hates and stop doing anything that displeases him.
As for the Latin: now the Church of Rome has adopted this, he says, since what the impious did in violence against the Apostle Peter, plucking out his beard, we do reckoning the violence against him an honor even in this, such as also cutting in a circle the heads of the Latin and Greek priests.
Next the Greek: we have adopted this entirely because of the crown of thorns and because men’s not growing hair is a precept in both the Old and New Testament, just like not shaving the beard. Who is the one who asserts this against the apostolic tradition, although we know this entirely without a Council? But why, we will not say. Now there was an Anacletus born in Herakleia [in] Thrace, as is written in the Chronicle of the Genealogies of the Apostles of Rome, and we have often read in your books how it was Anacletus who ordered tonsure and beards to be shaved. He was by birth a Greek and from Thracian Herakleia.
And enough about beards.129
Nicholas-Nektarios here asserts that the Latin custom of shaving the beard is unnatural and unmanly, based on the Westerners’ misunderstanding of the third-century Didascalia apostolorum, which states that “you should not corrupt the traces of your beard or change the natural figure of your face or change it to other than it is and God created it.”130 While the “Latins” claim that shaving and tonsuring were introduced in memory of Saint Peter having his hair and beard torn out, the “Greeks” held these depilations to be unauthorized reforms.131 The resulting shape of Peter’s torn-out hair was understood as an imitation of the crown of thorns, and therefore served as a model for Western monks and clerics but not for Orthodox ones.132 This was not new: the same issues had been cited as contributing to the mutual excommunications of 1054.133 What is relevant here is the specifically Salentine context for the objections, and the possibility of considering the hair of Saint Peter as emblematic in the thirteenth century when most of the images of supplicants, as well as most of the depictions of Saint Peter, were executed.
Priests and Monks
Clerical shaving and tonsuring had a long history in medieval Europe, as Giles Constable’s extensive treatment of the topic attests. The problem is that the textual evidence is contradictory; even with repeated anathemas on long hair and beards, many clerics still wore them. Sometimes this was permanent, a product of personal preference as a sign of dignity or age; sometimes it was temporary, when the man was fasting or traveling.134 Most of the popes and bishops in the eleventh and twelfth centuries appear to have had a beard. Shaving was certainly laborious and painful. In the twelfth century, a European monk was permitted to shave only fourteen, seven, or six times per year, according to the Cluniacs, Cistercians, and Carthusians, respectively,135 so few monks were truly beardless if indeed these regulations were enforced. By contrast, in some twelfth-century Byzantine monasteries a haircut required the permission of the abbot or fifty prostrations would be exacted as punishment, and there was no monastic legislation about beards.136
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
