City of Dog

Abstract

To be fully human in the Greco-Roman world was to be a member of a city. This is unsurprising as cities were the building blocks of Greek and Roman culture and society. The urban landscape of post-Roman Western Europe looked dramatically different, with smaller, less economically diverse cities which played a smaller role in administration. Despite this, Greco-Roman ideas of humans as city-beings remained influential. This article explores this by investigating early medieval descriptions of cynocephali, which sought to determine whether the dog-headed men were human or not. Accounts of the cynocephali that presented them as human showed them living in urban settlements, whereas in reports of non-human cynocephali there are no cities. In exploring interactions between cynocephali and urban settings through ethnographic portrayals and hagiography, this article traces the lingering importance of the city for concepts of humanity.

They return at evening: they make a noise like a dog, and go round about the city.

—Psalm 59.6

In Umberto Eco’s novel Baudolino (2000), the eponymous protagonist and his companions are delayed on their journey to the kingdom of Prester John by an extended stay in the city of Pndapetzim. ¹ The city is inhabited by numerous fantastic races possessed of a diverse range of Christian beliefs, including Arian skiapods, Adoptionist blemmyes, and Artotyrite giants. Despite these differences, the denizens of Pndapetzim live together in relative harmony, respecting the law of the Deacon of the city, enforced by his Circoncellion Nubian guards, and viewing the other groups as fellow citizens, albeit ones possessed of erroneous religious views.

The case of Pndapetzim invites the reader to consider the lines upon which communities are divided, parodying the twelfth-century Europe whence the main characters have traveled. ² Despite their extraordinary appearance, the humanity of the peoples of Pndapetzim is clear, in large part due to their ability to coexist under a common system of governance. Ironically their sense of unity spells disaster for the inhabitants of the city as their inability to see physical difference ultimately leads to their defeat by the White Huns, as they fail to make best use of their unique skills, while the Huns are only capable of seeing monsters. Throughout the novel, Eco underlines the importance of cities, with much of the plot hinging upon the foundation of his own home city of Alessandria. On their journey to the East, Baudolino’s companions assess the nature of the curious peoples they meet by whether they possess cities and if so, the quality thereof, being disappointed by “wretched hovels inhabited by repugnant rabble.” ³

Eco’s work is a modern fantasy, but one inspired by much older ideas. That the city was the true place for a human to live is an idea at least as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh. ⁴ That to be human was to inhabit the city as part of a community of citizens had particular significance in the Greco-Roman world. ⁵ To live beyond the connection of the city was to be in some sense wild or animal. ⁶ For Aristotle, the polis was the natural habitat of humanity, indeed the only place that a person could be fully human for:

the city-state is a natural growth, and man is by nature a political animal, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it. ⁷

Classical ethnography of nomads often presented them in bestial terms, as in the words of Ammianus Marcellinus on the Scythians who “feed after the foul manner of wild beasts.” ⁸ The Greco-Roman world was one organized around cities. ⁹ By contrast, the early medieval world of Western Europe was one in which cities were considerably smaller and less economically important. ¹⁰ Yet urbanism remained important for writers in the period as a marker of culture and order.

This article seeks to explore the extent to which Greco-Roman ideas linking human status with urbanism continued into the medieval world, by examining accounts dealing with one particular case study. Among the races encountered by Baudolino’s party are the dog-headed cynocephali. ¹¹ Popular throughout the ancient and medieval periods, accounts of the dog-headed men provided a tailor-made opportunity for writers to consider the boundaries between human and animal. ¹² As Lionarons observes, “literary portrayals of the cynocephali tend to stress either the bestiality or the humanity within the hybrid.” ¹³ It was no accident that when Augustine wished to broach the question of how to identify a human, he began by referring to the cynocephali. ¹⁴ To read a description of the cynocephali is therefore to read an argument about what it means to be human. In what follows I suggest that the human status of the cynocephali frequently depended on the mode of social organization attributed to them, that is to say whether they lived in cities. Varying “ethnographic” descriptions reveal a consistent set of criteria for humanity, which also appear in a range of Christian genres of writing. This placed great importance on the city as a marker of humanity.

Citizen Canine

Late antique and medieval authors frequently used animals in order to talk about being an inhabitant of a city. In Ostrogothic Italy in 526/7, Cassiodorus (d.c.585) composed a letter on behalf of King Athalaric (r.526-534) which was sent to Severus, the governor of Lucania-Bruttium. ¹⁵ In it, Severus was exhorted to encourage “the land-owners and town-councillors of Bruttium [to] return to their cities,” rather than remaining in their country estates, because “It is the way of animals to seek out the woods and fields, but of men to love their hearths and homelands above all things.” ¹⁶ Cassiodorus compares those who prefer to stay away from the city to “fierce hawks and hunting eagles,” intent upon doing harm to each other and so unable to trust their fellows. ¹⁷ By contrast, men who come to the city are akin to birds of “a gentle and harmless character,” who can trust each other as “nothing that lives an honest life disdains the pleasures of unity.” ¹⁸ To be capable of living in a city was a sign of good faith and an ability to cooperate and coexist with one’s fellow humans. Cassiodorus was an example of a much wider trend. Throughout this period people consciously discussed non-human or quasi-human beings in ways that reflected or shaped their ideas of what it meant to be an inhabitant of a city.

A century earlier in his De Civitate Dei, Bishop Augustine of Hippo (d.430) reflected that “the histories of the nations tell of certain monstrous races of men.” ¹⁹ He listed a series of such beings, many derived from Pliny’s Natural History. Last in this litany, he addressed the cynocephali:

And what am I to say of those dog-headed men whose dogs’ heads and actual barking show that they are more beasts than men? It is not, of course, necessary to believe in all the kinds of men who are said to exist. But anyone who is born anywhere as a man, that is a rational and mortal animal, no matter how unusual he may be to our bodily senses in shape, colour, motion, sound, or in any natural power or part or quality, derives from the original and first-created man; and no believer will doubt this. ²⁰

As the title of this article suggests, the influence of this passage of Augustine in City of God is to be found in many of the discussions of the dog-headed people examined below. Augustine ruled out physical appearance as the essential criterion for determining humanity, instead seizing upon rationality. ²¹ This was not a new concept. Aristotle described “people irrational by nature . . . like certain remote tribes of barbarians” as belonging “to the bestial class.” ²² If Augustine set the terms of the debate for subsequent writers, pre-Christian ideas remained crucial for the application of this test. Rationality is a notoriously slippery concept to define or to measure. ²³ In order to determine the rationality of a being, medieval writers regularly turned to classical ethnography, analyzing their fictional subjects through the lens of Greco-Roman concepts of rational behavior. Chief among them was the city.

In this investigation, the sources examined are those that include descriptions of cynocephali that contain some suggestion of their manner of habitation or comments on the society or lack thereof of the cynocephali. This therefore excludes short references such as that of Isidore of Seville (d.636) in his Etymologies. While Isidore mentions the cynocephali, saying that “their barking indeed reveals that they are rather beasts than humans,” he provides no indication as to whether his conception of their manner of living influenced his categorization. ²⁴ Nonetheless, many other writers were extremely interested in the question of the settlements of the cynocephali. It is to these portrayals that we now turn.

Cynocephali appeared in Greco-Roman descriptions of the east. ²⁵ Given the subject being discussed, it is striking that one of the earliest accounts of the cynocephali, that of the Greek physician Ctesias in the fifth century BC, emphasizes their civilized nature despite their lack of cities. ²⁶ Although they “live not in houses but in caves,” Ctesias takes pains to note that the cynocephali “are very just, like the rest of the Indians with whom they associate.” ²⁷ Despite the interest of his writings, Ctesias was not widely known in the medieval west, with most of his material on the cynocephali being preserved by Patriarch Photios’s epitome. More accessible for Western readers was Pliny’s Natural History, often mediated by Solinus. ²⁸ Citing Megasthenes as his source, Pliny describes the dog-headed men of India:

on many of the mountains there is a tribe of human beings with dogs’ heads, who wear a covering of wild beasts’ skins, whose speech is a bark and who live on the produce of hunting and fowling, for which they use their nails as weapons. ²⁹

Confined to inhospitable territory, devoid of tools, craft, or agriculture, these cynocephali are barely human barbarians. More striking still is Pliny’s account of the Menismini of Ethiopia, who

live on the milk of the animal which we call cynocephalus, and rear large flocks of these creatures, taking care to kill the males, except such as they may preserve for the purpose of breeding. ³⁰

These dog-heads are animals to be domesticated rather than humans.

The Greco-Roman accounts provided the kernel for much later discussion. One of the key ideas taken from this inheritance was that the cynocephali lived far from towns and cities. In the later middle ages, this was an idea communicated by maps. ³¹ Cynocephali are depicted in Norway in the Sawley and Hereford Mappae Mundi. ³² The coordinate tables for constructing a nova cosmographia transcribed by Brother Frederick in the Benedictine House of St. Emmeram in Regensburg (Munich MS CLM 14583 fol. 236r-277v) between 1447 and 1455 contain reference to the “mer von den Zenophalen hunczhaupter” in the far corner of North East Asia. ³³ Belonging to the same cartographic school are the fifteenth-century map of Andreas Walsperger (MS Palat. Lat. 1362) and the Zeitz map (Zeitz Stiftsbibliothek MS Hist. fol.497). ³⁴ Both include labels announcing the presence of dog-heads on the furthest edge of North East Asia, close to anthropophagi, and the lands ruled by Gog and Magog. ³⁵

From the earlier middle ages, information about the cynocephali survives in written sources. Most of these depictions of cynocephali agreed that they were not human. ³⁶ Developing out of the Greek Pseudo-Callisthenes tradition, the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle was highly popular in the medieval Latin west. ³⁷ While the first Latin manuscript dates to the ninth century, quotations elsewhere indicate that it had been translated from Greek by the seventh century. ³⁸ In the letter, Alexander recounts his adventures in India to his tutor, including an encounter with the cynocephali:

Next we found a grove full of huge cynocephali who tried to harass us but they began to flee when we shot our arrows. Now as we were entering a deserted area, the Indians reported that there was nothing more worth seeing. ³⁹

Emphasis is placed upon the remote location of the dog-heads, residing in a grove on the borders of uninhabited lands at the very end of the world. They are also somewhat primitive and easily bested by the archery of the Macedonians.

Part of a related tradition of fantasies concerning India is The Wonders of the East, which purports to be a letter from a King Pharasmanes of Iberia in the Caucasus to the Emperor Hadrian. The earliest extant manuscripts are eighth- or ninth-century and the text was later translated into Old English and French. ⁴⁰ The cynocephali appear as monsters and are described in detail, “the dog-heads, whom we call conopoenae: they have the manes of horses, the tusks of boars and the heads of dogs, and they breathe fire and flames.” ⁴¹ This impression of bestiality is heightened by the lands in which they live, which “is a desert because of the quantity of serpents.” ⁴² A contrast is drawn with the neighboring land for “nearby is a wealthy city, full of good things.” ⁴³

The Liber Monstrorum, composed in the late seventh or early eighth century in a southern Anglo-Saxon context, goes further in presenting the cynocephali as animals, for they “do not imitate humans but the beasts themselves in eating raw flesh.” ⁴⁴ In these accounts, the cynocephali are most certainly not human. They are also placed within the wilderness, possessing no cities or settlements. The author of the Liber Monstrorum explicitly begins their prologue by placing the subjects of the work “in the hidden parts of the world, raised throughout the deserts and the islands of the Ocean and in recesses of the farthest mountains.” ⁴⁵

More detailed is the Cosmographia, a fantastical geographical and ethnographic work written by one “Jerome” purporting to summarize the journeys and writings of an ancient Scythian philosopher named Aethicus Ister. ⁴⁶ Everything about the Cosmographia is contested and understanding the text is not helped by “Jerome’s” Latin, which is as eccentric as the contents of his work. Recent work by Michael Herren suggests that the Cosmographia was produced in the first half of the eighth century in the Frankish world. ⁴⁷

Cynocephali appear as inhabitants of “the northern isle of Munitia” in the North Sea. ⁴⁸ “Jerome” writes that Germans “come to this island for sea commerce, and they call that people Chananei,” before proceeding to write about the lifestyle of “These same heathens.” ⁴⁹ Ian Wood takes these heathens to be the cynocephali but in his edition Herren disagrees, believing “Jerome” to have used the reference to trade as an opportunity to change subject to the Germans. ⁵⁰ Wood’s reading seems to be the more logical. “Jerome” discusses Germans elsewhere in his work. ⁵¹ It seems probable that “Jerome” wanted to list the names given to the cynocephali as an opportunity to engage in some punning wordplay on Cain, Canaanite, and canine. ⁵² Having dealt with these linguistic possibilities, which necessitated bringing up Germans and their contact with the cynocephali in order to explain why they had a specific term for the dog-heads, “Jerome” could then continue with his ethnographic description.

Taking the subsequent description as an account of the cynocephali, “Jerome” is not particularly positive. His cynocephali are “a miscreant race” who “lead a most filthy life,” eating forbidden, unclean meat and worshipping demons. ⁵³ The cynocephali are unquestionably savage. But they are also capable of communicating with humans, as their commercial dealings with the Germans show, suggesting they are barbarians rather than monsters. Indicative of this status is the description of their settlements:

They have no proper buildings, but make use of poles with felt tent-coverings; their settlements are in wooded and remote locations, swamps and marshy places. ⁵⁴

“Jerome” clearly views these communities as inadequate, poorly built in a wild landscape, but they represent a higher state of existence than those present in the accounts above. In the spectrum of cynocephali status, the settlements of the dog-heads in the Cosmographia indicate a more human position.

“Jerome” claims that the cynocephali are a race who “no history describes except our philosopher’s.” ⁵⁵ He places great emphasis on Aethicus’s authority as an eyewitness, attributing his knowledge to the philosopher “examining the Dog-headed men there according to his well-known investigative method.” ⁵⁶ The polluted nature of the cynocephali was ascertained by Aethicus’s examination of the external manifestations of the internal corruption, in particular their barbaric way of life. Aethicus’s authority hinged upon his claim to personal experience in a manner similar to those made by classic anthropologists. ⁵⁷

Aethicus was not alone in “encountering” the cynocephali. It is in the nature of fictional peoples to be rediscovered and reconsidered. One of the most celebrated pieces of writing to emerge from the Carolingian period is the letter written in the mid ninth century by Ratramnus, a monk of Corbie (d.c.868), to Rimbert (d.888), the future Archbishop of Bremen-Hamburg. ⁵⁸ Rimbert had written to Ratramnus from his mission among the pagans of Scandinavia, having heard reports of dog-headed men in the vicinity. ⁵⁹ The question that exercised Rimbert was whether the cynocephali “arose from the line of Adam or possess the souls of animals.” ⁶⁰ This was a significant point, because if they were the former and therefore human, efforts should be made to convert the cynocephali. Ratramnus’s eventual reply, which is the only document that survives from this apparent exchange, argued in favor of the humanity of the cynocephali. This conclusion was based on a number of different grounds, but the bulk of the letter is concerned with an analysis of the description of the society of the cynocephali provided by Rimbert. Like “Jerome,” Ratramnus centered his understanding of the cynocephali on an ethnographic account from eyewitnesses.

Ratramnus followed Augustine’s criterion for human status. He analyzed the elements that made up the cynocephali way of life looking for outward signs of rationality. Having found these signs of rationality, he concluded that they must be human. Ratramnus summarizes these features near the beginning of the letter:

they follow some laws of society, to which their dwelling in villages bears witness. They cultivate fields, which [can be] inferred from their harvesting of crops. They do not reveal their private parts as animals do, but cover them with modesty in the way humans do, which is an indication of their sense of decency. As you wrote, they possess not only hides for use as coverings, but even clothes. All these things seem to bear witness in a way that there is a rational soul in [these dog-headed ones]. ⁶¹

Ratramnus places the settlements of the cynocephali under greater scrutiny later in the letter, where he writes,

Now since a city is said to be a collection of human beings living equally under the same law and those Cynocephali are said to live together in certain common dwellings in villages, the definition of a city is believed to agree with that. Indeed, they make a common collection of their crops, and they could not live equally except under the law of mutual relations. For where some law is kept, it is held together through the common consent of minds; nor can there be any law which common consent did not decree. But [law] can never be established or preserved except by the regulation of morality. ⁶²

Urban living was tightly connected to the development of law in classical thought. The city was a mark of humanity for the manner in which it forced people to learn to coexist with each other. Herodotus describes the cannibal anthropophagi as nomads who “have no sense of right and wrong, and their life is governed by no rules or traditions.” ⁶³ Sallust’s description of the original tribes of North Africa noted that “they were controlled neither by customs, laws, nor the authority of any ruler; they wandered about, without fixed habitations, and slept in the abodes to which night drove them.” ⁶⁴ Likewise, Ammianus Marcellinus wrote of the Blemmyes that “they rove continually over wide and extensive tracts without a home, without fixed abodes or laws.” ⁶⁵

Ratramnus did not have access to these works. What he did have was Cicero, who wrote about the connection between the city and the human capacity to coexist with that classical context. The opening line of Ratramnus’s treatment of the settlements of the cynocephali echoes Cicero’s words in The Dream of Scipio, where he defined the city as “the assemblies and gatherings of men associated in justice.” ⁶⁶ In his De Officiis, Cicero wrote that human civilization was based on cooperation, listing the perils faced by humans bereft of “the bonds of social life,” which ensured that people lived a far better life than “the lower animals.” ⁶⁷ Key to his argument was that the city

without the association of men, cities could not have been built or peopled. In consequence of city life, laws and customs were established, and then came the equitable distribution of private rights and a definite social system. Upon these institutions followed a more humane spirit and consideration for others. ⁶⁸

Laws were the product of urban life. Brought about by human sociability, they produced not only a just society but also a kinder one.

Cicero’s views on the city would have been most easily accessed through his Dream of Scipio, which was well known because of the Christian commentary written on it by Macrobius in the early fifth century, with ninth-century manuscripts surviving from a number of Carolingian centers, including Fleury and possibly Tours. ⁶⁹ Ratramnus had access to a copy in the library at Corbie (Paris n.a.lat.454). ⁷⁰ Macrobius quoted Cicero’s text throughout his own, and the commentary sometimes circulated with a copy of the Dream itself in the same manuscript, as is the case with the Corbie manuscript. It is these words here, where Scipio Africanus is admonished that nothing is more pleasing to God “than the assemblies and gatherings of men associated in justice, which are called cities” that Ratramnus most clearly engages with. ⁷¹ In his commentary Macrobius developed Cicero’s ideas, writing:

Man has political virtues because he is a social animal. By these virtues upright men devote themselves to their commonwealths, protect cities, revere parents, love their children, and cherish relatives; by these they direct the welfare of the citizens, and by these they safeguard their allies with anxious forethought and bind them with the liberality of their justice; by these “They have won remembrance among men.” [Virgil Aeneid VI.664] ⁷²

That Ratramnus understood the implications of this language is made clear by his reading of the society of the cynocephali. Their settlements are nothing more than villages. When Ratramnus calls them cities he does not mean a physical metropolis, but rather the more ancient sense of a community of people.

Given Ratramnus’s familiarity with City of God, we may hear also an echo of Augustine’s description of a city as “nothing but a group of men united by some bond of fellowship,” although the distinction between Augustine’s civitas and Cicero’s urbs should be noted here. ⁷³ Another possible influence is Isidore of Seville. That Ratramnus had been reading Isidore’s Etymologies is clear from the letter.

Although Isidore may have dismissed the humanity of the cynocephali, elsewhere the Etymologies refers to beings born to humans with “monstrous” attributes for the purpose of acting as portents. In a passage quoted by Ratramnus, Isidore writes that the monstrous races are these tendencies writ large:

Just as, in individual nations, there are instances of monstrous people, so in the whole of humankind there are certain monstrous races, like the Giants, the Cynocephali, the Cyclopes, and others. ⁷⁴

It seems plausible that Ratramnus’s reading of civitas as a community of humans living under a shared law might have been shaped by Isidore’s definition as “a multitude of people united by a bond of community.” ⁷⁵ That there are no surviving copies of Book 15 of the Etymologies associated with Corbie does not entirely rule out the possibility, for there are no surviving copies of Book 11 either, which Ratramnus quoted.

Ratramnus commented that “It follows that whatever is born from humans is also human and endowed with the wit of human reason.” ⁷⁶ The authority of Isidore was useful in suggesting a mechanism for the creation of human cynocephali and in adducing additional support for the argument, but it was not what Ratramnus rested his case on. As he observed to Rimbert,

I would not believe that these Cynocephali, whom we are studying, consistently possess rational minds, even if they have their beginnings from humans, were I not persuaded by what you wrote and by those things which we read or which are reported concerning them. ⁷⁷

As with Aethicus Ister, the front and center of Ratramnus’s argument was the ethnographic description, of which the status of the cynocephali as city-dwellers was an important element.

Given the difficulties inherent in conducting field research on fictional beings, all effort to provide ethnographic descriptions of the cynocephali requires some use of the imagination. The writers who did so drew upon pre-existing ideas of the nature of dog-headed people. Many of their readers may have had expectations of what the cynocephali were like. Despite this, the variety in the depictions of the dog-heads indicates that writers had considerable latitude in deciding whether their cynocephali were human and, if so, how that manifested itself and could be shown. This suggests that human cynocephali were deliberately placed living in cities in order to convey their true nature.

Ratramnus went further than others in the early medieval world in asserting the humanity of the cynocephali, in large part based on his impression of their cities. His cynocephali live and act together as a community, proving they must have common laws and customs, demonstrating their rationality and their humanity. The monk of Corbie was the most explicit about his reasoning, but his letter followed a pattern of thinking about the cynocephali in terms of their social structure that included the anonymous authors of the account of Aethicus Ister and of the Wonders of the East style descriptions. These texts demonstrate a spectrum of relative urbanism upon which the dog-headed people could be placed, with corresponding levels of humanity. Again, Ratramnus was the clearest about the intellectual hinterland that lies behind these descriptions, but a shared understanding that certain patterns of settlement occupation equate to rationality and thereby humanity runs throughout, suggesting a continuity of concepts from the Greco-Roman past. ⁷⁸

Hounds of the Lord

The previous section argued that ethnographic descriptions of the cynocephali demonstrate the importance of city-dwelling to questions about their status as humans. But other late antique and early medieval texts also brought together the cynocephali and the city. Ratramnus concluded his ethnographic analysis by writing:

since [reason] seems to be present in the Cynocephali under consideration here, they ought to be deemed humans rather than animals. A little book was issued concerning the martyrdom of Saint Christopher that seems to firmly support this understanding. For, as it is found in that book, it is clear that he was from the race of humans. ⁷⁹

This reference to the dog-headed St. Christopher makes clear the importance of hagiographic works in understanding medieval thought about the cynocephali. ⁸⁰

The exact little book that Ratramnus used has not been identified. The earliest Latin Passio for Christopher (BHL 1764) is eighth-century and is deeply indebted to earlier Greek accounts (BHG 309-11). ⁸¹ Another variant (BHL 1766) also exists with three manuscripts that are ninth-century or earlier. ⁸² Early Irish and Old English versions were also extant, one of the latter of which appears in the same Beowulf manuscript that contains other, more monstrous, descriptions of cynocephali. ⁸³ These early Western accounts are closely related and are probably descended from a common Latin source. Given this, the overwhelming likelihood is that Ratramnus’s book resembled the BHL 1764 or 1766 accounts. In this narrative a cynocephalus named Reprobus (“Condemned”) converts to Christianity and takes the name Christopher at a time when Christians are being persecuted by a pagan king named Decius or Dagnus. Christopher then enters the city of the king, which is sometimes Antioch and sometimes called Samos. He is brought to Decius’s palace and offered a mix of blandishments and tortures by the king to renounce his faith, before being martyred for refusing to do so.

Much of the literary energy of the account derives from Christopher being so apparently out of place in the city. His body immediately attracts hostile attention from the population for:

His head was terrifying, like that of a dog. His hair was very long, and gleamed like gold. His eyes were like the morning star, and his teeth like the tusks of a boar. ⁸⁴

Christopher scares the populace. In the Irish version Decius explicitly perceives Christopher as a foreign, corrupting influence, inimical to the health of the city:

The king said to Christopher: “Bad is your name Reprobus and hideous is your appearance, and we prefer that you should die than that the city should be spoilt through your sorcery.” ⁸⁵

Despite his poor beginning, Christopher proceeds to demonstrate that he is a true member of the city. Over the course of the narrative, he communicates with a mixed cast of the city’s inhabitants including merchants, soldiers, and prostitutes, converting them to Christianity in the process.

Christopher’s beneficial role for the city is indicated by the fate of his body after his martyrdom. In the first Latin version one “Athanasius, the bishop of Italy, a city which is on the border with Persia” ⁸⁶ comes to Antioch and takes Christopher’s body back to his city where

There was a river which used flow down and flood this city. The bishop constructed a basilica at the source of the river, and deposited there the corpse of the holy martyr; and the river was turned down the other side of the mountain, and the city has been kept safe until the present day. ⁸⁷

The Irish variant tells a similar story, except the bishop is named Peter, as in the Greek version, and the city is unidentified. ⁸⁸

In contrast to the apparently bestial Christopher who shows through his behavior that he belongs in the city, the apparently human Decius increasingly demonstrates that he is not fit for human company. Whereas Christopher is calm and reasonable, Decius is wild and emotional. In the Latin version this climaxes when Decius, enraged at the size of the crowds attending Christopher’s sermons, attacks them with his army and “fell upon them like the wolf attacks a flock when the shepherd is away,” killing seven of his own subjects, the language revealing the true identity of the wild, undomesticated canine who stalks the city. ⁸⁹

As this suggests, much of the narrative centers on the struggle between Christopher and Decius for the city. This takes place in a physical sense. Christopher’s converts destroy the statues of the pagan gods in the temple, leading Decius to admonish Christopher:

you most wickedly named and ugly man, you who are separated from the gods, you ought rather only to have died, and not to have destroyed the ornaments of this city by your magic skills. ⁹⁰

Thomson has pointed to the importance of the set pieces in the legend of Christopher, as the holy cynocephalus’ acolytes are shown dominating spaces through parades and public ceremonies, bringing the entire focus of the city onto them and their message. ⁹¹

The contest also takes place in a spiritual realm, as Decius’s offers of treasure and glory and threats of violence fail to halt the conversion of the population to Christianity. Just before he is about to be executed, Christopher speaks to his followers:

Brothers, listen to me all of you. I saw myself in this hour standing in the middle of a city, and I saw a beautiful man. His face shone like the sun, his garments were radiant like the light. ⁹²

Christopher describes the triumph of Christ in the city, before being led to his martyrdom. Through his adherence to the faith, and his wresting of the city from the pagan Decius, the Christopher Passio demonstrates the humanity of this cynocephalus. It is unsurprising that Ratramnus found his version of the Passio so useful as evidence for the humanity of cynocephali as a whole.

These themes reappeared in the more extended compositions of Walter, Bishop of Speyer (1004-1027) who produced both a verse and prose Passio of St. Christopher while a student at the cathedral school in Speyer in 984. ⁹³ Both of Walter’s accounts follow the principle narrative steps of the earlier Latin versions but expand upon them. Samos is presented as the chief city of Syria. ⁹⁴ The urban landscape is present throughout, with key events taking place in squares and markets. ⁹⁵ The same battle for the temples of the city takes place, with Dagnus seeking to defend the temple of Juno from neglect. ⁹⁶ Walter describes Samos, beginning with its walls and gates, before outlining the misery felt by its citizens, only to be lifted by the coming of Christopher, who wins them over. ⁹⁷ Above all, Christopher and Dagnus are conscious of performing under the eyes of the citizens of Samos, continually addressing them as the ultimate arbiters of victory in this contest. ⁹⁸ In the end it is Christopher who is embraced by the inhabitants of the city. ⁹⁹

The idea of the animal-headed St. Christopher as the protector of the city also made an appearance in visual art. In a martyrology compiled in Zwiefalten Abbey in the mid twelfth-century (Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart Cod.hist.fol.415), St. Christopher is depicted in a miniature on fol.50r. ¹⁰⁰ Somewhat unusually he is portrayed with the head of a lion rather than that of a dog, which may suggest a debt to images of St. Mark with a lion’s head, such as that in the Hereford Gospels (Hereford Cathedral Library MS O.I.viii, fol.46), but the fundamental point remains the same. ¹⁰¹ In the picture he stands as a giant in a city, staring over the walls, his hands holding onto a tower and an arch, bringing the entire under his protection, with his body wrapped within the city. ¹⁰²

This Christopher is striking in large part because it was unusual to portray the cynocephalus within a wider environment in illustrations from the earlier middle ages. ¹⁰³ These gave little hint as to the social organization of the cynocephali, generally depicting them without context, as in the Old English Marvels of the East in Cotton MS Vitellius A XV (fol.100r) or the eleventh-century illustrated copy of Hrabanus Maurus’ De Rerum Naturis (On the Nature of Things) (Monte Cassino MS 132 fol.166). ¹⁰⁴ Later illustrations of travel accounts present the cynocephali within their environment.

A particularly interesting example is provided by BnF MS fr.2810, a lavishly illuminated manuscript collecting many travel accounts, including those of Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone, and John Mandeville, given by Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy to Duke John of Berry in 1413. ¹⁰⁵ The picture that comes with Polo’s description of the cynocephali is striking for the liberties taken by the artist (fol.76v). ¹⁰⁶ Polo wrote of the cynocephali as a savage, brutal people, but the text is contradicted by the accompanying image. ¹⁰⁷ In a manuscript filled with pictures of naked wild men in empty lands, these cynocephali wear clothes and inhabit a landscape with a fabulous city in the background. Cynocephali reappear in the illustrations to Odoric’s account, where they are portrayed as clothed and noble (fol.106). ¹⁰⁸ They are shown inhabiting a city, suggesting that artists and readers viewed the dog-headed peoples as sophisticated urbanites, even when there was no support for it in the text. ¹⁰⁹

As the Syrian setting for many of the accounts suggests, the Passio of St. Christopher probably originated in the eastern Mediterranean. ¹¹⁰ St. Christopher was particularly popular in Egypt. ¹¹¹ Interesting parallels can be drawn between the western Christopher narratives and the appearances made by cynocephali in Egyptian New Testament apocrypha. ¹¹² Many of these stories expand upon the deeds of the Apostles in converting the nations of the world. A Syriac Acta Andreae et Matthiae (Acts of Andrew and Matthias) refers to a “city of dogs, which is called ‘Irqa,’” somewhere in the Crimea. ¹¹³

Most interesting in illuminating parallel ideas about the relationship between cynocephali and the city is the Acta Andreae et Bartholomaei (Acts of Andrew and Bartholomew). ¹¹⁴ Although the first full example of the text survives in the mid-thirteenth-century Arabic Synaxarium, ninth-century Coptic fragments attest to a much older history, while the existence of a fourteenth-century Ethiopic variant indicates its extended popularity. ¹¹⁵ In the Synaxarium, Andrew and Bartholomew are sent by God to convert the city of Barbaros. To aid them in this endeavor they are sent a man “whose face is like the face of a dog” named “Bewitched” ¹¹⁶ who they are to “take into the city.” ¹¹⁷ Bewitched is an eater of men, unfit for human company, as he himself protests when contacted by an angel:

O my lord, I am not like most men; for my appearance is not like the appearance of most people; and I know not their talk. And if I were to walk with them, what could they do about my food? And if I were hungry, where shall I find men to eat? I should turn round upon them and eat them [Andrew and Bartholomew]. ¹¹⁸

Incentivised by a burst of heavenly fire, Bewitched is persuaded, and divine power is used to tame him “And then the nature of the wild beast went out of him, and he became gentle as a lamb.” ¹¹⁹ Andrew renames Bewitched “Christian.”

The similarities with the story of Christopher are clear. Through divine providence a creature apparently antithetical to human society plays a key role in the conversion of a city to Christian faith. Where differences emerge is in the treatment of the cynocephalus. Christopher converted the citizens through rhetorical persuasion, working against his horrifying appearance. By contrast, it is Christian’s monstrous nature that is employed by Andrew and Bartholomew, who sneak the cynocephalus into the city. When the enraged townspeople capture the disciples, Christian prays to God to revert to his earlier state, and upon being returned to his previous nature, proceeds to scare the inhabitants with his bestial ferocity. The terrified survivors of the panic that ensues agree to convert in exchange for the calming of the cynocephalus. ¹²⁰

The differences between the two tales of holy cynocephali are instructive. Reprobus was a wicked man, but a human nonetheless, capable of seeking divine aid in the salvation of his soul on his own. The earliest Latin Passio makes clear that the moral of Christopher’s story is

that Our Lord not only helps Christians, but also rewards those from nations who are only recently converted to the Lord, and judges them acceptable in their knowledge of Him. ¹²¹

Christopher’s preaching of the word of God helped him to win the support of the city from a pagan king, but his ability to function in the city attests to his already human nature. Bewitched is a very different type of being, a monster incapable of visiting a city without terrorizing the inhabitants. His transformation into Christian is entirely due to God giving him “the nature of a man” and can be taken away just as swiftly. ¹²² If the lesson of Christopher’s Passio is that humans come in very different shapes and sizes, that of Christian’s passio is the power of the divine to make an animal act like a human. In both cases, the city proves the crucial test of the dog-headed man’s humanity: Christopher passes, Bewitched fails.

Conclusion: Cortés and the Cynocephali

Much like the Sphinx at Thebes, cynocephali are hybrid beings who pose questions about what it means to be human. The answers they generate reveal much more about the responders than they do about themselves. ¹²³ The importance of Christian concerns is clear in nearly all of them, most notably the missionary instincts exemplified by Ratramnus and the lives of St. Christopher. All of the writers who sought to determine the human status of the cynocephali did so in the shadow of Augustine’s rational man. But the way in which the rationality of potential humans was measured suggests a longer classical legacy. The reactions discussed in this essay demonstrate that urbanism was still considered an essential element of human status, in a way strongly reminiscent of Greco-Roman ideas. This was despite a very changed urban landscape in early medieval Europe of smaller, less economically diverse cities. Ratramnus in particular reveals a conception of a city community, defined by law and common purpose. These accounts suggest that rather than a binary between human and non-human, urban and not-urban, a spectrum could be constructed, in which quality of settlement was correlated with level of humanity.

Travelers of the later middle ages would continue to encounter the cynocephali but the location of their cities changed. Marco Polo described bestial cynocephali in the Andaman Islands, beyond all political organization and society. ¹²⁴ More congenial were John Mandeville’s cynocephali, who lived in cities and were “fully reasonable and intelligent,” despite their habit of worshipping an ox. ¹²⁵ When people from the Old World encountered the New, they found familiar faces waiting for them. Columbus reported that the Taíno of the Caribbean were familiar with cynocephali. ¹²⁶ The map drawn by the Turkish pirate Piri Reis in 1513 and presented to the Ottoman Sultan Selim I in 1517 depicts a dog-headed man fighting a monkey in what is now Colombia. ¹²⁷ As Hernan Cortés prepared his fateful expedition in 1519 that would lead to the fall of the Aztec Empire, he was instructed by the Governor of Cuba to gather news of the cynocephali. ¹²⁸ The importance of the city for determining humanity also crossed the Atlantic. ¹²⁹ Crucial to Bartolomé de las Casas’ defense of the Indians from slavery in 1550 was his assertion of their rationality for:

They cultivated friendship and, bound together in common fellowship, lived in populous cities in which they wisely administered the affairs of both peace and war justly and equitably, truly governed by laws that at very many points surpass ours, and could have won the admiration of the sages of Athens. ¹³⁰

The ancient city continued to cast a long shadow in deciding what sort of society could be classed as human.

This discussion has covered a long period of time. Much changed in the conversations about the cynocephali in this period. The locations in which they were found changed in accordance with the interest of the writers and the audiences in which they were written about; from the most distant North, to the furthest East and finally to the utmost West. Despite this, what is striking is the continuity in these discussions. The cynocephali always remained a challenge and an invitation to the beholder to consider what defined a human. With a similarly remarkable consistency, cities remained an essential means of determining the true status of the dog-headed people throughout the period.

As this suggests, the full history of the urban cynocephalus remains to be written, but what can be said now is that for writers of the early middle ages living in cities was an attribute that would indicate the fundamental humanity of dog-headed men. This reflected not just the technical challenges of construction, but also the capacity to share the same space as one community under common laws. All of this suggests that ancient ideas of the importance of civic life to being human held a place in the early medieval imagination long after the end of the ancient world. As Baudolino perhaps understood on his travels, in standing together when their city was threatened, the inhabitants of Pndapetzim were not just announcing their common citizenship, but also demonstrating the full range of beings who could make claim to calling themselves human.