indulgences 375REAL CONDITIONSLife in the isolation of rural communities, the absence of
social mobility for most people, and the social ambitions
and objectives of nobilities led inevitably to endogamy or
the marriage between kin in any case. Because spiritual
kinship resulted from baptism or confirmation, marriage
was forbidden between godfather and godmother, and
between godfather or godmother and godchildren. Legis-
lation was abundant but not very coherent. The effective-
ness of these measures has remained even more difficult
to evaluate.
Further reading:Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the
Medieval Imagination(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001);
James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in
Medieval Europe(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987).
Indiction This was a medieval system of dating used
in documents based on 15-year cycles. It was used as an
aid to date documents more securely. The term originally
meant “a levy of foodstuffs for the imperial government.”
From September 1, 312, onward, it referred to a 15-year
tax cycle. From 537 all imperial documents were to be
dated by the year of the Indiction (first year, second year,
and so on, of the 15-year cycle). By itself this means little
to modern historians unless the first year of the cycle can
be related to a calendar year. This is complicated by the
induction year starting on 1 September, 24 September, or
25 December.
See alsoCALENDARS AND THE RECKONING OF DATES;
FORGERY.
Further reading:R. Dean Ware, “Medieval Chronol-
ogy,” in Medieval Studies,ed. James M. Powell (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1976), 213–237, especially pp.
225–227.
Indo-European languages The vast majority of
languages spoken in Europe are from this group. The
original home of proto-Indo-Europeans was likely in
the region bordered by the Dnieper River on the west, the
Caucasus on the south, and the Ural Mountains on
the east. Between the third and second millennia B.C.E.,
the inhabitants of this area spread westward. As they
moved, separate languages developed. By the year 500
much of the future linguistic pattern of Europe had been
essentially determined.
NON-INDO-EUROPEAN IN EUROPEBy the end of the Middle Ages, invaders from the early
Middle Ages speaking non-Indo-European languages,
such as the HUNS,AVARS, and BULGARS, had long
been absorbed. Other such languages were spoken. By
711 until the conquest of GRANADAin 1492, Arabic was
used in SPAIN. As this area was gradually reconquered,
Arabic retreated in Europe but left words in religious
and technical vocabularies, such as algebra, caliber,and
zero. Hebrew, another non-Indo-European language,
flourished in the Iberian Peninsula. It was maintained
by Jewish communities elsewhere in Europe as a reli-
gious and literary language.
In the meantime from the end of the ninth century, a
Finnish Ugric language was introduced to modern-day
HUNGARY; other non-Indo-European languages were the
related Finnish and Estonian in the northeast by the
Baltic Sea.LATIN-BASED INDO-EUROPEAN
The church functioned as a linguistic agent with Latin as
its language but had to cope with the social, political, and
linguistic decentralization that took place as regions
began to use a vernacular. Latin was used in the adminis-
trative centers throughout the old Roman Empire, includ-
ing the Iberian Peninsula, present-day France,
Switzerland, the Balkan Peninsula, Hungary, Romania,
western Germany, and Austria.
Local dialects developed in individual regions and
became national languages. The common language of the
old Roman Empire around 500 was a set of varieties of
dialects of Latin rather than distinct languages. By the
11th century, each of these regions had developed a lan-
guage that reflected this long period of independent
changes away from Latin.NON-ROMANCE INDO-EUROPEAN
Some regions maintained non-Latin languages, generally
where access was difficult, such as the Pyrenees (Basque)
and part of the rugged Dalmatian area (Albanian). In fron-
tier areas that the Romans had controlled only tenuously
or briefly, such as Britain, the NETHERLANDS, and part of
BELGIUM, there were tribal dialects, many of which devel-
oped national languages. There were Celtic inscriptions
from the early centuries of the Christian era, a GOTHIC
translation of the BIBLE from the sixth century, and
numerous Old Church Slavic texts from the ninth century.
Further reading:Vladimir Ivanov Georgiev, Introduc-
tion to the History of the Indo-European Languages,3d ed.
(Sofia: Publishing House of the Bulgarian Academy of
Sciences, 1981); Sydney M. Lamb and E. Douglas
Mitchell, eds., Sprung from Some Common Source: Investi-
gations into the Prehistory of Language(Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1991); Colin Renfrew, Archae-
ology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins
(London: J. Cape, 1987); Victor Stevenson, The World of
Word: An Illustrated History of Western Languages(New
York: Sterling Publishing, 1999).indulgences Indulgences were amnesties obtained
from the merciful GOD, acting through the medieval
church, of the guilt and resulting just punishments due
for SIN. From 1215, the technical meaning of the term