Christopher Tyerman - God's War - A New History of the Crusades

The type of the early medieval Christian warrior was Charlemagne (d. 814) who renewed the western Roman empire as a Christian imperium in 800 when he was crowned emperor by the pope in Rome. Charlemagne portrayed himself, and encouraged his propagandists to regard him, as the defender of the church. In 791, Charlemagne asked the pope to pray for his success against rebels and enemies so that they would be vanquished by ‘the arms of Faith’. Before campaigns against the pagan Avars of Pannonia in the 790s, special fasts, processions and masses were ordered to ensure victory and a profitable campaign ( prosperum iter ), Christ Himself being entreated to bring ‘victory and vengeance’, the latter a common legal justification. In 793, Frankish bishops were instructed to institute litanies and fasts for the king and the army of the Franks. Charlemagne’s protracted conquest of the pagan Saxons between the Rhine and the Elbe was placed in a Christian context: the pagan Saxons were ‘hostile to our religion’ and felt ‘no dishonour to violate and transgress the laws of God and man’. 12The Franks were careful to attack Saxon religion and to impose Christianity by force as a civic duty on the conquered Germans. The atmosphere of holy war was deliberately fostered. Frankish kings traditionally carried into battle the relic of St Martin’s cappa (i.e. cloak) to bring victory. According to the Annals of the Kingdom of the Franks , miracles displayed God’s approval of Frankish imperialism and genocide, as at Syburg in 776 when flaming red shields appeared in the sky to confound the Saxons. (The Revised Annals , composed after the great king’s death, interestingly make no mention of such divine encouragement.) 13A contemporary Italian poem attributed the victory over the Avars achieved by Charlemagne’s son Pippin to God, who ‘granted us victory over the pagan peoples’. At Ingelheim near Mainz a wall painting depicted the wars of the Carolingians:

with these and other deeds that place shines brightly;

those who gaze on it with pleasure take strength from the sight.

In such a world, the virtues of the Frankish warrior and the good Christian coincided. In her famous advice (843) to her son William, Dhuoda of Septimania, after praying that God would ‘determine that prosperity shall be his lot in all things’ hoped that he would be ‘openhanded and prudent, pious and brave’. 14

Older Christian attitudes to violence did not disappear in the face of militant Carolingian Christian triumphalism. One of Charlemagne’s closest advisers, the Englishman Alcuin of York, in a lament on the destruction of the Northumbrian monastery of Lindisfarne by the Vikings in 793 and the loss of the Christian Near East, North Africa and Spain to the Muslims, insisted that only by prayer and pious living would the tide be reversed. The ninth-century Irish philosopher and poet John Scot Erigena, tutor to Charlemagne’s grandson Charles the Bald, proudly contrasted pagan poets’ descriptions of temporal battles with his own poems on Christ’s spiritual victories, although even he was not above asking that God ‘thwart the scheme of our enemies and rout the pagan fleets’. 15This was no literary flourish but highly topical. The ninth century saw the disintegration of the Carolingian imperium Christiana in the face of civil wars exploited by external attacks of Muslims, Vikings and Magyars, whose success seemed to threaten Christendom itself, thrusting the practice as well as theory of holy war into urgent prominence.

DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH: THE NINTH AND TENTH CENTURIES

The impact of the invasions of the ninth century was to consecrate wars fought in defence of the church, called by one contemporary ‘battles of Christ’. Pope Leo IV (847–55) offered salvation and Pope John VIII (872–82) penitential indulgences, remission of sins, to those who fought and died ‘for the truth of the Faith the salvation of souls and the defence of Christendom ( patria Christianorum )’ ‘against pagans and infidels’. 16Only in the secular arm lay Christianity’s survival as Saracens established themselves in Sicily and southern France and Vikings penetrated the heartlands of western Francia and destroyed three ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The detached theorizing of Augustine’s just war was replaced by a seeming life-and-death struggle to which the church was inescapably committed. The propaganda of Alfred of Wessex (d. 899) deliberately and consistently characterized his Danish foes as pagans; his thegns fought with swords decorated with symbols of the evangelists; prayers and alms accompanied military success. The secular and religious causes became one. The Frankish Annals of Fulda – a monastic source – portrayed Arnulf, king of the East Franks, urging his men on to victory over the Northmen at the river Dyle in 891: ‘we attack our enemies in God’s name, avenging the affront not to us but to Him who is all powerful’, the justice of the cause being carefully established by reference to the pagan Vikings’ atrocities against Frankish civilians and clergy. 17The identification of religion and war extended to the clergy. A French monk, in his enthusiasm at the defence of Paris against the Vikings in 885/6, praised his own abbot of St Germain for his skill with a ballista , a sort of enlarged crossbow:

He was capable of piercing seven men with a single arrow;

in jest he commanded some of them to be taken to the kitchen. 18

A few years earlier, Adelarius, a monk at Fleury in Burgundy, which claimed to possess the bones of St Benedict, the founder of his order, recorded that a Frankish commander in a skirmish against the Vikings thought he had seen monks on the battlefield; when told that none had been present he realized that he had witnessed St Benedict himself fighting for him ‘with his left hand directing and shielding my cavalry and with his right hand killing many enemies with his staff’.

This remarkable recruitment of the founder of western monasticism into the armies of the beleaguered Franks strikingly evokes the fusion, or perhaps confusion, of the sacred and the profane that underpinned Christian holy war in medieval Europe. The synthesis was neither a temporary expedient nor of recent gestation. In mediating between the Christian message and Germanic values, the vocabulary of Christianity itself adopted appropriate images accessible to warrior elites. In the eighth-century Old English poem The Dream of the Rood , composed only a generation or so after the completion of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, Christ is described as ‘the young warrior’, ‘the Lord of Victories’; His death on the cross a battle; and heaven a form of Valhalla, ‘where the people of God are seated at the feast’. 19The ninth-century Old German poetic rendering of the Gospel story the Heliand (i.e. Saviour), perhaps used to popularize the new religion among the recently and forcibly converted Saxons, witnesses a similar expression of what could be called vernacular Christianity. Thus, in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Blessed are the merciful; for they shall obtain mercy’ (Matthew 5:7) is transformed into ‘Blessed are those who have kind and generous feelings within a hero’s chest: the powerful Holy Lord will be kind and generous to them.’

The language of martial lordship and the warband dominate. Christ is the liege lord of mankind ( manno drohtin ), ‘a generous mead-giver’, his disciples his ‘gesiths’, ‘earls’ in high-horned ships or ‘royal thegns’ ( cuninges thegn ). Judas is damned for changing lords and breaking his bond of loyalty. Peter ‘the mighty noble swordsman’ begs to fight to the death in Gethsemane; Thomas argues that Christ’s followers should suffer with him ‘for that is the thegns’ choice… to die with his liege at his doom’; even Pilate, ‘coming from Caesar… to rule our realm’ resembles nothing so much as a Carolingian governor or missus . 20The thrust of these images is metaphorical, but the extended equation of Christian discipleship with the social relationships and functions of temporal warriors could blur the inherent distinctions between the two, providing a mental picture in which actual physical violence for Christ needed little special pleading. In the poem on the English defeat by the Danes at the battle of Maldon (991), the doomed hero Britnoth, in the thick of the fighting, thanked ‘his Creator for the day’s work that the Lord had granted him’; after his death, his thegns prayed ‘that they might take vengeance for their lord and work slaughter among their foes’. 21The theme of lordship, loyalty and vengeance reached a logical if extraordinary conclusion in one version of the twelfth-century poem about the First Crusade, the Chanson d’Antioche , where Christ is depicted on the cross prophesying that: