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

the people are not yet born

Who will come to avenge me with their steel lances.

So they will come to kill the faithless pagans

…

They will all be my sons, I promise them that.

In heavenly paradise shall their heritage be. 22

Official church teaching remained reluctant to embrace the secularization of the spiritual battle, though still eager to appropriate the values and services of temporal warriors in its defence. God was a god of victory, His best advocates godly heroes such as Charlemagne or the tenth-century conqueror of the Magyars and recreator of the western empire, Otto the Great (d. 973). Ironically, as the immediate threat from outside diminished, within Christendom the political and social role of the armed nobleman grew as larger political units imploded. Monks persisted in asserting that their ‘spiritual weapons’ and the ‘sword of the spirit’ were effective ‘against the aery wiles of the devil’ and thus of direct use to kings and kingdoms. As the English monk Aelfric of Cerne, the abbot of Eynsham, argued at the end of the tenth century, the religious in their monasteries were ‘God’s champions in the spiritual battle, who fight with prayers not swords; it is they who are the soldiers of Christ’. 23

Yet Aelfric’s own vernacular Lives of the Saints (mid-990s), aimed at a secular, aristocratic audience, contains laudatory homilies of St Oswald, St Edmund of East Anglia and Judas Maccabeus. There was no pacifist metaphor here. Following Abbo of Fleury’s widely popular Passio sancti Edmundi , Aelfric’s King Edmund is a martyr for Christ at the hands of the Danes. Even though the king was shown as throwing away his weapons, his resistance is made explicit; as Abbo put it, ‘I have never fled a battlefield, thinking it a fine thing to die for my country ( pro patria mori )’; Edmund, a keen warrior, is ‘a martyr for Christ’. Aelfric copied Bede in showing Oswald using force to win power and protect his people and faith; Judas Maccabeus is ‘godes thegen’, waging bloodthirsty war, his troops supported by angels and the prospect of remission of sins. Aelfric makes clear that unbelievers will be slain ‘for their hardheartedness against the Heavenly Saviour’. Of course, as a monk Aelfric insisted on the primacy of the spiritual conflict inherent in the New Covenant but he admits that Judas Maccabeus, through his temporal wars

is as holy, in the Old Testament

as God’s elect ones, in the Gospel-preaching. 24

Both Aelfric and Abbo employ the image of a secular warrior, in battle or not, aspring to martyrdom to point to their respectability.

These warrior saints were rulers who, in a sense, validated their own wars. Abbo of Fleury made great play with Edmund’s status as an anointed monarch, vested with authority to defend his people. In his version of the Passio , Aelfric refers to Alfred of Wessex, another protector of his people against pagans. This concentration on kings ceased to match contemporary reality as both the political and ecclesiastical worlds increasingly revolved around princes, counts, even castellans and seigneurs, whose military strength supplied social control and church patronage. From the tenth century the church’s express support was extended more widely to soldiers in public wars and against pagans, even their swords, arms and banners beginning to be blessed in formal liturgies. In his Vita Geraldi Comitis Aurillac ( Life of Gerald, count of Aurillac ), Abbot Odo of Cluny, one of the most influential ecclesiastical figures in western Christendom in the early tenth century, depicted a man of action, a saintly knight who fought in God’s cause for the common good in a just war. However removed from actual life – Gerald’s sword never shed blood – Odo’s portrait allowed for morality in martial culture. This was particularly important as monasteries more than ever relied on the protection of just such local military bosses. Thus, in the eleventh century, Odo of St Maur-les-Fosses, called Burchard, count of Vendôme, a count ‘faithful to God’ because he defended churches, monks, clergy, widows and nuns: his protection of St Maur itself counted for much. This pious layman nevertheless engaged in private warfare against his neighbours and, ‘confidently trusting in the Lord’, killed people. 25However, this idealized picture of the pious warrior was, in many cases, no less than the truth, as evinced in the level of lay funding and donations to monasteries. The spiritual anxieties attendant on violence as a way of life were not confined to the cloister.

Yet if the church accommodated war, it did not surrender to it, rather churchmen of the tenth and eleventh centuries sought to control and direct it in law and in practice. Across western Europe regional power was increasingly vested in the hands of landed aristocrats whose cultural world and social mentality were shaped by the practice of war. Around them emerged a class of dependants, members of their military households and tenants who in turn adopted the habits and outlook of their superiors, the future knights. While in many, but by no means all, parts of western Europe (England, areas of northern France and Germany were exceptions) political power had tended to devolve down to the localities, the years around 1000 did not witness some reversion to a Hobbesian state of nature. At a time of growing population, ownership of land was increasingly profitable, provided control of agricultural and commercial resources was tightly managed. Nucleated estates, often combined into blocs with associated public as well as private fiscal and judicial authority being exercised by the local landowners rather than by distant rulers or their representatives, may have looked chaotic from above, but supplied local cohesion, even if only that of the protection racket. This process of political, judicial and fiscal fragmentation seems especially apparent in western Francia, what is now France, but even here much power remained or was recreated by regional counts. One problem created by this mosaic of private usurpations of public rights, which applied to areas with emergent towns such as Flanders, the Rhineland or north Italy as much as to rural provinces, was the lack of sovereign or effective arbitration. Literally, counts, seigneurs and castellans took the law into their own hands in a process that sharply exacerbated the tendency towards endemic violence. Yet the perpetrators of this seemingly endless round of private violence were often themselves concerned for the destiny of their immortal souls, frenzied violence being interrupted by no less hysterical contrition. Famously, Fulk Nerra, the Black, count of Anjou, punctuated his bloody career of territorial aggrandizement in the Loire valley in the years around 1000 with three pilgrimages to Jerusalem ‘driven by fear of hell’; more permanently, he founded a monastery near Loches, where monks could pray ‘day and night for the redemption of his soul’. 26

TOWARDS HOLY WAR: THE ELEVENTH CENTURY

The principles evoked by Odo of Cluny’s portrait of Gerald of Aurillac and Odo of St Maur’s description of Burchard of Vendôme were not merely literary models. From the later tenth century, initially across the duchy of Aquitaine but spreading to Burgundy and, after an apparent lull in the third quarter of the eleventh century, resuming in northern France and the Rhineland, bishops summoned clergy and laity to councils at which they proclaimed the Peace of God, reinforced from the 1020s with Truces of God. The Peace of God consisted of agreement by the arms-bearers, under oath, to protect those outside the pale of the military classes: monks, other clergy, the weak, the vulnerable and the poor, just those, in fact, for whom Burchard of Vendôme allegedly spent his time fighting. The Truces specified periods during which all violence should cease. Both were to be policed by the local arms-bearers, under oath and the threat of excommunication and ecclesiastical interdict. The oaths exacted at these councils were regarded as demonstrating a communal repentance as much as responsibility, all sections of free society being apparently represented in attempts to expiate sins and alleviate God’s punishment in the shape not only of violence but of pestilence and famine. To this end, many councils were held in the awesome presence of the relics (i.e. almost invariably cadavers or bones) of local saints. There was an apparent contradiction in churchmen who willingly blessed the warriors’ instruments of death proclaiming, as did the Council of Narbonne in 1054, that ‘no Christian shall kill another Christian for whoever kills a Christian undoubtedly sheds the blood of Christ’. 27