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

The Peace and Truce of God movements, sporadic, local, regional and ineffectual though they were, provided if not a model for the laity then a pattern for the clergy that directly influenced the inception of the First Crusade. The role of the knight was couched in positive language, as protector of Christian peace, specifically of the church and its interests. The clergy assumed leadership in tackling the material as well as moral ills of the temporal world and commanded the laity; oaths bound laymen into corporate action for a religious end, peace. Logically, if knights were forbidden to pursue their profession within Christendom, then just causes outside had to be found. It was no coincidence that Urban II’s speech launching the First Crusade echoed in setting, style and possibly even content the exhortations of the Peace and Truce movement; his audience’s vocal responses – ‘Deus lo volt!’ – paralleled the cries of ‘Pax, pax, pax!’ at earlier councils; and at Clermont Urban’s council passed a decree establishing a Peace throughout Christendom which was promulgated at regional church councils over the following months. Given the revival of the Peace and Truce movement in the 1080s in the Rhineland, a centre of reforming ideas with close contacts with the papacy, the link with holy war, although not geographically universal, was evident.

The problem remained of the legitimate function of arms-bearers in a Christian society. That of benign local policeman hardly fitted the political reality or individual self-image of men who saw what violence could bring; in the case of those Frenchmen who sought their fortunes in southern Italy or England fame, fortune and riches beyond their dreams. Despite concerted attempts from the tenth century, through exhortation and the liturgy, to refine the attitudes of arms-bearers to ensure righteous motives, just cause and humility even in victory, the prevailing ideology remained that, however lawful the conflict, fighting was sinful, the occupation of arms intrinsically a sin. This traditional position was retained by the widely influential canon lawyer Burchard, bishop of Worms (d. 1025) and even in his early years by Pope Gregory VII, who was to transform papal ideas on arms-bearing. In 1066, William of Normandy had invaded England with explicit papal approval, his cause deemed just, his army fighting under a papal banner. His opponent, Harold II, was adjudged an oath-breaker, having previously promised to support William’s claim to the throne, a usurper and, thanks to his patronage of a pluralist archbishop of Canterbury of contested legitimacy, a schismatic. Nonetheless, in 1070 on all who had fought with William at Hastings and had killed or wounded men penances were imposed even though the invasion was recognized as a ‘public war’ in the classical sense. 28The idea that an arms-bearer could be truly penitent whilst remaining a warrior, still less use fighting itself as a penance, was a development only of the twenty years before Urban II’s ideological coup of 1095 and a result of precise circumstances of papal policy and perceived threats to the Roman church from within and beyond Christendom’s frontiers.

THE PAPACY AND HOLY WAR

In the later eleventh century, holy war became a particular and intimate concern of the reformed papacy, one which was to transform Christian attitudes and practices for half a millennium. The main thrust of papal reform was towards restoring to the church the pristine autonomy and spirituality of the Acts of the Apostles. This required enforcing canonical rules on the secular clergy, prohibiting abuses such as simony (buying or selling a cure of souls), clerical marriage, treating ecclesiastical office as property or political position and the intrusion of lay control over clergy and churches. A radical alteration was projected in the relationship of church and state which, since the Carolingians and perhaps since Constantine, had assumed mutual cooperation rather than separation. This carried severe political risks. At most centres of political power, the church was inextricably linked with secular rule: kings, notably in England or Germany, looked to churchmen for material and political assistance, received their prayers in scarcely disguised king cults and exercised recognized powers of patronage in church appointments. Exclusion of lay control not only undermined powerful and well-established political structures, it cut at local patronage systems whereby donor families maintained close, proprietorial interests in monasteries they had founded or subsidized or in parishes they had established on their estates. For the secular clergy, reform implied a deliberate attempt to distinguish the clerical order from the habits and behaviour of the laity. Crudely, reform aimed at making them more like monks in celibacy, in immunity from the material snares of money and personal property, and in obedience, to canon law, their ecclesiastical superiors and, ultimately, the pope. The social impact was potentially considerable, marking the end of the inheritance of clerical land and office. For the church, while there were clear economic advantages in denying the heritability, division and potential alienation of church property, there remained the argument of law and morality. The impact of papal reform was profound because of such effective combination of the temporal and spiritual.

While moral and institutional reform of the clergy had been promoted in many areas of early eleventh-century western Christendom, the annexation of the papal office by a cosmopolitan group of radicals and puritans from the mid-1040s provided reformers with the oldest, most dignified institution of church government with which to exercise authority and impose doctrinal, legal and liturgical uniformity. The challenges to the reformed papacy became those of politics and discipline as well as law and doctrine. Skilfully, if controversially, manipulating political circumstances in Italy and Germany, the reforming popes asserted not just the independence of the church, libertas ecclesiae , but the autonomous primacy of the see of St Peter. Trumpeting the Petrine texts in the New Testament as demonstrating how Christ gave St Peter – and therefore the pope as his heir or, more telling, vicar (i.e. representative) – rule of the church and authority in heaven and on earth (e.g. Matthew 16:18–19), the reforming popes increasingly claimed authority not just over all churches but over states and laymen as well. Ideologically and politically, this invited opposition, much of it physical. To establish and protect their ‘right order’ of Christendom, successive popes were forced or chose to fight with temporal weapons. The First Crusade was a direct result of this.

In recruiting allies or raising their own troops, later eleventh-century popes were fully aware of the theoretical implications as much as the political necessities. The moral standing of those who fought for the pope became a matter of acute concern. In 1053, Leo IX (1048–54) offered German troops who fought (unsuccessfully) under his personal command against the Norman bandit lords of southern Italy remission of penance and absolution of sins. In 1059, as a result of a major diplomatic revolution, these same Normans became papal vassals, with the obligation to fight for their new lord. Papal banners were granted the Norman invaders of Sicily (in 1060) and England (in 1066) and to Milanese street gangs, the Patarines, engaged in a violent and protracted struggle for the eradication of clerical abuses and control of the archbishopric of the city in the 1060s and 1070s. Holy war became part of the papal programme. The Patarine conflict was called a bellum Dei , a war of God, the fallen Patarine leader Erlembald (d. 1075), a martyr. The key testing ground of papal reform and power was in Germany, where any loosening of the link between church and state or challenge to imperial authority was fiercely opposed by Emperor Henry IV. From the late 1070s disagreements turned to war, the so-called wars of the Investiture Contest, although the issues were far broader than whether or not kings should invest bishops with ring and staff. To fight for papal interests, the most militant of the reforming popes, Gregory VII, even attempted to recruit knights from across Europe to form a papal army, a militia sancti Petri , a Militia of St Peter.