God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  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’.19 The 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.20 The 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’.21 The 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:

  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.25 However, 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

  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.28 The 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 ad
vantages 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.