God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  CHRISTIAN JUST WAR

  When Christianity became adopted as the official religion of the Roman empire in the early fourth century, Graeco-Roman just war confronted the Judaic tradition of wars fought for faith and not merely temporal but divinely ordained rights. The conversion of Constantine and the final recognition of Christianity as the offical religion of the Roman empire in 381 prompted the emergence of a set of limited principles of Christian just war which, by virtue of being fought by the Faithful, could be regarded as holy. The identification of the Roman empire with the church of God allowed Christians to see in the secular state their protector, the pax Romana being synonymous with Christian Peace. For the state, to its temporal hostes were added enemies of the Faith, pagan barbarians and, more immediately dangerous, religious heretics within the empire. Eusebius of Caesarea, historian of Constantine’s conversion, in the early fourth century reconciled traditional Christian pacifism with the new duties of the Christian citizen by pointing to the distinction between the clergy, immune from military service, and the laity, now fully encouraged to wage the just wars for the Christian empire. Ambrose of Milan (d. 397), as befitted a former imperial official, consolidated this symbiosis of the Graeco-Roman and Christian: Rome and Christianity were indissolubly united, their fates inextricably linked. Thus the war of one was that of the other, all Rome’s wars were just in the same way that those of the Old Testament Israelites had been; even heresy could be depicted as treason. Ambrose’s vision of the Christian empire and the wars to protect it which constituted perhaps the earliest formulation of Christian warfare was, therefore, based on the union of church and state; hatred of foreigners in the shape of barbarians and other external foes; and a sharp intolerance towards dissent and internal debate, religious and political.

  The collapse of the institutions of the Roman empire in the west in the fifth century undermined Ambrose’s union of interests and could have threatened the whole theoretical basis of Christian just war without the work of a younger contemporary, Augustine of Hippo (d. 430). Augustine combined the classical and biblical doctrines of just war to arrive at some general principles outside the context of an active imperium Romana. Augustine’s analysis depended on sin, which caused war but which could also be combated by war. In the face of the political realities of successful barbarian invasions and Donatist heretics in his North African diocese, Augustine combined the Graeco-Roman ideas of right causes and ends with a Christian concept of right intent. With Aristotle he agreed that the right end of war was peace. With Cicero he argued, ‘it is the injustice of the opposing side that lays on the wise man the duty of waging war’. With Roman lawyers, he agreed that public war must be supported by authority, but cited scriptural evidence: ‘the commandment forbidding killing was not broken by those who have waged war on the authority of God’.9

  From Augustine’s diffuse comments on war could be identified four essential characteristics of a just war that were to underpin most subsequent discussions of the subject. A just war requires a just cause; its aim must be defensive or for the recovery of rightful possession; legitimate authority must sanction it; those who fight must be motivated by right intent. Thus war, by nature sinful, could be a vehicle for the promotion of righteousness; war that is violent could, as some later medieval apologists maintained, act as a form of charitable love, to help victims of injustice. From Augustine’s categories developed the basis of Christian just war theory, as presented, for example, by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century.

  However, Augustine was no warmonger. The world of the spirit was preferable to that of the flesh. Although public prayers, litanies and masses continued to be said from the fifth to the eight centuries, especially under papal instigation in Rome itself, to invoke divine aid in wars against enemies of the church, the Christian tradition of withdrawal from the world, of non-violence and condemnation of temporal aggression remained, if anything strengthened by the spread of monasticism across Christendom. Nonetheless, Augustine had moved the justification of violence from lawbooks to liturgies, from the secular to the religious. His lack of definition in merging holy and just war, extended in a number of later pseudo-Augustinian texts and commentaries, produced a convenient conceptual plasticity that characterized subsequent Christian attitudes to war. The language of the bellum justum often described what came closer to bellum sacrum. This fusion of ideas might conveniently be called religious war, waged for and by the church, sharing features of holy and just war, allowing war to become valid as an expression of Christian vocation second only to monasticism itself.

  A just war was not necessarily a holy war, although all holy wars were, to their adherents, just. While holy war depended on God’s will, constituted a religious act, was directed by clergy or divinely sanctioned lay rulers, and offered spiritual rewards, just war formed a legal category justified by secular necessity, conduct and aim, attracting temporal benefits. The fusion of the two became characteristic of later Christian formulations. Where Rome survived, in Byzantium, the coterminous relation of church and state rendered all public war in some sense holy, in defence of religion as well as state, approved by the church, none more so than when the Emperor Heraclius defeated the Persians and returned the True Cross to Jerusalem in 630. However, Byzantine warfare remained a secular activity, for all its divine sanction, never a penitential act of religious votaries.

  THE GERMANIC WORLD

  The advent of successor kingdoms in what had been the western Roman empire from the fifth century presented the Christian church with cultural as well as political problems. By the eighth century the ruling aristocracies of kingdoms in Italy, Gaul, Spain and the eastern British Isles had almost universally adopted orthodox Roman Christianity without radically altering their social assumptions and belief systems in which, in Carl Erdmann’s words, war provided ‘a form of moral action, a higher type of life than peace’.10 In this new aesthetic, apparently contradictory of Christian teaching, war provided a raison d’être for political power and social status because, with the collapse of Roman civil institutions, war and its associated fiscal and human structures of plunder, tribute and the comitatus or warband of dependent warriors, provided the basis for economic and social cohesion. The army – exercitus – assumed the role of a central public institution in the medieval west. In the process of converting the new rulers of early medieval Europe the church had no option but to recognize their values, even if it sought to defuse them of exclusively martial connotations by employing the new converts’ language metaphorically, much in the manner of St Paul.

  Nevertheless, extremely and personally violent converted heroes such as Clovis the Frank in Gaul c.500 or Oswald king of Northumbria c.635 emerge from flattering accounts of Christian apologists as warriors for the Faith even when their political, tribal or national priorities are recognized. According to fellow Northumbrian Bede, Oswald, ‘a man beloved of God’, prayed for divine aid in battle against the British king Cadwalla ‘for He knows that we are fighting in a just cause for the preservation of our whole race’. It might be noted that Cadwalla was a Christian too. Oswald’s bloody career, which ended in death, mutilation and dismemberment at the hands of pagan enemies, earned him the sanctity of a martyr’s crown.11 The concept of the Christian warrior was thus forged in the reality of political life as the church relied for patronage and protection on such violent warlords. So intimate was the symbiosis of religion and society that bishops in northern Europe, themselves usually chosen from aristocratic families, began to appear as great noblemen complete with military retinues. The process of the conversion itself was accompanied by violence; even among the Anglo-Saxons, where there was comparatively little physical hostility to the missionaries, at least one pagan priest, a South Saxon, was killed by a Christian missionary as sign of God’s judgement. Perhaps even more corrosive of Christian pacifism than the political compromises reflected in accounts of conversions was the emergence of physical evangelical aggression in the burgeoning corpu
s of Christian hagiography: holy men were now themselves party to holy violence, a literary trend that reached maturity in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

  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’.12 The 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.)13 A 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’.15 This 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’.16 Only 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.17 The 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’.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