by Sean McGlynn
None of the reasons supplied for Philip’s action redound to his advantage. The best that his propagandists could come up with was his suspicion of Richard’s talks with Saladin, his illness and his fear of poisoning (Philip was paranoid about assassination). His malady, arnoldia, is well documented; but to leave the greatest undertaking of the age because one’s hair and nails were falling out was hardly going to promote Philip’s image as an heroic general. When Richard also fell ill, he had himself carried on a litter to shoot a crossbow bolt symbolically at the walls of the city, thereby reassuring his troops. Touches like this made Richard the hero without equal.
Other explanations for Philip’s departure included his jealousy of Richard and his distaste for Richard’s arrogance. The real reason, recognized by some chroniclers, was hardly less flattering; it was purely political and motivated further by the opportunities open to him back home with Richard absent in the Holy Land. Unchivalrous as this was, it was a wise recognition on Philip’s part that Richard was the better commander; and Philip did indeed make military headway until Richard’s return. But even a pro-Ricardian source has this to say in mitigation: ‘Yet the king of France’s reputation should not be completely blackened. He had expended a great deal of effort and expense in that country, in storming the city. He had given aid and support to a great many people, while the very authority of his presence had brought about more quickly and easily the completion of that great undertaking.’26
Part of Philip’s strength as a general was to acknowledge his own weaknesses and his enemy’s strength, and to act on it. Had Philip succumbed to the pressures of knightly behaviour and engaged in single combat with Richard, the chroniclers would have loved it and the fanfare for chivalry would have blown loudly and joyously. Militarily, it would have been a total disaster for France, with their royal champion an overweight poodle flung into the arena against England’s pitbull terrier. Richard knew this and over the years of Anglo-French conflict he would taunt Philip mercilessly with challenges to duel.
Richard’s embodiment of the medieval view of the king as a warrior translated into real military capital for the English monarch: his reputation weakened the resolve of his enemies; his leadership qualities inspired his soldiers and encouraged others to serve him. Conversely, this should mean that Philip was hampered by his less bellicose character, but was this so in reality? Clearly Richard’s military record speaks for itself. But whatever advantages he gained by leading from the front were negated by his death, in action, at the siege of Chalus Chabrol near Limoges in 1199. The consequences for his kingdom and empire were disastrous. He was succeeded by his incompetent younger brother John. Revisionist attempts to re-evaluate John as a good king, on account of his efficient bureaucracy, and to rescue him from his malign reputation, have been rebutted by recent scholarship. John, whose sobriquet of ‘Softsword’ (Mollegladium) reveals his aversion to war, was a poor general and hence a poor king. He shared many unattractive personality traits with Philip and, like him, disdained direct involvement on the field of battle. The difference that counted was Philip’s awareness and understanding of all things military, and his appreciation of simple but important values such as consistency, determined intent and man-management. John lacked all of these and the result was that Philip’s generalship defeated John time and again. Within five years of John’s accession to the throne in 1199, Philip had accomplished the long-held dream of the kings of France and annexed Normandy. He went on to even greater glory at the epoch-making Battle of Bouvines in 1214.
Had Richard been alive it is debatable whether Normandy would have fallen at all. Philip’s disinclination to personal risk had served him well; Richard’s risk-taking had reaped huge dividends until it acted spectacularly and mortally against him. John not only lost all Richard had won, he even nearly lost the crown of England itself to the French in 1216; France was served both by Philip’s military achievements and by the stability of his reign. Philip came close to death at Bouvines, a battle he had tried to avoid; after this experience, he left military campaigning to his more belligerently inclined son, Louis the Lion. Despite his accomplishments in war, Philip was not happy to let actions speak louder than words. Kings were very conscious of the image they portrayed and Philip was no exception; but attempts to depict him in Ricardian mode were unconvincing. On one occasion William the Breton implausibly describes Philip as biting at the bit to get stuck into action, being restrained only by the wise counsel of his advisers, who warn their king against the folly of reckless bravery: ‘Go … while we hold back the enemy. Our deaths would be a light loss, but in you rests the hope and glory of the entire kingdom; for as long as you remain safe and well, France has nothing to fear.’27 Philip was only too ready to take this sound advice. Timid and even pusillanimous though this might have been, it was good sense for the king to avoid danger whenever possible; Philip’s staying power proved to be an invaluable, if not inspiring, military asset.
As warrior kings, Richard and Philip demonstrated contrasting styles. Richard’s insights were arguably more brilliant and he was unequalled as a leader of men; but Philip’s conquests affirm his own methods. What they shared was a deep understanding of the nature of warfare and the way it should be fought, and also the key attribute in a leader of the ruthless determination necessary to obtain objectives. This was seen in stark terms by Richard’s treatment of the garrison at Acre and Philip’s treatment of non-combatants at Château Gaillard during his conquest of Normandy. They matched each other tit for tat in vicious reprisals. When Philip massacred a large force of Richard’s Welsh mercenaries, Richard hurled three prisoners to their deaths from the rocky heights of Château Gaillard and blinded fifteen others, leaving one with an eye to lead them to the French king. Philip, not to be outdone, responded in exactly the same fashion, ‘so that no one’, asserted William the Breton, ‘would believe him less than Richard in strength and courage’.28 Each attempted to intimidate the other; neither was too quick to show mercy, as this would be interpreted as a sign of having been intimidated. As in the sphere of crime and punishment, mercy was valued if sparingly used; in warfare it also had its uses, but if too readily resorted to it was a fatal sign of weakness and lack of resolve. The warrior king, as rex irae, was more to be feared than a merciful one. The implications for warfare were frightening.
THE CHURCH AND JUST WAR
In the summer of 793 the Vikings arrived at Lindisfarne monastery off the north-east coast of England.
Like stinging hornets they overran the country in all directions, like fierce wolves, plundering, tearing and killing not only sheep and oxen, but priests and deacons, and choirs of monks and nuns. They came to the church of Lindisfarne, and there they laid all waste with dreadful havoc, trod with unhallowed feet the holy places, dug up the altars, and carried off all the treasures of the holy church. Some of the brethren they killed; some they carried off with them in chains; many they cast out, naked and insulted; some they drowned in the sea.29
Medieval chronicles are crowded with such attacks on churches and monasteries. As centres of wealth and priceless artefacts they were obvious targets for pillaging; as economic centres, they could provide ransacking troops with grain, wine, horses and other forms of supply so necessary for an army on the move.
That the Vikings were pagans and roundly condemned as such for their barbaric activities did not mean that the Church was safe from its Christian brothers. The very things that attracted the Vikings attracted Christian troops in the Latin west. Although the latter did not inflict such heavy mortality rates upon ecclesiastics and the religious, these rates remained appreciable. We have already glimpsed – and we shall see again – how sanctuary for criminals was a flexible concept; in times of war it could be a meaningless one. The vulnerability of religious establishments can be shown by the events in the 1216–17 French invasion of England. Even in this relatively restrained war, fought between chivalrous, Christian knights, the principal abbey of St Albans was
plundered by both sides in the space of a few weeks: stores, horses and money were seized, in one case under the threat of razing the monastery and entire town to the ground.
Despite such acts being sacrilegious and even condemned as war crimes, the prospect of Church wealth was too tempting to resist; here was a ready source of pay and provision for the troops. Church writers portrayed the perpetrators as blasphemous, ungodly barbarians, but the intent was very rarely anti-religious. Statues, images and altars were not wantonly destroyed, but broken to extract the valuable stones and metals with which they were embedded, while vestments, wall hangings and altar cloths were easily transportable forms of wealth. Even kings, the vicars of God, got in on the act, as the supposedly saintly Henry III did in 1231. During the Welsh uprising of that year, Prince Llewelyn’s forces are recorded as having spared neither churches nor ecclesiastics, and burned several churches, even when women and children had taken refuge in them. King Henry III of England responded by plundering a pro-Welsh Cistercian abbey and burning many of its structures; he spared the abbey itself only when its abbot paid him 300 marks to save the building in which the community had invested so much time and labour.
This last example demonstrates how churches and monasteries might be attacked for reasons other than financial ones. In 1194 Philip Augustus destroyed churches in Evreux in northern France as an act of revenge against the town’s citizens after Count John (later King John) had massacred the French garrison there. Destruction was often directed against religious establishments under the patronage of an enemy, damaging the patron’s reputation and the economic benefits with which the establishments provided him; also, as with Henry III in Wales, it was directed against partisan houses, a problem that faced John during his reign, when monasteries poured out anti-royalist rhetoric. In his perceptive study of attacks on churches, Matthew Strickland has written: ‘Religious foundations, which often served as the necropolis of a noble family, might be deliberately targeted precisely because they were tangible symbols of an opponent’s status and prestige … [A]ssaults on churches marked not simply the negation of an immense investment of capital and labour but a psychological blow which highlighted a lord’s inability to defend his own.’30 Thus Henry’s violence against the Cistercian abbey in Wales was much more than a mere display of vengeful spite.
The Church had to rely on more than prayerful invocations for protection. It had to turn to the temporal world of politics and warfare, seeking benefactors who provided not only wealth but also the means to defend that wealth, thus involving themselves in the power politics of the age and widening the scope of warfare. From the pope in Rome to abbots of provincial houses, the Church needed swords and shields to guard against violation; as a great landowner, it raised money and troops not only for its feudal lord but also for its own use, often deploying these for its own personal ends as demonstrated by the ecclesiastical–secular feuds in Germany. Even its churches could be built with defence in mind, splendid examples still standing today in the Languedoc. When secular help was lacking, the Church sometimes took direct action, as Richard Hodges reveals in his account of the sack of the Italian monastery at San Vincenzo al Volturno in 881. The monastery was attacked by Arab mercenaries who had been in the employ of the Duke of Naples, one Bishop Athanasius. The monks, forewarned of the troops’ advance, assembled with arms at the bridge entering the monastery, determined to fend off the assault. A ferocious battle ensued in which the monks acquitted themselves well, killing many of the mercenaries. Despite their effective defence they were betrayed by their slaves (so the source informs us); the Arabs fired and plundered the monastery, and put to the sword those monks who were unable to escape.
As the Middle Ages progressed, such expressions of the Church militant became increasingly rare as the Church grew ever more dependent on secular protection, so much so that, by the fourteenth century, it had become a bone of contention for some commentators. In the Disputation Between a Clerk and a Knight, a sparring dialogue for supremacy between the secular and religious worlds, the knight reproves the clerk for the protection he and his brethren enjoy: ‘Whilst the kings fight risking their lives and property, in order to defend you, you lie in the shade and dine luxuriously – then, you may indeed call yourselves lords, whilst kings and princes are your slaves.’31
Clearly the Church had, for the most part, a vested interest in peace. Individual bishops, like those who feuded in Germany and Bishop Athanasius in the above paragraph, and on many occasions the collective Church itself, pursued explicitly military aims, but its wealth and personnel were exposed and vulnerable in times of war. Motivated by not only this but also genuine abhorrence at Christians spilling the blood of other Christians in endless private and dynastic wars, the Church instigated the Peace of God and the Truce of God in a forlorn attempt at limiting the effects of war. The Church’s concerns are distinctly expressed by the Peace of God (Pax Ecclesie) of the late tenth century. It attempted to defend the Church’s interests by prohibiting acts of violence or war against clergy, pilgrims and Church property; it extended its cover to women, peasants, merchants and livestock (which in their turn contributed to the Church’s income). During a council held at Bourges in 1035, it’s Archbishop decreed that all Christian men of fifteen years and above should swear an oath to uphold the Peace. From this emerged the Truce of God (Treuga Dei) in the early eleventh century. The Truce attempted to restrict the extent of warfare, banning it from Saturday nights until Mondays (later extended to Thursdays) and also at Lent, Advent and a host of vigils and feast days. By the end of the century it was established throughout the entire Holy Roman Empire and was confirmed at the Council of Clermont in 1095. Ironically, this papal council, called by Pope Urban II to declare the launching of the First Crusade, pressed for peace in Christian Europe so that a united front could make war against the Muslims in the Holy Land. More than just an embryonic, proto-peace movement or a disingenuous pursuit of vested self-interest, these initiatives helped to establish a convention of what was permissible in war and adumbrated the chivalric code. They expressed admirable ideals: ‘The Peace sought to protect certain classes and their goods at all times, the Truce was an attempt to stop all violence at certain times.’32 Although these were of some help in curtailing private wars, such ideals were given short thrift on royal battlefields where kings were the highest authority.
One real consequence of the measures to limit conflicts was the strengthening and reassertion of ducal and royal power in France and other kingdoms where law and order had to some extent broken down; in England, especially post-Conquest England, the strength of central administration and royal control meant that the movements had less impact here. In France and elsewhere, the Church was attempting to make up for deficiencies in a ruler’s maintenance of the king’s peace; rulers of fissiparous and fractious territories were happy to co-opt the Church in reasserting central authority. Matthew Bennett suggests that ecclesiastical peace councils were less a sign of government weakness and more a supplementation of the endeavours of authorities to enable means of conflict resolution. In this way the Church subtly appropriated to itself in Rome an increased moral authority over temporal affairs and powers as an arbiter of peace.
The Church’s peace movement ran out of steam in the twelfth century as it was replaced by the consolidation of royal power and the king’s peace. In mid-twelfth-century England, however, when King Stephen’s grip on power was weakened by civil war (the ‘Anarchy’), the Church was once again very active in promoting peace measures. Ironically, at the same time the Church was becoming more militant towards the enemies of God and later, by association, enemies of the Church. The success of the First Crusade, culminating in the bloodbath at Jerusalem in 1099, spurred the papacy to harbour ambitions in the Middle East. The crusading movement, perhaps the defining phenomenon of the Middle Ages, pervaded every aspect of medieval life. Ultimately, it relied on the men of Latin Christendom to fight wars against the infidel.
The peace movements had sought to constrain violence, but did not actually condemn the act of fighting itself; the crusaders had few restraints placed upon them. In 1054 the Council of Narbonne prohibited warfare between Christians: ‘Let no Christian kill another Christian, for there is no doubt that he who kills a Christian spills the blood of Christ.’33 Now the Church was exhorting the faithful to take up arms and spill the blood of Muslims in the Holy Land and Spain, granting indulgences – including automatic entrance into Heaven for martyrs – to all who did so. Indeed, killing unbelievers was a meritorious act in itself. The Jews were soon caught up in the bloodletting as pogroms against these ‘killers of Christ’ erupted from the violent religious fervour generated. Soon came the turn of pagans in northern Europe and heretics, especially the Cathars of southern France, where the Albigensian Crusade was even more of a cynical land-grabbing exercise than the expeditions to the Middle East. The crusade against the Cathars was followed up by the Inquisition, employing and innovating the dreadful methods of torture already discussed, and developing methods of informing, denouncing and terrorising that were to play such a part in the state-led persecutions of Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.
Politics and religion became ever more fused and by the later Middle Ages the papacy was launching blatant crusades against its political opponents, thereby devaluing the movement further. Thus the Church, instigators of the peace movement and its ranks full of holy men who genuinely prayed for an end to wars and violence, played its full role in spreading death and destruction within Europe and beyond its boundaries. The observation that ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction’34 was borne out repeatedly in the Middle Ages. In 778 at Verden, the great Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne had 4,500 pagan Saxon prisoners decapitated in cold blood. His biographer Einhard has little to say on the matter, opining only that you could do as you pleased with rebels; the fact that they were non-Christian made their deaths even more inconsequential. Further examples of religious atrocities in warfare will be examined in our look at Jerusalem, Béziers, Acre and Hattin, which will also show that there were far more to these atrocities than mere religious fanaticism, and that it can be too easy simply to blame the Church militant for them.
