European Knights & Religion
The Peace of God Movement
Written by Michael Lovell Beginning at the end of the tenth century in France, the Peace of God movement first gained traction amongst clergymen and the masses of lower social status. The events of the movement usually included great crowds before the clergy. Besides clergymen and those of lower social status, knights were also present at the gatherings. Either the monks or the priests held relics before the knights and forced them to swear an oath to limit their violent conduct against specific groups of people and their property: namely those of the poor and the church. The great crowds surrounding these knights would all shout in unison, "Pax! Pax! Pax!" or "Peace! Peace! Peace!" as a form of social pressure. Initially, historians understood this mass social movement, arguably the first of its kind in European history, as a reaction to the chaos and anarchy of the period (Paxton 31). There was no strong centralized monarchy to help maintain order in the region. However, more recent scholarship has complicated the understanding of the Peace of God movement. The goals and motivations of various parties were diverse and multifaceted. Nevertheless, the role they were to have on shaping the ideal conduct of a knight bore a strong mark upon the knightly class' psyche. |
In 989, the Synod of Charroux decided those who dared to attack unarmed clergy, church lands, unarmed peasants, and the peasants' livestock were anathema to the Christian community. These ideals grew in support at the Le Puy in 994, when Bishop Guy and the local nobility proclaimed the same measures. The duke of Aquitaine and its bishops continued to repeat these canons at Limoges, Poitiers, Bourges, and Limoges throughout the beginning of the eleventh century. Those who violated these regulations of violence were excommunicated, and denied a proper burial (Frassetto 14-17). Those who violated this peace were generally the banal lords, which had proliferated castles across the landscape of France in the preceding century (Debord 135). Nevertheless, many of the knights saw advantages in this peace movement. Those involved in feuds could not simply give up on their feuds out of fear of loss of honor. Swearing an oath upon a relic of forgiveness for their enemies before a huge crowd provided them an honorable means to drop their feuds (Koziol 246-248).
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Successful or not, the Peace of God movement of the tenth and eleventh centuries had a tremendous impact upon the psyche of the knights. Considering many of the aforementioned peace councils also issued regulations on the behavior of clergy and other matters, peace was something more than the enforcement of non-violence. Rather, it was peace in the Augustinian sense, characterized as the belief in the right order:
Peace between mortal man and God is ordered obedience, in faith, to eternal law; peace between men is ordered concord.... The peace of the city is ordered concord of its citizens in ruling and obeying; the peace of the celestial city is that most ordered and most harmonious fellowship of delighting in God and being mutually in God; the peace of all things is the tranquility of order. Order is the arrangement granting to each of like things its proper place (Remensnyder 282).
The emphasis of right order and the proper way for knights to conduct violence had a tremendous impact upon the culture of the knights. First and foremost, it helped paved the way for the popes of the later centuries to direct knightly violence towards crusading (Cowdrey 54-56). Furthermore, it helped to shape the ideas of Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the most influential preachers of the Second Crusade and most prominent advocate of the Knights Templar. He said regarding secular knighthood:
As you [knights] yourselves have often certainly experienced, a warrior especially needs these three things - he must guard his person with strength, shrewdness and care; he must be free in his movements, and he must be quick to draw his sword. Then why do you blind yourselves with effeminate locks and trip yourselves up with long and full tunics, burying your tender, delicate hands in big cumbersome sleeves? Above all, there is that terrible insecurity of conscience, in spite of all your armor, since you have dared to undertake such a dangerous business on such slight and frivolous grounds. What else is the cause of wars and the root of disputes among you, except unreasonable flashes of anger, the thirst for empty glory, or the hankering after some earthly possessions? It certainly is not safe to kill or to be killed for such causes as these (Bernard of Clairvaux 132-133).
In other words, Bernard's problem with the secular knight was not with their role in society itself. Rather, Bernard criticized what he saw as the excesses and vanities of the knight. By comparing the secular knights to the Knights Templar, Bernard not only extolled and promoted the new monastic military order, but he also helped to set standards for which the secular knights should strive to live up to. Bernard of Clairvaux had continued to build upon the notion of proper knightly violence, which the Peace of God movement had initiated.
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Peace between mortal man and God is ordered obedience, in faith, to eternal law; peace between men is ordered concord.... The peace of the city is ordered concord of its citizens in ruling and obeying; the peace of the celestial city is that most ordered and most harmonious fellowship of delighting in God and being mutually in God; the peace of all things is the tranquility of order. Order is the arrangement granting to each of like things its proper place (Remensnyder 282).
The emphasis of right order and the proper way for knights to conduct violence had a tremendous impact upon the culture of the knights. First and foremost, it helped paved the way for the popes of the later centuries to direct knightly violence towards crusading (Cowdrey 54-56). Furthermore, it helped to shape the ideas of Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the most influential preachers of the Second Crusade and most prominent advocate of the Knights Templar. He said regarding secular knighthood:
As you [knights] yourselves have often certainly experienced, a warrior especially needs these three things - he must guard his person with strength, shrewdness and care; he must be free in his movements, and he must be quick to draw his sword. Then why do you blind yourselves with effeminate locks and trip yourselves up with long and full tunics, burying your tender, delicate hands in big cumbersome sleeves? Above all, there is that terrible insecurity of conscience, in spite of all your armor, since you have dared to undertake such a dangerous business on such slight and frivolous grounds. What else is the cause of wars and the root of disputes among you, except unreasonable flashes of anger, the thirst for empty glory, or the hankering after some earthly possessions? It certainly is not safe to kill or to be killed for such causes as these (Bernard of Clairvaux 132-133).
In other words, Bernard's problem with the secular knight was not with their role in society itself. Rather, Bernard criticized what he saw as the excesses and vanities of the knight. By comparing the secular knights to the Knights Templar, Bernard not only extolled and promoted the new monastic military order, but he also helped to set standards for which the secular knights should strive to live up to. Bernard of Clairvaux had continued to build upon the notion of proper knightly violence, which the Peace of God movement had initiated.
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Bibliography
Bernard of Clairvaux, In Praise of the New Knighthood. In The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux. Translated by Conrad Greenia. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1977.
Cowdrey, H. E. J. "The Peace of God in the Eleventh Century," Past & Present 46 (1970), 42-67.
Dobord, André. "The Castellan Revolution and the Peace of God in Aquitaine." In The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000. Edited by Thomas Head and Richard Landes, 135-164. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.
Frassetto, Michael. "Violence, Knightly Piety and the Peace of God Movement in Aquitaine." In The Final Argument: The Imprint of Violence on Society in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Edited by Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon, 13-26. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1998.
Koziol, Geoffrey. "Monks, Feuds, and the Making of Peace in Eleventh-Century Flanders." In Head, The Peace of God, 21-40.
Paxton, Frederick S. Paxton. "History, Historians, and the Peace of God." In Head, The Peace of God, 21-40.
Remensnyder, Amy G. "Pollution, Purity, and Peace: An Aspect of Social Reform between the Late Tenth Century and 1076." In Head, The Peace of God, 280-307.
Image Credits:
(Banner images):
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/304220/Saint-Joan-of-Arc
http://www.alan-demore.com/
http://www.dnevno.hr/ekalendar/na-danasnji-dan/118267-ukinuce-templarskog-viteskog-reda-1312.html
Knight in deep prayer:
http://thetemplarknight.com/2012/06/03/two-templar-images-for-this-sunday/168257_3811303692594_1578169140_n/
Three classes of medieval society:
http://medievaletrasufrj.wordpress.com/
The Albigensian Crusade
Written by Michelle Fornal
Written by Michelle Fornal
While the Peace of God Movement attempted to establish rules for knights to follow, these rules were not always followed, even by the Church itself. Beginning in 1209, a twenty yearlong crusade was launched against a group of “heretics” in southern France known as the Albigensians. The Albigensian Crusade was unlike other crusades in that the “heretics” considered themselves as Christians. Although crusades had been previously called upon by Popes to reclaim the Holy Land, the Albigensian Crusade was unique in that the crusade took place solely on Christian soil. Despite the unique enemy, crusaders fought brutally to root out any forms of heresy. The act of killing other Christians would not have been allowed, but due to the circumstances of the Crusade, these murders were seen as necessary to preserve Christianity. |
The Albigensians, also known as Cathars, were a group of Christians who resided in what now comprises southern France. The Albigensians believed in two separate deities: the benevolent God and the malevolent God. The New Testament was an account of the benevolent God, while the Old Testament told of the malevolent One. They also believed that the Catholic Church in Rome was evil and corrupt (Raynaldus, “Annales”). The Pope and Catholic Church believed the Albigensians were a serious threat to the Church and ordered inquiries against them. In 1208, a Papal legate named Peire de Castelnau was murdered while investigating the Albigensian region. While the identity of the murderer was unknown, the Pope believed that it was a man hired by Raimon VI, the count of Toulouse. Since Pope Innocent III suspected the Albigensians murdered de Castelnau, he then launched a crusade against them. The Pope thought that Raimon VI, who ruled the region, was protecting the “heretics” and had allowed them to kill his legate. |
Raimon VI’s nephew, Raimon Roger, was the leader of Béziers, a city that housed many Albigensians. When the crusading armies marched to the city, the town refused to hand over any “heretics”. In response to this refusal, the crusaders murdered about 7,000 people (Marvin 44); including all of the people who were housed in the sanctuary church (Pegg 76). The problem for the crusaders was how to distinguish who was a heretic and who was not. Albigensians lived among Catholics and both sets of people used the New Testament (Marvin 2). The Abbot of Citeaux, who was with the crusaders, had a solution: he supposedly responded, “Kill them all! Truly, God will know his own!” (Pegg 77). While this quote may not even have been uttered at all, it suggests that the church’s ethical codes were rendered void in this battle against the “heretics”. Possibly, the abbot felt that the Albigensians posed too much of a threat to Christianity that sacrifices were necessary. The atrocities committed in Béziers displayed how circumstances sometimes allowed knightly codes to be broken. In the case of the Béziers, knights would have ideally only killed the “heretics”, but since it was difficult to decipher a heretic from a Christian, the knights needed to kill everyone. One account claimed that “Barons and ladies and little children and men and women, their clothes slashed, their bodies naked, were hacked and cut to pieces by sharp-edged swords” (Pegg 164). However, these acts also display the immense strength the crusaders had in their faith. They believed that their enemies were heretics who threatened the very existence of Christianity, similar to the Muslims that were fought against in previous crusades. Had the crusaders’ faith in their religion or acceptance of the Pope’s decree wavered, they may not have been able to slaughter the people of Béziers and other Albigensian cities.
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Bibliography
A Source Book for Medieval History. New York: Scribners, 1905. Edited by Oliver J. Thatcher and Edgar Holmes McNeal.
De Tudela, Guillaume. The Song of the Cathar Wars: A History of the Albigensian Crusade. Translated by Janet Shirley. London: Ashgate, 2000.
Graham-Leigh, Elaine. The Southern French Nobility and the Albigensian Crusade. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer Press, 2005.
Huot, Sylvia. “The Political Implications of Poetic Discourse in the Song of the Albigensian Crusade.” French Forum 9, no. 2 (1984): 133-144. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40551093.
Marvin, Laurence W. The Occitan War: A Military and Political History of the Albigensian Crusade, 1209-1218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Pegg, Mark Gregory. A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Raynaldus, “Annales” in S.R. Maitland, trans., History of the Albigenses and Waldenses (London: C.J.G. and F. Rivington, 1832), pp. 392-394.
Strayer, Joseph R. The Albigesnian Crusades. Edited by Norman F. Cantor. New York: Dial Press, 1971.
Sumption, Jonathan. The Albigensian Crusade. London: Faber & Faber, 1978.
Image Credits:
"Chanson de la croisade des Albigeois", Ink drawing, France, early Thirteenth century, National Library of France, Manuscripts Department (Western Division) French 25425 Fol. 231r
Albigensians being expelled:
http://pillingswritingcorner.blogspot.com/2014/02/heresy.html
Albigensians burning at the stake:
http://www.cathar.info/cathar_inquisition.htm
"Chanson de la croisade des Albigeois", Ink drawing, France, early Thirteenth century, National Library of France, Manuscripts Department (Western Division) French 25425 Fol. 231r
Albigensians being expelled:
http://pillingswritingcorner.blogspot.com/2014/02/heresy.html
Albigensians burning at the stake:
http://www.cathar.info/cathar_inquisition.htm