God's War: A New History of the Crusades

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 corpus 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