God's War: A New History of the Crusades

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