God's War: A New History of the Crusades

The Peace and Truce of God movements, sporadic, local, regional and ineffectual though they were, provided if not a model for the laity then a pattern for the clergy that directly influenced the inception of the First Crusade. The role of the knight was couched in positive language, as protector of Christian peace, specifically of the church and its interests. The clergy assumed leadership in tackling the material as well as moral ills of the temporal world and commanded the laity; oaths bound laymen into corporate action for a religious end, peace. Logically, if knights were forbidden to pursue their profession within Christendom, then just causes outside had to be found. It was no coincidence that Urban II’s speech launching the First Crusade echoed in setting, style and possibly even content the exhortations of the Peace and Truce movement; his audience’s vocal responses – ‘Deus lo volt!’ – paralleled the cries of ‘Pax, pax, pax!’ at earlier councils; and at Clermont Urban’s council passed a decree establishing a Peace throughout Christendom which was promulgated at regional church councils over the following months. Given the revival of the Peace and Truce movement in the 1080s in the Rhineland, a centre of reforming ideas with close contacts with the papacy, the link with holy war, although not geographically universal, was evident.

The problem remained of the legitimate function of arms-bearers in a Christian society. That of benign local policeman hardly fitted the political reality or individual self-image of men who saw what violence could bring; in the case of those Frenchmen who sought their fortunes in southern Italy or England fame, fortune and riches beyond their dreams. Despite concerted attempts from the tenth century, through exhortation and the liturgy, to refine the attitudes of arms-bearers to ensure righteous motives, just cause and humility even in victory, the prevailing ideology remained that, however lawful the conflict, fighting was sinful, the occupation of arms intrinsically a sin. This traditional position was retained by the widely influential canon lawyer Burchard, bishop of Worms (d. 1025) and even in his early years by Pope Gregory VII, who was to transform papal ideas on arms-bearing. In 1066, William of Normandy had invaded England with explicit papal approval, his cause deemed just, his army fighting under a papal banner. His opponent, Harold II, was adjudged an oath-breaker, having previously promised to support William’s claim to the throne, a usurper and, thanks to his patronage of a pluralist archbishop of Canterbury of contested legitimacy, a schismatic. Nonetheless, in 1070 on all who had fought with William at Hastings and had killed or wounded men penances were imposed even though the invasion was recognized as a ‘public war’ in the classical sense.²⁸ The idea that an arms-bearer could be truly penitent whilst remaining a warrior, still less use fighting itself as a penance, was a development only of the twenty years before Urban II’s ideological coup of 1095 and a result of precise circumstances of papal policy and perceived threats to the Roman church from within and beyond Christendom’s frontiers.

THE PAPACY AND HOLY WAR