Religion and Peace Historical Aspects Edited by Yvonne Friedman First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Yvonne Friedman; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Yvonne Friedman to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Friedman, Yvonne, editor. Title: Religion and peace : historical aspects / edited by Yvonne Friedman. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017041161 (print) | LCCN 2017044347 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315528335 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138694248 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Peace—Religious aspects—History. | Reconciliation— Religious aspects—History. | Religions—Relations—History. Classification: LCC BL65.P4 (ebook) | LCC BL65.P4 R443 2017 (print) | DDC 205/.6242—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017041161 ISBN: 978-1-138-69424-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-52833-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents List of figures List of contributors Preface List of abbreviations Introduction ix x xiii xiv 1 YVONNE FRIEDMAN 1 Violence and nonviolence/peace: introduction to a holistic approach 7 MARKUS FATH 2 Religion and diplomatic peacemaking in the Middle Byzantine period 25 NICOLAS DROCOURT 3 The peace of God: demotic millennialism and the religious dynamics of the Central Middle Ages 44 RICHARD LANDES 4 Learning the religious concepts of the Other: Muslim-Christian treaties in the Latin East 67 YVONNE FRIEDMAN 5 Islam as a peacemaking religion: self-image, medieval theory, and practice 84 YEHOSHUA FRENKEL 6 Making peace with “God’s enemies”: the Muslim dilemma of treaty-making with Christians in the medieval Levant BETTY BINYSH 98 viii Contents 7 Pursuit of peace in the service of war: papal policy, 1198–1334 115 SOPHIA MENACHE 8 Holy women as spokeswomen for peace in late medieval Europe 129 ESTHER COHEN 9 The pursuit of peace in medieval Judaism 146 DANIEL ROTH 10 The development of religious tolerance in Poland: from the medieval period to the Reformation 159 PAWEŁ KRAS Epilogue: Theology of forgiveness and peace: Christian culture of peace in the Roman Catholic Church after Vatican II 184 BERNARD ARDURA Index 193 3 The peace of God Demotic millennialism and the religious dynamics of the Central Middle Ages Richard Landes Introduction According to the great German historian of the crusades, Carl Erdmann, the peace of God (ca. 980s–1030s) was “the first mass religious movement in the West.”1 There were, actually, a few earlier cases that one could also call “mass religious movements,” but most of these were led by charismatic, messianic, prophets, and they aroused intense, even violent hostility from both ecclesiastical and lay authorities.2 By contrast, this “new” mass movement, the Pax Dei, was the first one led and endorsed by the highest strata of the ruling elite of the day: archbishops, bishops, abbots, kings, dukes, and counts.3 Moreover, in contrast with the “magical” millennium of peace and plenty offered by earlier messiahs,4 this movement explored more concrete and realistic formulas for bringing an age of peace, techniques that significantly anticipate the emergence of modern civil polities.5 In vast assemblies those attending, especially the warrior aristocracy, took oaths restricting their use of violence against the unarmed. We have evidence of these open-air assemblies from the 980s to the 1030s in areas radiating from its early core (Aquitaine, Auvergne, Burgundy) and expanding to include an arc from Catalonia to Flanders – ad ultimas partes Franciae.6 The main goal of virtually all of these assemblies was the protection of the unarmed (inermes), which included not only the laboring classes and (some) clerics, but Jews and even aristocrats on pilgrimage. What to us moderns may seem like a sine qua non of civil polity – the protection of civilians who do not bear arms from the violence of weapons-bearers – was apparently, in those days, a quasi-messianic project. Indeed, most historians who bother mentioning this ephemeral and quixotic movement emphasize the Peace of God’s failure to bring anything resembling civil polity to medieval Europe.7 For many historians, it made little more than a dent in the endemic violence of eleventh-century Europe.8 As a result, medievalists have tended to relegate the Pax Dei to a curiosum without consequences even for those phenomena normally associated with it: church reform, crusades, and communes.9 Specific articles even The peace of God 45 question whether it was a movement at all, focusing on local dynamics, and highlighting the more routinized elements of the Pax Dei – especially the political and legal strategies of the ecclesiastical and lay leaders who presided over each specific assembly.10 Perhaps in response to the weight of the surviving archival evidence, historians have often turned discussions of the peace movement into reconstructions of a political landscape that differs little from what preceded or followed.11 But the anomalies of the peace movement, especially in its earlier and more active phases, render somewhat problematic those historiographical efforts to routinize and banalize ex post facto the motivations and deeds of the key players.12 Whereas such an effort may find justification in a documentation that itself privileges later concerns, it hardly means that this perspective should dominate our understanding of the movement at the time. To do so privileges a retroactive functionalism that may seriously misgauge the temper of the times. Here I would like to present a different dimension of the Pax Dei, one that focuses on the unusual presence and behavior of crowds of commoners at these assemblies and the role they played in the dynamics of the peace movement. Such an approach leads to conclusions that not only differ significantly from recent historiographical assessments, but also sheds light on some sociopolitical dynamics with possibly important implications for understanding the emergence of the modern West over the course of the subsequent millennium of Christian history. I begin with what I would identify as the major sociological and political anomalies of the movement in the context of post-imperial Europe (sixth century onward), the unprecedented or highly unusual aspects of the peace. Sanctified peace assemblies: anomalous dynamics An examination of the primary characteristics of the “sanctified” peace assemblies shows how they transgress every sociopolitical and religious norm of early medieval (and especially Carolingian) society – certainly major anomalies to previous Church “councils.” They differ from conciliar norms gathered by the episcopate and the ruling aristocracy to discuss public and ecclesiastical matters in several ways: (1) people of all ages, sexes, and ranks not only came, but were invited; (2) organizers extensively used public display of many relics; (3) a marked (and remarked on) atmosphere of religious enthusiasm prevailed; (4) weapons-bearers took collective public oaths to restrain their use of violence, especially against the unarmed (inermes); and (5) councils often emphasized spiritual sanctions as the enforcing threat rather than physical coercion. The open-field venue, which accommodated the large crowds, was especially unusual for church councils. Indeed, outdoor venues seem so unusual to the historian that one, in an effort to deny any singularity to the peace movement or role for these crowds, insisted that all peace councils took place inside: “[The indoor council] is, doubtless, the way all the other peace 46 Richard Landes assemblies took place . . . the people are spoken of, they do not speak.”13 And yet, in the unusual case when a council was held in a city and not outside in open fields, as in Limoges in 994, Ademar reports that the assembled filled the entire city.14 The presence of relics constitutes the signature aspect of the peace assemblies. Not only did the ecclesiastical participants – monastic and clerical – bring major relics to these gatherings, they also brought many other relics, from various places, thus literally “inviting” the crowds that predictably followed their processions. Whereas the Carolingians had approved of translationes, which animated crowds of faithful in their passage, the goal was reburial in crypts, with restricted access to relics once in place, especially to lay commoners.15 These early councils changed the rules: parading the relics through the countryside – delationes – organizers drew huge crowds, enthused by the miracles that occurred on the way, not to a new crypt but to a multi-day outdoor, political gathering.16 Descriptions of the crowds and the excitement elicited comparison with the children of Israel following Moses to the promised land.17 Anyone (and everyone) attended these assemblies. The presence of female commoners at these events especially suggests that either “church council” is a misnomer, or that these were among the most unusual councils in the history of the church. In the course of a few days, these commoners saw more people – thousands – than they might in the course of their entire lives, an unheard-of social experience, including unprecedented levels of socializing between clergy and laity. Monks in principle had no exposure to laity – especially women – and yet here, for days and nights, with no walls to cloister them, an unwonted proximity reigned between lay commoners, the saints, and their guardians.18 Similarly, peasants, normally isolated in their villages and markets, could exchange information about lords and their evil customs, an opportunity as subversive as bosses allowing workers to communicate freely.19 All this contrasts markedly with the norms of the prevailing political culture, when commoners petitioning for fair treatment might have their hands and feet chopped off.20 We do not know how often, or under what actual conditions, the aristocracy took the “peace oaths,” oaths that placed constraints on their use of violence. Some functionalist analyses downplay any novelty in the oaths which, they argue, worked to the advantage of those taking them, creating “a new order but not disorder” – as if the two options were mutually exclusive.21 Others see these oaths as one of the most remarkable aspects of the peace assemblies, whose rapid spread in a society normally hostile to lateral oaths represented a revolutionary change, “a genuinely and entirely new actuality, a phenomenon of the same nature, perhaps, as the [prohibited] sworn associations of the ninth century, but multiplied by a hundred and a thousand.”22 In fact, even the most “conservative” of the oaths taken by the weapons-bearers at these councils had them swearing oaths down the social hierarchy, publicly committing to respect the rights of unarmed commoners. The peace of God 47 Gerard of Cambrai, the conservative aristocratic bishop of Cambrai and Arras, denounced the wave of oath taking of 1033 as most dangerous. And, as if to prove him right, within five years, the archbishop of Bourges invited commoners to take oaths in order to form a peace militia that would fight the belligerent aristocracy: for the weapons-bearing classes, it was self-evident that one did not allow impotentes to organize their own defense.23 Furthermore, the Pax Dei was a Christian event characterized by intense religious fervor. Presided over by saints’ relics, whose cults, from their fifthcentury origins, had offered participants a profound sense of communal solidarity,24 the multiple references to the religious excitement, joy, and labile and voluble moods in these crowds, feature frequently in descriptions, even from laconic historians.25 The pattern they describe often follows the classic millennial dynamic of suffering from famine, plague, or war (three of the four horsemen), provoking public collective penitence, arriving at peace declared in collective joy.26 The miracles performed by the relics at these councils played a role in legitimating novel legislation (oaths, restrictions). The early (earliest?) peace council at Coler in the Rouergue in the 980s gathered to deliberate the problem of warrior violence.27 When such innovation occurred, it gave an almost constitutive role to the very crowds whose presence was so anomalous in the first place, whose collective enthusiasm framed (if not created) such miracles, and who so benefited from the constraints on the weapons-bearers. Most historians agree that the Peace of God failed for lack of “teeth” in its sanctions. The shift from peace of God to peace militias, to the truce of God, to the peace of the communes, to peace of the king, to the “peace of iron,”28 reflects realistic responses over several centuries to the failure of a voluntary peace, whose only sanctions were spiritual. Granted not all such spiritual sanctions lacked substance: the threat of excommunication or interdict could have social consequences.29 But they only work when commitment to the church as a salvific institution is high. Thus the fact that ecclesiastics relied so much and so long on religious sanctions to restrict aristocratic recourse to violence – some 40 to 50 years – suggests that the commitment to a salvific church remained high during those many decades.30 One might think that social historians of power relations would pay attention to these remarkable anomalies, any one of which alone deserves their attention. What moved the ecclesiastics to assemble masses and relics in violation of their own prudent norms? At what other time in history had clerical and lay elites gathered large crowds of commoners – the very people on whose immiseration they built their affluence – to participate in fundamental decisions about how to tame violence in society?31 What recklessness inspired leaders to deliberately assemble unhappy peasants in an atmosphere of religious fervor amidst images of liberation?32 Whether intended or not, the peace movement’s mobilizing of the populace played a key role in a radical transformation of the culture, at least according to Jan Dhondt: 48 Richard Landes In fact, this [peace] movement constitutes for us the essential argument in favor of a transformation in the spontaneous behavior of individuals who based themselves on religious elements to reorganize the society. And all this vast movement in its duration, spread, and depth, becomes understandable only when we assume a powerful push from the people at its base.33 Indeed, none of the extensive “precedents” in Carolingian and local society pointed out by those who emphasize the movement’s “continuity” with the past involve the presence of large crowds of commoners who energized these aspects of peacemaking, and gave new meaning and direction to their deliberations. Unlike past elites who avoided rousing the multitude, the organizers of these assemblies went to great lengths to assure their presence and encourage their enthusiasm. The story of the “populace” in subsequent generations reveals what kind of subversion resulted when they let the popular genie out of the bottle.34 When viewed from the perspective of maintaining traditional forms of hegemony, the peace assemblies constituted a huge gamble. The downside for the aristocracy became poignantly clear when the archbishop of Bourges convened a Peace League in 1038 in which everyone over 15 years of age took oaths to fight the peacebreakers. These members of the peace militia saw themselves as new Israelites (and their aristocratic foes, by extension, as Canaanites to be exterminated).35 In short, however one chooses to reconstruct the actual versus perceived “anarchic violence” of the day to which these ecclesiastical measures were meant to respond, only a desperate church would resort to such wildly irresponsible actions.36 From apocalyptic fear to millennial hope: the eschatological genealogy of the peace of God Perhaps the most important issue for understanding both the daring and the desperation of the ecclesiastical and lay authorities throughout the 40-year period during which peace assemblies occurred with some regularity concerns apocalyptic expectations, that is to say expectations that the time for the last judgment and either the end of the world (good to heaven, bad to hell) or the advent of the millennial kingdom of peace and joy, heaven on earth, was about to happen.37 The earliest historian to tackle this topic systematically, Norman Cohn, noted that movements inspired by such ideas, especially those that foresaw the advent of an egalitarian perfection on earth, involved exceptional popular participation, often radical and subversive.38 As a result of a set of apocalyptic expectations of longue durée from the preaching of John the Baptist to the tenth century, Latin Christendom inherited a “millennial” dating system that targeted either a millennial year 1000 (onset of the sabbatical millennium) or the eschatological year 1033 (end of the millennium that Augustine insisted began with the Resurrection).39 And, indeed, The peace of God 49 the approach and passage of the first Christian millennium shows evidence of widespread apocalyptic expectations: signs (Halley’s comet 989, supernova 1006), wonders, terrors (earthquakes, plagues of “holy fire,” famines, invasions, destruction of the Holy Sepulcher), anticipatory apocalyptic dates (970, 981, 992), and political convulsions (end of the Carolingian line in West Francia, renovatio imperii romani in Ottonian Germany40), all of which played important roles in the wide range of apocalyptic scenarios available to Christians. Fear of God’s judgment: from public penitential assemblies to peace councils In this apocalyptic vortex, a mutation in behavior emerged. Normally, at the appearance of apocalyptic signs, crowds of penitents gathered and collectively promised (swore oaths?) to reform their lives.41 But often enough, these moments were short-lived, and, as John Chrysostom complained, within weeks, even days, the newly reformed started to slide back into old and evil ways.42 But the peace assemblies amplified all these apocalyptic social dynamics: they gathered for days at a time, drew people from many leagues all around, and oaths taken there had a far more political dimension concerning not personal, but public, vices. Participants turned these collective penitential events into social programs. Some of the earliest oaths taken by the aristocracy at these gatherings (e.g., Limoges 994) were taken in apocalyptic time and were probably considerably more radical than any promises these warriors might have made under more normal circumstances.43 Ademar describes the devastating plague of holy fire that led to first the gathering of relics and public fasts, followed by miraculous healings and an oath of “peace and justice” sworn by the duke and the magnates (principes). It is a sociopolitical vision of events framed by the oracles of Isaiah and Micah: the Aquitanian people, God’s new people, taught in the ways of peace, ascend the Mount of Joy to celebrate and to take oaths. For Ademar (and his audience?) this was a time when swords became plowshares and spears pruning hooks.44 Our sole evidence for the contents of these oaths comes from later councils where they are clearly the product of considerable negotiation and qualification, and concern primarily the regulation of private warfare and private justice.45 What they were like when they first emerged is harder to say. Historians, especially the ajustationistes (no dramatic change), tend to downplay their significance: overall, the peace councils look, ex post facto, like a big “win” for the castellans in which the pacified countryside accepted their exercise of authority, which they had only recently usurped from count, duke, and king as legitimate. As for the peasantry, the “end” result was a rather limited “win”; they went from a more anarchic to a more systematic oppression, or, in the words of Duby, who appreciated how monumental it was even in these terms: a shift “from plunder to exploitation.”46 50 Richard Landes But such a perspective privileges the better-known, better-documented, long-term results and projects them back on the origins. The original, early oaths, sworn in apocalyptic time, probably contained more radical concessions by the warrior aristocracy, at their most intense (and millennial) a vision of society in which violence against others, especially the unarmed, was banned. Indeed, by the millennium of the Passion (1033), violence against anyone had become illegitimate; the weapons bearers swore to renounce even self-help justice and its required vengeance.47 Now given the pervasiveness of violence in European society at this time and for centuries to come, especially the violence of the weapons-bearing potentes both against each other and against impotentes, their innate desire for the rabies bellorum, the frenzy of war,48 and the rapacitas praedonum, the greed for plunder,49 such an aspiration might seem ludicrous, indeed messianic.50 As the premier historian of medieval violence noted regarding the twelfth century: “Clearly the peace of God was something which, in the words of the liturgy, passes human understanding.”51 And, outside of apocalyptic time, such aspirations were ludicrous and did surpass human understanding. Nonetheless, based as they are on egalitarian principles rendered acute by apocalyptic time, they were revolutionary in a very modern sense: they envisioned a society in which people engaged in voluntary relations, in which coercion, certainly of the most physical sort, was illegitimate. Whereas democratic constitutional states have made that rule-set the norm, in the power politics of warlords and the law of a hierarchy at a time when the powerful legitimately owned people, it constituted a radical program. The wave of peace assemblies in 1033 These speculations on the early councils find confirmation in the second, much more documented wave of councils that came in 1033, the millennium of the Passion. The main narrative for this wave of peace assemblies comes from the pen of the most remarkable of the several historians of the period, Rodulfus Glaber. According to his dramatic account, the previous three years there had been a famine so terrible that even the wealthy starved and some turned to cannibalism.52 “People thought that the natural order of things was returning to its original chaos.” But with the “millennium of the Passion of our lord,” the skies began to shine, and the earth gave forth abundant fruit. Assemblies gathered from southern France through Burgundy into Flanders, bringing together “innumerable relics” for the sake of reforming the peace and instituting the holy faith, attended by the entire populace [tota multitudo universae plebis] . . . unanimously prepared to follow whatever should be commanded them by the pastors of the church. A voice descending from heaven could not have done more. The peace of God 51 In the northeast of France in open fields between the monastery of Corbie and the city of Amiens, a recorded assembly illustrates Glaber’s description in considerable detail. In response to a terrible seven-year famine (fames septem annis regnasset atrociter), the leaders called a mass assembly: Driven by this necessity [the famines], they determined to provide a rapid remedy. God, that is, whom manifold evils had offended, by good deeds was placated. They understood that this judgment imposed from the heavens, was so that they should now serve peace, which God loves alone and orders to be loved . . . The relics were summoned from whatever place was nearby to be brought to the place. And there an inviolable pact of peace was confirmed . . . They tied themselves to this promise by a vow, they bound their vow to an oath.53 In response to the terrible famines at the approach of the millennium of the Crucifixion, the highest authorities took a previously local or regional practice of peace assemblies and turned it into a national movement (in ultimas partes franciae).54 The amanuensis of Gerald, bishop of Cambrai and Arras (i.e., on the edge of the council’s farthest reach, the border between Francia and the German Empire), expressed his patron’s disapproval of these novelties: The French bishops promulgated a decree for their subjects. One of them claimed he had a letter sent from heaven that demanded that peace on earth be renewed. He communicated this matter to the others and gave these issues to be conveyed to the people: no one should bear arms, or attack for plunder; an avenger of his own blood or of his neighbor’s should be compelled to forgive the murderers . . . And they should confirm by oath that they will observe these things; and those who refuse should be deprived of Christianity. And they passed many other rules that would be burdensome here to recount.55 This formula for peace – no one should bear arms, or attack for plunder; an avenger of his own blood or of his neighbor’s should be compelled to forgive the murderers – represents something much more radical than a mere taming of the warrior’s most flagrantly violent behavior, and has echoes in contemporary texts.56 These councils sought nothing less than to revoke the aristocracy’s birthright, the right to avenge wrongs, the “license to kill.”57 They sought, as Charlemagne had tried with no success in 802 (i.e., 6001 annus mundi), to banish self-help justice itself.58 The objections of Gerald of Cambrai to the radical nature of the gatherings – especially their promiscuous use of oaths in the service of so impossible a demand – offer a good illustration of a “sound mind” responding to the overheated enthusiasm of the French bishops.59 After all, “letters from heaven” had a long and highly suspicious history of millennial and heterodox 52 Richard Landes behavior, and to have bishops(!) using them to ban war was most unusual. Had not Charlemagne ordered his subjects to burn “letters from heaven?”60 What could have led to such ambitious efforts? Indeed, the Miracula sancti Adalardi pose and answer precisely this question in a passage virtually paraphrased by Jules Michelet in his famous passage on “les terreurs de l’an mil”: Such was the custom naturally innate in the kingdom of Gaul, that they were wont above all other nations to engage in the madness of wars. How then did this [peace assembly] happen? It was no longer necessary to want to die in war, since they were dying from the sword of famine and plague. The world could not bear the wrath of the Judge. They undertook the counsel of the Ninevites. Peace and Justice came together as one: already it pleased the Saturnine rule to return. With all desperate, one counsel imposed itself for placating the wrath of the Judge on high to respond to the implorations of the Saints.61 Afraid that the God, who had just and justly punished them so terribly, would withdraw his grace if they should not repent and turn to him, they tried not merely to change each his or her individual ways, but collectively, to create a new, just and peaceful society. Like so many of the more spectacular peace assemblies, miracles played a critical role in infusing the gatherings of 1033 with enthusiasm and (through that enthusiasm) sanctifying the decisions of the council. Here, given the extreme nature of the conciliar demands, the miracles were indeed crucial to success. Glaber describes their impact: Everyone was overcome with such ardor [universi tanto ardore accensi], that, when the bishops raised their staffs to the heavens, they, with their palms extended to God, unanimously shouted “Peace! Peace! Peace!”62 The “everyone” here refers to the demos, the whole people omnis aeve utriusque sexus, maximi, mediocres ac minimi, of whom the vast majority – and the most unwonted of presences at the proceedings of church councils – were the minimi. Their cry of peace turned miracles into a miracle-demanding,63 sociopolitical fiat: Vox populi vox Dei. The historian Glaber takes us still further. Indeed, he takes us where virtually no other historian of his era brought his audience – namely, inside the experience of the masses: For them [the universi of the previous sentence], it was the sign of a perpetual covenant [signum perpetui pacti] with which they were marrying themselves to God [quod spoponderant inter se et Deum], promising that in five years they would renew this pact in the same admirable way.64 The peace of God 53 In other words, these people believed that they were replicating the deeds of the ancient Israelites when they stood at Sinai and vowed a pact with God to create a just society. Ademar described a similar sense of covenant in 994 for Aquitaine: “This house of the God of Israel taught the Aquitanian nation; peoples previously given over to errors, began to walk in the paths of justice.”65 If we try to imagine what the participants in these councils experienced, it seems like they, believing that the time had come for the messianic age of “swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks,” collectively entered into a social covenant with God. And that covenant included everyone, creating a new “people of God,” who would henceforth live in the peace of God, the Pax Dei. Thus, behind Gerard of Cambrai’s explicit concern for the inability of the aristocrats to keep their vows may have lain a still more profound anxiety about the spread of public, collective, oath taking to the commoners as part of a messianic movement that any well-instructed Augustinian must oppose. In their own minds, the commoners constituted a “new Israel,” willing to accept God’s demands and gain his rewards – namely, accept egalitarian principles and enjoy the abundance of a land at peace (Deut. 11:14–24). This world turned upside down would produce, as Gerard’s cousin Adalbero of Laon lamented around the same time, “naked bishops endlessly plowing, singing the original song of our first parent,” a probable allusion to the later egalitarian battle cry of peasants in revolt: “When Adam delved and Eve span who was then the gentleman?”66 Glaber describes the economic effects of the assembly vows: In that very year there was such an abundance of grain and wine and other produce that one could not have hoped for in subsequent years. Every kind of food short of meat and the greatest delicacies sold for nothing. It was as if it was the beginning of the great Mosaic Jubilee. The next year, and the third and the fourth were no less abundant.67 Riding on the wave of abundance that followed the famine, this alliance of elites and commoners added a radical dose of positive-sum behavior to social interaction: trust, empathy, productive labor, mutual benevolence, renunciation of violence. And the result was one of the earliest clear manifestations of the kind of civil society that Western Europe would eventually generate on a stable basis, some eight centuries later.68 Ex post defectu: the aftermath of apocalyptic millennialism and the pieces of God The impact of believing that one faced the judge, naked and helpless to hide from his scrutiny, that one’s deeds hidden and public, repressed or suppressed, were now under inspection, may not have lasted long – at least as far as public behavior was concerned. And, as with Chrysostom’s flock in 54 Richard Landes the late fourth century,69 backsliding was the order of the day in virtually every account. Glaber’s is perhaps the most extensive and eloquent, but he records the backsliding not after a few days, as with Chrysostom’s earthquake, but four years (!) after the climactic covenant of the millennium of the Passion: But alas! The human race, always unmindful of the beneficence of God, from its origins prone to evil, like a dog returning to its vomit, or a pig wallowing in its sty, in many ways [people] broke the oaths they had sworn . . . For those same magnates [primates] of both orders began to turn to greed and began to commit many rapacious acts – as they formerly had done only worse – of greed. And from them to the middling sort, and the lesser sort (minimes), by the example of the great, returned to their depraved behavior.70 As Thomas Hobbes wrote six centuries later, “And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”71 Moments of egalitarian messianic enthusiasm are short-lived because the most powerful generator of such moments – the belief in apocalyptic time that will bring on either a final judgment (eschatology) or a fundamental mutation in social dynamics (millennialism) – always proves wrong. Once the initial fire of collective commitment and mutual renunciation passes, and people begin to realize that neither the cosmic threats nor the promises will materialize, they undergo deep crises of cognitive dissonance and, finally, for most, backsliding.72 It took the French revolutionaries less than a decade to substitute propriété for fraternité.73 Glaber provides one detail that should hardly surprise either the historian or the political “scientist,” but whose honest admission puts him in an unusual category of medieval historians: the powerful were the first to renege on their commitments, followed by the middling sort, and, eventually, the poor (who, one might speculate, had the most to gain from this new dispensation). But the backsliding indicates that such moments did happen. And if so, what happened to those who had joined the messianic enthusiasm, especially those who got the raw end of the post-apocalyptic stick? Did the impotentes give up hope that this glorious event, of which they had just shared a spectacular, extended, if proleptic, taste, would happen in the near future?74 Did the potentes who backslid feel no guilt about the behavior to which they had returned, as both Isaiah and Glaber put it, like a dog to its vomit? Two generations later, at the time of the First Crusade, we have sharp testimony as to the condition of warriors who had been “injected” with “bad conscience,” who felt torn about doing what they were, from time immemorial, supposed to do – kill, in other words, warriors who took seriously the peace’s efforts to put an end to their license to kill.75 The backsliding, however, has led many historians to dismiss the peace movement (and most other apocalyptic moments) as insignificant (or The peace of God 55 nonexistent). Closer familiarity with apocalyptic movements, however, suggests something quite different. We are concerned now with the period marked by deep disappointment and cognitive dissonance, when the impact of the apocalyptic moment has worn off, and believers must confront the failure of their (previously certain) expectations. Some sought solutions that reshaped the Pax Dei by providing some “teeth.” In 1038, the archbishop of Bourges conducted a radical experiment in which everyone, commoner and warrior, joined a sworn militia that would enforce the Pax Dei on peacebreakers who were designated “rebels.” In this way they many times routed the faithless and brought their castles down to the ground. With the help of God they so terrified the rebels that, as the coming of the faithful was proclaimed far and wide by rumor among the populace, the rebels scattered. Leaving the gates of their towns open, they sought safety in flight, harried by divinely inspired terror. You would have seen [the faithful] raging against the multitude of those who ignore God, as if they [the faithful] were some other people of Israel. Presently they trampled [the rebels] underfoot so that they forced them to return to the laws of the pact which they had ignored.76 Despite its initial success, however, the oxymoronic movement of armed inermes77 soon broke its teeth on the rocks of feudal reality: the count of Déols’ men slaughtered them by the river Cher.78 This experiment in active millennialism was not, to our knowledge, repeated, unless one considers the communes as the next adventure in the commoner search for a Pax.79 Some of these deeply disappointed but deeply affected people continued to search for their vocation, for the meaning of this covenant they and their parents had sworn: they thronged “like bees to honey” to aristocrats who voluntarily renounced their power and status, and continued to do so for generations.80 Some of these charismatic leaders commanded large crowds who, precisely in this first century of the new millennium, stepped boldly “onto the stage of public events,” and whose “eminently respectable beginnings” (if not also continuations) began with the mobilization of populace in the Peace of God movement.81 And among the most fecund of these currents issuing from the millennial generation was that of pilgrimage, to Compostella, to Jerusalem, to the great European shrines, an ever-greater stream throughout the eleventh century, repeatedly punctuated by mass pilgrimages to Jerusalem in apocalyptic time (1033, 1064, 1096).82 Nor was the impact of the Pax Dei on eleventh-century society only on the behavior of crowds on the occasion of some renewal of apocalyptic time. The peace, whatever its failures, injected the society in which it occurred with heavy doses of demotic, egalitarian religiosity, even in “normal time.”83 This demotic identity involved both a commitment to the dignity of manual labor, and a sense of solidarity among believers that transcended clan, 56 Richard Landes lineage, and especially a hierarchy constructed around the chasm between manual laborers and elites: in other words, an ideal formula for new “textual communities” that productively worked the land. In millennial terms, the marital oaths described by Glaber created a demos, a chosen (or choosing) people of God, a notion that transcended the zero-sum, stratified, dynamics so dominant in almost every aspect of medieval society. Indeed, in its inclusive sense – every Christian, laborer, scribe, and warrior is part of the people, the demos – one has a parallel to the process whereby Sieyès defined the “Third Estate” as “the Nation.”84 The eleventh century was an astonishingly creative century, a laboratory of people creating new ways to interact reliably: new “textual communities” (some hierarchical, some heretical), voluntary associations and religious orders, markets thriving on extensive credit, free cities, and assarting peasants clearing the forests and founding autonomous, productive, and self-sustaining communities, often incorporating technology like watermills and heavy plows.85 This “new period of peaceful conditions” reflects a remarkable self-confidence, initiative, and social trust. In terms of the peace movement discussed here, it seems that people from all walks of life refashioned the Pax Dei’s covenantal dimension in more manageable venues, this time with smaller, like-minded, and committed groups of fellows, based on mutual trust and cooperation (and often a mutual oath): corporations, contracts, and rural and urban communes. Notes Robert Lopez, Unstinting credit was the great lubricant of the Commercial Revolution . . . altogether a new phenomenon . . . a change that stems from the same cooperative attitude involved in the collaboration of men of all classes in the political struggle that lead eventually to the emergence of independent communes.86 Demotic religiosity had distinct economic advantages: in considering productive labor as a source of human dignity (rather than stigma), it encouraged making, not taking, voluntary association, not coercion.87 And its initial vigor (e.g., Glaber’s four “Jubilee” years after 1033) may have given this positive-sum dynamic an ability to resist the “inevitable” return of the dominating imperative.88 As the communes in their early forms show, this solidarity involved egalitarian principles rarely seen in post-imperial European society. As the nineteenth-century formula for the twelfth-century rule runs, in the communes, “city air makes you free.” These new and free cities founded themselves on the unusual principle that welcomed escapees of the seigneurial system: the serf who lived in the city for a year and a day – in other traditions, the time allotted to take vengeance – became a free man, a citizen. Notes Hägen Keller, “It is the idea of ‘Christian fraternity,’ it is the idea of Christian love and free association (Friedensgemeinschaft), that gave The peace of God 57 the Peace of God movement as well as the Commune movement their strength.”89 As a poem describing the commune of Bergamo in 1125 put it, “For golden peace firmly unites the citizens/By the peace covenant poor and rich alike live together in peace.”90 These are, of course, formulas, and most of the time, no reflection of actual conditions of the struggle of daily life, but they mean much more in apocalyptic time, often the time when the cities are founded. We can see this spirit at work in the early twelfth century in the reaction of the citizens of Lille in defense of someone whom the count’s men had identified as a runaway serf and sought to distrain. The townsmen armed themselves and came rapidly to his defense, chasing William Clito’s men out of town.91 This is much the same effrontery that the peace association of Le Puy, the Cappuciati, displayed some 50 years later. Not only is it a new wind blowing across the European landscape (one Weber considered an early and unusual sign of things to come) but also may well have its origin in a reading of one of the most demotic laws in the Hebrew Bible: “Do not return a slave to his master who has fled to you from his master. He will live among you in the place he shall choose in one of your gates. You will not oppress him” (Deut. 23:16–17). Janet Nelson argued a generation ago that the astonishing vitality and creativity of eleventh-century (Western) Europe stems from a crisis of theodicy92 and that the previously prevailing explanations for human suffering (and especially humanly inflicted suffering) no longer provided people with acceptable explanations. Much of the creativity generated in the second two-thirds of the eleventh century arose from addressing the problem of human suffering at a time when waiting for a future date, in particular a millennial date, when God would distribute justice to the just and the unjust alike, before the eyes of the whole world, no longer carried conviction. Thus the millennial generations, repeatedly drawn into apocalyptic time at the advent of the two years (1000 and 1033), participated in and witnessed what Glaber called nova – new things. In both cases, their hopes were disappointed, their efforts to bring the millennium failed, but that hardly made their labors inconsequential. Differently put, the eleventh century is filled with refugees from failed apocalyptic time, suffering from the cognitive dissonance of a failed, but immensely creative form of theodicy – that whole complex of beliefs including eschatological justice, apocalyptic fears, and millennial hopes. These refugees and their descendants and students, however bitter the disappointment, did not dismiss the millennial dream. Instead, like Marx and so many others,93 they refashioned it and prepared action for the newly recalculated apocalyptic date. Glaber describes the phenomenon at the passage of AD 1000, with almost clinical precision: After the many prodigies which had broken upon the world before, after and around the millennium of the Lord Christ [whose passage 58 Richard Landes was the occasion of the first three books], there were plenty of energetic men of penetrating intellect [sagaci mente viros industrios] who foretold others, just as great, at the approach of the millennium of the Lord’s Passion, and such wonders were soon manifest.94 Some (if not almost all) of these industrious men of penetrating intellect tried to live an apostolic life – a life built on a radical demotic religiosity. An unusual number over the course of the eleventh century took to the roads and woods and became hermits and wandering teachers and preachers, with some founding, joining, and transforming monastic and clerical communities. Cluny manifested this dynamic precisely at the turn of the “second” millennium (1033): it developed a major liturgy about death addressed to all Christians95 and promoted a “Truce of God” that treated every weekend as a monastic (and hence nonviolent) meditation on the unfolding of the Passion from Thursday’s Last Supper to Sunday’s Resurrection. A century later, Guibert of Nogent describes a time when the roads were full of apostolic wanderers whose disciples provided a major recruitment pool for such exceptional ecclesiastical movements as those led by Bernard of Clairvaux and Norbert of Xanten, and the budding universities.96 Others, the most socially radical, created egalitarian textual communities that transgressed all the societies’ normative boundaries. Everyone, whether layperson or cleric, man or woman, laborer or aristocrat, shared the same dignity. For reasons that explain much of the post-peace dynamics of eleventh-century power politics – returning to their vomit like pigs in a sty – factions in both lay and clerical courts found the more radical lay apostolic communities intolerably heretical and launched the first major hunt and execution of commoner heretics in Latin Christendom.97 And still others hit the road and settled in the “peace” zones of commerce and trade and learning. They clustered in the protected zones of peace, free of arbitrary aristocratic violence. These zones grew in both number and independence over the course of the eleventh, newest of centuries. They form the core of both the urban and the rural communes. What they all had in common, I submit, was an apocalyptically induced sense that their participants were God’s chosen people, whose vocation was to do – to fulfill – God’s will on earth. Just like the catastrophe that killed the dinosaurs made a space for then tiny mammals to evolve into humans, the aristocracy’s fear of the millennium made a space, however brief, for civil society to emerge in a form sufficiently widespread and substantial that it could survive the counterattack of the elites and mutate over the centuries into full-fledged civil polities. In many cases, both spectacular and modest, these men and women undertook their novel labors to the resounding encouragement of an aroused people that now, even after the peace had failed, believed that they had been chosen to enact the salvific gesta Dei per populum suum. The peace of God 59 Notes 1 “Die erste, religiöse Massenbewegung im Mittelalter.” See Carl Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (Berlin: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1936), 66. 2 Aside from popular relic cults (which could hardly be called a movement), the only clear examples of popular enthusiasm for elements of Christianity were the millennial movements around apocalyptic prophets (“False Christ” of Bourges, 590s; Adalbert, 750s; Thiota, 848). See Aaron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 39–77; Richard Landes, “Millenarismus absconditus: L’historiographie augustinienne et l’An Mil,” Le Moyen Age 98 (1992): 355–77. 3 Bishops, abbots, archbishops, counts, dukes, and, eventually, the king of France were sponsors/organizers. Indeed, much of the literature on the peace movement tries to insist that the authorities, especially the bishops, had this movement under control from beginning to end. See Hans W. Goetz, “Protection of the Church, Defense of the Law, and Reform: On the Purpose and Character of the Peace of God,” in The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 259–79. 4 On the broader phenomenon, see Bryan R. Wilson, Magic and the Millennium: A Sociological Study of Religious Movements of Protest among Tribal and ThirdWorld Peoples (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Richard Landes, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism, ed. Catherine Wessinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 5 Georges Duby suggested that the three orders became a (dominant) commonplace at the time of the peace movement and that it had a genealogical relationship with the three estates of later French political thought. See Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), 1, 356. 6 The bibliography on the peace is extensive. Key introductory works include Hartmut Hoffmann, Gottesfriede und Treuga Dei, Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica 20 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1964); Herbert E. J. Cowdrey, “The Peace and the Truce of God in the Eleventh Century,” Past and Present 46 (1970): 42–67; The Peace of God, ed. Head and Landes. More recent work includes Thomas Gergen, Pratique juridique de la paix et trêve de Dieu à partir du Concile de Charroux (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2004); Thomas Head, “Peace and Power in France around the Year 1000,” Essays in Medieval Studies 23 (2006): 1–17; Claire Taylor, “Reform and the Basque Dukes of Gascony: A Context for the Origins of the Peace of God and the Murder of Abbo of Fleury,” Early Medieval Europe 15 (2007): 35–52; Theo Riches, “Bishop Gerard I of Cambrai-Arras, the Three Orders, and the Problem of Human Weakness,” in The Bishop Reformed: Studies in Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages, ed. John Ott and Anna Trumbore (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 122– 36; Hans-Werner Goetz, “Pacem et iustitiam facere: Zum Rechtsverstandnis in den Gottes- und Landfrieden,” in Das Recht und seine historischen Grundlagen: Festschrift für Elmar Wadle zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Tiziana Chiusi, Thomas Gergen, and Heike Jung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2008), 283–96; Jehangir Yezdi Malegam, The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200 (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2013); Richard Landes, “Can the Church Be Desperate, Warriors Be Pacifist, and Commoners Ridiculously Optimistic? On the Historian’s Imagination and the Peace of God,” in Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of 60 Richard Landes 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 William Chester Jordan, ed. Katherine Jansen, Guy Geltner, and Anne Lester (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 79–92. A civil polity, as I use it here, “arises from a cultural project best described as the systematic substitution of consensual discourse of fairness for violence in dispute settlement.” See Richard Landes, “Civil Polity vs. Prime Divider Society,” Augean Stables, www.theaugeanstables.com/reflections-from-second-draft/ civil-society-vs-prime-divider-society/. “How different, indeed, are they from tenth-century violences?” (Stephen White, “The ‘Feudal Revolution,’” Past and Present 152 [1996]: 218). “Peace ideas were, at most, peripheral” to the knightly piety that eventually produced the crusades (Marcus Bull, Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade: The Limousin and Gascony, c. 970–c. 1130 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1993], 68). On the communes, see the following. One might even argue that historians have gone out of their way to dismiss the Peace’s significance and its connection to subsequent developments. “[T]he Peace councils were part of a complex set of negotiations and compromise, and thus of a piece with contemporary norms of conflict resolution” (Thomas Head, “The Development of the Peace of God in Aquitaine (970–1005),” Speculum 74 [1999]: 686). For similar conclusions, see Jeffrey Bowman, “Councils, Memories and Mills: The Early Development of the Peace of God in Catalonia,” Early Medieval Europe 8 (1999): 121. Some reject the very notion that these disparate councils constitute a “movement.” See Kathleen Cushing, Reform and the Papacy in the Eleventh Century: Spirituality and Social Change (New York: Macmillan, 2005), 44–5; Jane Martindale, “Peace and War in Early EleventhCentury Aquitaine,” in Medieval Knighthood, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1992), 147–76. “Les conciles de paix des évêques n’y sont pas une nouveauté radicale, ni leurs décrets, ni leur usage social des reliques, ni le mythe de l’apaisement de Dieu après ses avertissements terribles” (Barthélemy, L’an mil et la paix de Dieu [Paris: Fayard, 1999], 40). Normalizing studies focus on the bishops and counts. See Goetz, “Protection of the Church”; Bowman, “Councils, Memories and Mills,” 99–129. “C’est la, n’en doutons pas, le déroulement même de toutes les autres assemblées de paix . . . On parle du peuple, des pauvres, mais ils ne parlent pas eux-mêmes” (Barthélemy, L’an mil et la paix de Dieu, 370 [italics mine]). “E quibus totam videres urbem intus et per circuitum foris plenam” (Ademar, Sermo, PL, vol. 141, col. 118A). Paul Fouracre, “The Origins of the Carolingian Attempt to Regulate the Cult of Saints,” in The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. James Johnston and Paul Hayward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 143–68. One example comes from the first datable “sanctified” peace assembly at Charroux in 989. See Letaldus of Micy, Delatio corporis s. Juniani, PL, vol. 137, cols. 823–6. “Chartes et documents pour servir à l’histoire de l’abbaye de Charroux,” ed. P. Monsabert, Archives historiques du Poitou 39 (1910): 36–9, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/bpt6k2095059/f93.image. See Bernard of Angers, Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis, ed. Luca Robertini, Biblioteca di Medioevo Latino 10 (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1994), 2.4, unwonted familiarity even in the crypt at Conques. Christian Lauranson-Rosaz, “Les mauvaises coutumes d’Auvergne (fin Xe–XIe siècle),”Annales du Midi 192 (1990): 557–85. On subversion, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale University Press, 1992); John Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1984), chap. 13. The peace of God 61 20 As in the case of petitioners to Duke Richard, see Mathieu Arnoux, “Les paysans et le duc: Autour de la révolte de 996,” in La Normandie vers l’an mil, ed. François de Beaurepaire and Jean-Pierre Chaline (Rouen: Société de l’histoire de Normandie, 2000), 105–11. In 859, Frankish potentiores massacred the vulgus promiscuum who imprudently swore a coniuratio to defend against pillaging Northmen who coordinated troop movement with those potentiores. See Annales sancti Bertini, MGH SSrerGer 5 (Hannover, 1883), 51. 21 “Umordnung, nicht Unordnung.” Hans Werner Goetz, “Die Gottesfriedensbewegung im Lichte neuerer Forschungen,” in Landfrieden: Anspruch und Wirklichkeit, ed. Arno Buschmann and Elmar Wadle (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), 31–54. On the relationship of the peace oaths to the communes, see the following. 22 Jan Dhondt and Michel Rouche, Le haut moyen âge (Paris: Bordas, 1968), 253. See the recent discussion of oaths in Gergen, Pratique juridique, 61–9, 84–90, 195–202. 23 On Gerald’s problems with the peace oaths, see Duby, The Three Orders, 28–32; Riches, “Bishop Gerard I of Cambria–Arras, the Three Orders, and the Problem of Human Weakness.” On the peace militia of Bourges, see the discussion that follows. On the reaction of the weapons-bearers to commoners defending themselves in 859, see n. 20. 24 Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 25 “Unde leticia immensa omnes repleti sunt”(Ademar, Chronicon 3.35, ed. Pascale Bourgain, Richard Landes, and Georges Pon, CCCM 129 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1999], 157). See also Bernard of Angers, Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis, 1.28. 26 Richard Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 285–327. 27 Translatio s. Viviani episcopi in coenobium Figiacense et eiusdem ibidem miracula, chaps. 13–19 in Analecta Bollandiana 8 (1889): 263–65; Christian Lauranson-Rosaz (d. April 2016), “Le Concile de Coler dans les Miracula sancti Viviani,” in Autour de Gerbert d’Aurillac: Le Pape de l’an mil, ed. Olivier Guyotjeannin and Emmanuel Poulle (Paris: Ecole nationale des chartes, 1996), 120–4. 28 Aryeh Graboïs, “De la trève de Dieu à la paix du roi: étude sur les transformations du mouvement de la paix au Xlle siècle,” in Mélanges d’histoire médiévale dédiés à René Crozet, ed. Pierre Gallais and Yves-Jean Riou (Poitiers: Société d’Etudes Médiévales, 1966), 1:585–96; Frédéric Duval, De la paix de Dieu à la paix de fer (Paris: Paillard, 1925). 29 See the discussion in Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History, 34–8. 30 Warren Brown, Violence in Medieval Europe (New York: Routledge, 2010). 31 On elites and the “prime divider” between them and commoners, see Landes, Heaven on Earth, chap. 8. On the Carolingian warrior elite, see Timothy Reuter, “Plunder and Tribute in the Carolingian Empire,” in Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 231–50; Brown, Violence in Medieval Europe, 125–8; for sociological observations, see Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, 79–166. 32 The preceding discussion appeared in different form in Landes, “Can the Church Be Desperate,” 80–3. 33 Dhondt and Rouche, Le haut moyen âge, 252. See especially Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 60–141. 34 Generally, Jean Musy, “Mouvements populaires et hérésies au XIe siècle en France,” Revue historique 253 (1975): 33–76; Robert I. Moore, “Family, 62 Richard Landes 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Community and Cult on the Eve of the Gregorian Reform,” Transactions, Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 30 (1979): 49–69; idem, The Origins of European Dissent (London: Allen Lane, 1977); Claire Taylor, “The Year 1000 and Those who Labored,” in The Year 1000, ed. Michael Frassetto (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 187–236. “You would have seen [the faithful] raging against the multitude of those who ignore God, as if they were some other people of Israel” (Miracula sancti Benedicti 5.2; discussed and translated by Thomas Head, “The Judgment of God,” in The Peace of God, ed. Head and Landes, 219–38; text in appendix, 340). Paul Freedman remarks to the contrary: “The Truce must not be thought of, therefore, as a desperate measure designed to substitute spiritual for secular enforcement of order; rather, it assumed that the two powers should act in concert” (The Diocese of Vic: Tradition and Regeneration in Medieval Catalonia [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983], 27; cited approvingly by Bowman, “Councils, Memories and Mills,” 114). Thus a remarkable pattern becomes, ex post facto, evened out. Landes, Heaven on Earth. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Richard Landes, “The Historiographical Fear of an Apocalyptic Year 1000: Augustinian History Medieval and Modern,” Speculum 75 (2000): 131–8. Two collections of essays on the topic have appeared: The Year 1000: Religious and Social Response to the Turning of the First Millennium, ed. Michael Frassetto (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002); The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Religious Expectation and Social Change, 950–1050, ed. Richard A. Landes, Andrew C. Gow, and David C. Van Meter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Most recently, Levi Roach, “Emperor Otto III and the End of Time,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 23 (2013): 75–102. For an excellent example, see Agathias, Historiae 5.5, ed. Rudolf Keydell, Agathiae Myrinaei Historiarum libri quinque in Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae, vol. 2 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967), 169–70; cited by Paul Magdalino, “The History of the Future and Its Uses: Prophecy, Policy and Propaganda,” in The Making of Byzantine History: Studies Dedicated to Donald M. Nicol, ed. Roderick Beaton and Charlotte Roueche (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), 6. “As soon as there was some respite and relief from danger, most people reverted to their normal ways” (Chrysostom, In terrae motum, PG, vol. 50, cols. 713– 16). On the phenomenon of earthquakes in this period and their remarkable religious (apocalyptic) impact, see Brian Croke, “Two Early Byzantine Earthquakes and the Liturgical Commemoration,” Byzantion 51 (1981): 122–47; Frank Vercleyen, “Tremblements de terre à Constantinople: L’impact sur la population,” Byzantion 58 (1988): 155–73. The pattern of dramatic concessions made in moments of duress or enthusiasm, later watered down, extends from biblical times (Jeremiah 34:7–11) to the French Revolution and oaths of August 4, 1789 (Landes, Heaven on Earth, 256–9). On the Limoges council of 994, see Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History, 24–49. For the text of the two best-known oaths, see Roger Bonnaud-Delamare, Les institutions de la Paix en Aquitaine au XIe siècle (Brussels: Extrait de Recueils de la Société Jean Bodin 14: La Paix, 1962), 1:148–53. For an English translation of the oath of Béraud and Garin, see The Peace of God, ed. Head and Landes, 332–4. The peace of God 63 46 Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, trans. Howard B. Clarke (Ithaca: Cornell, 1974), Part III. 47 See the following on the councils of 1033. 48 “Talis quippe consuetudo naturaliter innata est regno Gallorum, ut præter ceteras nationes semper velint exercere rabiem bellorum” (Ex Miraculis s. Adalhardi Corbeiensibus 4.8 [AASS, Jan. I, 119; PL, vol. 147, col. 1067D]). 49 “Prædonum rapacitate devastamur” (Acta s. Veroli, AASS Jun III, 387). 50 See the debate in Past and Present 152 (1996): 196–223 and 155 (1997): 177– 208; Feud, Violence and Practice: Essays in Medieval Studies in Honor of Stephen White, ed. Belle Tuten and Tracey Billado (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). Ian Miller argues in the introductory essay that this was a society in which “threat advantage” played a critical role in “negotiations” (see 9–28). As Richard Kaeuper puts it, “Knights worshipped at the altar of the demi-god ‘prowess’” (Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 126). 51 Kaeuper, Chivalry, 15. 52 Rodulfus Glaber, Quinque libri historiarum 4.5.13, ed. and trans. John France, Rodulfus Glaber, Opera (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); translations are mine. Other, completely independent sources – Ademar of Chabannes, the Gesta episcoporum cameracensium, and the Miracula sancti Adelardi – all confirm Glaber in significant details. See David Van Meter, “The Peace of Amiens-Corbie and Gerard of Cambrai’s Oration on the Three Functional Orders: The Date, the Context, the Rhetoric,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 74 (1996): 633–57. 53 Ex Miraculis S. Adalhardi Corbeiensibus, MGH SS 15/2: 4.8, 861. 54 An early reference to France as a territory with national boundaries. At this point the common term is rex francorum, and only after the accession of Phillip II (Augustus) in 1180 do the royal documents speak of rex franciae. See John Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 360–1. 55 Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium 3.52; MGH SS 7.485f. 56 Glaber and the author of the Miracula sancti Adelardi both confirm this radical legislation (see the discussion in Van Meter, “The Peace of Amiens-Corbie,” 650–5). 57 Warren Brown, “Charlemagne, God and the License to Kill,” in Violence in Medieval Europe (New York: Routledge, 2010), 69–95. 58 See Capitulare Missorum Generale (802) §32, ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Leges Capitularia regum francorum, 1:97. Although this assertion is based on vague language about the council’s legislation, the detailed language of the peace council of Narbonne in 1054 is quite explicit: Canon 18, Joannes D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova amplissima collectio (Paris: Welter, 1926), 19.830–1. 59 Duby, The Three Orders, chap. 2; Van Meter, “The Peace of Amiens-Corbie.” 60 See Van Meter, “The Peace of Amiens-Corbie,” 646–50. Charlemagne ordered any such letters to be burned: Admonitio Generalis §78 (789 CE), ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Leges Capitularia regum francorum, 1:60. Glaber may allude to this (rather heterodox) phenomenon in his phrase: “A voice descending from heaven could not have done more” (Quinque 4.5.14). 61 Ex Miraculis s. Adalhardi Corbeiensibus, MGH SS 15/2: 4.8, 861. Michelet paraphrases this text in his famous passage about “the terrors of the year 1000” (Jules Michelet, Histoire de la France, vol. 2, book 4 [Paris: Flammarion, 1893], 170–4, www.gutenberg.org/files/38244/38244-h/38244-h.htm). 62 Glaber, Quinque libri historiarum 4.5.16; France trans., 197. 63 As Eli Sagan dryly notes: “Paranoia is the problem. The paranoid position [rule or be ruled] is the defense. Democracy is a miracle, considering human 64 Richard Landes psychological disabilities” (The Honey and the Hemlock [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, 22). 64 Glaber, Quinque libri historiarum 4.5.16; France trans., 197. 65 “Haec domus Dei Israel vias Dei gentem docuerat Aquitaniam, gentes erroribus olim deditae coeperant ambulare in semitis justitiae” (Ademar, Sermo, MS BnF lat. 2469, fol. 88v; PL, vol. 141, col. 118A). 66 Claude Carozzi, Adalbéron de Laon: Poème au roi Robert, Les classiques de l’Histoire de France au Moyen Age 32 (Paris: Les Belles lettres, 1979): Nudi pontifices sine fine sequantur aratrum, Carmina cum stimulo primi cantando . . . 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 On the identification of this poem with the “leveler” ditty that only shows up in texts of the later Middle Ages, see Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), 61. Glaber, Quinque libri historiarum 4.5.17, France trans., 197. Richard Shelly Hartigan, “The ‘Peace of God,’ Chivalry, and the Emergence of the Civilian,” in Dissent and Affirmation: Essays in Honor of Mulford Q. Sibley, ed. Arthur Kalleberg, James Donald Moon, and Daniel Sabia (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1983), 67–79. On the role of positive-sum interactions embedded in demotic religiosity, see Richard Landes, “Economic Development and Demotic Religiosity: Reflections on the Eleventh-Century Takeoff,” in History in the Comic Mode: The New Medieval Cultural History, ed. Rachel Fulton and Bruce Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 101–16. See n. 42. Glaber, Quinque libri historiarum 4.5.17, France trans., 197f. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651), 1.17. On cognitive dissonance, see Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956); more recently, Joel Cooper, Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of Classic Theory (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2007). Note that the sociologists who follow the more intense forms of cognitive dissonance focus on the dedicated few who do not give up, and pay little attention to the larger group that “merely” falls away (backslides). On the role of fraternité in the fêtes révolutionnaires which Michelet saw as the heart and soul of the revolution (“the tale of the most beautiful days of the Revolution, still credulous, fraternal, clement”), see Landes, Heaven on Earth, 258–9, 301. During the Second Empire, a 90-year-old manual laborer from Nantes, on his deathbed, “raised his eyes to the sky with a look of ecstasy and murmured ‘O sun of [17]93, I will then die without seeing your rays again!’” Story recounted by Gabriel Monod in his introduction to Albert Mathiez, Contributions à l’histoire de la révolution française (Paris: F. Alcon, 1957), i. Bull, Knightly Piety, 3–4; also Tomaž Mastnak, “From Holy Peace to Holy War,” in Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1–54. Andrew of Fleury, Miracula sancti Benedicti 5.1–4. On the anomaly, see Head, “Judgment of God” (see n. 35), 221 n. 8. Head, “Judgment of God”; cf. Barthélemy, L’an mil et la paix, 414–16. Albert Vermeesch gives the Bourges Peace Militia a major role in the genesis of the commune movement a generation later in Le Mans (1064). See his Essai sur les origines et la signification de la commune dans le nord de La France (Xle et X/le siecles) (Heule: UGA, 1966), 28–34. More commonly, historians downplay The peace of God 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 65 the connection. See Hans-Werner Goetz, “Gottesfriede und Gemeindebildung,” Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte, Germanische Abteilung 105 (1988): 133–4; Gerhard Oexle, “Friede durch Verschworung,” in Träger und Instrumentarien des Friedens im hohen und spaten Mittelalter, ed. Johannes Fried (Sigmarigen: Thorbeke Verlag, 1996), 121–3, 138–9; Barthélemy, La Paix de Dieu et l’an mil. See Frederick Paxton, “History, Historians, and the Peace of God,” in The Peace of God, ed. Head and Landes, 21–40. People like Richard of Saint-Vanne. See David Van Meter, “Count Baldwin IV, Richard of Saint-Vanne, and the Inception of Monastic Reform in EleventhCentury Flanders,” Revue Benedictine 107 (1997): 130–48. R. I. Moore, “Family, Community and Cult on the Eve of the Gregorian Reform,” 46. Note that, according to Glaber’s formulation, the commoners (minimes) were the last to abandon their commitments (see n. 70), suggesting that a) they were the most moved by the messianic fervor, and b) had most to lose in its collapse. On 1033, see Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History, 320–37; on 1064, see David Jacoby, “Bishop Gunther of Bamberg, Byzantium and Christian Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the Eleventh Century,” in Zwischen Polis, Provinz und Peripherie, ed. L. Hoffmann, Mainzer Veröffentlichungen zur Byzantinistik 7 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), 267–85, www.mgh-bibliothek. de/dokumente/a/a139920.pdf. On the apocalyptic dimension of 1096, see Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 1–17. On demotic religiosity and production, see Landes, “Economic Development”; on demotic millennialism, Landes, Heaven on Earth, chaps. 1, 8. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état? (January, 1789). Brian Stock calls the new, early-eleventh-century “textual communities,” many of which were deemed heretical, “laboratories of social organization.” See his The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the 11th and 12th Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 88. Robert Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 72–3. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some Are So Poor (New York: Norton, 1999); Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2013). Landes, “Economic Development,” 101–16. Hagen Keller, “Die Entstehung der italienischen Stadtkommunen als Problem der Sozialgeschichte,” Fruhmittelaterlichen Studien 10 (1976): 169–211 (at 204). Namque ligat stabili nodo pax aurea cives, pace manet pauper, pacis quoque foedere dives (Carmen from Bergamo [1125], Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. 5, ed. Ludovico A. Muratori [Milan: A. Forni, 1724], 534, ll. 273–4; cited in Oexle, “Friede durch Verschworung,” 122). Full poem online www.rm.unina.it/ didattica/strumenti/fasoli_bocchi/testimonianze/test22.htm. Galbert of Bruges, The Murder of Charles the Good, vol. 93, trans. James B. Ross (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 137. Notes Van Caenegem: “the townsmen [were] defending the special peace that protected their market and was in fact one of its great attractions” (“Law and Power in Twelfth Century Flanders,” in Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in TwelfthCentury Europe, ed. Thomas Bisson [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995], 153). Janet Nelson, “Society, Theodicy and the Origins of Heresy: Towards a Reassessment of the Medieval Evidence,” in Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest, 66 Richard Landes 93 94 95 96 97 ed. Derek Baker, Studies in Church History 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 65–77. Landes, Heaven on Earth, chap. 10. Glaber, Quinque libri historiarum 4.1; France trans., 171. Dominique Iogna-Prat, Ordonner et exclure: Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l’hérésie, au judaïsme, et à l’Islam, 1000–1150 (Paris: Aubier, 1998); Frederick Paxton, The Death Ritual at Cluny in the Central Middle Ages, Studia Monastica, Series Fontes (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). Guibert of Nogent, Monodies 2.8–9, ed. and trans. Joseph McAlhany and Jay Rubenstein, Monodies and On the Relics of Saints (London: Penguin Classics, 2011); Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). Richard Landes, “The Birth of Popular Heresy: A Millennial Phenomenon,” Journal of Religious History 24 (2000): 31–3.