Religion and Peace
Historical Aspects
Edited by Yvonne Friedman
First published 2018
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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)
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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.