Fields of Blood (38 page)

By the end of the eleventh century, however, the Seljuk Empire had also started to decline. It had succumbed to the usual problem of a military oligarchy, since the emirs began to fight one another for territory. They were so intent on these internal feuds that they neglected the frontier and were incapable of stopping the influx of
pastoralists from the steppes who had begun to bring their herds into the fertile settled lands now ruled by their own people. Large groups of Turkish
herdsmen moved steadily westward, taking over the choicest pasturage and driving out the local population. Eventually they arrived at the Byzantine frontier in the
Armenian highlands. In 1071 the Seljuk chieftain
Alp Arslan defeated the Byzantine army at
Manzikert in Armenia, and as the Byzantines retreated, the nomadic Turks broke through the unguarded frontier and began to infiltrate Byzantine
Anatolia. The beleaguered Byzantine emperor now appealed to the
Christians of the West for help.

8

P
ope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85) was deeply disturbed to hear that hordes of Turkish tribesmen had invaded
Byzantine territory, and in 1074 he dispatched a series of letters summoning the faithful to join him in “liberating” their brothers in
Anatolia. He proposed personally to lead an army to the east, which would rid Greek Christians of the Turkish menace and then liberate the
holy city of
Jerusalem from the infidel.
¹
Libertas
and
liberatio
were the buzzwords of eleventh-century Europe; its
knights had recently “liberated” land from the Muslim occupiers of
Calabria,
Sardinia,
Tunisia,
Sicily, and
Apulia and had begun the Reconquista of
Spain.
²
In the future, Western
imperial aggression would often be couched in the rhetoric of liberty. But
libertas
had different connotations in medieval Europe. When
Roman power collapsed in the western provinces, the bishops had taken the place of the Roman senatorial
aristocracy, stepping into the political vacuum left by the departing imperial officials.
³
The Roman clergy thus adopted the old aristocracy’s ideal of libertas, which had little to do with freedom; rather, it referred to the maintenance of the privileged position of the ruling class, lest society lapse into barbarism.
⁴
As the successor of
Saint Peter, Gregory believed that he had a divine mandate to rule the Christian world. His “crusade” was designed in part to reassert papal libertas in the
Eastern Empire, which did not accept the supremacy of the bishop of Rome.

Throughout his pontificate, Gregory struggled but ultimately failed
to assert the libertas, the supremacy and integrity, of the Church against the rising power of the lay rulers. Hence his proposed crusade came to nothing, and in his determined effort to free the clergy from lay control, he was ignominiously defeated by
Henry IV,
Holy Roman emperor of the West. For eight years the pontiff and the emperor had been locked in a power struggle, each trying to depose the other. In 1084, when Gregory threatened him with
excommunication once again, Henry simply invaded
Italy and installed an antipope in the Lateran Palace. But the popes had only themselves to blame, for the Western Empire was their creation. For centuries the Byzantines had maintained an outpost in Ravenna, Italy, to protect the Church of Rome against the
barbarians. By the eighth century, however, the
Lombards had become so aggressive in northern Italy that the pope needed a stronger lay protector, so in 753
Pope Stephen II made an heroic journey over the Alps in the middle of winter to the old Roman province of
Gaul to seek an alliance with
Pippin, son of the
Frankish king
Charles Martel, thus giving papal legitimacy to the
Carolingian dynasty. Pippin at once began preparations for a military expedition to Italy, while his ten-year-old son, Charles—later known as
Charlemagne—escorted the exhausted and bedraggled pope to his lodgings.

The
Germanic tribes who established kingdoms in the old Roman provinces had embraced
Christianity and revered the warrior kings of the
Hebrew Bible, but their military ethos was still permeated with ancient
Aryan ideals of heroism and desire for fame, glory, and loot. All these elements blended inextricably in their conduct of war. The Carolingians’ wars were presented as holy wars, sanctioned by God, and they called their dynasty the New Israel.
⁵
Their military campaigns certainly had a religious dimension, but material profit was every bit as important. In 732 Charles Martel (d. 741) had defeated a Muslim army on its way to pillage
Tours, but after his victory Charles immediately proceeded to loot the Christian communities in southern Francia as thoroughly as the Muslims would have done.
⁶
During his Italian wars to defend the pope, his son Pippin forced the Lombards to relinquish a third of their treasure; this massive wealth enabled his clergy to build a truly Catholic and Roman enclave north of the Alps.

Charlemagne (r. 772–814) showed what a king could do when supported by such substantial resources.
⁷
By 785 he had conquered northern Italy and the whole of Gaul; in 792 he moved into central Europe and
attacked the
Avars of western
Hungary, bringing home wagonloads of plunder. These campaigns were billed as holy wars against “pagans,” but the Franks remembered them for more mundane reasons. “All the Avar nobility died in the war, all their glory departed. All their wealth and their treasure assembled over so many years were dispersed,” Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer, recorded complacently. “The memory of men cannot remember any war of the Franks by which they were so enriched and their material possessions so increased.”
⁸
Far from being inspired solely by
religious zeal, these wars of expansion were also informed by the economic imperative of acquiring more arable land. The episcopal sees in the occupied territories became instruments of colonial control,
⁹
and the mass baptisms of the conquered peoples were statements of political rather than spiritual realignment.
¹⁰

But the religious element was prominent. On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne “Holy Roman Emperor” in the
Basilica of St. Peter. The congregation acclaimed him as “Augustus,” and Leo prostrated himself at Charlemagne’s feet. The popes and bishops of
Italy had long believed that the raison d’être of the
Roman Empire was to protect the libertas of the Catholic Church.
¹¹
After the empire’s fall, they knew that the Church could not survive without the king and his warriors. Between 750 and 1050, therefore, the king was a sacred figure who stood at the apex of the social pyramid. “Our Lord Jesus Christ has set you up as the ruler of the Christian people, in power more excellent than the pope or the emperor of
Constantinople,” wrote
Alcuin, a British monk and court adviser to Charlemagne. “On you alone depends the whole safety of the churches of Christ.”
¹²
In a letter to Leo, Charlemagne declared that as emperor it was his mission “everywhere to defend the church of Christ.”
¹³

The instability and chaotic flux of life in Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire had created a hunger for tangible contact with the eternal stability of Heaven. Hence the popularity of the
saints’ relics, which provided a physical link with a martyr who was now with God. Even the mighty Charlemagne felt vulnerable in this violent and unstable world: his throne in Aachen had cavities stuffed with relics, and the great monasteries of Fulda, St. Gall, and
Reichenau, positioned on the borders of his empire as powerhouses of prayer and sanctity, took great pride in their relic collection.
¹⁴
The monks of Europe were very different from
their counterparts in
Egypt and
Syria. They were not peasants but members of the nobility; they lived not in desert caves but on estates farmed by serfs who were the monastery’s property.
¹⁵
Most followed the Rule of St. Benedict, written in the sixth century at a time when the bonds of civil society seemed on the point of collapse. Benedict’s aim had been to create communities of obedience, stability, and
religio
(“reverence” and “bonding”) in a world of violence and uncertainty. The rule provided
disciplina,
similar to the military disciplina of the
Roman soldier: it prescribed a series of physical rituals carefully designed to restructure emotion and desire and create an attitude of humility very different from the aggressive self-assertion of the
knight.
¹⁶
Monastic disciplina set out to defeat not a physical enemy but the unruly psyche and the unseen powers of evil. The Carolingians knew that they owed their success in battle to highly disciplined troops. Hence they appreciated the
Benedictine communities, and during the ninth and tenth centuries support for the rule became a central feature of government in Europe.
¹⁷

Monks formed a social order (
ordo
), separate from the disordered world outside the monastery. Abjuring sex, money, fighting, and mutability, the most corrupting aspects of secular life, they embraced chastity, poverty,
nonviolence, and stability. Unlike the restless boskoi, Benedictine monks vowed to remain in the same community for life.
¹⁸
A monastery, however, was designed not so much to cater to individual spiritual quests but to serve a social function by providing occupation for the younger sons of the nobility, who could never hope to own land and might become a disruptive influence in society. At this point, Western
Christendom did not distinguish public and private, natural and supernatural. Thus by combating the demonic powers with their prayers, monks were essential to the security of the realm. There were two ways for an aristocrat to serve God: fighting or praying.
¹⁹
Monks were the spiritual counterparts of secular soldiers, their battles just as real and far more significant:

The Carolingian aristocracy was convinced that the success of their earthly battles depended on their monks’ disciplined warfare, even though they fought only with “vigils, hymns, prayers, psalms, alms and daily offering of masses.”
²¹

Originally there had been three social orders in Western Christendom: monks, clerics, and the laity. But during the Carolingian period, two distinct aristocratic orders emerged: the warrior nobility (
bellatores
) and the men of religion (
oratores
). Clerics and bishops, who worked in the world (
saeculum
) and had once formed a separate ordo, were now merged with monks and would increasingly be pressured to live like them by abjuring marriage and fighting. In
Frankish and
Anglo-Saxon society, still influenced by ancient
Aryan values, those who shed blood on the battlefield carried a taint that disqualified them from handling sacred things or saying Mass. However, military violence was about to receive a Christian baptism.

During the ninth and tenth centuries, hordes of
Norse and Magyar invaders devastated Europe and brought down the Carolingian Empire. Although they would be remembered as wicked and monstrous, in truth a
Viking leader was no different from
Charles Martel or Pippin: he was simply a “king on the warpath [
vik
],” fighting for tribute, plunder, and prestige.
²²
In 962 the Saxon king
Otto managed to repel the
Magyars and re-create the Holy Roman Empire in much of
Germany. Yet in Francia, the kings’ power had so declined that they could no longer control the lesser aristocrats, who not only fought one another but had begun to loot church property and to terrorize the peasant villages, killing livestock and burning homes if the agricultural yield was poor.
²³
A member of the lower aristocracy—called
cniht
(“soldier”) or
chevaller
(“horseman”)—felt no qualms about such raiding, which was essential to his way of life. For decades French
knights had been engaged in almost ceaseless warfare and were now economically dependent on plunder and looting. As the French historian
Marc Bloch has explained, besides bringing a knight glory and heroism, warfare was “perhaps above all, a source of profit, the nobleman’s chief industry,” so for the less affluent, the return of peace could be “an economic crisis as well as a disastrous loss of prestige.”
²⁴
Without war, a knight could not afford weapons and horses, tools of his trade, and would be forced into menial labor. The violent seizure of property was, as we have seen, regarded as the only honorable way for
an aristocrat to acquire resources, so much so that there was “no line of demarcation” in early medieval
Europe between “warlike activity” and “pillaging.”
²⁵
During the tenth century, therefore, many impoverished knights were simply doing what came naturally to them when they robbed and harassed the peasantry.