Fields of Blood (43 page)

Those Christians who remained loyal to the Church but could see how the intrinsic violence of Christendom violated the gospel teaching were inevitably conflicted. Unable to admit that the “heretics” had a point, yet furious with them for drawing attention to their dilemma, they projected these sentiments outward, in forms monstrous and inhuman. There were paranoid fantasies of a highly organized, clandestine Catharist Church determined to destroy the human race and restore
Satan’s kingdom.
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We shall see that similar
conspiracy fears would later erupt in other societies that were going through a traumatic modernization process and would also result in violence. The
Council of Rheims (1157) described the Cathars “hiding among the poor and under the veil of
religion … moving from place to place and undermining the faith of simple people.”
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Soon
Jews would be said to belong to a similar international conspiracy.
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Even a fair-minded man like
Peter the Venerable, abbot
of Cluny, who claimed to be reaching out to the Muslim world with love rather than force, described
Islam as a “heresy and diabolical sect” addicted to “bestial cruelty.”
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At the outset of the Second Crusade he wrote to King
Louis VII of France that he hoped he would kill as many Muslims as
Moses and
Joshua had killed
Amorites and
Canaanites.
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During this period Satan, often pictured as a monstrous human being with horns and a tail, became a far more menacing figure in Western
Christianity than in either
Judaism or Islam. As they made their stressful transition from a political backwater to a major world power, Europeans were terrified of an unseen “common enemy,” representing what they could not accept in themselves and associated with absolute evil.
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Innocent III had achieved a virtual papal
monarchy in Europe, but no other pope would match his power. Secular rulers, such as Louis VII of France (1137–80),
Henry II of England (r. 1154–89), and Frederick II all challenged this papal supremacy. They had built powerful kingdoms with government institutions that could intrude more than ever before into the lives of ordinary people, so they were all zealous persecutors of “heretics” who threatened the social order.
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They were not “secularists” in our sense; they still regarded royal power as sacred and war as holy, but they had developed a Christian theology of war that was quite different from that of the official church. Again, we find it impossible to pinpoint a single, essentialist “Christian” attitude to war, fighting, and violence. The Christian template could be used to very different effect by different groups.

Bishops and popes had used both the
Peace of God and the Crusades to control the warrior
aristocracy, but during the thirteenth century the
knights responded by developing a chivalric code that declared independence of the papal monarchy. They rejected the Cluniac reform, had no intention of converting to the monastic ideal, and were indifferent to Bernard’s scathing critique of knighthood. Their Christianity was laced with the
Indo-European warrior code of the
Germanic tribes, with its ethos of honor, loyalty, and prowess.
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Where the reforming popes had forbidden knights to kill their fellow Christians, urging them to slaughter Muslims instead, these rebellious knights were happy to fight any Christian who threatened their lord and his people.

In the
chansons de geste,
or “songs of deeds,” composed in the early
twelfth century, warfare is a natural, violent, and sacred activity. These knights clearly loved the excitement and intensity of the battlefield and experienced it with
religious fervor. “Now war is upon us again, all praise to
Christ!” cries one of King
Arthur’s knights.
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The Song of Roland,
composed in the late eleventh century, describes an incident that occurred at the end of
Charlemagne’s campaign in Muslim
Spain:
Archbishop Turpin kills Muslims with joyous abandon, and Roland has no doubt that the souls of his dead companions have gone straight to heaven.
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His sword, Durendal, which has relics embedded in its hilt, is a sacred object, and his loyalty to Charlemagne inseparable from his devotion to God.
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Far from having monastic aspirations, these knights regard monks with disdain. As Archbishop Turpin says robustly, a knight who is not “forward and fierce in battle” might as well “turn monk in monastery meek and for his sins pray daily on his knees.”
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The Quest of the Holy Grail
(c. 1225), a prose fable, takes us into the heart of knightly spirituality.
¹¹⁴
It shows clear influences of the Cistercian ideal, which had introduced a more introspective spirituality into monasticism, but it replaced this internal quest with heroism on the battlefield and set the knight’s religious world apart from the ecclesiastical establishment. Indeed, knights alone can participate in the quest for the Grail, the cup that
Jesus used at the
Last Supper. Their liturgy takes place in a feudal castle rather than a church or monastery, and their clergy are not abbots or bishops but
hermits, many of them former knights.
Galahad, not the pope, is Christ’s
representative on earth. The knight’s loyalty to his earthly lord is a sacred duty and no other commitment can supersede it: “For the heart of the knight must be so hard and unrelenting to his sovereign’s foe that nothing in the world can soften it. And if he gives way to fear, he is not of the company of knights, a veritable companion, who would sooner meet death in battle than fail to uphold the quarrel of their lord.”
¹¹⁵
Killing the enemies of his king, even if they are Christians, is just as holy as killing the Muslim enemies of Christ.

The ecclesiastical establishment found it impossible to control the knights’ dissident Christianity. Aware that they were in an unassailable position, these knights simply refused to comply with the Church’s demands.
¹¹⁶
“Everybody should honor [them],” wrote an early thirteenth-century cleric, “…              for they defend Holy Church, and they uphold justice for us against those who would do us harm.… Our chalices would be stolen from before us at the table of God and nothing would ever
stop it.… The good would never be able to endure if the wicked did not fear knights.”
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Why should knights obey the Church? Their victories alone proved that they had a special relationship with the Lord of Hosts.
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Indeed, one poet argued, the physical effort, skill, tenacity, and courage that warfare required made it “a much nobler work” than any other occupation and put the knight in a superior class of his own. Chivalry, claimed another knight, was “such a difficult, tough and very costly thing to learn that no coward ventures to take it on.”
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Knights regarded fighting as an ascetic practice that was far more challenging than a monk’s fasts or vigils. A knight knew what real suffering was: every day he took up his cross and followed
Jesus onto the battlefield.
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Henry of Lancaster (1310–61), hero of the first phase of the
Hundred Years’ War between
England and
France, prayed that the wounds, pain, fatigue, and danger of the battlefield would enable him to endure for Christ “such afflictions, labors, pains, as you chose, and not merely to win a prize nor to offset my sins, but purely for love of you, as you Lord have done for love of me.”
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For
Geoffroi de Charny, fighting on the other side, the physical struggle of warfare gave his life meaning. Prowess was the highest human achievement because it required such extreme “pain, travail, fear, and sorrow.” Yet it also brought “great joy.”
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Monks had it easy; their so-called sufferings were “nothing in comparison” to what a soldier endured every day of his life, “beset by great terrors” and knowing that at any moment he could be “defeated, or killed, or captured, or wounded.” Fighting for worldly honor alone was useless, but if knights struggled in the path of God, their “noble souls will be set in paradise for all eternity and their persons will be forever honored.”
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The kings, who also abided by this chivalric code, believed that they too had a direct link to God that was independent of the Church, and by the late thirteenth century some of them felt strong enough to challenge papal supremacy.
¹²⁴
This began in 1296 with a dispute about
taxation. The Fourth
Lateran Council (1215) had “liberated” the clergy from the direct jurisdiction of secular princes, but now
Philip IV of France and Edward I of England asserted their right to tax the clergy in their realms. Even though
Pope Boniface VIII objected, they got their way—Edward by outlawing the English clergy and Philip by withholding essential resources from the papacy. In 1301 Philip again went on the offensive,
when he ordered a
French bishop to stand trial for treason and heresy. When Boniface issued the bull
Unam Sanctam,
insisting that all temporal power was subject to the pope, Philip simply dispatched
Guillaume de Nogaret with a band of
mercenaries to bring Boniface to Paris to face charges of usurpation of royal power. Nogaret arrested the pope at
Anagni and held him prisoner for several days before he was able to escape. The shock proved too much for Boniface, and he died shortly afterward.

At this date no king could survive without papal support. But the outrage of Anagni convinced Clement V (r. 1305–14), Boniface’s successor, to make the papacy more accommodating, and he was the first in a line of French popes to reside in
Avignon. Clement meekly restored Philip’s legitimacy by repealing all the bulls Boniface had issued against him and, on Philip’s orders, disbanded the
Templars and confiscated their vast wealth. Subject to the pope and owing no obedience to the king, the Templars were an enemy to royal ascendancy; they epitomized the
Crusading ideals of the papal
monarchy and had to go. The monks were tortured until they admitted to sodomy,
cannibalism, and devil worship; many repudiated these confessions at the stake.
¹²⁵
Philip’s ruthlessness did not suggest that royal power would be more irenic than
Innocent III’s papal monarchy.