Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  The idea that the ruler is absolute has a certain logic on its side: how can the lawmaker be bound by law? But it had to be reasserted for the modern West after the Middle Ages effectively suppressed it. The sovereign power of medieval rulers was limited in theory in four ways: first, it was conceived essentially as a matter of jurisdiction – the administration of justice. Legislation, the right to make and unmake laws, which we now think of as the defining feature of sovereignty, was a relatively minor area of activity, in which tradition, custom, divine law, and natural law covered the field and left little scope for innovation. Second, royal power was limited, as we have seen, by the notion of a community of Christendom, in which the king of a particular country was not the ultimate authority: the pope had, at least, a parallel supremacy. Next, the notion persisted that the Roman Empire had never come to an end and that the authority of the emperor over Christendom continued to repose in the person of the pope or the elected head of the German Reich, who was actually called ‘Roman emperor’. Finally, kings were lords among lords and were obliged to consult their so-called natural counsellors – that is, the nobles who in some cases derived their power from royal favour but, in others, sometimes also claimed to get it directly from God.

  In the late Middle Ages, kings challenged these limitations systematically. Fourteenth-century French and Castilian kings, and a sixteenth-century English one, called their own kingdoms their empires and proposed that they were ‘emperors in their own realms’. The imagery of majesty surrounded them – ideological strategies devised by propagandists. The French king’s office was miraculous, endowed by God with ‘such a virtue that you perform miracles in your own lifetime’.55 The earliest recognizable portrait of a French king – that of John the Good, done in the mid-fourteenth century – resembles the depiction of a Roman emperor on a medallion and of a saint in a nimbus of glory. Richard II of England had himself painted staring in majesty from a field of gold, and receiving the body of Christ from the hands of the Virgin. The idea never quite took hold in practice. ‘You have the power to do what you like’, said President Guillart of the Parlement of Paris, addressing King Francis I early in the sixteenth century. ‘But you do not or should not wish to do it.’56 Nevertheless, with occasional setbacks, kings did gain power progressively from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries in most of Europe, at the expense of other traditional sources of authority: the Church, aristocracies, and city patriciates.57

  ‌Social Thought in Christianity and Islam: Faith, War, and Ideas of Nobility

  One reason moral philosophers have for putting a lot of effort into political thinking is the ancient assumption, which Aristotle endorsed and made almost unquestionable, that the purpose of the state is to facilitate or promote virtue. In practice, however, states seem no better at this than religions. Medieval thinkers therefore addressed directly the problem of how to influence individual behaviour for the better. Christ’s whole life and work show an unflinching desire to sanctify real life and make people’s lives in this world conform to what he called the kingdom of Heaven. On the whole, however, his teachings were honoured in the breach: even his most enthusiastic followers found it hard to practise love of others, meekness, humility, cheerful suffering, marital fidelity, and ‘hunger and thirst after righteousness’. As Christ recognized, the difficulty of behaving well increases with wealth, which clogs the eye of a needle, and power, which corrupts. So the problem of human behaviour generally was a problem for elites in particular. How do you stop them exploiting the people, oppressing vassals, and exchanging with each other, as aristocrats did in warfare, the abhorrent levels of violence that scar the bones archaeologists excavate from medieval battlefields?

  The best answer anyone came up with was chivalry. The religious model suggested the idea that the lay life could be sanctified – like those of monks and nuns – by obedience to rules. The first such rules or codes of chivalry appeared in the twelfth century. Three writers formulated them: St Bernard, the austere abbot who excoriated rich and lazy clergy; Pope Eugenius II, who was always looking for ways to mobilize lay manpower for the Church; and the pious nobleman Hugh de Payens. They realized that warriors tended to savagery in the heat of battle, the adrenaline of fear, and the euphoria of victory. Knights needed civilizing. Discipline could save them. The earliest rules reflected religious vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, but lay virtues gathered prominence. The prowess that fortified the knight against fear could be adapted to confront temptations, and practical virtues could be turned against deadly sins: largesse against greed, equanimity against anger, loyalty against lies and lust.58

  Chivalry became the great common aristocratic ethos of the age. In the popular pulp fiction of the late Middle Ages, heroes of the kingship of a pre-chivalric age, including Alexander, Arthur, Pericles, and Brutus of Troy, were transformed into exemplars of chivalric values. Even the Bible was ransacked for recruits, and King David and Judas Maccabeus joined the canon. Maccabeus appeared in illuminations and wall paintings as an exponent of the art of jousting.59 Ritual jousts and accolades became foci of political display in every princely court.

  Chivalry was a powerful force. It could not, perhaps, make men good, as it was intended to do. It could, however, win wars and mould political relationships. It was probably the main ingredient in Europe’s unique culture of overseas expansion, making Christendom a more dynamic society, more far-going in exploration and out-thrust than better-equipped neighbours to the east, such as Islam and China. It inspired venturers such as Christopher Columbus and Henry ‘the Navigator’, in search of the denouements of their own romances of chivalry.60 Ethos is more powerful than ideology in shaping behaviour, because it supplies individuals with standards by which to adjust and appraise their actions. Chivalry did that job for medieval Europe. It has continued as a spur to Western actions and self-perceptions ever since. In the nineteenth century, it could cram Victorian gentlemen into their creaking reproduction armour. ‘The Age of Chivalry is never past’, remarked that great sentimentalist, Charles Kingsley, ‘so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.’61 In the twentieth century, chivalric soubriquets could still compensate the ‘knights of the air’ of the Battle of Britain for their generally modest social origins. It could still shape the heroics of the golden age of Hollywood. It has dwindled almost to nothing today.62

  Chivalry was, in a sense, an apology for war: it provided an escape route to salvation for professional warriors who had to present themselves bloodstained at the gates of heaven. But chivalry could not justify war: that needed separate attention from the thinkers.

  War as a religious obligation was enshrined in the sacred history of the ancient Jews, whose God heaped high the bodies and scattered heads far and wide. As we have seen, the third-century bce Indian emperor Ashoka even justified wars ‘for Buddhism’. But it was one thing to use religion to justify war, another to make war seem good. Islamic and Christian traditions produced justifications of war so sweeping and sanctifying that they have had frightening consequences ever after.

  Jihad literally means ‘striving’. ‘Those who believe with the Prophet’, says the Qur’an, ‘strive with their wealth and lives. Allah hath made ready for them gardens where rivers flow … That is the supreme triumph.’ Muhammad used the word in two contexts: first, to mean the inner struggle against evil that Muslims must wage for themselves; second, to denote real war, fought against the enemies of Islam. These have to be genuine enemies, evincing a genuine threat. But since in Muhammad’s day the community he led was frequently at war, these terms of reference have always been quite generously interpreted. Chapter 9 of the Qur’an seems to legitimate war against all polytheists and idolaters. After the Prophet’s death, the doctrine was turned against the apostates who left the camp, believing their obligations to the leader had lapsed at his demise. It was then used to proclaim a series of highly successful wars of aggression against Arabian states and the Roman and Persian empires. The rhetori
c of jihad has often been abused by Muslims to justify their wars against each other. It is used to this day to dignify shabby squabbles, like those of tribal strongmen in Afghanistan and of terrorists against innocent people in areas singled out for enmity by self-appointed Islamist leaders.

  Nevertheless, the term ‘holy war’ seems an appropriate translation for jihad: the enterprise is sanctified by obedience to what are thought to be the Prophet’s commands and rewarded by the promise of martyrdom.63 According to a saying traditionally ascribed to Muhammad, the martyr in battle goes straight to the highest rank of paradise, nearest to the throne of God, and has the right to intercede for the souls of his own loved ones. It is worth observing, however, that most Islamic legal traditions lay down strict laws of war, which ought surely to define a jihad, including indemnity for the lives and property of non-belligerents, women, infants, the sick, and non-resisters. These limitations effectively outlaw all terrorism and most state violence.

  Abuses apart, the idea of jihad has been influential in two main ways. First, and more importantly, it fortified Muslim warriors, especially in the early generations of the expansion of Islam. In the hundred years or so after the death of Muhammad, it is hard to imagine how Islam could have achieved its successes of scale – which turned most of the Mediterranean into a Muslim lake – without it. Second, the jihad idea came to be copied in Christendom. Christians started the crusades with two comparable notions: one of just war, waged to recover lands allegedly usurped by their Muslim occupants, and another of armed pilgrimage, undertaken as a religious obligation to do penance for sin. Until crusaders began to see themselves in terms analogous to those applied to Islamic warriors – as potential martyrs for whom, as The Song of Roland said, ‘the blood of the Saracens washes away sins’ – there was no idea of holy war, though the objective was hallowed in the sense that the disputed territory had borne the blood and footprints of Christ and the saints.64

  In the late Middle Ages in the West, as crusading waned and politics and law increasingly provided new routes to power and wealth, the notion of nobility became detached from war. Firepower gradually diminished the need for a warrior aristocracy, expensively trained in horseborne combat with sword and lance. A society of opportunity could never develop freely where ancient riches or ancient blood determined rank and the elites were impenetrable except by individuals of exceptional prowess, virtue, or genius. China, in this as so many respects, was way ahead of the West in the Middle Ages, because the imperial elite was selected by examination in an arduous, humanistic curriculum; clans could club together to pay for the training of intelligent poor relations. In the West, where no such system existed, government was revolutionized in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the use first of paper, then of printing. Princes’ commands could be cheaply and speedily transmitted to the farthest corners of every state. The consequent bureaucratization added another avenue of social advancement to the traditional routes via the Church, war, commerce, and adventure. The magnate ranks of Western countries were everywhere supplemented – and in some areas almost entirely replaced – with new men. To suit their self-perceptions, Western moralists embarked on the redefinition of nobility.

  ‘Only virtue is true nobility’, proclaimed a Venetian ambassador’s coat of arms. A Parisian academic in 1306 declared that intellectual vigour equipped a man best for power over others. A German mystic a few years later dismissed carnal nobility among qualifications for office, as inferior to the nobility of the soul. Letters, according to a Spanish humanist of the fifteenth century, ennobled a man more thoroughly than arms. Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the strong-arm man who seized Milan in 1395, could be flattered by an inapposite comparison with the exemplary self-made hero of humanists, Cicero. Antonio de Ferraris, a humanist of Otranto whose very obscurity is a guarantee that he was typical, declared that neither the wealth of Croesus nor the antiquity of Priam’s blood could replace reason as the prime ingredient of nobility. ‘Virtue solely’, declared Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, ‘is the sum of glory and fashions men with true nobility.’65

  This doctrine, however, was resisted in eastern Europe. In Bohemia, nobility was simply ancient blood. In the Kingdom of Hungary, only nobles constituted the nation; their privileges were justified by their presumed descent from Huns and Scythians whose right to rule was founded on the right of conquest; other classes were tainted with disgraceful ancestry from natural slaves who had surrendered their rights. Even here, however, the doctrine was tempered by the influence of humanism. István Werböczy, the early-sixteenth-century chancellor of the kingdom, who was the great apologist of aristocratic rule, admitted that nobility was acquired not only by ‘the exercise of martial discipline’ but also by ‘other gifts of mind and body’, including learning. But he saw this as a means of recruitment to what was essentially a caste – not, as in the thought of Western humanists, a method of opening up an estate of society.66 This bifurcation of Europe had important consequences. The term ‘eastern Europe’ came to have a pejorative sense in the West, denoting a laggard land of arrested social development, held back during a protracted feudal age, with a servile peasantry and a tightly closed elite.67

  ‌Spiritual Conquest

  As holy wars failed – at least for Christian practitioners expelled from the Holy Land – and aristocracies diversified, a new idea arose. We might call it spiritual conquest. One of the conspicuous trends of modern history has been the rise of Christianity to become the world’s most successful proselytizing religion. To judge from the appeal of the Hebrew God, Judaism could have anticipated or trumped it to become a great world religion; the numbers of adherents, however, remained small because Jews generally shunned proselytization. Islam grew slowly to its present massive dimensions: Richard W. Bulliet, who has devised the only method of computation that has so far achieved anything like wide scholarly approval, calculates for Iran that 2.5% of the population were converted to Islam by 695, 13.5% between 695 and 762, 34% between 762 and 820, another 34% from 820 to 875, and the remainder between 875 and 1009.68 As well as being slow-growing, Islam, as we have seen, has remained culturally specific: extremely popular in a belt of the world that stretches across a broad but limited band, and virtually unable to penetrate elsewhere except by migration. Buddhism seems infinitely elastic, to judge from the worldwide appeal it demonstrates today, but was checked for a long time. Early Christendom flamed with missionary zeal, which flagged after the eleventh century ce. The crusades produced few converts.

  The idea of spiritual conquest was instrumental in reviving evangelization. Christ’s own reported words were, perhaps, the key source of inspiration. ‘Go into the highways and byways and compel them to come in’ was the master’s injunction to his servants in the parable of the wedding feast. The words called for reinterpretation in the late Middle Ages, when a new sense of mission grew in the Church: a new conviction of the obligations of the godly elite to spread a more active, committed, and dogmatically informed Christian awareness to parts of society and places in the world where, so far, evangelization had hardly reached or only superficially penetrated.

  A new conversion strategy was the result, addressed to two constituencies. First came the unevangelized and under-evangelized masses inside Christendom: the poor, the rootless, the neglected country folk, the dwellers in forest, bog, and mountain, beyond the candle-glow of the Church, and the deracinated masses of growing cities, cut off from the discipline and solidarity of rural parish life. Then there was the vast, infidel world revealed or suggested by exploration and improved geographical learning. The rise of the mendicant orders, with their special vocations for missions to the poor, the unbelieving, and the under-catechized, helped the trend along. So did the growing interest in a restoration of apostolic habits to the Church, which was a prominent theme from the time of the rise of the friars to the Reformation. The outward drive revived thanks to a new idea of what conversion meant, formulated at the end of the thirteenth century and in the earl
y years of the fourteenth by the Majorcan Ramon Llull. He realized that proselytization had to be culturally adjusted. You need to know the culture you are converting people from and make appropriate compromises. Above all, you have to address people in their own terms. So he instituted language schooling for missionaries. Indifferent elements of native culture could be left undisturbed. There was an apostolic precedent: St Paul decided Gentile converts could elude circumcision; St Peter decreed that they could waive Jewish dietary laws. In consequence, the Christianity of converted societies normally exhibits original features, which are best understood as examples of two-way cultural exchange.69

  The period was alive with popular preachers and prophets who made insurrection holy and sanctified the poor in their often violent response to the oppression of the elite. At the end of time, God would put right all the inequalities of society. For revolutionaries the millennium meant something more immediate. The poor could precipitate it by taking matters into their own hands and trying to realize God’s objectives for the world here and now. The problems of monstrous, menacing inequalities were insoluble by such means. The next age would take a fresh look and propose new answers.

  ‌Chapter 6

  Return to the Future