Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

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.”117 Why should knights obey the Church? Their victories alone proved that they had a special relationship with the Lord of Hosts.118 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.”119 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.120

  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.”121 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.”122 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.”123

  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.

  It is wrong to claim, as some scholars have done, that Philip created the first modern secular kingdom; these were not yet sovereign states.126 Philip was resacralizing kingship; these ambitious kings knew that the king had once been the chief representative of the divine in Europe and argued that the pope had usurped their royal prerogative.127 Philip was a theocratic ruler, whose subjects called him “semi-divine” (quasi semi-deus) and “king and priest” (rex et sacerdos). His land was “holy,” and the French were the new chosen people.128 In England too, holiness had “migrated from the crusade to the nation and its wars.”129 England, claimed the chancellor when he opened the Parliament of 1376–77, was the new Israel; her military victories proved her divine election.130 Under this sacral kingship, defense of the realm would become sanctified.131 Soldiers who died fighting for a territorial kingdom would, like the Crusaders, be revered as martyrs.132 People still dreamed of going on Crusade and liberating Jerusalem, but in an important development, holy warfare was beginning to merge with the patriotism of national war.

  Part Three

  MODERNITY

  9

  The Arrival of “Religion”

  On January 2, 1492, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile celebrated their victory over the Muslim kingdom of Granada in southern Spain. Crowds watched the Christian banners unfurled on the city walls with deep emotion, and bells pealed triumphantly throughout Europe. Yet despite the triumph of that day, Europeans still felt threatened by Islam. In 1453 the Ottoman Turks had obliterated the Byzantine Empire, which for centuries had protected Europe from Muslim encroachment. In 1480, the year after the monarchs’ accession, the Ottomans had begun a naval offensive in the Mediterranean, and Abu al-Hassan, sultan of Granada, had made a surprise attack on the port of Zahara in Castile. Spain therefore was on the front line of the war with the Muslim world, and many believed that Ferdinand was the mythical emperor who was expected to unite Christendom, defeat the Ottomans, and usher in the Age of the Holy Spirit in which Christianity would spread to the ends of the earth.1 Western Europe was indeed about to achieve global dominance, but in 1492 it still lagged far behind Islamdom.

  The Ottoman Empire was the strongest and most powerful state in the world, ruling Anatolia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Arabia. But the Safavids in Iran and the Moghuls in India had also established absolute monarchies in which almost every facet of public life was run with systematic and bureaucratic precision. Each had a strong Islamic ideology that permeated every aspect of their rule: the Ottomans were staunchly Sunni; the Safavids Shii; and the Mughals leaned toward Falsafah and Sufism. Far more efficient and powerful than any European kingdom at this time, they marked the culmination of the agrarian state, and were the last magnificent expression of the “conservative spirit” that was the hallmark o
f premodern society.2 As we have seen, all agrarian societies eventually outran their intrinsically limited resources, which put a brake on innovation. Only fully industrialized societies could afford the constant replication of the infrastructure that unlimited progress required. Premodern education could not encourage originality, because it lacked the resources to implement many new ideas. If people were encouraged to think innovatively, but nothing ever came of it, the ensuing frustration could lead to social unrest. In a conservative society, stability and order were far more important than freedom of expression.

  In any traditional empire, the purpose of government was not to guide or provide services for the population but to tax them. It did not usually attempt to interfere with the social customs or religious beliefs of its subjects. Rather, a government was set up to take whatever it could from its peasants and prevent other aristocrats from getting their surplus, so warfare—to conquer, expand, or maintain the tax base—was essential to these states. Indeed, between 1450 and 1700, there were only eight years when the Ottomans were not involved in warfare.3 An Ottoman treatise expressed succinctly the agrarian state’s dependence on organized violence:

  The world is before all else a verdant garden whose enclosure is the State; the State is a government whose head is the prince; the prince is a shepherd who is assisted by the army; the army is a body of guards which is maintained by money, and money is the indispensable resource which is provided by subjects.4

  But for centuries now, Europeans had been devising a commercial economy that would result in the creation of a very different kind of state. The modern world is often said to have begun in 1492; in fact, it would take Europeans some four hundred years to create the modern state. Its economy would no longer be based on the agrarian surplus, it would interfere far more in the personal lives of its subjects, it would be run on the expectation of constant innovation, and it would separate religion from its politics.

  Present at the ceremony in Granada was Christopher Columbus, the monarchs’ protégé; later that year he sailed from the port of Palos in Spain to find a new trade route to the Indies, only to discover the Americas instead. In sponsoring this voyage, Ferdinand and Isabella had unwittingly taken an important step toward the creation of our globalized, Western-dominated world.5 For some, Western modernity would be empowering, liberating, and enthralling; others would experience it as coercive, invasive, and destructive. The Spaniards and Portuguese, who pioneered the discovery of the New World, imagined that it was simply waiting to be carved up, plundered, and exploited for their benefit. So did Pope Alexander VI, who, as if he were undisputed monarch of the globe, divided it between Spain and Portugal from pole to pole and gave Ferdinand and Isabella a mandate to wage a “just war” against any native peoples who resisted the European colonialists.6

  But Alexander was no Innocent III. Papal power had plummeted during the fourteenth century, and the balance of power had passed to the kings. Seven successive popes had resided in Avignon (1309–77), firmly under the thumb of the French kings. In 1378 a disputed papal election divided the Church between the supporters of Urban VI in Rome and Clement VII in Avignon, and the kings of Europe had taken sides according to their own rivalries. The schism ended only with the election of Martin V at the Council of Constance in 1417, but the popes, now safely back in Rome, never recovered their former prestige. There were reports of corruption and immorality, and in 1492 Rodrigo Borgia, father of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia and two other illegitimate children, had won the papacy by flagrant bribery, taking the name of Alexander VI. His chief goal as pontiff was to break the power of the Italian princes and secure their wealth for his own family. His mandate to Ferdinand and Isabella was, therefore, of dubious spiritual value.

  The early colonialists stormed violently into the New World as if they were conducting a giant acquisition raid, greed melding seamlessly with pious intent. The Portuguese set up sugar plantations in the Cape Verde Islands, and between three and five million Africans were torn from their homes and enslaved there. No American colony would be as gravely implicated in slavery. When the Portuguese finally rounded the Cape and exploded aggressively into the Indian Ocean, their bronze cannons made short work of the slender dhows and junks of their rivals. By 1524 they had seized the best ports in eastern Africa, western India, the Persian Gulf, and the Malacca Straits, and by 1560 they had an oceanwide chain of settlements based on Goa.7 This was a purely trading empire: the Portuguese made no attempt to conquer territory inland. Meanwhile, the Spanish had invaded the Americas, slaughtering the indigenous peoples and seizing land, booty, and slaves. They may have claimed to fight in the name of Christianity, but Hernán Cortés was brutally frank about his real motivation: he simply wanted “to get rich, not to work like a peasant.”8 In Montezuma’s Aztec Empire in central Mexico, in each city Cortés would invite local chieftains to the central square, and when they arrived with their retainers, his small Spanish army would gun them down, loot the city, and go on to the next.9 When Cortés arrived in the Aztec capital in 1525, Montezuma was already dead, and his now-shattered empire passed into Spanish hands. Survivors were decimated by European diseases for which they had no immunity. Some ten years later Francisco Pizarro, using similar military tactics, brought smallpox to the Inca Empire in Peru. For Europeans, colonialism brought unimaginable wealth; for the native peoples, it brought death on an unprecedented scale. According to one estimate, between 1519 and 1595 the population of Central Mexico fell from 16.9 million to 1 million and between 1572 and 1620 the Inca population had been halved.10

  Cortés and Pizarro were the heroes of the conquistadores (“conquerors”), men of low social status who went to the New World to become Spanish grandees. Their conquests were achieved with martial savagery and maintained by systematic exploitation. When they arrived in a new region, they would read out a formal statement in Spanish, informing the uncomprehending inhabitants that the pope had given their land to Spain so they must now submit to the Church and the Catholic monarchs: “We shall take you and your wives and your children, and make slaves of them and we shall take away your goods and do you all the mischief and damage that we can.”11 The Spanish did not need to import African slaves; they simply enslaved the local people to grow cash crops, work in the mines, and provide domestic labor. By the end of the sixteenth century, they were shipping on average 300 million grams of silver and 1.9 million grams of gold every year. With these unprecedented resources, Spain established the first global empire, stretching from the Americas to the Philippines and dominating large portions of Europe.12

  The Spanish colonialists felt no compunction about their treatment of the indigenous peoples—they regarded the “savage” as scarcely human and had been horrified to discover that the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism.13 But at home the Dominicans adhered more faithfully to Christian principles and spoke up for the conquered peoples. The Church had no jurisdiction over these American “kings,” argued Durandus of San Poinciana in 1506; they should not be attacked unless they were actually harming Europeans. The popes should send missionaries to these new lands, Cardinal Thomas Cajetan argued, but not “for the purpose of seizing their lands or reducing them to temporal subjection.”14 Francisco de Vitoria maintained that the conquistadores had no right to “eject the enemy from their dominions and despoil them of their property.”15

  The Renaissance humanists, however, were far more sympathetic to the colonial project. In Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), a fictional account of an ideal society, the Utopians went to war only “to drive invading armies from the territories of their friends, or to liberate oppressed people in the name of humanity from tyranny and servitude.” All very admirable, but there were limits to this benevolent policy: if the population became too great for their island to support, Utopians felt entitled to send settlers to plant a colony on the mainland, “wherever the natives have plenty of unoccupied or uncultivated land.” They would farm this neglected soil, which “previousl
y had seemed too barren and paltry even to support the natives,” and make it yield an abundance. Friendly natives could be absorbed into the colony, but the Utopians felt no qualms about fighting those who resisted them: “The Utopians say that it is perfectly justifiable to make war on people who leave their land idle or waste yet forbid the use and possession of it to others who, by the law of nature, ought to be supported from it.”16

  There was a strain of ruthlessness and cruelty in early modern thought.17 The so-called humanists were pioneering a rather convenient idea of natural rights to counter the brutality and intolerance they associated with conventional religion. From the outset, however, the philosophy of human rights, still crucial to our modern political discourse, did not apply to all human beings. Because Europe was frequently afflicted by famine and seemed unable to support its growing population, humanists like Thomas More were scandalized by the idea of arable land going to waste. They looked back to Tacitus, an apologist for Roman imperialism, who had been convinced that exiles had every right to secure a place to live, since “what is possessed by none belongs to everyone.” Commenting on this passage, Alberico Gentili (1552–1608), professor of civil law at Oxford, concluded that because “God did not create the world to be empty,” the “the seizure of vacant places” should be “regarded as a law of nature”:

  And even though such lands belong to the sovereign of that territory … yet because of that law of nature which abhors a vacuum, they will fall to the lot of those who take them, though the sovereign will retain jurisdiction over them.18

  Gentili also quoted Aristotle’s opinion that some men were natural slaves and that waging war against primitive peoples “who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit,” was as necessary as hunting wild animals.19 Gentili argued that the Mesoamericans clearly fell into this category because of their abominable lewdness and cannibalism. Where churchmen frequently condemned the violent subjugation of the New World, the Renaissance humanists who were trying to create an alternative to the cruelties committed by people of faith endorsed it.