In the early eleventh century, the Christian Prince of Navarre signed a treaty with the Muslim ruler of Toledo to split spoils after jointly defeating the Muslim city of Guadalajara. The rulers of the latter then made a deal with the King of Leon-Castile and sacked Toledo. The King then agreed to switch sides and back Toledo for a large sum. These events exemplify how warfare based on internal divisions between Berber and Arab rulers drained the Cordoban Caliphate’s resources and led to its collapse in 1031, and that warfare was rarely religiously motivated even if done under its banner. But the last Iberian Muslim stronghold only fell in the fateful year of 1492. The idea that Islam was spread and Muslims ruled solely by the sword, a fuel of today’s fear and fierceness, is an inaccurate reduction of history, also unfortunate because it obscures the message of peaceful unity based on tolerance and benevolence put forth by Mohammed in the Qur’an and practiced by him and the vast majority of his followers, then as now.
5
Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation Peaces
A Tale of Two Cities: Medieval Peace and Peacemaking
This chapter’s coverage of extended periods in European history, from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance rise of Italian city-states and the Reformation, is intended first to dispel the myth that there was nothing peaceful about medieval times. Contrary to popular and even some academic beliefs, it may be the Middle Ages more than any other single period that has shaped modern peace principles and practices, notably by innovations in treaty-making and through the modus vivendi of monasticism, but in other ways as well. Saint Augustine’s (354–430) emphasis on peace through individual and social order in the following prescription, for instance, was probably a reaction to chaos stemming from the sack of Rome by Germanic tribes in 410, who eventually seized much of the Western Roman Empire:
The peace of the body is an ordered proportioning of its components; the peace of the irrational soul is an ordered repose of the passions; the peace of the rational soul is the ordered agreement of knowledge and action. The peace of body and soul is the ordered life and health of a living creature; peace between mortal men and God is an ordered obedience in the faith under an everlasting law; peace between men is an ordered agreement of mind; domestic peace is an ordered agreement among those who dwell together concerning command and obedience; the peace of the heavenly city is a perfectly ordered and fully concordant fellowship in the enjoyment of God and in mutual enjoyment by union with God; the peace of all things is a tranquility of order. Order is the classification of things equal and unequal that assigns to each its proper position.1
Augustine, a well-educated and well-traveled bishop, perceived that a paradigm shift was underway that could transform the Roman way of life. So the questions he raised in the City of God, written soon after the sack and in which this passage appears, were how and by whom.
Two kinds of cities, he claimed, could be “created by two kinds of love: the earthly city by a love of self carried even to the point of contempt for God, the heavenly city by a love for God carried even to the point of contempt for self.”2 In earthly cities, “waging war and extending their dominion is in the eyes of the wicked a gift of fortune, but in the eyes of the good it is a necessary evil.”3 Just wars, then, are those that establish or sustain heavenly cities, in which the “voice of God is an invitation to peace. It says: ‘If you be not in peace, love peace; what can you hope to receive from me more useful for you than peace?’ What is peace? The condition from which war has been excluded; where dissension, resistance and adversity no longer exist.”4 Augustine’s near totalitarian, dualist definition of peace as the absence of war, also Platonically absolutist and idealist in its incontestable perfection, reflects the hierarchical universality and internality of his prescription for peace. Together, the metaphors of the two cities prove to be highly predictive of the limits and possibilities of peace in the Middle Ages, which flowed from the fusion of Roman and Germanic peace traditions once considered antithetical by both sides.
Rome’s ongoing difficulties in maintaining internal peace through external wars and effective socio-political structures became impossibilities as its resources depleted, its armies weakened, and Church institutions gained power. Terminal conflict with “barbarian” Germanic tribes, once considered the only solution to their threat, lost ground to compromises, bringing about a fusion of Roman and Germanic peace traditions. As in the heyday of Romanization, such compromises included offering land, enculturation and citizenship for pacts of non-aggression, taxes and military service – except they were now used for remilitarization, not pacification. Overdependence on Germanic mercenaries, as Edward Gibbon points out in the best-read history on the period of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), ultimately put them in a better position to make or break the peace they were paid to protect than as adversaries. To be sure, many chose to break it, and their invasions were brutal affairs. But as Gibbon also points out, the invaders had their own peace traditions, as when during their annual festival “the sound of war was hushed, quarrels were suspended, arms laid aside, and the restless Germans had an opportunity of tasting the blessings of peace.”5 Building on these traditions, some newcomers chose to make and maintain peace with locals after they arrived, and recent scholarship holds that modern Western culture derives from such collaborative efforts.
One example is Ostrogoth King Theodoric the Great (454–526), who continued Roman traditions after he invaded Italy. Two of his administrators, Boethius and Cassiodorus, greatly influenced medieval thought and education. While not all Germanic tribes found it necessary or desirable to fully Romanize, all eventually converted to Christianity. As a diplomatic instrument, conversion was of tremendous use because it conferred spiritual benefits at no cost and a unitive impetus regardless of language or race, bringing together peoples Romans had been unable or unwilling to, as in the case of the first king of a united France, Clovis I (466–511). Intermarriages created or made official socio-political, economic and emotional ties between Romans and their tribal arch enemies; without such mingling, the shedding of blood alone could not have permitted foci of power and prestige to swing from longstanding urban centers to previously remote rural areas. An apogee of this mixed system was the ninth-century Carolingians, whose celebrated leader Charlemagne (742–814) was crowned by the chief bishop in Rome, now called the Pope, enhancing the Church’s temporal powers with land and military might, and evolving peace and peacemaking into feudal and religious forms with strong parallels to Augustine’s earthly and heavenly cities. Gradually, the Western Roman Empire was thus transformed into a labyrinth of regional kingdoms based on reciprocal obligations and mutual recognition, including the Lombards and Ostrogoths in the Italian Peninsula, Visigoths in the Iberian, Burgundians and Franks in Gaul and Germany, and Anglo-Saxons in England. Romanticizing of medieval warfare has regrettably taken the spotlight away from the realism of the period’s peace practices. They came as close as possible to actualizing peace in embodying Augustine’s earthly city.
In the tenth century, a clergy-led peace movement called the Pax Dei (“Peace of God”) tried to curb the feudal system’s pervasive violence by prohibiting attacks on Church grounds, unarmed churchmen and peasants, their properties and families. Traders and merchants, a class also greatly reduced in size and importance since Roman times by unsafe land and sea travel, were also eventually protected by the Peace of God. By the eleventh, a Treuga Dei (“Truce of God”) was added, prohibiting all violence during certain holy days and periods, signaled by church bells. As in contemporaneous Japan, a distinction was increasingly made between private wars fought between individuals and their supporters, and public wars fought between kingdoms and theirs. The Peace and Truce of God aimed to limit both private and public wars, but despite kings’ nominal support in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, after the Carolingian collapse heightened both kinds of warfare, the Peace and Truce of God were on the whole ineffective. One reason was that violators c
ould “buy” their way back into the Church’s good graces by its increasingly used indulgences, decreasing their motivation to comply. In the late twelfth century, England’s King Richard I, Lionheart, began commissioning knights to ensure that his kingly obligation to keep the peace in his realm was met. At first stationed in unruly regions, by the fourteenth century these Justices of the Peace, as they were now called, were present in every corner of his kingdom. They were charged with mediating disputes, preventing crimes as best they could, and rendering summary judgments and punishments in the tradition Greek and Roman Irenarchs. Positions of Justice of the Peace still exist today in England, also in some of its former colonies from Canada and Jamaica to Hong Kong. However, in general no longer active peacekeepers, they tend to be honorary or bureaucratic posts with no power.
Feudalism derived from both Roman and Germanic sources as an agreement between landholding nobles as high up as kings to grant lands to subordinates in return for fealty and the provision of armed forces when called upon. This is why so few early medieval kingdoms had standing armies, but also how so many violent disputes erupted between them. Securing internal peace by the reciprocal obligations of homage, investiture and their chains of command also became a means of defending or extending a kingdom’s borders. Below kings were barons, lords and knights, all hereditary titles, who formed the external military and internal police core of the feudal system. The chivalric codes they ostensibly came to live by, while based on martial skills and wherewithal, also required them to defend the weak and be generous to the poor. In theory, war was only justified under Ciceronian circumstances meeting certain criteria: right authority, just cause, right intention, proportionality, last resort and breached peace. Over time, the powers of the chivalric classes grew to the point where they could challenge kings who abused theirs either by revolting or, more peacefully, simply by switching allegiances. To avoid violence by negotiations and to expedite feudal affairs, kings and/or their inferiors also formed the first post-Roman legislatures, such as the Cortes of Spain (twelfth century), the Parliament in England (thirteenth century), the Estates General in France (fourteenth century) and the Diets of German and Northern European states (fifteenth century). As the basis of most European-derived political systems, these early assemblies also formed foundations for modern intra-national peace.
Medieval bishops below the Pope in Rome, but who sometimes rivaled kings in wealth and influence, could enrich themselves and the Church by using their lands for secular as well as religious purposes. By their clerical schools bishoprics came to provide literate administrators, ever-rarer after Rome fell and before the Renaissance, whom kings needed to maintain their realms in order and who also played peacemaking roles. One of them, a French monk named Pierre Dubois (c. 1250–1312), proposed an alliance of all feudal Christian powers to maintain peace by a permanent court, its sole purpose being to prevent warfare by settling disputes nonviolently between its members, which did not attract any support. At the bottom of the feudal hierarchy were the peasants or serfs, whose duties were to live peacefully while providing agricultural or other labor to their lords. In return, lords were supposed to provide protection and subsistence use of their lands. While not technically slaves, the structural violence serfs suffered was often as severe, offset only by the spiritual and material solace they may have received from the Church. Although serfs’ direct involvement in warfare before the Hundred Years War between France and England (1337–1453) was limited, they were often its indirect victims. It was only after peasants began to be conscripted that they rebelled en masse against their lords, usually after famines or plagues such as the Black Death (fourteenth century), which physically precluded the possibility of any peace, even despite the smartest treaties tendered.
Unlike under the Roman-Christian policy of “one empire, one peace”, backed by a central power capable of enforcing it, the multitude of medieval kingdoms required a multidirectional approach and so formed foundations of modern international peacemaking. To prevent or end territorial wars or to affirm a kingdom’s sovereignty, treaties of mutual recognition were signed between rulers, usually represented by noble delegates at each other’s courts. In 803, for instance, the Pax Nicephori was tendered between Charlemagne and the Byzantine Empire, recognizing his authority and Venice as Byzantine territory. Similarly, after the Carolingians’ fall, West and East Francia (roughly modern France and Germany) recognized each other by the Treaty of Bonn in 921. Treaties were also used to deal with noble family feuds. The Treaty of Alton (1101), by which Robert, Duke of Normandy, recognized his younger brother Henry I as King of England in exchange for a stipend and continental lands, temporarily diffused a succession debate that might otherwise have ended in bloodshed, ensuring cooperation between the two on pre-determined terms. However, to show how fickle all medieval treaties could be, Henry invaded Normandy four years later and jailed Robert for life.
Other pacts such as the Pactum Sicardi (836), between Italian Duchies and the Prince of Benevento, provided for temporary armistices, while still others such as Pactum Warmundi (1123) established temporary alliances, in this case between the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem and Venice. Informal leagues of a few small principalities were formed politically, as in the Lombard League (twelfth century) of northern Italy, or economically, such as the Hanseatic League of dozens of guild towns and villages which controlled trade around the Baltic Sea in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Formal alliances were also set in place, as in the Treaty of Windsor (1386),which cemented Anglo-Portuguese alliance and is the oldest extant interstate treaty. Multilateral peace and defence agreements were also used, as in the Treaty of Venice (1177) between the Lombard League, the Kingdom of Sicily, and the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy, occasionally renewed as this one was in the Peace of Constance (1183). Some treaties dealing with a kingdom’s internal affairs were called Bulls, not to be confused with Papal Bulls, as in the Golden Bull of 1222 by which King Andrew II of Hungary granted noblemen and clergy the right to disobey the king if he acted contrary to law. Others were called Charters, as is the Magna Carta (1215), which bound English kings to the law while protecting certain of subjects’ rights, notably that of Habeas Corpus, or protection from unlawful imprisonment. Those who straddled social and collective peace in crafting these agreements were in most cases betrayed by conditions or participants that had changed before their ink dried.
Conflicts between religious and secular potentates recurred both between and within kingdoms. They were sometimes diffused and resolved through special treaties (reglements d’avouerie) aimed at normalizing their relations, in which paid “devotees” acted as arbitrators. Agreements were also reached across religious and linguistic lines, as in the Al-Azraq Treaty (1245) between the Christian King Jaime I of Aragon and the Muslim commander Mohammad Abu Abdallah Ben Hudzail al Sahuir, delimiting property and revenue rights in Spain. Some treaties took on grandiose titles, such the Treaty of Perpetual Peace (1502), halting hostilities between Scotland and England and voided a decade later. While many such secular agreements aimed to end or prevent the use of armed forces, only religious ones aimed at outlawing them outright. The Synod of Toledo (693), for example, forbade duels and private wars and the Synod of Poitiers (1000) resolved that all disputes should be adjured by law, not by force. The Synod of Limoges (1031) used the most terrible spiritual punishment, interdicts, against war. But proactive rather than prohibitive intercessions were Christianity’s most influential contributions to peace in the Middle Ages: the related medieval institutions of sainthood and monasticism.
Sainthood, originally reserved for martyrs, was in time granted by a council of bishops to Christians, both men and women, whose exemplary lives were modeled on Christ’s and so made for models themselves. The medieval patron saint of peace, Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), founded a monastic order. While the famous “Prayer for Peace” erroneously attributed to him is probably a twentieth-century creation, it nonetheless captures
many of the pacific criteria usually required for canonization, save those of a popular cult and the performance of miracles:
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
Hagiographies, biographies of saints, were one of the few ways the spirit of early Christian pacifism survived, as in the Life of Saint Anthony, the first Christian monk. Maybe medieval warfare would have been better tempered if more people could have read them and did.
Two forms of monasticism emerged in Western Europe based on Near Eastern modes of renouncing earthly pursuits including violence. Eremite monks like SaintAnthony in Egypt (251–356) lived ascetically in solitude, striving for perfect spiritual peace on scriptural principles as mendicants. Saint Pachomius (292–338) went on to found the first Christian monasteries with the same goals, but achieved communally and self-sufficiently. His followers, first cenobite monks and nuns, began the peaceful monastic movement that spread across Europe. In 526, Saint Benedict put forth his Rule of monastic life. Among his “Instruments of Good Works” for cenobite monks he listed not making false peace, praying for one’s enemies and making peace with adversaries. He advised that cenobite monks should be under the direction of an Abbot, upon whose will the “perseveration of peace and charity” of the monastery depended.6 In the following centuries, many monastic orders were founded with different rules, on the surface non-violent and peace-oriented but not always actually so. Among the most prominent were those of Saint Francis, or Franciscan order, stressing inner peace through poverty and chastity (est. 1210); Dominican order, emphasizing social peace through public preaching (est. 1216), but which also carried out the Inquisition; and Society of Jesus or Jesuits (est. 1534), committed to spreading collective peace through education and missionary work, but also conspired in European colonial violence. If kingdoms were as close as medieval societies came to the peace of Augustine’s earthly city, monasteries were the closest to that of the heavenly city, and have inspired utopian visions of peaceful communal and spiritual life down to our times.
Peace Page 16