Peace and Truce of God

Today is Memorial Day, when we remember those who are no longer with us, and honor veterans.  These days, with an all-volunteer army, veterans are mostly middle class or lower class, not from the ranks of the wealthy or well-connected.  In the Middle Ages, in contrast, the fighters were from the elite, the aristocracy.

What do we want our soldiers to fight for?  Peace.  (Seems ironic, but that's how it appears to work.)  Everybody wants peace (though you might not know it from some video games), peace to raise food and raise their families.  The big thing that Old Testament prophets expected from the Messiah was an era of peace.  In the 1950s, American postmarks said, "Pray for peace."

Medieval people also wanted peace.  The peace they were concerned about was not so much an end to war between nations (at least until you get to the Hundred Years' War) but rather an end to local fighting and brigandage.

Right at the end of the tenth century, at exactly the same time as castles and knights first appeared in France, French bishops started what is called the Peace of God movement.  The coincidence of these three (castles, knights, and Peace of God) was not accidental.  Western Europe had managed to recover from the Vikings and other disasters, and now it faced new challenges to peace.  Knights, fighters on horseback, could work serious damage on the countryside, then retreat behind castle walls where no one could catch them.

The bishops realized they could not physically overcome the knights.  So they did what seemed like the best alternative--shaming the knights to give up hurting people.  The bishops held what they called peace councils, inviting everyone from a region to attend, bringing along the relics of all the local churches.  Here they persuaded the attending knights to swear great oaths not to harm the harmless--people in the church, peasants, women, merchants.  Since in promising not to harm those who couldn't fight back, the knights realized they could still fight each other (more fun anyway), they agreed.

It was not of course a perfect solution.  But it did decrease the overall level of violence and made the regional counts, in their capacity as judges, much more likely to be extremely stern with knights who broke their oaths.  For the entire eleventh century, repeated peace councils were held.  During this period of (relative) peace, castles proliferated.  If you think about it, you need a peaceful period to build a castle.

Emboldened by their success, around 1050 the bishops began the Truce of God.  Here councils sought to get knights to swear they wouldn't even attack each other except at certain times:  not Lent, not Advent, not Sunday, not Friday (and probably not Saturday, as between Friday and Sunday).  Monday through Thursday were good.

The Truce was a lot less successful, but it was a nice try.  With the beginning of the Crusade movement around 1100, churchmen encouraged knights not to kill each other at all, not even a little bit, but to restrict their violence to Muslims.  The twelfth century was a period in which it was clear (in theory anyway) that Christians really weren't supposed to kill Christians.  By the late thirteenth century they'd pretty much abandoned this notion, but it was a nice idea.


© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more about  war, peace, knights, and so much more, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Conflict resolution

In an earlier post, I discussed medieval violence.  There was certainly plenty of violence then (as now!), but there were also plenty of ways to defuse conflicts before they became violent.

It used to be thought that, in an era without the courthouses, police forces, and clear law codes we take for granted now, then anarchy was the only possibility.  This was far from the case in the Middle Ages, in large part because everybody agreed on (or at least gave lip service to) the ideal of peace.

If two men (say, in a drunken brawl) leaped at each other, their friends were supposed to grab them and pull them back, not egg them on.  Hot-headed violence was deplored in all the epics and romances, not celebrated.  (Our own movies and TV shows glorify violence a lot more than did medieval literature.)  Local authorities, whether landlord, sheriff, count, or even king, were expected to act as peacemakers.

A quarrel would be brought before a court, not anything like our judicial courts, but the court of a powerful man (or sometimes woman).  Both sides would present their positions.  Long discussion would ensue.  Both sides would bring forth witnesses, oath-helpers, and material evidence.  More discussion would ensue.  The judge would not end up ruling definitively for one or the other, but rather act more as a mediator, trying to reach some sort of agreement.  The only way one party would get a summary judgment against them would be if they failed to show up.

Sometimes one party or the other would volunteer to undergo trial by ordeal.  The other side, realizing no one would volunteer to do something so painful unless completely convinced they were right, would often yield at this point, leaving the other side the winner.  If someone were accused of major crimes, and everyone knew they were guilty, a good defense would be to suddenly become penitent and head off to Rome or Jerusalem on pilgrimage.  By the time one came back, with luck things would have blown over.

If one had a quarrel with a church, or even a quarrel that involved such sacraments as marriage or oaths, one side or the other could stop the proceedings cold by appealing to the pope, from the early twelfth century on.  Both sides would then go to Rome, get in line to await judgment (a line often years long), and usually end up settling it between themselves anyway.  (By the later Middle Ages, popes started just referring most cases back to the local bishops, so appealing to Rome was much less useful.)

Churches would try to forestall quarrels over pious donations by getting all relatives of the donor to agree ahead of time.  This was much easier than the alternative, trying to persuade one's saints to blast the malefactors.  Threats of such saintly blasting, however, could be quite persuasive.

Castles also acted, by their very presence, to forestall violence.  Although one now thinks of castles as centers of fighting, most would not be attacked for centuries.  Their very presence sent a clear message, Don't even think of it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015
For more on medieval society, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Violence in the Middle Ages

Medieval society was violent--but not anarchical.  Efforts were constantly being made, some more successful than others, to rein in violence.  When you have a number of muscular, well-trained fighting men carrying swords, it was, not surprisingly, a constant concern.

In the modern US, we tend as a society to fear those of lower socio-economic status.  Poorer parts of town are considered dangerous.  In the Middle Ages, in contrast, the powerful, the wealthy, the elite were considered the most frightening.  On the other hand, poor people's only defense against dangerous warriors was found in other wealthy and powerful men.

The reason villages grew up around castles was because the villagers saw them as sources of protection.  A lord would certainly defend his own peasants, even if he ran roughshod over someone else's peasants' fields (or even the peasants themselves).

Knights and nobles were trained to be fighters.  From the twelfth century on, nobles defined themselves in part by their military prowess.  A touchy sense of honor, where every insult had to be met with violence, was a constant issue.

Of course, this violence was not unmitigated.  For one thing, it is much harder to kill someone from a distance with a sword than with a gun, so until gunpowder was invented in the fourteenth century, fighting had to be up-close.  (Nobles used bows for hunting, but not for attacking each other.)

Also, "peace" was considered an extremely important value.  If two knights insulted each other and then sprang at each other, their friends were supposed to pull them apart, not egg them on.  Everyone knew all too well that a fight with knives and swords would turn deadly all too fast.

At exactly the same time as knights and castles first appeared in France, in the years around 1000, bishops started holding Peace of God councils.  They would bring knights together and make them swear mighty oaths, on relics, not to harm the harmless--churchmen, women, merchants, peasants.  This was reasonably successful, at least in getting the knights to consider that killing the weak was wrong and might even send them to hell.

Two generations later, the bishops followed up on their initial success by establishing the Truce of God, where they persuaded knights that they shouldn't even kill each other on Sundays, great saints' feast days, Advent, or Lent.  This was not nearly as effective, but it certainly made the knights think.  By the twelfth century, everyone more or less agreed (whether or not they always acted on it) that Christians should not kill Christians.

Churchmen instead urged the knights to go on Crusade, to use their warrior skills to kill Muslims.  The knights themselves preferred tournaments, mock battles where people (theoretically) were not killed, but they were able to show off their prowess.

There were of course psychopaths in the Middle Ages, just as there are now, people who enjoyed inflicting pain and suffering.  The chroniclers always described such acts of violence as "unheard of," indicating that they were far from the norm.

See more here on medieval conflict resolution.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015