Langres

 The city of Langres, located on the Burgundy-Champagne border, was an important city in Roman Gaul and a major bishopric during the Middle Ages, even though it's become a rather quiet provincial town in recent centuries, with a current population under 10,000.

 

It's located quite dramatically at the top of a steep hill, overlooking the countryside, and still has its Roman walls.  Traffic has to drive in and out through some of its Roman gates. The gates pictured above are the best preserved of the Roman gates and thus are closed to traffic.

 

The Romans liked Langres for its strategic location, and a number of Roman roads met there. The strategic location meant that Langres continued to be important militarily up through the nineteenth century.

Like most bishoprics in what is now France, Langres dates its Christianization and first bishop to the third century.  Autun was probably the original diocese covering what is now Burgundy, and other dioceses were carved out of it between the third and fifth centuries (Langres, Auxerre, Nevers, Mâcon, and Chalon-sur-Saône).

The bishops were important counselors to the Carolingian kings in the ninth century and continued to be major political players.  During the twelfth century the Capetian kings granted the bishops the right to hold Langres and its region directly from the crown, rather than having either the duke of Burgundy or the count of Champagne be in authority over their territory. The bishops liked to say they were dukes in their own right.

 The diocese of Langres was one of the most central in the early spread of the Cistercian order. A number of houses were founded on the Langres plateau.  Unlike the monastery of Cluny, which always tried to exempt itself from the authority of its local bishop (Mâcon), the Cistercians always got along well with their bishops—some of whom were Cistercians themselves.

During the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, a son of Langres, Denis Diderot, established the first "Encyclopedia," volumes that purported to cover all of human knowledge, in the hope that educating the populace by whatever means possible would lead to a more rational and happier and prosperous population.

 The city of Langres commemorates Diderot (who also rates a statue and a central square named for him) with a park bench made to look like an encyclopedia volume.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval social history and how it still affects us today, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback. 

 

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.

Bishops

Medieval Christianity was run by its bishops, as indeed was the organized church from the beginning.  So, what's a bishop? you say.  He was the head Christian of a region (there are now female bishops in some denominations, but there were not any in the Middle Ages).

The early Christian communities were self-governing.  The local Christians elected their leader, the bishop.  (Modern Amish communities still do the same thing.)  The word comes from the Greek, as do all words from early Christianity, episkopos, meaning someone in charge, an overseer (think of the root epi-, as in epicenter, plus "scoping things out").  The word became episcopus in Latin; take the -e- off the front and you'll see where we get the word 'bishop'.

Early Christian bishops tried to coordinate, but no one was in charge of the others.  Any sort of dispute or question would be settled by a council, where the bishops would meet, discuss, and vote.  One of the most important early councils was Nicaea of 325, which determined the nature of the Trinity.  At this point, the Emperor Constantine was beginning to tolerate Christianity (he was baptized on his deathbed), so bishops were able to make their religion and their flocks more public and start building churches.  A cathedral (on which see more here) is a church for a bishop.

Each bishop was in charge of a diocese, his region, which in the old Roman Empire corresponded to the pagus, the basic geographic unit of imperial administration.  In the west, counties, headed by counts, also corresponded to the pagus, creating tensions between bishop and count throughout the Middle Ages.

Early bishops were married, with families, though by the sixth century western bishops generally were single or widowed—or adopted separate bedrooms.  In Byzantium, however, where early Christianity evolved into Greek Orthodoxy, bishops still married.  Modern Protestantism, self-consciously following the practice of the early church, returned to married bishops.

By the fifth or sixth century, it came to be taken for granted that five bishoprics were "first among equals," those of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria (a great learning center in Egypt), Jerusalem, and Antioch (Peter's city, according to the New Testament).  They were honored with the title 'papa', meaning (naturally) Daddy.  With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, all of these cities except for Rome and Constantinople had Christianity essentially disappear, leaving only the bishops of Rome and Constantinople, the forerunners of the pope and the Greek Orthodox patriarch (see more here on early medieval popes).

In practice, bishops, not popes, continued to run Christianity between them until the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as discussed more here.  Bishops held councils to decide any important issues and were still locally elected, by both powerful lay people and by the priests of the diocese.  During the twelfth century, however, election was restricted to the cathedral canons, the priests who served the cathedral and helped the bishop run the diocese.  In the thirteenth century, popes began insisting that they, and only they, could choose bishops.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015 

For more on the medieval church, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

The Medieval Church

In an earlier post, I discussed medieval Christianity in broad outlines.  But religion (Christianity in this case) is not the same as the institution (the church) whose purpose is to support that religion.  This is why, for example, one can still be a good Catholic in the modern world even if deploring some things that some priests have done.

Medieval people made the same distinction.  From the middle of the twelfth century on, there were always plenty of people--people who considered themselves good Christians--who mocked priests, bishops, monks, anyone who they themselves did not think was behaving as a good Christian should behave.  Wealthy churchmen frequently came in for criticism in the late Middle Ages.  Martin Luther's criticism came out of a long tradition.

For that matter, "the medieval church" was not a monolithic entity.  One cannot speak of the medieval church any more than one can now speak of the government.  (Though some try!)  First question:  which one do you mean?  Federal government? state? local?  If federal, which branch, executive, legislative, judicial?  If executive, the president himself or the civil service?  If legislative, House, Senate, or the staffers?  And so on.

In the medieval church, there were many different individuals and groups, all of which had their own agenda.  Most notably, bishops and monasteries were often at odds.  The bishops had been established by the fourth century in most cities of the old Roman Empire, and they considered themselves to have "apostolic succession."  That is, a bishop would have been consecrated by another bishop, himself consecrated by an earlier bishop, and so on, supposedly back to Saint Peter.  So bishops felt that cities were their cities, and that they were firmly in the tradition of Jesus's first followers.

The monasteries saw things differently.  Although they had been established more recently--rarely before the sixth century in the West and often much later--they believed that they, and only they, were truly "apostolic," because they tried to follow the life of the apostles as described in the New Testament Book of Acts.  That is, they gave up all personal possessions and shared everything in common.

(Sounds communist, doesn't it!  It's also biblical.)

Monasteries resented bishops, who might live like lords, coming around to "correct" the life of monks who felt that the only person who needed correcting was the wealthy and powerful bishop himself.  Monks and bishops did try to get along in a spirit of Christian charity, but monasteries might try to free themselves legally from their bishop's oversight.  The cathedral and the chief monastery in a town were often in competition as to who had the best, most impressive church.

And then there were the popes, basically ignored in practice (though honored in theory) throughout the early Middle Ages, until they abruptly made themselves the head of the church hierarchy in the eleventh century (click here for more details).

© C. Dale Brittain 2015