European Ideas of Peace in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries

Abstract

This article explores the diversity of the European idea of peace in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In the late Middle Ages, a literary genre of “peace writings” emerged. Despite the ubiquitous academic interest in peace, however, late medieval scholastic conceptions of peace have hitherto escaped serious scholarly investigation. Drawing on Johan Galtung's classic typology of the idea of peace, this essay offers an examination of the discussions of Thomas Aquinas, Remigio de’ Girolami, and Dante on peace, which not only illustrates the diversity of late medieval visions of peace but also argues that late medieval thinkers shared the recognition that temporal peace was possible: a significant departure from the Christian skepticism of this-worldly peace.

Notes

An earlier version of this article was presented to the History Research Seminar at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, 16 September 2009. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks are also due to Stephen Conway for his help in the preparation of this essay.

1. Guibert de Tournai, Tractatus de pace auctore Fr. Guiberto de Tornaco, ed. Ephrem Longpré (Quaracchi: Ad Claras Aquas, 1925). This is not to suggest, of course, that there were no writings on peace before the middle of the thirteenth century. One could mention, for example, Rufinus, De bono pacis, ed. and trans. Roman Deutinger (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1997).

2. There are two critical editions: Maria Consiglia De Matteis, La ‘teologia politica comunale’ di Remigio de’ Girolami (Bologna: Patro Editore, 1977), 53–71, and Charles Till Davis, “Remigio de’ Girolami and Dante: A Comparison of Their Conceptions of Peace,” Studi Danteschi 36 (1959): 105–36. I refer to the De Matteis edition.

3. There are two critical editions: Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis, ed. C. W. Previté-Orton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), and Defensor pacis, ed. Richard Scholz (Hannover: Hahn, 1932–33). There are also two English translations: The Defender of Peace, trans. Alan Gewirth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), and The Defender of the Peace, trans. Annabel Brett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

4. John Wyclif, De civili dominio, ed. Iohann Loserth, 4 vols. (London: Wyclif Society, 1885–1904). On Wyclif's pacifism, see especially Ian Christopher Levy, “John Wyclif: Christian Patience in A Time of War,” Theological Studies 66 (2005): 330–57.

5. There are two critical editions: Christine de Pizan, Livre de la paix, ed. Charity Cannon Willard ('s-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1958), and The Book of Peace, ed. and trans., Karen Green, Constant J. Mews, Janice Pinder, and Tania Van Hemelryck with the assistance of Alan Crosier (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).

6. Nicholas of Cusa, De pace fidei cum epistola ad Ioannem de Segobia, ed. Raymond Kilbansky and Hildebrand Bascour (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1970).

7. The works by medievalists include: Thomas Renna, “The Idea of Peace in the Augustinian Tradition, 400–1200,” Augustinian Studies 10 (1979): 105–11; Renna, “The Idea of Peace in the West, 500–1150,” Journal of Medieval History 6 (1980): 143–67; Renna, “St. Bernard's Idea of Peace in its Historical Perspective, 750–1150,” Res Publica Litterarum: Studies in the Classical Tradition 5 (1982): 189–95; Klaus Arnold, “De bono pacis – Friedensvostellungen in Mittelalter und Renaissance,” in Überlieferung-Frömmigkeit-Bildung als Leiithemen der Seschichtsforschung, ed. Jürgen Petersohn (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1987): 132–54; and more recently, Rosa Maria Dessì, ed., Prêcher la paix et discipliner la société: Italie, France Angleterre (XIIIe – XVe siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005). The intellectual quest for peace has attracted great interest of experts in Peace Studies: Sylvester John Hemleben, Plans for World Peace through Six Centuries (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1943) is a (now dated) work which includes an account of medieval peace plans, especially of Pierre Dubois and Dante. For a broader overview, we have yet to rely on works by experts in Peace Studies who are not medievalists: Ronald G. Musto, The Catholic Peace Tradition (New York: Peace Books, 2002) includes chapters on the Middles Ages, although its scope is limited to the Roman Catholic tradition; James Turner Johnson, The Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions in Western Cultural History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987) includes a chapter on medieval pacifism including Dante and Marsilius of Padua's conceptions of peace; Ben Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas, 1340–1560 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997) provides a fuller account of the late medieval and Reformation pacifist discourses with a special focus on English authors.

8. See, for instance, C. T. Allmand, ed., War, Literature, and Politics in the Late Middle Ages (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1976); Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, trans. M. Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); John Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450–1620 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1985); and E.-D. Hehl, “War, Peace and the Christian Order,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History IV c. 1024–c. 1198, Part I, ed. D. E. Luscombe and J. Riley-Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 185–228.

9. M. H. Keen, The Laws of War in the Late Middle Ages (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965).

10. John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanteur and His Circles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).

11. Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

12. James Turner Johnson, Ideology, Reason, and the Limitations of War: Religious and Secular Concepts, 1200–1740 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), and Just War Tradition and the Restraints of War: A Moral and Historical Enquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).

13. Tomaž Mastnak, Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World and Western Political Order (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).

14. Jonathan Riley-Smith, What were the Crusades? 3d ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).

15. R. S. Hartigan, “Saint Augustine on War and Killing: The Problem of the Innocent,” Journal of the History of Ideas 27 (1966): 195–204; L. J. Swift, “Augustine on War and Killing: Another View,” Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973): 369–83; R. A. Marcus, “Augustine on the ‘Just War’,” in The Church and War (Studies in Church History, vol. 20), ed. W. J. Sheils (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 1–13; and J. M. Mattox, St Augustine and the Theory of Just War (London: Continuum, 2006). Just war theory is, of course, highly relevant in contemporary political theory too: see, for instance, John Kelsay and J. T. Johnson, eds., Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions (New York: Greenwood, 1991), and M. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 3d ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

16. For instance, P. Biller, “Medieval Waldensian Abhorrence of Killing Pre-c.1400,” in The Church and War (Studies in Church History, vol. 20), ed. W. J. Sheils (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 129–46; T. Head and R. Landes, eds., The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France Around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).

17. Elizabeth Siberry, Criticism of Crusading, 1095–1274 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

18. Johan Galtung, “Social Cosmology and the Concept of Peace,” Journal of Peace Research 18 (1981), 183–99.

19. Galtung, “Social Cosmology and the Concept of Peace,” 186.

20. Gerardo Zampaglione, The Idea of Peace in Antiquity, trans. Richard Dunn (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973), 43.

21. Galtung, “Social Cosmology and the Concept of Peace,” 187.

22. Erich Dinkler, “Eirēnē – the Early Christian Concept of Peace,” The Meaning of Peace: Biblical Studies, ed. Perry B. Yoder and Willard M. Swartley, trans. Walter Sawatsky (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 173.

23. Zampaglione, The Idea of Peace in Antiquity, 31.

24. Harald Fuchs, Augustin und der antike Friedensgedanke: untersuchungen zum neunzehnten Buch der Civitas Dei (Berlin/Zurich: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1965), 40.

25. Fuchs, Augustin und der antike Friedensgedanke, 182–84; Stefan Weinstock, Divus Julius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 267; Galtung, “Social Cosmology and the Concept of Peace,” 187.

26. Stefan Weinstock, “Pax and the ‘Ara Pacis’,” Journal of Roman Studies 50 (1960): 44–58.

27. Dinkler, “Eirēnē – the Early Christian Concept of Peace,” 175.

28. Weinstock, “Pax and the ‘Ara Pacis’,” 45; Galtung, “Social Cosmology and the Concept of Peace,” 187.

29. Gerardo Zampaglione, The Idea of Peace in Antiquity, 133.

30. Stefan Weinstock, Divus Julius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 267.

31. Zampaglione, The Idea of Peace in Antiquity, 133.

32. Weinstock, Divus Julius, 267; Weinstock, “Pax and the ‘Ara Pacis’,” 45.

33. Dinkler, “Eirēnē – the Early Christian Concept of Peace,” 176.

34. Kenneth C. M. Sills, “The Idea of Universal Peace in the Works of Virgil and Dante,” The Classical Journal 9 (1914): 139–53.

35. Zampaglione, The Idea of Peace in Antiquity, 154.

36. Scholarship on Virgil in the Middle Ages has a long history: see, for instance, Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E. F. M. Benecke (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1895); James Westfall Thompson, “Vergil in Medieval Culture,” American Journal of Theology 10 (1906): 648–62; and much more recently, Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Jan M. Ziolkowski and Michael C. J. Putnam, eds., The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteenth Hundred Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

37. Dinkler, “Eirēnē – the Early Christian Concept of Peace,” 168; Galtung, “Social Cosmology and the Concept of Peace,” 185.

38. For the rhetorical use of “peace and concord” in post-apostolic Christian literature, see Odd Magne Bakke, “Concord and Peace”: A Rhetorical Analysis of the First Letter of Clement with an Emphasis on the Language of Unity and Sedition (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001). For St Augustine's reference to “peace and concord,” see Tilman Struve, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffassung im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1978), 63; and Matthew S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 62, 323. Nicolai Rubinstein observed that in the political thought of northern Italy in the late Middle Ages, pax et concordia “represent… the most desirable effect of just government in the interest of the common welfare, or, in St Thomas’ words, of the ordo ad bonum commune.” Nicolai Rubinstein, “Political Ideas in Sienese Art: The Frescoes of Ambrossio Lorezetti and Taddeo di Bartolo in the Palazzo Pubblico,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 21 (1958): 187.

39. Dinkler, “Eirēnē – the Early Christian Concept of Peace,” 186.

40. Zampaglione, The Idea of Peace in Antiquity, 210–11.

41. Fuchs, Augustin und der antike Friedensgedanke, 46.

42. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought.

43. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q.29, a.1 (vol. 34: Charity, ed. and trans. R. J. Batten) (London: Blackfriars, 1975), 196–99.

44. Concord is a union of wills, not of opinions. Concord concerns will, while opinion is a matter of intellect. See Benjamin Schwartz, Aquinas on Friendship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 33.

45. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, in Opera omnia, vol. 14 (Rome: Typographia Polygotta Vaticana, 1926), lib. 3, c. 146, 434,

46. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, in Opera omnia, vol. 15 (Rome: Typographia Polygotta Vaticana, 1930), lib. 4, c. 76, 241.

47. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q.29, a.2, 198–203.

48. St Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1972), XIX, c.12, 866–70.

49. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q.29, a.2, 200–201.

50. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q.29, a.2, 200–203.

51. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q.29, a.3, 202–5.

52. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q.29, a.3, 202–5.

53. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, in Opera omnia, vol. 14, lib. 3, c. 128, 392.

54. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages, 286. A contrasting (and less convincing) reading of Aquinas on this issue can be found in Mastnak, Crusading Peace, 208–16.

55. Davis, “Remigio de’ Girolami and Dante,” 108.

56. Remigio de’ Girolami, De bono pacis, 62–63. The source of the quotation is St Augustine, The City of God, XIX, 13.

57. Remigio de Girolami, Sermo n.27, 482 as cited in Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought, 323.

58. Remigio de’ Girolami, De bono pacis, 58.

59. Remigio de’ Girolami, De bono pacis, 66.

60. Remigio de’ Girolami, De bono communi, 3–4: “Ex quo apparet quod pro pace, que nimirum est bonum commune multitudinis, sicut certe sanitas corporalis est bonum commune totius corporis.”

61. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought, 322.

62. Norman Housley, “Pro deo et patria mori: Sanctified Patriotism in Europe, 1400–1600,” in War and Competition between States, ed. Philippe Contamine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 224.

63. Dante, De monarchia, ed. E. Moore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916). Also Dante, Monarchy, trans. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Anthony K. Cassell, The Monarchia Controversy (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 111–73. I use the Cassell edition.

64. Davis, “Remigio de’ Girolami and Date,” 105–36, and Cassell, The Monarchia Controversy, 57.

65. Dante, Monarchy, I.xv.127.

66. Dante, Monarchy, I.iii.113. The source of this metaphor is Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1098b 6–7.

67. Charles Till Davis, however, argued that Remigio and Dante were similar in terms of using bodily metaphor. See his “Remigio de’ Girolami and Dante,” 113–14.

68. On Dante's reference to Virgil, see, for instance, John Woodhouse, “Dante and Governance: Contexts and Contents,” Dante and Governance, ed. J. R. Woodhouse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 9.

69. Monarchy, I.xvi.128.

70. Dante, Monarchy, II.ii.129. Charles Till Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 46–47.

71. Charles Till Davis, “Dante and Empire,” The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 76.

72. Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome, 64. In Convivio, however, Dante purchased the providential view of Roman history from Virgil, Aeneid, 6:756–853. See Cassell, The Monarchia Controversy, 67.

73. Monarchy, III, xvi, 92–93. This is not to say, however, that Dante did not take the Christian supremacy of eternal peace seriously. Dante viewed temporal peace as instrumental to eternal peace: a position contrasting to Remigio's. Nonetheless, Dante rejected mutual dependence between emperor and pope. Dante posits a twofold end for human beings–material and spiritual–and correspondingly he posits rulers for each: emperor and pope. The task of governing the city of man, however, was entrusted to the emperor alone. On Dante's idea of other-worldly peace, see Davis, “Remigio de’ Girolami and Dante,” 121, and Stephen Bemrose, “Gaudium et Pax: What Being in Heaven Means for Dante,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 41 (2005): 71–89.

74. Mastnak, Crusading Peace, 287.

75. R. W. Southern, “Dante and Islam,” Relations between East and West in the Middle Ages, ed. D. Baker (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973), 58.