Christianity's stamp: Of hybrids, traitors, false peace, massacres and other horrors

ABSTRACT

The contribution focuses on the ways in which medieval Catholic religion influenced warfare, not in terms of causality but in terms of conditions of possibility. After having looked at (1) the way in which the crusades, in particular, opened up the possibility to transfer attributes from monastic asceticism (the monks were spiritual ‘warriors of God’) to warriors (fighting as ‘warriors of God’), the article examines two examples. (2) Theology provided to the Western European culture of war the figure of the ‘false brother’, which, translated, yielded a script for the internal enemy, the political traitor and adversary in civil wars. Around this figure enormous fantasies crystallized themselves, arguably without equivalent in non-monotheistic cultures. One sees in the late medieval French civil wars the semi-secularized mobilization of this figure, with fantasies and execution of violent purge. (3) The ascetic values activated for warfare with the First Crusade meant that while in reality (as one would expect) sexual did transgressions occur, rape in war by one’s own side was hardly ever admitted, and arguably was in reality also inhibited.

KEYWORDS:

• War
• religion
• Christianity
• treason
• rape
• status groups

Concepts: religion as condition of possibility¹

Analyses of the premodern relationship between religion and warfare in Western and Central Europe have possibly devoted too much attention to issues of causality as well as to the crusades and the wars of religion. As is well known, scholarly interest in the European holy war was reactivated by the acts of religious terrorism that followed soon after the U.S.A.’s cold war ‘victory’ over the Soviet Union and the triumphant American proclamation of an End of History (1989). The focus on causality present in the newer cottage industry of publications on religion and armed violence built on at least three centuries of highly charged controversies, on the one hand, the pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment critique of religion as a cause of armed violence, on the other the counter-argument that this violence is a product of human drives unrelated to faith. Jan Assmann (1998, 2002, 2016) may be the most famous figure among the neo-Voltairian incriminators of monotheism (his first statement was entitled ‘the cost [Preis] of monotheism’). On the other side is William Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence (2009). Cavanaugh submits that the early modern European State created itself via massive war, but gained hegemony over society and ascribed to itself a transcendental value by attributing to confessional rivalries the violence it itself was producing. The State presented itself as the Leviathan, the sole entity able to curb fanaticism’s excesses (critiques: Benedict 2016; Rudolph 2016). Relayed for a wider bien pensant reading public by Karen Armstrong’s popular but scientifically dubious Fields of Blood (2014), the theologian Cavanaugh thus would exculpate Christianity from an essential affinity with war and its atrocities.

There is at least one logical flaw in Cavanaugh’s counter-critique – a for us useful logical flaw. It highlights that one can fruitfully move away from a focus on causality, in which religion produces war, to a more productive questionnaire, that is, to how and how far religious conceptions provide warfare with conditions of possibility (that is, how their existence accounts in part for the shape that armed violence takes). One shall readily grant to Cavanaugh that the violence of the early modern wars of religion was not only confessional and that it was not always directly caused by confessional differences between Catholics and Lutherans. However, in arguing that the early modern states scapegoated religion, making it the cause of war, Cavanaugh has recourse to the argument proposed by John Bossy’s Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (1985), to the effect that there took place a ‘migration of the holy’ from Church to State. He also cites Ernst Kantorowicz’s famous The King’s Two Bodies (1957) to argue that martyrdom for the faith was sublated into martyrdom for the Fatherland. The State’s self-sacralization and its ability to project its own violence onto religion went hand-in-hand. Now comes the critique and the pointe, in the service of the present article’s main thesis. Pace Cavanaugh, the proto-national and national State was able to harness and instrumentalize religious energies and discourse only because of the State’s own quality as a ‘mystical political body’, therefore only because of its affinities in structure with the model it took, the Church as ‘mystical ecclesiastical body’ (Kantorowicz 1957, ch. 5).² Since every sacrality has historical contents, in this process, the State adopted sacred traits and characteristics specific to the Church, as understood by Kantorowicz, who quietly drew on Carl Schmitt’s concept of secularization (Buc 2015, 3–5; Whalen 2020, 138–141).³

Thus if the historian leaves aside the issue of causality, he or she can focus on form – religion as a post-Kantian ‘conditions of possibility’, Bedingungen der Möglichkeit (Blume 2003), for this or that characteristic of war. The question now becomes how a specific religion, Catholic Christianity, shaped warfare, including the waging of war, conceptions of war, and the experience of war (see programmatically Kortüm 2001). In some cases, the causative dimension and issues of causality will still play a part in this analysis, but accessorily so. This article will thus argue that religion explains some (not all) among the forms that armed violence took. It will first consider the vectors and matrices involved in the transfer of religious forms to the sphere of warfare. Two are key, and related: the binary warrior-clergy and the crusade’s entanglement with societal reform. The article will then present two instantiations: first, the obsession with political treason, which was a secularization of the concerns over ‘false brethren’ corrupting the religious community from the inside; second, atrocities on the battlefield, including rape.

The transfer of attributes and norms: vectors of secularization⁴

One dominant early medieval model of the ecclesia (the Church as community) was the caste-like bipartition between, on the one hand, clergy and monks – the oratores, specialists in the salvation of souls – and, on the other, the warriors – the bellatores, specialists in warfare (see in a Marxist and positivistic vein, Duby 1978; corrected by Oexle 1978, 1981, 1984). In the early Middle Ages, this bipartition held sway over the opposite model that undergirded unity within the ecclesia despite duality, that is, Saint Peter’s position that all Christians were sacramentally both priests and kings (Dabin 1950; Savigni 2002). Yet as since long shown by Adolph Harnack (1905; see also Erdmann 1935; Scharff 2002),⁵ the bipartition opposing monks and clerics (as oratores) to warriors (bellatores) left open the potential for, firstly, one-sided appropriations and, secondly, symbolically charged bridging forms combining characteristics of both orders. This took place in several phases. Prior to Constantine’s conversion, Christian apologists had represented to Roman elites that the new religion was civic-minded. Outside the Church, pagan Roman soldiers fought with material weapons against the barbarians, but within the Church, Christians fought loyally for the Empire in the much more momentous spiritual fight, by means of prayers against ‘demons who provoke wars, lead to oath-breaking, and disturb peace’. Christians were thus, said Origen of Alexandria (d. 253), ‘a special army of piety’, idion stratópedon eúsebeías (Origen 1969, 344–348; Harnack 1905, 71–72; Caspary 1979, 128–129; Buc 2015, 78–79). After Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) transposed the binary, which with Origen had opposed Church and World, to within the Church itself. Writing in 418 to the Roman comes Boniface, Bishop Augustine drew on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, chapter 12, which explains that each person had a specific God-given ‘charism’ or gift within the ecclesia, to reassure Boniface that material warfare was not sinful: The clergy, ‘as they pray for you, fight against the invisible enemies; you, fighting on their behalf, toil against visible barbarians’ (Augustine 1911, Letter 189, 134). Implicit, however, remained the superiority of prayer over arms. Yet paradoxically the superiority of prayer over material weapons existed only insofar as prayer was also a weapon, even though immaterial. War was prestigious.

In the following centuries, early medieval monks hijacked to their own benefit the meaningfulness that their world’s violent culture attached to war. Monks constituted the real militia Christi, the military service of Christ; as ascetics, they fought the critical combat, war against demons and vices (Smith 2011; foundational Harnack 1905, 28 & passim). In the course of time, however, warriors did re-appropriate for themselves the notion of militia Christi (Harnack 1905). This took place both through pious deeds imitating monks, and through bridging contexts and forms that enabled a person to belong simultaneously to both militias, thus be both orator and bellator. The main bridging context is well known; it was the crusade, the first of which was preached in 1095 (most recently Smith 2011, 103–107). Contemporary commentators viewed it as a miraculous gift: God had granted Christian warriors the chance to be saved within their profession. Killing pagans in the effort to recover, cleanse, and keep Jerusalem did not incur the pollution of bloodshed; on the contrary, it purified the crusader of his sins. On crusade, the warriors became the militia Christi, the denomination that monasticism had until then monopolized. The crusade allowed the oxymoronic conjoining of two auras, all the more symbolically charged since they belonged to two initially separate castes.

On the march to Jerusalem, which the expedition conquered in July 1099, a crusader, if he so wanted, could be both an ascetic and a warrior. More even, asceticism was even required in the army of Christ, and at certain key moments, rigorously and brutally enforced. Crusaders were expected to behave as monks, in particular eschew greed and sexuality (at least in extra-marital form); they were both the ‘armies of heavens’ of John's Revelation, which the returning Christ on His white horse led to Jerusalem, and the same holy text’s 144,000 saints, who had not known woman, and would people the New Jerusalem. The armies, castra, of the New Israel on the march to the eternal Promised Land had to be made sancta, holy or pure, on the model of what the Lord of Armies had ordained for the Israel of Old (Deuteronomy, 23.9–14). No one was to cheat another in buying or selling, or commit theft, adultery, or fornication. Even watching female pagan acrobat-jugglers while feasting could anger the Lord (Raymond d’Aguilers 1969, 66). Albert of Aachen recounts how ‘on anyone who disobeyed this mandate (mandatum) and was caught, there would be inflicted the most cruel punishments, and thus God's people would be sanctified from filth and impurity’. There were indeed transgressors, and thus enforcement:

The judges established to this end severely castigated them; some were put in chains, other beaten with whips, others shorn and branded, this for the whole army’s castigation (correctio) and amendment. Further, those men and women caught in adultery were stripped naked before the whole army; their hands having been tied behind their back, executioners (percussores) brutally flogged them, coerced to make the rounds in the army, so that the rest, seeing the most cruel punishments of these [sinners], would be terrified and keep away from such enormous, wicked transgressions. (Albert of Aachen 2007, 228; Buc 2017b, 320–321)

We may have here the ancestor of late medieval army regulations (see for example Curry 2011), which too tried to prevent sin in order to prevent defeat.

The crusade could also awaken the long dormant oxymoron of the individual Christian as simultaneously priest and king (the king being the summit of the warrior status group, and epitomizing it). Right before landing in Egypt (1249), King Louis IX of France assimilated his soldiers, destined either to victory over the Muslims or to martyrdom at their hand, with the Church and with the king (Barthélemy 2016, 738–739, 2018; Buc 2015, 180–181). Louis harangued them: ‘I am not the king of France, I am not the Holy Church; but it is you who all are the king, you [all who are] the Holy Church’ (Non sum rex Franciae, non sum Sancta Ecclesia; sed vos utique omnes rex estis, vos sancta ecclesia). As a collective, Louis IX’s French crusaders were priests and kings, in the words of saint Peter, an elect lineage, royal priesthood, and holy nation (vos autem genus electum, regale sacerdotum, gens sancta, 1 Pet. 2.9). The formula had all the more weight as it was itself an echo of God's own statement to His elect people on the march to the Holy Land, ‘You shall be to Me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation/people’ (vos eritis mihi regnum sacerdotale et gens sancta, Exod. 19.6; see also Apoc. 1.6).

After the First Crusade, in the course of the twelfth century, the possibility to be simultaneously warrior and quasi-monk was both narrowed and institutionalized. The narrowing was the product of a higher level of control on the combatants; the institutionalization came with the foundation of the military orders. Templars and Hospitallers, joined later by the Teutonic Knights (Demurger 2002), fought both with the sword against Islam and with asceticism against vices and Satan (Smith 2011, 107–110). For the monastic star of the mid-twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux, the Templar was ‘a fearless knight, safe on every side, who vests his soul with the armour of faith [cf. Eph. 6] just as his body with iron; thus protected with these two armaments, he fears neither demon nor man’ (Bernard 1990 vol. 1, 214). A fresco in the Templars’ church in Perugia, Italy, illustrates this dialectical sublation of the early medieval duality bellator-orator (Roncetti, Scarpellini, and Tommasi 1987; Barber 1994, 205–208; Buc 2015, 90). The image’s bipartition along a vertical axis expresses well, on the one hand, the complementarity of spiritual warfare via prayer and material warfare willed by God, and the superiority of the spiritual over material combat. The fresco superposes (lower register) the Templars’ armoured fight against Muslims marked with dragon heraldry over (upper register) their spiritual warfare. Wearing a monastic cowl, they face off a lion. The beast symbolizes the Devil, ‘the lion which prowls [the desert of this world] looking for whom he might devour’ (leo quaerens quem devoret, I Pet. 5.8). On the north-eastern front of German expansion, the Teutonic Order also gave a spiritual sheen to its material weapons. Its cleric Peter von Dusburg explained the mystical meaning of each piece of military equipment (1861, 40–46). Furthermore, the Order’s Rule provided for a high degree of ascetic restraint (Perlbach 1890).

The military orders’ elitist bridging of the initial bipartition oratores-bellatores constitutes an institutionalization (the orders are institutions) of the synthesis present in widely read sources commemorating the First Crusade, such as Robert the Monk's Jerusalem History, composed circa 1108, and the late twelfth century vernacular Song of Antioch. In Robert’s fanciful armchair rewrite of earlier crusading chronicles, Bohemond of Taranto ‘enlightened by God's Spirit’ explained to a future convert a wonder that had puzzled this Pirrus – the presence in combat alongside the crusaders of a multitude of knights in shining white armour, whom the Muslims could not withstand. Sensing the Turk’s goodwill, the Norman warlord proposed, to ‘reveal’ (aperire) to Pirrus ‘some of the mystery (sacramentum) of our faith’ – a mystery being something spiritual that lies beneath the surface of a literal event. These incandescent knights, Bohemond explained, were the military martyrs whom God had sent from their heavenly mansion to succour His army (Robert the Monk 2013, 51; Rubenstein 2014, 200–201). In the Chanson d'Antioche, the crusaders often speak theology (Buc 2019). This takes often the form of long prayers before combat, with rich dogmatic contents (Bender and Kleber 1986, 40, 44. 50–51; Labande 1955 vol. 2, 62–80). The statement that the combat against the infidel was not ‘carnal’ but ‘spiritual’ was also attributed to Bohemond (Gesta Francorum 1972, 37; Lobrichon 1998, 97; Buc 2015, 90–91). Three hundred years later, Philippe de Mézières would dream of a vast Order of the Chivalry of the Passion of Jesus Christ, recruiting widely among Christendom’s knightly and patrician classes. Clerics are remarkably absent from his proposals for this Order. Some warrior members, however, would have clerical knowledge, including Church doctrine. This Chivalry would convert heathens by the sword but also through holy preaching and the example of a holy life. It remained a project, but Mézières’ utopian Order of the Chivalry of the Passion of Jesus Christ would have been yet another institutional synthesis of spiritual and material militias (Philippe de Mézières 2008; Buc 2017a, 216–217). The military orders may have institutionalized and thus restricted access to the fusion of monk and warrior, however, they never prevented the resurgence of the alternative, more broadly-based synthesis witnessed during the First Crusade. The later Middle Ages did see a few crusades with large popular participation, a strong component of devotional piety, and reformism, to wit, two peasant crusades in Hungary (1456 and 1514) and the Hussite counter-crusade of 1420–1436 (Housley 2002, 66–71; 2004, 104–110; Buc 2015, esp. 249–250; Pjecha 2018).

Evidently, not all warriors in Western and Central Europe were crusaders; not all crusaders lived up to the fusion of monk and warrior argued for by many chroniclers and essayists. Most men-at-arms, besides having to deal with the practical constraints of war, were conditioned by a double habitus, that of Christian and that of noble. As Richard Kaeuper (2009) has shown, knights adopted but even more, adapted, religious norms, in which their violence, which also meant suffering wounds, could be equated to martyrdom (see also Strickland 1996). Honour and vengeance also belonged to this aristocratic ethos. However, first, the crusading experience certainly complicated many warriors’ habitus and values. And, second, the constant interchange between just war (bellum iustum), an initially juridical concept, and holy war (Kortüm 2010, 103–115), meant that right intention, one of three conditions for a war to be just, was religiously coloured. An intentio is an intentio animi, the direction toward which the soul ‘tenses’ itself, thus an intentio is either virtuous or sinful desire. The warrior, therefore, had to be pure, first, for his combat to be legal according to the definition of a just war, second, in order to avoid sin, which God might well punish in defeat (Buc 2020, 13–14). Furthermore, just war and holy war were waged by a collective, which included both the actual fighters and the home front (the latter fought via prayers and monetary contributions). Therefore, the solidarity of warrior and nation entailed a semi-asceticism for the civilian population in time of war (compare the Aztec home front, Dodds Pennock in this volume). It demanded spiritual reform (demands concerning which there many examples, for instance, the imperial edict of 1454 [Schreiner 2000, 104]). Spiritual reform, given the overlap between religious and social spheres, might well include measures we moderns would readily categorize as social and political.

This potentiality – linkage of war abroad with reform at home – actualized itself many times in the Middle Ages and beyond, including during the American Civil War (Buc 2015, 25). At the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Pope Innocent III proclaimed his willingness to suffer martyrdom, in his words: to ‘drink of the chalice of the passion to defend the Catholic faith, or to succour the Holy Land, or to maintain ecclesiastical liberty’. The pope linked the ‘reformation of the universal Church’ to the ‘liberation of the Holy Land’. He wanted Christendom to celebrate a triple paschal sacrifice, ‘in the body, that there may be the passage to the Holy Place to free wretched Jerusalem; spiritual, that there may be a passage from status to status, [that is] to reform the universal Church; and eternal, that there may be the passage from one life to the other, to obtain glory in Heaven’ (Buc 2017a, 211–212, 214). Initially produced in the crusading matrix, the alloy of reform at home and holy war, when transferred to a more secular context, allowed the perpetration of righteous violence to bring the polity to a fairer, better state. It was not only, as Kantorowicz (1951) famously had it, ‘to die for the fatherland’; it was also to kill for the rectification of the fatherland.

Given its omnipresence from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, the crusade served as the matrix for the elaboration of religious forms, which then were translated to the world of ordinary armed violence in secularized or semi-secularized versions, in part thanks to the hybrids, whether occasional or institutional, between ascetic warfare and material warfare. Characteristics of the spiritual militia (the army in the service of Kantorowicz’ ‘Mystical Body’, that is the Church) were transferred to the physically warring militia (the army fighting for the ‘mystical political body’, that is the State, or warriors struggling to defend other ‘political’ institutions that were endowed with some sacrality). One trait transferred from oratores to bellatores was the intense fear of and hatred for the internal enemy; the other an inhibition of sexual violence.

From internal enemy of the Church to political traitor

War in a Christian universe entailed what may seem like a paranoid attention to side-switchers, and an intense negative aura attached to the same – something absent in a number of other political cultures, for instance in Japan between ca. 900 and ca. 1550 (Buc 2020, 14–21). Let us look first at the theological foundations for this. The theological opposition between good and evil, and between good and evil’s respective social-mystical bodies, corpus Christi and corpus diaboli, should have meant that it was evident who belonged to which camp. But the opposition generated in practice a sense that individual human wills were opaque, and individuals’ commitment to one or the other ‘body’, not transparent. That is, in order to account for the complexity of existing conflicts, there had to be hidden traitors in God’s camp (one would assume that the same dynamic is at play in other monotheisms, but see the introduction to this volume). The Apostle Paul had inveighed against ‘false brethren’ (Gal. 2.4) who would spy on the congregation. Closing a list of ‘perils’, the same Paul wrote of periculis in falsis fratribus (‘dangers coming from false brethren’, 2 Cor. 11.26). The Latin adjective falsus (-a, -um) denoted deceitfulness, lies, and perjury.⁶ The term passed into the languages of politics and ecclesiology, where it underscored a threat that would exist until the End of Times and the Last Judgement, that of internal enemies of the Church. In his commentary on Revelation, Haymo of Auxerre (d. ca. 865) divided the members of Antichrist into two categories: ‘The [mystical] body of the reprobates is composed of openly infidel humans and of false brethren’ (Commentary on Revelation 17, Patrologia Latina [1844–1864] vol. 117, 1149b). Augustine (d. 430), and elaborating on him Caesarius of Arles (d. 542), explained how it was conceivable that the just were still persecuted in an age ‘when there is peace, when the judges in the provinces honour the Church, when the Church does not suffer from enemy kings, when all the laws are it its favour’. It was because of the existence of these false brothers, who ‘persecuted’ the just with their sins (Caesarius 1953, 736; cf. Augustine Sermo 167, in Patrologia Latina [1844–1864] vol. 38, 609).

According to several theological schemes sequencing the unfolding of Sacred History, Satan tried to unhinge the Church by unleashing successively Jews, pagans under their kings, heretics, and treacherous false brethren (Goetz 1988, 313–315). The favour that the Church had enjoyed starting with Emperor Constantine's conversion had ushered in the era of inner enemies and treachery. The quarrels over the nature of Christ under Constantine's sons demonstrated as much. Constantius II (r. 337–362) sought to force the bishops opposed to his own position on Christ’s divinity, which favoured a version of Arianism, to make peace with the prelates of his camp. Coercion of the timid was the order of the day. After a council in Milan (355), where the Arian-leaning emperor failed to obtain the unanimous condemnation of Athanasius of Alexandria, herald of the opposing ‘Nicene’ side, Constantius sent Pope Liberius’s envoy Lucifer of Cagliari and two other bishops into exile. Reacting, Liberius (r. 352–366) praised the three as superior to the martyrs of the Great Persecution. Their foe was indeed greater, since more devious, thundered Pope Liberius:

Even though under a simulacrum (imago) of peace the Enemy of the human race has more energetically raged against the Church's members, yet you, bishops O most worthy in the Lord, have demonstrated a remarkable and unique faith, which both shows that you are proven in God and indicates already that you are martyrs destined to future glory. (…) You can deduct from the following how great a glory you shall obtain: If those who were crowned in [pagan] persecution [by the crown of martyrdom] felt only the bloodied swords of the persecutor, soldiers of God devout in all things, you experienced also the enmity of false brothers against you, and bore victory against false faith (perfidia). (Patrologia Latina [1844–1864] vol. 8, 1356–1358)

Bishops Lucifer, Eusebius and Dionysius did not fight a material war, but a much more serious combat against an illusionary and idolatrous peace and its minions. Other monotheisms could foster in the same way attention toward inner enemies. For instance, the Twelver Shi’ites would later assume the superiority of the battle against hypocrites, hidden within Islam, over the more material Jihad (Terrier 2017).

Christian imagination expected that treachery would accompany wars willed by God. Composed circa 1102–1106, Ekkehard of Aura's depiction of Western Europe's fervent mobilization for the First Crusade in 1095–1096 is a splendid illustration of this systemic suspicion. Satan sowed in the Lord's armies ‘false brothers and immodest persons of the feminine sex who pretended to be religious’. Ekkehard considered that travails had winnowed the crusade. But his contemporary Raymond d’Aguilers (1969, 114–115), writing likely in 1100 (Flori 2010), the apocalyptically-minded chaplain to Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse, considered that Christ's army would have to purge its own ranks and slay the traitors in its midst. Christ had commanded as much in a vision displaying His five bloody wounds. One would be justified to speak of a collective ‘paranoia’, and explain it with recourse to various theories bearing on psychopathology (critique in Buc 2015, ch. 3), were it not that the cultural expectation of treachery stemmed from Theology. The corollary of this concern was the need felt for purges of one’s own ranks. This may be a tendency inherent to monotheisms; it is at least present among the twelfth-century Maghribi Almohads (Garciá Arenal 2006, 171–173; Buresi in this volume).

The polemics of the intra-European Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229; see Oberste 2003; Pegg 2008) adapted the theme of falsehood and treason. This took place both on the side of the Northern Catholic crusaders and their local Occitan allies in the form of sermons and chronicles, and on the side of the resistors led by the Count of Foix and the Counts of Toulouse in the form of epic songs and poems (Aurell 1989, 51–55; 2018). By circa 1215, both parties considered that they fought with God's approval. One sang not unlike Liberius or Augustine of ‘feigned peace’, enfeingna patz (Aurell 1989, 51–52; Frank 1957, 72), of ‘false crusade’, falsa croisada (Aurell 1989, 52; 2018, 244–247; Frank 1957, 74), of false clerics and false priests. The enemy camp became the camp of deceit, lies, treason, and manipulation. In one among many made-up speeches in the Occitan Canso de la crosada, Guy, brother of the epic's arch-villain, the crusade leader Count Simon IV de Montfort, ruefully admits that God has now favoured the Toulousains per los nostres engans, ‘owing to our deceit’ (Canso 1957–1961 vol. 2, 294). Another speech, this time attributed to the good camp, that of the Toulousain resistors, confirms: God is now favouring the Count of Toulouse’s side and has come to his help,

since deceit (engans) and falsehood (falsesa) turn to dishonour. I have not yet seen a sermon by a false preacher that does not when it comes to its end turn into error. Those in the know make us understand (…) that he who is betrayed is more worthy than the traitor. (Canso 1957–1961 vol. 2, 150–152)

In the eyes of the anonymous, pro-Toulousain author of the Canso’s second part, the Catholic clergy are especially treasonous. They launched the crusade with promises of salvation. In explaining his hope that the siege of Beaucaire would constitute the decisive battle, Bertrand, a knight from Avignon, declaimed that ‘we have revealed evil and become aware’ that ‘the clerics lied [when they said] that we would have obeyed well Jesus Christ’ by killing with sword and fire and by exiling our lord [the Count]. We shall now follow a road ‘through which everyone can save his soul per dreit [“as is right”, or “through enforcing what is right”]’ (Canso 1957–1961 § 161:40–46, 2.136–138). The bishop of Toulouse constantly manipulates. He entreats the town's rebellious citizens, ‘starting sweetly, and with sights, pretending to be tearful’ (ab dossor, en sospiran sermona, ab samblanza de plors) to come to terms with the crusaders. Mentioning the charity that befits a shepherd, the bishop pledges to mediate a good peace between the townsmen and Count Simon. If the Toulousains put themselves in his mercy, they can be without fear that they will obtain his love and forgiveness.⁷ And of course, when Toulousains accept the bishop’s entreaties despite earlier broken clerical promises, it ends badly for them.

The camps fighting over the County of Toulouse, proclaims the poet, are captained respectively by Loyalty and Deviousness. It is an ordeal, a trial by battle. It will incriminate Deviousness, treason personified: ‘It seems from all this war's appearance / That God will return the land to His faithful lovers / Since Pride and Rightfulness, Loyalty and Deviousness / Have come to [render judicial] account (…)’ (Canso 1957–1961 § 160:1–4 vol. 2.128; Aurell 2018, 245).

For both Southern and Northern French, the Albigensian Crusade was a holy war. For this reason, it was apt to generate from each side accusations of falsehood and treason. On the invading side, the young Cistercian Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay considered duplicity an essential trait of the Southern resistance (1926–1939; see Buc 2022 (in print)). However ‘false’ and ‘traitor’ spread beyond the context of the crusade. Strikingly, the trope could even seep in a non-Catholic context. By the end of the Middle Ages, the initially ecclesiological lexicon had so much currency that (according to a royal letter of grace from 1376) a Spanish Jew could use it to insult a coreligionist intent on converting. This Spaniard alleged that the other Jew’s father, who had converted to Catholicism earlier, was un faulx chrestien reniez et qu'il avoit fait baptiser plus de IIIc Juifs (literally, ‘a false renegade Christian who had made over three hundred Jews be baptized’). The expression evidently did not mean ‘a person who was falsely a Christian’, but a ‘a renegade and traitor [to Judaism] who was now a Christian’ (Paris Archives Nationales JJ108.197v–198r, n° 352; with Kohn 1988, 187; 1985, 67–68).

More widely, secular conflicts within Christendom were written up and fought using this lexicon of ‘falsity’, meaning, ‘treason’. The anonymous Bourgeois de Paris penned his so-called diary in the first half of the fifteenth century as the Armagnac-Orléans and Burgundy factions were violently renting the Kingdom of France apart (Vaughan 1966; Schnerb 1988; Guenée 1992). To the Bourgeois, the Armagnacs were `faulx traistres’, false traitors. They were on a par with other ‘false’ persons mentioned in his Journal as religious deviants: the Jews desecrators of the Host (Bourgeois de Paris 1881, 21 / 1990, 47–48; see ibidem 372/417–418) and Joan of Arc, whose ‘false hypocrisy’ made the ‘simple people fall into idolatry’ since they believed that she was a ‘saintly virgin’ (Bourgeois de Paris 1881, 267 / 1990, 292). This said in passing, the ‘hypocrite’ had since long been in theological writings a synonym for false brother, who along with the heretic was a member of the coming Antichrist (Buc 2017b, 328, 336; see as well Booker 2018). ‘False’ was a fighting word, as Jacques de la Rivière’s violent death indicates:

(…) Sir Hélion de Jaqueville, a knight [in the service] of the Duke of Burgundy, visited him [Jacques de la Rivière] in prison, and among other words called him false traitor (faulx traistre). When Jacques de la Rivière immediately answered that Hélion de Jacqueville had lied and that he [Jacques] was no such man, the said Jacqueville fully angered (tout courroucé) struck Jacques on the head with a small hatchet he then had in hand, so hard that Jacques immediately died, there and now. (Monstrelet [1857–1862] vol. 2, 370; official proclamations used the same lexicon, see Jean Juvénal des Ursins [ca. 1450] 1861, 450)

Besides justifying violence, political treason called for religious remedies. On the one hand, executions of traitors incorporated the fire normally meted out to heretics (Buc 2020, 17–21). The following example comes from an epic, penned circa 1200, that imagines an intra-cultural conflict where faith was not the issue. The ‘traitor’ Hervé is executed on a high gibbet, with nine companions. He is quartered, four horses pulling at his four limbs, and ‘killed and dismembered’. Then ‘the traitors were burnt there and their ashes thrown to the wind’ (Chanson des Quatre Fils Aymon 1909, vv. 2727–2744, 361).

On the other hand, treason called for God’s vengeance. Victim of civil war's violence, its excessive taxation, and fluctuating prices, the people of Paris blamed the Armagnac, in a prayer to God alluding to eschatological retribution for the blood shed by the martyrs:

(…) they shouted in a loud voice much frequently and firmly, ‘Alas! Alas! True und most sweet God, when shall cease for us this most evil pain and this painful existence and this accursed war’, and they added many times, ‘True God, avenge the blood of Your saints (cf. Apoc. 6)! Avenge the blood of good creatures who die innocently at the hand of these false traitors, the Armagnacs’. (Bourgeois de Paris 1881, 163 / 1990, 177)

For the opposite side in the civil war, eschatological justice also coloured deaths and turned victims into, as it were, political martyrs. Less friendly than the anonymous Bourgeois to the cause of Burgundy, the Saint-Denis monk Michel Pintoin wanted to believe that all victims of the 1412 massacres, as they saw their last hour coming, had repented of their sins, and had asked Christ for forgiveness. And so, ‘about them one can well believe that they are to be numbered among those who will be saved at the Last Judgement (finaliter)’ (Pintoin [1839–1852] vol. 6, 248).

Treason justified gruesome public executions. The mercenary captain Colinet du Puiseux, who had handed over to the Armagnacs the bridge of Pontoise, was so rewarded. He was beheaded, and his severed limbs were hung at Paris’ main gates (Bourgeois de Paris1881, 17 / 1990, 44). But excessive, violent partisanship which might endanger one’s own cause could be tarred with the brush of treason. Thus the Bourgeois disapproved of the ‘false anger’ (falce ire) that along with other base passions of the soul had led the mob to massacre Armagnacs and others in Paris’ jails on 12 June 1418. The populace began at the royal palace's prison, shouting: ‘Tuez, tuez ces faulx traistres Arminaz! Je reny Bieu, se ja pié en eschappe en ceste nuyt’ (Kill, kill, these false Armagnac traitors! I renounce God, should any one escape this night). The armed Parisian commoners then fanned out to other jails, killing without mercy, absent ‘Reason and Justice’. The Prévôt of Paris tried to calm them, but

Anger and Madness answered through the people's mouth: ‘God be accursed, lord, as to your justice, your mercy and your reason! May God curse who will have any mercy for these false traitors Armagnacs [and] English; they are naught but dogs! For they have destroyed and harmed the Kingdom of France, and they have sold it to the English’. (Bourgeois de Paris 1881, 96–97 / 1990, 115–118)

Was it the blasphemous slogans that turned the Bourgeois against the pro-Burgundian mob? Or simply the massive murders absent due process of law? Be it as it may, his descriptions refract the gory offspring of fear of, and anger about treason. Fear of treason naturally harmed the prospects of peace (Oschema 2011). The Religieux de Saint-Denis (Pintoin [1839–1852] vol. 6, 332–334), after having described ecstatic scenes that followed a peace between the Dauphin and the Duke of Burgundy, sombrely added, ‘Because of the suspicions (ymaginaciones) that had arisen in us, we were hindered from going about in concord’ (for a much earlier era, see Booker 2018).

Atrocities at war enabled and inhibited

War and peace in dialectic

Hélion de Jacqueville had allegedly murdered in anger. The chronicles of this Franco-French civil war frequently mention love and hate. Evidently, the emotions involved in warfare were not all religious, and just as evidently, they did not all take religious form. However, love for those on one’s side and hate for the enemy, considered as virtues in the emotional repertoire of the early fifteenth century, derived some of their meaningfulness from the image of a God of love and anger, Who was to be imitated by His kings and by His chosen ones. The Psalmist, King David, had sung to the Lord, ‘Have I not hated them, O Lord, who hated Thee, and wasted away because of Thy enemies? I have hated them with a perfect hatred, and they are become my enemies’ (Ps. 138.21–22). In the 1970s, Jonathan Riley-Smith published a now famous article, entitled ‘Crusading as an act of love’ (1980); more recently, Susanna Throop rebounded with a Crusading as an act of vengeance (2011; see also Throop 2006; Buc 2006), in which she explored the lexical presence of vengeance, anger, and related emotion words. Complicating this positivity of love, anger, and hate, as we have seen, the emotions as leanings of the soul (intentiones animi) played a role in the definition of just war and regulated (to a point) its conduct. Thus hatred and anger were ambiguous emotions. Were they, from the standpoint of the clergy, permissible only in Holy War, and systematically criticized for secular conflicts? As said earlier, proper motivation and ‘right intention’ were a sine qua non for just war; conversely, rage and desire for vengeance made war unjust (Reinle 2012, 107–115).

A proper motivation was the achievement of a just peace, even at the cost of brutality. This seeming contradiction was not merely a factor of human nature – if human nature is indeed opposed to the shedding of human blood (see Gabbert, in this volume).⁸ Clearly, the litany of horrors attached to war could serve not only as an argument for peace, but also, paradoxically (as nowadays), as an argument for a quick military solution. Thus Richard II of England proposed in 1383 to his French counterpart Charles VI (r. 1380–1422) a duel to put an end to

… the shedding of Christian blood, a huge and sacrilegious destruction and abandoning of churches, monasteries, and other places of piety, the defloration of virgins, the rape of married women, and the quite unspeakable dishonouring of other women, the most merciless oppression of innocent commoners, and many other abhorrent evils. (cited in Moeglin 2012, 77–79)

Just as the literal ‘demonizing’ of side-switching, this readiness to wage war and employ arms for the sake of peace was a semi-secularized offspring of a theological dialectic (Buc 2015). In late May 1418, the Bourguignon faction took control of Paris by surprise, with the help of Parisian allies who opened the Porte Saint-Germain to two captains and their troops (Sizer 2007). Massive massacres ensued, casualties including not only key Armagnac leaders but also many commoners. Jean Juvénal des Ursins, an opponent of the Bourguignon faction, but also the pro-Burgundian Bourgeois de Paris, agree that the Burgundian men-at-arms’ slogan invoked ‘peace’. They came in through the gate, shouting aloud, ‘Peace, peace, Burgundy!’ (Jean Juvénal [ca. 1450] 1861, 542) or ‘Our Lady! Peace! Long live the King and the Dauphin and peace’. The Bourgeois further chalked the Armagnacs’ violent demise to their refusal of any reconciliation with Burgundy: ‘Fortune (…) turned its wheel with ill-will, avenging itself of their [the Armagnacs’] lack of gratitude, since they cared not a bit about peace’ (Bourgeois de Paris 1881, 90 / 1990, 109). In this decisive moment, one took arms to force peace: ‘To arms! Long life to the king and the Duke of Burgundy, and let those who favour peace, quickly assemble!’ (Ad armas, vivat rex et dux Burgundie, et qui pacem optant, cito congregentur, Pintoin [1839–1852] vol. 6, 230–232). The same slogan would animate the popular massacres of June 12th, 1418: ‘Long life to the king and the Duke of Burgundy, and let peace be made! (…) Truly, lest these Armagnac traitors are killed, neither the citizens nor the city will remain at peace’ (Pintoin [1839–1852] vol. 6, 244).

On a first level, that of conjuncture, it is evident that the Parisians, whose favour and armed help the Bourguignons curried, wanted peace, given that civil war was harming commerce and food provisioning. Michel Pintoin, the Religieux de Saint-Denis, also incriminates the motivations for the mass killings of June 12th: the argument for peace was uttered by a populace afraid of retribution for its plundering. By displaying murderous violence, the commons thus sought to bully the royal court into proclaiming an amnesty. However, considered at a second level, that of political culture, it made sense that war and killings were perpetrated explicitly to bring about a just peace. This connection was a corollary of the medieval Christian notion of pax. A just peace, not a bad peace, since just as there were good wars willed by God and false good wars (so bad wars) stirred up by Satan, so there could be good peace and false peace. This explains oscillations in the way in which war and peace were evaluated, even within a single author’s oeuvre (Naegle 2012; following Contamine 1993). It explains also why one so readily assumed that a peace was treasonable. The partisans of the Dauphin, the future Charles VII, excluded by his royal father from succession to the throne at the Anglo-French treaty of Troyes (1420), thundered against this peace-pact: It was not ‘a temporal or spiritual peace, but was filled with divisions, wars, murders, plunder, bloodshed and most horrible rebellions’ (Libelles 1990, 132; with Contamine 1993, 11). And finally, the notion of false peace explains the existence of veritable purges, patterned after those described in the Old Testament (Buc 2022 (in print)). In pro-Burgundian Paris as in Hussite Prague, false peace demanded violent action (Buc 2015, 196–198). The murderous energies of the Parisian crowds in the 1410s were fired by the conviction that ‘false peace’ or paix fourrée(s) had been engineered to the Armagnac’ advantage (for the expression, Naegle 2012, 292).

Blood and brains

Authors of high and late medieval epics relished in graphic violence.⁹ Some of it drew meaning and meaningfulness from crusade culture, some from non-religious fields. In Old Testament descriptions or prophecies of battles or violent mass cleansing, as well as in John’s Revelation, blood was a sign of God’s vindictive justice, past or future. The Bible provided, for instance, the image of the Lord clad in a robe stained red on the day of vengeance (Isaiah 63); that of Israelite warriors drunk on the blood of the slain enemies (Zach. 9.15); and that of the sword drunk with blood of Jeremiah 46.10 and Deuteronomy 32.42. The model could become an actual script: apocalyptically-minded First Crusaders arguably tried to enact the sacred harvest at the End of Times, with its famous overflow of blood all the way to the horses’ bridles (Apoc. 14.20; Buc 2015, 100–105, 264–272; Buc 2017b, 316–320).

Biblical massacres were massive. God foretold the fall of Assyrian Niniveh. It would take place by means ‘of the shining sword, and of the glittering spear’. There would be ‘a multitude slain, and a heavy destruction. (…) no end of corpses, and they shall fall down on the dead bodies [of already slain men]’ (Nahum 3). Chivalric literature recycled this tumbling of bodies. A much prized epic imagined that as the crusaders stormed Antioch, ‘you would have seen our stalwart men circling through’ the city, ‘killing the pagans and cutting limbs, sending the one falling and tumbling over the other! They soil all their swords’ blades with blood and brains. Great were the rivulets of blood that issued from the corpses’ (Chanson d’Antioche 1976, CCLX, vv. 6310–6314, 314). An abundance of body parts and gore graces also the Canso de la crosada ([1957–1961] 1961, for example § 161:75–79, 2.140–141, § 165:44–48, 2.166–167), an epic inspired by the Chanson d’Antioche, and secular epics such as Raoul de Cambrai (for example 1995 CXXVI, v. 2388, 158–159; CL, v. 2804, 182–183; CLXI, vv. 3116–3119, 200–201; CLXXI, vv. 3293–3299, 212–213). The twelfth-century house history of the Angevin counts projected back crusade massacres onto legendary conflicts against invading Danish Vikings. Here too ‘(…) the fields were intensely purpled by blood. You would have seen guts hanging, cut heads, and mutilated bodies dying everywhere’ (Chroniques des comtes d'Anjou 2013, 42–43).

But the interest in skulls slit and brains spilled was not biblical (with one exception, the smashing of babies’ heads against walls, Isa. 13.16 and Ps. 136.9; see Buc 2015, 266–268). De-braining likely entered crusade epics because, along with splitting an opponent in two from helmeted head to belt, it epitomized the best possible sword-thrust. In the Oxford Song of Roland, oozing brains grace the finale of two twinned duels that reveal God’s will: the decisive single combat between Charlemagne and the Muslim Caliph Baligant, and the trial by battle fought by Charlemagne’s champion Thierry to determine the guilt of the traitor Ganelon (CCLXII, vv. 3015–3019, CCLXXXVI; vv. 3926–3929). The one duel demonstrates the absolute superiority, ethical and religious, of Christianity over materialistic Islam, while the other reveals the absolute priority of loyalty to the king (gendered spiritual) over and above kin solidarity (demeaned as materialistic). The excessive anti-hero, Raoul, also dies in this way (Raoul de Cambrai 1995 CLIV, vv. 3152–3153, 190–191). So does also, later, Raoul’s killer Bernier (CCCXXXVIII, vv. 8233–8234, 490). Proportionally, spilled brains (cervele, chervelle) are much more frequent in one crusade epic, the Conquest of Jerusalem, than in the related Song of Antioch. It is likely not a coincidence that this takes place in the Conquest of Jerusalem’s depiction of the storming of the Holy City. A leitmotiv is ‘the earth [variant: his sword] was covered with blood and brains’. Brain-spilling is understandably also attributed to perverse and evil figures, as a perversion. In total rage and despair, the false crusader Simon of Montfort blasphemed ‘by the Holy Cross’ that his banner would ‘imbibe itself and be sated (abeuratz e pascutz) with blood and brains’ (Canso 1957–1961 §164:40–53, 2.158–161). Oozing cervele was thus a narrative marker, negative for unjustified excess, positive for the sublime. It does not seem to have come from the initial biblical or theological lexicon. However, it was taken up into it in the twelfth century. Crusade epics mustered it when the hand of God was at play in sacred history, wielding the human sword of His agents.

For this reason, chronicles and epics painted trans-cultural religious battles with much more gore than their intra-cultural counterparts. There was, however, a form of internal warfare whose literary representations approximated those of holy war in the dimension of gore: the violence that took place across another master cleavage (Gorski and Türkmen-Dervisoglu 2013, 204), that of class. The conflicts where aristocratic mounted knights faced off against plebeian footsoldiers, for instance French chivalry to Flemish bourgeois militias during the fourteenth century (Kortüm 2001, 39–40; Morillo 2006, 38), did generate comparable textual levels of dismemberment, blood, and scattered brains as holy war. Needless to say, the degree to which holy war (including crusades against heretics) was actually more savage than class war is hard to measure. But to the well-born and the writers who served them, aristocratic class violence, while not justified by Christianity, had a secular sacrality of its own. Jean Froissart’s visceral dislike for plebeian rebels is well known. Like his main source for 1325–1378, Jean le Bel (1904–1905), Froissart (ca. 1337–ca. 1405) spilt much ink on the atrocities committed by insurgents against their aristocratic betters, and enjoyed describing the nobility’s just retaliations. Yet at the battle of Roosebeke (1382), it was not the French nobles but the more plebeian men-at-arms in the king’s service who mercilessly mowed down as many of the bourgeois of Ghent as they could. Their axes escherveloient testes, de-brained heads (Froissart [1867–1877] vol. 10, 170–171). In the main, in Froissart’s Chroniques, the military upper class’ cruelty is much less graphic. What sense can we make of this? It was a matter of noblesse oblige! Aristocratic violence was necessary against the wild, demonic plebe; it had to be performed visibly, both in text and in reality, to assert lordship; but it had to take place with proper measure in order to assert difference vis-à-vis the beastly commons and even the nobles’ own underlings.¹⁰

Only the foe rapes

One atrocity was hedged by religious taboos, rape. Rape is legion in medieval European chronicles. The shameful and shameless abuse of women – nuns, virgins, and matrons – appears with numbing frequency. It graced or disgraced the Franco-French and Franco-English Hundred Years’ War. A prophecy of this war’s evils, reported as fulfilled by the Religieux of Saint-Denis Michel Pintoin ([1839–1852], 286–288), announced among other horrors that ‘holy women and consecrated nuns would flee in all directions, having been soiled and raped’. Frequently narrated, the sexual abuse of holy virgins, maiden, and married women accompanies the massacres of monks and priests and the killing of the elderly (Signori 2000). Sometimes comes an added ornament, the ripping open of the bellies of pregnant females and the extraction therefrom of the live foetus (Jean Juvénal des Ursins [ca. 1450] 1861, 543), likely a reference to Isaiah 13.18.¹¹ Such sins in the conduct of war, joined to others, explained defeats in war. Allegedly, before the decisive battle of Agincourt (1415), the English king Henry V, in rivalry with his distant Valois cousins for the French crown, ‘demonstrated to his captains and people’ that from olden times his predecessors had maintained to have a right to the kingship of France, and that he had come there on good and just title, to do all in his power to conquer it. Henry had not come to the continent

(…) as a mortal enemy, for he had not consented to arson, [or] kidnapping, violating or raping girls and women, as had been done in Soissons. Rather, he wanted to conquer fully softly what was his, not at all destroy it. And he told them that he had true hope in God that he would win the battle, since furthermore his opponents were full of sins and did not fear their Maker (…).

Right after Agincourt, during a festive dinner to his distinguished captives, King Henry underlined again that his victory had been

(…) God’s work, Who was their enemy on account of their sins. And one had to marvel that worse had not befallen them. For there was no kind of evil or sin to which the French had not given themselves over, no faith or loyalty to any one in marital unions or otherwise. They perpetrated sacrilege by plundering and violating churches. They took by force [raped] all sorts of people, religious women and other [women]. They robbed all the people and destroyed it without grounds. Et pource il ne leur pouvoit bien venir. (‘And for these reasons nothing good could come their way’, Jean Juvénal des Ursins [ca. 1450] 1861, 521, 520)

In Henry V’s eyes, his Valois rivals were illegitimate, an illegitimacy demonstrated among other things by their un-Christian breaches of the laws of war. While no friend of the English branch of the Capetian family and its claims to the French crown, Jean Juvénal ([ca. 1450] 1861, 496) had reported the Soissons atrocities, including those sexual, perpetrated by the Valois side, and hinted that the Valois defeat at Agincourt was God's punishment for these.

But no source glories in rape for the side that it favours, and very few admit to it. While the Chanson d’Antioche exulted in blood and gore, and rejoiced in the cut limbs and brains of the Muslim enemy, it condemned rape. When Antioch is stormed, it not the normal crusading soldiery, but the grotesque, semi-animal and plebeian Tafurs, ‘lowlife men’ (ribauts), who ‘take their pleasure from the beautiful Saracen women’. Immediately the poet comments: ‘this bore heavily on the King of Paradise, Jesus’ (Chanson 1976, CCLXII, vv. 6413–6414, 317–318).¹² Incidentally, we meet here the class aspect present in Froissart: the uglier stuff is perpetrated by lowly fighters. When it comes to the enemy, violent sexual defilement is another matter: self-evidently the foe rapes and delights in rape. After the Italian Holy League had defeated King Charles VIII’s French at the battle of Fornovo (1495), the victors found in the booty a book in which were ‘drawn naked (al naturale) many women whom they [the French] had raped in many cities’ (Corio [1503] 1978 vol. 2, 1584; with Margaroli 1995, 379). One alleged Greek eyewitness report of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 depicted the Great Turk (Mehmed II) raping Grand Duke Notaras’s beautiful daughter on Hagia Sophia’s high altar, a crucifix under her head as a pillow (Signori 2000, 154; source in Weigl and Grüneisen 1969 vol. 5:1, 13). Dishonouring females was also taboo, and therefore attributed to the foe. In August 1418, the Parisians rioted violently, massacring real or putative enemies of good governance and of the reform of the realm. Their opponents understandably denied them these authentic aims. The royalist Saint-Denis chronicler, rather, painted scenes of collective madness and illicit violence. The chief executioner Capeluche ‘alone mounted on a horse’ took

the leadership of a motley multitude on foot. At his orders, the citizens killed and hacked more than two hundred very important citizens. He crowned these execrable homicides with most evil cruelty: He stripped naked in the sight of all one distinguished and most beautiful noble damsel and beheaded her, with the sole explanation that he considered she was an Armagnac. (Pintoin [1839–1852] vol. 6, 264)

This asymmetry (we do not dishonour women, the enemy does) is likely religious in origins. Arguably, it had been promoted (although not initially produced) by the crusade matrix.¹³ It was a trait whose condition of possibility was Christianity, thus not present in all societies, although other religious conceptions or norms could also limit sexual violence at war, others to a point foster them (see Buc, Introduction to this volume; Gabbert in this volume). Over the centuries, in part owing to the crusades as matrix, but not simply in crusade contexts, properties of the oratores (in this case chastity) had transmigrated to the bellatores.

Did one ever feel regret at killing? At least Jean Juvénal des Ursins, an enemy of the Bourguignons who had almost lost his life in a Paris riot, thought so. God sent an epidemic upon the Paris region that struck down many perpetrators of the summer 1418 massacres – thieves and members of the Paris commune. They left this world without confession, a confession that they refused because they despaired of God's mercy:

There was well seven to eight hundred of them who died. And one exhorted them to confess and repent from the evil deeds that they had perpetrated. But they answered that they would not request God pardon for these, because they knew well that God would not pardon them. And when one demonstrated to them or preached God's mercy, it was to no avail. And so they died as desperate men, which was greatly wretched.

Even more spectacularly, right after this, Jean Juvénal recounts a suicide out of despair:

There was a notable person from Senlis who was present at the said massacres, and then returned to Senlis. One day, though, as he thought about what he had done, or consented to be done, suddenly he left his dwelling, shouting through the streets, ‘I am damned!’ Then he threw himself down a well, head first, and thus killed himself.

Whether true or false, the story indicates that certain forms of horror were off-limits and could be punished mercilessly by God (Jean Juvénal des Ursins [ca. 1450] 1861, 545).

Conclusion

These considerations on how Christianity shaped medieval warfare are both tentative and limited. Tentative, since surmised connections cannot be absolutely demonstrated, limited, since a full-length essay could have developed other aspects of religion’s formative power. One will mention the sacred topography of warfare, including in and around cities walled by protective sanctuaries to the saints (cf. Haverkamp 1987), and the meaning of pain and wounds, coloured by the influence of asceticism (Kaeuper 2009). Further, as is evident, non-religious dimensions should not dismissed as conditions of possibility. Plausibly the prevalence of braining in crusade narratives and description of just vengeance originated initially in warrior culture. Furthermore, noble armed violence was inflected by class considerations, both as motor and as inhibitor.

In conclusion, this article’s argument has been that theology influenced some (not all) dimensions of non-religious warfare and armed violence in the High and Late Middle Ages, by giving them form, meaning, and meaningfulness. Such processes of secularization or semi-secularization were enabled (1) by the crusade’s centrality as myth and experience as well as by its intimate connection with social and political reform, and (2) by the reciprocal appropriation of characteristics between warriors and monks or clergy. They account for the intense fear of, and hatred for side-switching (treason), as well as reactions to this cultural paranoia. They account also for some of the forms that atrocities took, or did not take, in fact and in narratives – a focus on blood but a tendency to avoid rape. Catholic Christianity was one condition of possibility that explains armed violence in the ‘West’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For the appropriateness of the concept of religion, see the introduction for this dossier.

2 Kantorowicz proposes a purely intellectual history. For the historical process, see Housley (2000).

3 This article uses ‘secular’ and ‘secularization’ in the Schmittian sense, bypassing the discussion in Sociology and Anthropology about the West and the Rest, which involves different concerns and a totally different definition (see Asad 2003). Asad’s critique has led to the emergence of the thesis of ‘multiple secularities’ (see Künkler et al. (2018); and for Japan Rots and Teeuwen, eds. (2017)), which while fascinating is not topical here.

4 Susanna Throop (2020), whom I read in revising this article, rightly underlines the absence of strict boundaries between crusading violence and other forms of Christian violence. Her chapter was likely too limited in scope to discuss more than the one common denominator she identifies, charity for the in-group.

5 A fine study, Smith (2011) might have been more explicit about what she owes to Harnack.

6 ‘Traitor’ itself is initially a religious term (the normal Latin words for treason are proditio, infidelitas, and perfidia). A traditor is a person who ‘hands over’ (tradere) the Holy Scriptures to the pagan persecutor, see Frend (1951). A related exemplar is Judas traditor, who sold Jesus Christ to His enemies (thus the prime traitor who passed from Christendom’s initial core (the group of twelve apostles) into the corpus diaboli). A history of the term’s evolution would warrant an article of its own. Ca. 800, Alcuin cursed contemporary ‘accomplices of his [Judas’] wickedness, who also now persecute His [Christ’s] members’ (Patrologia Latina 100, 907d). Clauses protecting Church property vowed transgressors to Hell ‘cum Iuda traditore’ (with the traitor Judas).

7 Canso (1957–1951) xxvi, in particular § 175:11–12, 2.226. It is a galïament, deceit or treason, § 177:67, 2.242. In § 179:20–42, 2.250–252, wicked Simon praises the bishop, who ‘with words and pacts deceived’ his enemies. One of his knights sees the planned plunder of Toulouse as a breach the mutual oaths between Simon and the citizens. The theme of clerical deceit runs through the chapters devoted to Simon's vengeance against Toulouse, Canso xxiiff, 2.199ff. See as well § 169:11–18, 2.182, where a companion of Simon, opposing the count himself, pleads that to break an oath that was coerced, a sagramen forsat, is not treason.

8 A classic discussion is Azar Gat (2006). Biologists however have subverted the notion of deep dispositions created in the far prehistoric past and transmitted genetically to present human agents. See e.g. Callebaut (2011, esp. 345–347).

9 Blood and gore also in abundance in the Ayyoubid chronicler and companion of Saladin Al-Iṣfahānī (1972).

10 In the counter-attack against the insurgent Jacques (1358 C.E.), the nobles push and cut with their swords; it is the men-at-arms who ‘butcher (abatoient) right and left like sheep’ these villains, described as ‘dark (noirs), short, and badly armed’ (Chroniques [1867–1877] vol. 6, 57).

11 Whereby the enemy perversely apes a God-willed purge of the wicked (see Buc 2015, 268).

12 A statement of no small weight, see the parallel wording when a Christian priest is slain at the altar during mass, XXI, vv. 558–561 (Chanson 1976, 43).

13 A rare instance in Julian of Toledo, Historia Wambae regis §10, from the later seventh century: ‘Behold, judgment by combat is at hand, and it would be pleasing that a person fornicates?’ (cited in Buc 2015, 266).