Sombra del Estado de Seguridad Nacional
L A B IOPOLÍTICA , LAS R ELACIONES DE P ODER Y LA D ESECHABILIDAD
For the purposes of this section and overall, it must be understood that Cluny did not necessarily constitute a specifically Burgundian identity, and that as we have argued in the introduction, the simple fact of geography does not mean that its interest or sphere of influence was constrained to Burgundy alone. Indeed, quite the opposite; Cluny represented an international network of monasteries with a variety of political, ecclesiastical, and social concerns, and when it intersected with the dukes of Burgundy, the relationship was not always co-operative or warm. However, due to the fact of its being centred in Burgundy, and the vast amount of attention paid,
particularly in older historiography, to the role of the Peace of God in the formulation of
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crusading theology, it is useful to have the material laid out, even if not substantially revised, as part of this work, as our understanding of Burgundian religious history, the prehistory of the crusades, and the state of the scholarly debate on both is less complete without it. Arguments for Cluny’s unqualified support of the crusading movement often rest on the fact that Pope Urban II, instigator of the First Crusade in 1095, served as prior of the abbey from 1070–80, and
maintained the relationship after his elevation to cardinal and then pope.55 Additionally, a letter from Peter, prior of Sens, to Hato, bishop of Troyes, written in c. 1145, claimed that the pope had acquired in Cluny the ‘knowledge and eloquence which were able to enlighten all the faithful and gave to the Christians the courage to crush the infidels’.56 As Giles Constable pointed out, however, this document postdates Clermont by fifty years and does not prove any Cluny-wide support of the endeavour. As has been generally argued, and as we will demonstrate, Cluny’s relationship to the crusades emerges as ultimately inconclusive, cautious, and carefully
negotiated. Nonetheless, its major role in eleventh-century Iberia, treated in the final section of the chapter, cannot be ignored or overlooked, and this context must first be understood.
In brief, Cluny was established in the year 910 by Duke William I of Aquitaine, who granted the abbey a charter ensuring that it would be free from secular authority and answer only to the Pope.57 It quickly became a centre for pioneering ecclesiastical reforms: outlawing married
55 Giles Constable, ‘Cluny and the First Crusade’, in Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century (Aldershot :
Ashgate, 2008), p. 193. Reprinted as ‘Cluny and the First Crusade’, in The Abbey of Cluny: A Collection of Essays to Mark the Eleven-Hundredth Anniversary of its Foundation, ed. by Giles Constable (LIT Verlag, 2010), 197–211.
56 Constable, ‘Cluny and the First Crusade’, p. 187. See also H.E.J. Cowdrey, ‘Cluny and the First Crusade’, Revue
bénédictine, 83, 3-4 (1973), 285–311.
57 Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny, ed. by Auguste Bernard and Alexandre Bruel, 6 vols (Paris: Imprimerie
nationale, 1876-1903), I, act 112, pp. 124–28: ‘Placuit etiam huic testamento inseri ut ab hac die nec nostro, nec parentum nostrorum, nec fastibus regie magnitudinis, nec cujuslibet terrenæ potestatis jugo, subiciantur idem monachi ibi congregati; neque aliquis principum secularium, non comes quisquam, nec episcopus quilibet, non pontifex supradicte sedis Romanæ, per Deum et in Deum omnibusque sanctis ejus, et tremendi judicii diem contestor, deprecor invadat res ipsorum servorum Dei, non distrahat, non minuat, non procamiet, non beneficiet alicui, non aliquem prelatum super eos contra eorum voluntatem constituat’. See Giles Constable, ‘Cluny and Rome’, in The Abbey of Cluny, pp. 19–41; Constable,‘The Reception-Privilege of Cluny in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in Le Gouvernement d'Hugues de Semur à Cluny: Actes du Colloque scientifique international,
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clergy, caring for the poor, focusing on the liturgy and hours of prayer, and other efforts to restore ideological purity to a weakened and ‘worldly’ church.58 However, one should not forget the question of why William I, a southern French nobleman who had no particular influence in the region or inclination toward the church (though he earned the soubriquet ‘the Pious’ for his monastery foundations) would make such an establishment in the first place. The answer seems to lie with his wife. Duchess Angilberga was the daughter of the ill-fated Boso of Burgundy and Provence and the niece of Richard the Justiciar, and had married William shortly after Boso’s death.59 Furthermore, after William’s death in 918, the dukes of Aquitaine forgot about Cluny for another hundred years, while it continued to be generously patronised by Angilberga’s
Burgundian relatives. Cluny was thus established as the sort of monastic house that the Bosonids had invested in for several generations, and not a new order in and of itself.60
Similarly, there had been a spate of monastery foundations in Burgundy during the previous several decades: Vézelay, Pouthières, Saint-Bénigne in Dijon, Charlieu, and Saint- Philibert in Tournus all dated their origins between 858 and 875.61 Cluny’s foundation in 910 fitted within this emerging pattern of monastic patronage by Burgundian elites. Moreover, its origin under the sponsorship of an Aquitainian duke and a Burgundian duchess matches rather Cluny, septembre 1988 (Cluny: Ville de Cluny, 1990), 59–74; Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Cluny’s Immunities in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries: Images and Narratives’, in Die Cluniazenser in ihrem politisch-sozialen Umfeld, ed. by Giles Constable, Gert Melville and Jörg Oberste (Münster: LIT Verlag, 1998), 133–63; and H.E.J. Cowdrey, ‘St Hugh and Gregory VII’, in The Crusades and Latin Monasticism, 11th-12th Centuries, ed. by H.E.J. Cowdrey (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 173–90. A case is made for the Cluniac reforms inspiring the Gregorian reforms directly in Jean-Francois Lemarignier, ‘L’exemption monastique et les origines de la réforme grégorienne’, in Structures politiques et religieuses dans la France du haut Moyen Age. Recueil d'articles rassemblés par ses disciples, ed. by Jean-François Lemarignier and Dominique Barthélemy (Rouen: Université de Rouen, 1995), 285–337.
58 See generally Cluniac Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages, ed. by Noreen Hunt (London: Macmillan, 1971)
and Steven Vanderputten, Reform, Conflict, and the Shaping of Corporate Identities: Collected Studies on Benedictine Monasticism, 1050-1150 (Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2013), especially ‘How Reform Began: ‘Traditional’ Leadership and the Inception of Monastic Reform in Late Eleventh-Century Flanders’ (3–30) and ‘Fulcard’s Pigsty: Cluniac Reformers, Dispute Settlement, and the Lower Aristocracy in Early Twelfth-Century Flanders’ (51–80).
59 Bouchard, ‘Burgundy and Provence, 879-1032’, pp. 332–33. 60 Bouchard, ‘Burgundy and Provence, 879-1032’, p. 333. 61 Bouchard, ‘Burgundy and Provence, 879-1032’, p. 333.
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well, if inadvertently, with the greatest reform for which it would become known: the Peace and Truce of God. This project first appeared in Aquitaine and Burgundy at the end of the tenth century, and developed more extensively in the early eleventh. The eleventh-century Cluniac historian Ralph Glaber constructed it in benevolently providential terms, supposedly arriving in previously war-torn regions almost exactly in the year 1000 to portend a new era of peace and plenty.62 Duby, following Glaber and his own preference for the millennium, concurrred, arguing for its appearance in Burgundy around 1023 and reaching full influence in France by 1033.63 It was the result of a number of church councils attempting to address the problems of social disruption and violence engendered by the lack of a strong central authority.64
While the ‘feudal anarchy’ thesis is a long-dated one, resting on the modern tendency to equate the term ‘feudal’ with petty territorial violence or primitive or unstable political
arrangements, Gregory Smith argued in 2002 that the ecclesiastical authors who complained about the state of society at the time ‘cannot be relegated dismissively to the barren category of stylized monastic reactions to stylized representations of pillaging and plundering’.65 The word ‘feudal’ has been stripped of much critical value, and some historians have abandoned it altogether, while others still find some purpose for it, but only if carefully constructed.66 Either way, the political situation and secular leadership in Burgundy had been precarious for
62 Ralph Glaber, Historiarum Libri Quinque, ed. and trans. by John France (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), pp. 195–99: ‘Anno a passione Domini millesmo, memorate cladis penurias subsequente, sedatis nimborum imbribus, respectu diuine bonatis et misericordie, cepit leta facies celi clarescere congruisque ethereis flare placidaque serenitate magnamitatem Conditoris ostendere, telluris quoque tota superficies amicabiliter uirens frugum habundantiam funditus inopiam expellendo portendere [...] Dehinc per Arelatensem prouintiam ac Lugdunensem, sicque per uniuersam Burgundiam usque in ultimas Francie [...]’.
63 Georges Duby, ‘Laity and the Peace of God’, in The Chivalrous Society, trans. by Cynthia Postan (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980), p. 123.
64 H.E.J. Cowdrey, ‘The Peace and Truce of God in the Eleventh Century’, Past and Present, 46 (1970), 42–67. 65 Smith, ‘Sine Rege, Sine Principe: Peter the Venerable on Violence in Twelfth-Century Burgundy’, p. 5. See also
Dominique Iogna-Prat, Ordonner et exclure: Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l’hérésie, au judaïsme et à l’islam, 1000-1150 (Paris: Aubier, 1998) and R.W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).
66 Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe: From the Breakup of the Western Roman Empire to the Reformation (New
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generations, and it cannot be assumed that the church was deliberately manipulating or exaggerating circumstances to consolidate its power.67 But nonetheless, the responsibility of peacekeeping in society is a profoundly political one, and was one of the central expectations of medieval kingship.68 Indeed, we find Gerald of Florennes, bishop of Cambrai, opposing the Peace of God upon its appearance in his territories, on grounds that the emperor was able to do this as usual, and the church was not needed in the role.69 Furthermore, while Gerald is formally credited with introducing it to Flanders in 1024, his biographer tells us that Baldwin IV, count of Flanders, was the actual agent behind the decision, and had to force the bishop into agreeing.70 This is the inverse from what one might cynically expect – that the Peace was merely a vessel for the church to usurp a previously secular political function – and reveals the change in thought which was still taking place. Nonetheless, the Peace challenged social expectations and redefined power dynamics; in prescribing certain days of the week, feast days, holidays, and other
religiously significant dates as off-limits for violent actions, and punishing wrongdoers with ecclesiastical sanctions, it also implicitly and then explicitly assumed the ‘authority to determine who could employ arms, for what purpose, on whose command, against whom, and when’.71
67 As Gregory Smith remarks, ‘To be sure, we have learned long since not to talk about “feudal anarchy “ in twelfth-
century Burgundy or anywhere else, though it has proven harder to find a suitable replacement for the term. But the just demise of a facile modern phrase need not impugn beyond recall all those medieval sources that once served as its justification.’ (Smith, pp. 32–33.) Some of the dated sections of Cowdrey should be read in light of this.
68 Tomasz Mastnak, Crusading Peace: Christendom, The Muslim World, and Western Political Order (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), pp. 1–10. See also our discussion of Bisson and White in the first section of this chapter, notes 30 and 34, and for comparative perspectives on the Peace, Frederick S. Paxton, ‘History, Historians, and the Peace of God’ in The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000, ed. by Thomas Head and Richard Landes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 21–40, and in the same volume, Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier, ‘The Enemies of the Peace: Reflections on a Vocabulary, 500-1000’, pp. 58–79.
69 Duby, ‘Laity and the Peace of God’, p. 128.
70 Geoffrey G. Koziol, ‘Monks, Feuds, and the Making of Peace in Eleventh-Century Flanders’, Historical
Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 14 (1987), 531–49 (p. 531). See also Stephen Vanderputten and Diane J. Reilly, ‘Reconciliation and Record Keeping: Heresy, Secular Dissent and the Exercise of Episcopal Authority in Eleventh- Century Cambrai’, Journal of Medieval History, 37 (2011), 343–57.
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The idea that a Christian could attain salvation through military service, and by fighting ‘infidels’, was by no means pre-established or self-evident in the eleventh century. Indeed, it went diametrically against the opinions of earlier theologians and church fathers.72 The
ambitious and reform-minded Pope Gregory VII played a large part in eliding the divide between militia Christi and militia saecularis. Traditionally, the former fought its battles with prayer,
asceticism, piety, and scripture, whereas the latter handled the unholy, demeaning work of physical warfare.73 However, Gregory conflated Christus and saecularis, promoting a view of the ideal soldier of Christ as partaking in active and vigorous work against His enemies.74 But to a monastery as powerful as Cluny, which had established itself as best able to offer salvation through its strict focus on the liturgy and prayerful seclusion, this ideal was not destined for easy acceptance. Bouchard, in her studies of the twelfth-century hierarchy of Burgundy, has identified the fact that while the secular and religious elite often came from the same powerful families and had similar concerns, their goals were not identical.75 It is pertinent to apply this distinction here as well. While Cluny became a prominent supporter of the crusades under the abbacy of Peter the Venerable in the mid-twelfth century, this previously resulted in some historians positioning Cluny as the birthplace of crusading ideology from the start, which Étienne Delaruelle found very thinly, or not at all, supported in the primary sources.76 Indeed, the nearly complete lack of reference to the crusades in the late eleventh century cannot be taken to mean that the well-
72 Carl Erdmann treated some of the misconceptions about the genesis of crusading: that Christianity is inherently
inclined to ‘world domination,’ that the church was warlike from its earliest origins, that crusades were merely ‘erroneous pilgrimages’ to Jerusalem that somehow and inexplicably turned violent, that they could not be explained apart from the ‘religious exuberance’ of the age, or that they were mere political and diplomatic gambits for
economic resources and secular credentials. As he pointed out, early theologians such as Tertullian (c.160–c. 225) and Origen (c. 184–c. 253) had such a negative view of war that they did not think it possible for a Christian to fight at all, and considered the soldier’s life profoundly irreligious. Carl Erdmann, The Origins of the Idea of Crusade, trans. by Marshall W. Baldwin and Walter Goffart, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
73 Erdmann, Origins of the Idea of Crusade, p. 201. 74 Erdmann, Origins of the Idea of Crusade, p. 202. 75 SMC, p. 45.
76 E. Delaruelle, ‘The Crusading Idea in Cluniac Literature of the Eleventh Century’, in Cluniac Monasticism in the
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connected abbey was somehow unaware of them, but instead reveals a deeper tension and ambiguity about a competing model of militia Christi.
In any event, the Peace and Truce of God, whether intentionally or not, functioned as a broader political project, with the result of converting now-unlawful civil wars and localised feuds against fellow Christians into a unified effort against the ‘infidels’. Nor were Muslims an initially obvious choice of enemy. For the previous nine hundred years, Christianity had targeted pagans, philosophers, heretics, and Jews, building itself into a movement remarkable in late antiquity for its intolerance of competing theological perspectives.77 Furthermore, its paradigm for a holy death was that of the martyrs, meekly submitting to persecution at the hands of Roman authorities rather than recant their faith. Thus for the Cluniac writers of the late eleventh century, the obvious successors to the martyrs were not crusaders, but priests.78 In this framework, Cluny itself represented an ideological geography of the Holy Land, a place where God’s real work was already being performed to perfection, and which did not need or require rivals.79
This is not to argue that Cluny was uninterested in or actively disapproving of crusading efforts. Indeed, its own encounter with Muslims in the late tenth century had sparked an outraged response across France. After Abbot Maiolus of Cluny, returning from Rome in July 972, was kidnapped by Muslim raiders in the Alps, he sent a hasty ransom note to the monastery in which he described his predicament as ‘the hordes of Belial have surrounded me’.80 Scott G. Bruce has
77 See Karen King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), and Robert
M. Royalty Jr., The Origin of Heresy: A History of Discourse in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity (New York: Routledge, 2013). For more on how this discourse was shifted to Muslims, see John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
78 Delaruelle, ‘Crusading Idea in Cluniac Literature’, p. 207. 79 Delaruelle, ‘Crusading Idea in Cluniac Literature’, p. 211.
80 Syrus, ‘Vita Sancti Maioli B.H.L. 5179’, in Agni Immaculati: Recherches sur les sources hagiographiques
relatives à saint Maieul de Cluny (954-994), ed. by Dominique Iogna-Prat (Paris: Les editions du Cerf, 1988), pp. 153–285 (p. 253): ‘Dominis et fratribus cluniensibus, Maiolus miser captus et catenatus. Torrentes Belial
circumdederunt me, preoccupauerunt me laquei mortis. Redemptionis pretium, si placet, mittite pro me et his qui una mecum capti tenentur’.
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traced the historical etymology of ‘Belial’ to argue that Maiolus was making a particular claim about the wicked or heathen religion of his captors, and the response expected as a result.81 Furthermore, while payment was secured and Maiolus was released, the incident conferred a sort of living sainthood on him, was retold extensively by Cluniac authors between 1000 and 1150,82 and within a year of its occurrence, motivated William I, count of Arles and Provence, to lead an army south to wipe out the Muslim frontier state of Fraxinetum (now La Garde-Freinet, dep. Var, arr. Draguignan, near Saint-Tropez, France).83
Hence we do see Cluny playing a particular role in the prehistory of the crusades, from its strategic use of Maiolus’ ordeal in the tenth century to its careful management of papal
interference in Iberia in the eleventh (next to be examined). However, the claim that it was involved in the movement from its earliest origins, and that the Peace of God was conceived to give the church the direct legal and political license to prosecute a war against Muslims, is not borne out by the evidence. In fact, the First Crusade represented a serious challenge to Cluny’s claims of having perfected Christian duty and embodying a semi-Holy Land, and had to be dealt with as much as the simultaneous rise of the Cistercians, reacting austerely against perceived Cluniac luxury and worldliness.84 It is possible to read the interplay between these groups – Cluniacs, Cistercians, and crusaders – as part of the larger renegotiation of Christian ethics, and
81 Scott G. Bruce, ‘An Abbot Between Two Cultures: Maiolus of Cluny Considers the Muslims of La Garde-
Freinet’, Early Medieval Europe, 15 (2007), 426–40 (p. 433).
82 This incident is also described at more length in the work of Ralph Glaber, which adds (or invents) details
regarding Maiolus’s saintly interactions with his captors. See Ralph Glaber, Historiarum Libri Quinque, pp. 18–23.
83 Bruce, ‘An Abbot Between Two Cultures’, pp. 427, 432. Mohammad Ballan has questioned the troublesome
tendency of Western historians, some language of which is certainly present in Bruce’s article, to treat the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet as a ‘historical anomaly’ or a mere nest of thieves and robbers intent on making life difficult for Christian kings, rather than considering the reasons for their presence and the questions it raises. See Mohammed Ballan, ‘Fraxinetum: An Islamic Frontier State in Tenth-Century Provence’, Comitatus, 41 (2010), 23–76.
84 See Emilia Jamroziak, The Cistercian Order In Medieval Europe, 1090-1500 (Abingdon: Pearson, 2013); The
Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, ed. by Mette Berkdal Bruun (Cambridge: Cambridge University