A Cultural History of Peace in the Medieval Age

209 Pages·2022·3.652 MB·English

by  Walter Simons

A CULTURAL HISTORY
OF PEACE
VOLUME 2
i
A Cultural History of Peace
General Editor: Ronald Edsforth
Volume 1
A Cultural History of Peace in Antiquity
Edited by Sheila L. Ager
Volume 2
A Cultural History of Peace in the Medieval Age
Edited by Walter Simons
Volume 3
A Cultural History of Peace in the Renaissance
Edited by Isabella Lazzarini
Volume 4
A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Enlightenment
Edited by Stella Ghervas and David Armitage
Volume 5
A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Empire
Edited by Ingrid Sharp
Volume 6
A Cultural History of Peace in the Modern Age
Edited by Ronald Edsforth
ii
A CULTURAL HISTORY
OF PEACE
IN THE
MEDIEVAL AGE
Edited by Walter Simons
iii
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2020
Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020
Walter Simons has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identifi ed as Editor of this work.
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Cover image: Allegory of good government, peace © DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI / Getty Images
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iv
CONTENTS
LIST OF IL LUSTRATIONS vi
G ENERAL E DITOR’S PR EFACE ix
A BBREVIATIONS xiv
Introduction: Was there Peace in the Middle Ages? 1
Walter Simons
1 Defi nitions of Peace 13
Jehangir Yezdi Malegam
2 Human Nature, Peace, and War 33
Gregory M. Reichberg
3 Peace, War, and Gender 51
Katrin E. Sjursen
4 Peace, Pacifi sm, and Religion: A Universal Longing Unfulfi lled 65
Anne Marie Wolf
5 Representations of Peace: Heavenly Dreams, Earthly Needs 81
Walter Simons
6 Peace Movements: Peace in the Communes 101
James A. Palmer
7 Peace, Security, and Deterrence 119
Jenny Benham
8 Peace as Integration: The Many Sides of Medieval Peace 135
Geoffrey Koziol
N OTES 149
BI BLIOGRAPHY 153
C ONTRIBUTORS 177
IN DEX 179
v
ILLUSTRATIONS
INTRODUCTION
0.1 St Francis arranging peace between a wolf and the citizens of Gubbio,
by Sassetta. 2
0.2 Cross with inscription Pax-Lux / Rex-Lex . 8
CHAPTER 1
1.1 Division of the Carolingian Empire at the Treaty of Verdun, 843. 16
1.2 The Deditio : Henry IV of Germany kneels to seek forgiveness at
Canossa in 1077, before Queen Mathilda of Tuscany. 19
1.3 Laon Cathedral, France, West Front. 24
1.4 Frederick I Barbarossa, German emperor. 29
CHAPTER 2
2.1 Triumph of the Catholic Doctrine embodied by Thomas Aquinas,
by Andrea Di Bontaiuto. 34
2.2 Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s E thics . 41
2.3 Statue of Averroë s, Cordoba, Spain. 43
2.4 Portrait of Pope Innocent IV, writing. 45
CHAPTER 3
3.1 Women following Peter the Hermit on Crusade. 53
3.2 Marriage of Margaret of Anjou and King Henry VI of England,
to signal peace between England and France. 55
3.3 Women besieged in a fortifi ed town. 57
3.4 Joan of Arc at the siege of Orlé ans. 61
CHAPTER 4
4.1 Maimonides’ draft of his legal code, M ishneh Torah , in his own hand. 70
4.2 Knight of the Order of Knights Templar during the battle of al-Bocquee
or Buqaia (Lebanon) in 1163. 77
4.3 A knight, probably a crusader, in a gesture of homage. 78
vi
ILLUSTRATIONS vii
CHAPTER 5
5.1 Pax overseeing the fl ight of L abor (suffering), Metus (fear), and Fraus
(deceit), in a manuscript of Prudentius, P sychomachia , about 1000 A D . 82
5.2 “The Good Tree” ( Ecclesia ), displaying the fruits of the Spirit, including
Peace ( Pax ), in autograph manuscript by Lambert of St Omer. 83
5.3 Antiphon for Peace ( Da pacem, Domine, in diebus nostris ) in a
Book of Hours. 85
5.4 The Heavenly Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation. 86
5.5 Heavenly and earthly communities compared in Augustine, C ity of God ,
after a fi fteenth- century engraving. 87
5.6 Celestial Jerusalem in Guillaume de Deguileville, The Pilgrimage of
Human Life. 89
5.7 Hieronymus Bosch (c . 1450–1516), T he Wayfarer or Peddler . 90
5.8 Crusaders besieging Jerusalem. 91
5.9 Judas’ kiss, by Giotto. 96
5.10 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Peace and War . Detail: Virtues of
Good Government. 98
5.11 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Peace and War . Detail: Peace. 99
5.12 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Peace and War . Detail: Effects of
Good Government. 100
CHAPTER 6
6.1 St Francis’ exorcism of demons from the city of Arezzo’s. 104
6.2 A preacher’s audience. 105
6.3 The Kiss of Peace. 108
6.4 A Bianchi procession, depicted in 1401. 113
6.5 San Bernardino of Siena, preaching in the Campo, Siena,
by Sano di Pietro. 117
CHAPTER 7
7.1 Emperor Louis the Pious treating for peace, and the sack of a town. 120
7.2 King John I of England does homage to King Philip Augustus
of France. 125
7.3 Charlemagne receives hostages of Tassilo of Bavaria. 126
7.4 King John II of France as a hostage in London. 128
7.5 Drawing up of a treaty between France and England. 131
viii ILLUSTRATIONS
CHAPTER 8
8.1 An idealized depiction of an ecclesiastical council in the Utrecht
Psalter of c . 830. 137
8.2 The Peace and Truce of Lillebonne, Normandy (1080). 143
8.3 Swearing an oath on a reliquary in the S achsenspiegel Landrecht ,
Landesbibliothek Oldenburg, Germany, 1336. 144
GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
RONALD EDSFORTH
When people learn that I study and teach peace history, they often look puzzled and ask
me, “Does peace have a history?” A Cultural History of Peace is an emphatically positive
response to that question. Yes, peace has a history. The original scholarly essays collected
in these six volumes clearly show that peace always has been an important human concern.
More precisely, these essays demonstrate that what we recognize today as peace thinking
and peace imagining, peace seeking and peace making, peace keeping and peace building
have long recorded histories that stretch from antiquity to the twenty-fi rst century. All of
us who have contributed to A Cultural History of Peace believe that present and future
generations should have the opportunity to recognize and understand the importance of
this peace history.
Very few universities and colleges had faculty who taught and researched peace history
before the end of the Cold War. Even today, most professors who do peace history moved
into it from other specializations in History or other academic disciplines. Most
contributors to A Cultural History of Peace are professional historians, but Anthropology,
Sociology, Political Science, Journalism, Art History, Religion, and Classical Studies are
also represented. These fi fty- six contributors work on four continents in thirteen different
countries. Their participation in this project tells us that peace history has earned a global
recognition in academia that not so long ago was unimaginable. Their essays build upon
prior scholarship, but they also introduce new research and new interpretations. As a
whole, A Cultural History of Peace highlights our humanity, something that has been for
too long overshadowed in history by the inhumanity of war and other forms of violent
confl ict. Pursuing answers to new and seldom asked questions, these collected essays
expand our knowledge of when, how, and why people in the past pursued peace within
their own societies and peaceable relations with people from other societies.
The South African novelist Nadine Gordimer wisely observes, “The past is valid only
in relation to whether the present recognises it” (2007: 7). In other words, what happened
in the past is not necessarily history. History is made when scholars produce meaningful
answers to the questions they ask about the past. The past cannot change, but history can
and does change when scholars ask new questions, and when they use previously
undiscovered or ignored evidence to develop new interpretations of the past. Evidence of
what people said or did, or said they did, are basic materials out of which scholars shape
answers to questions like “Does peace have a history?” Of course, to answer this particular
question about the past, we must have in mind some defi nition of peace. Like most people,
we probably immediately think of peace as n ot war , a classic defi nition that describes
peace in negative terms, as an absence of the type of violent confl icts that still loom so
large over popular histories and stories about the past. The American psychologist and
peace activist William James succinctly summed up this common way of framing of the
past, simply stating, “History is a bath of blood” (1910: 1).
James’ description of history still plays well in a world that during the last century
experienced the massive casualties and devastation of two world wars, genocides, and
ix