Millennium, Holland, Tom [manga ereader txt] 📗

too, like Odilo’s monks, could take up their place in the line of battle, to serve as the warriors, not of Antichrist, but of God Himself.

Much would depend upon the castellans’ answer; and not only in the neighbourhood of Cluny. To the west, in the uplands of the Auvergne and across the great duchy of Aquitaine, where order had collapsed no less grievously than in Burgundy, attempts were being made to set the world back upon its feet that were, if anything, even bolder and more radical than Odilo’s. As early as 972, more than two decades before the Council of Anse, clergy from the Auvergne had gathered at Aurillac, site of the tomb of St Gerald, that splendid model of how a warrior should behave, to demand that the local castellans cease their oppression of the poor; by 989, the trend for peace councils had spread to Aquitaine; and over the following decade, more than half a dozen would be staged across southern France. The instigators, by and large, were not abbots like Odilo, but bishops: men of impeccably aristocratic lineage, whose ancestors, ever since the unimaginably distant days of Roman Gaul, had believed themselves charged by Christ Himself with the maintenance of a Christian society. Now, fed up as they were with the collapse of law and order, and despairing of the ability of dukes or counts, still less of the distant king, to do anything about it, they were resolved to try to succeed where the princes themselves had failed. In this ambition, ironically enough, they were actively encouraged by the most prominent of all the region’s great aristocrats, William, the Duke of Aquitaine: for he, far from feeling that his toes were being trodden on, was desperate to shore up his crumbling authority in any way that he could. Yet it was a sign of how strange the times had become that even his backing was of less value to the bishops, those magnificent princes of the Church, than was that of the despised and bleeding poor. Desperate for assistance against the castellans, and resolved to make one final defence of their vanishing freedoms, peasants of every class, ‘from the most prosperous, through the middling ranks, to the lowest of all’, flocked to the peace councils — and in such numbers that it seemed to startled observers as though they must have heard ‘a voice speaking to men on earth from heaven’. Febrile and ecstatic was the mood; and the bishops, resolved to bring all the pressure that they could upon the castellans, ‘those wicked men who like thornbushes and briars ravage the vineyard of the Lord’, did not shrink from harnessing it.

So it was that the councils were summoned, not to the cloistered security of great churches, but rather to the open fields: those same fields where the peasantry, by ancient tradition, had always held their assemblies, meeting as men who were free. ‘And great were the passions that were stirred. High in the air the bishops lifted their crosiers, in the direction of heaven; and all around them, their hands upraised, their voices become a single voice, the people called out to God, crying, “Peace, peace, peace!”’

And the foes of peace, the castellans – what was their response to be? As in Burgundy, so in Aquitaine: hesitation, initially, and some alarm. The bishops were far too sacrosanct, and the peasants far too numerous, merely to be ridden down. Nor, the truth be told, were either the most intimidating presence at the councils anyhow. To ride into a field where the Peace of God had been proclaimed was, for a castellan and his followers, to enter an arena that appeared suffused by the very breath of heaven, numinous and terrifying, where swords and spears, if unsheathed, might prove worse than useless. Beyond the seething mass of the peasantry, beyond the gorgeously arrayed ecclesiastics with their crosses, ‘embellished all over with enamels and gold, and studded with a great variety of gemstones flashing like stars’, and beyond the stern-faced princes, the true enforcers of the Peace of God stood arrayed in silence. From their crypts all across southern France the saints had been escorted, led in candlelit procession amid the chanting of psalms, the clashing of cymbals and the blowing of ivory trumpets: an awesome sight. In the south it was the habit, ‘a venerable and antique custom’, to enclose the remains of the sainted dead within statues of gold or silver, so that they looked, brought together, like a phalanx formed out of metal. There was none there, it was true, who rivalled St Peter in rank; and yet who could dispute the terrifying power of those saints that had been assembled? Awaiting the castellans at the peace councils were relics known to have halted terrible epidemics, to have freed innocent prisoners from their chains, to have restored eyeballs to the blind, to have brought mules back to life. Why, in the very fields consecrated to the Peace of God, the holy remains had been giving certain proofs of their potency: for ‘many a bent arm, and many a bent leg’ had been straightened, ‘and in such a manner that the miracles could not be doubted’. Well, then, might the knights in attendance at the councils have bowed their heads, slipped down from their saddles and fallen to their knees, there to swear a solemn oath before the glittering army of reliquaries that they would indeed keep God’s peace.

This was a step not to be taken lightly. Fearsome were the sanctions proclaimed against any horseman who might subsequently go back upon his word. A lighted candle, extinguished by the fingers of a bishop himself and dropped into the dust, would serve to symbolise the terrible snuffing out of all his hopes of heaven. ‘May he render up his bowels into the latrine’ such was the venerable curse. Filth, indeed, was the natural condition of all oath-breakers: for it was well known that, at the very