replaced by Chris-tian festivities. In short, existing holy places and times were to become
christianized and so remain holy.
The holiest objects at these new Christian shrines were the bodily remains of people
like Martin of Tours. Crowds flocked to their tombs to ask these friends of God to
intercede on their behalf, and the keepers of their shrines recorded and proclaimed their
miracles. Oaths sworn on relics became a normal part of judicial procedure, and at the
beginning of the 9th century relics were declared an essential element of all churches in
the Frankish realm: altars lacking them were to be destroyed, and any newly consecrated
churches had to contain them. Access to the necessary relics became an important
element in the alliance between the Carolingian rulers and the papacy, since Rome was
the great repository of the bones of saints and martyrs; and from Rome these relics
flowed north to France, as items of legitimate commerce or objects of pious theft.
In the 11th century, a renewed interest in the lives of Jesus and the Apostles redirected
devotion and inspired new forms of piety. Pilgrims continued to frequent local shrines,
but increasingly they plied the routes that led across France to Rome or Santiago de
Compostela in northwestern Spain, stopping along the way to visit the shrine of Mary
Magdalene at Vézelay or the statue of the Virgin at Le Puy—or worship at any of the
hundreds of other churches dedicated to Mary. Others set off for the Holy Land, where
they could follow the footsteps of Jesus himself. Concern for these holy places helped
inspire those armed pilgrimages known as the Crusades. Returning crusaders brought
back a fresh harvest of relics: a lumberyard’s worth of fragments of the True Cross and
the crown of thorns for which Louis IX (r. 1226–70) built that great reliquary known as
the Sainte-Chapelle.
Renewed interest in the apostolic life also encouraged reverence for those living holy
men who best embodied the evangelical ideal, which was increasingly defined in terms of
apostolic poverty. Making a striking contrast to the gold and jewels that adorned the
relics of the saints, popular preachers like Robert d’Arbrissel, Bernard de Tiron, and
Vitalis de Savigny abandoned secure clerical livelihoods, dressed in rags, and withdrew
to the wilderness. But paradoxically, those who most resolutely renounced the world
found that an awestruck world pursued and enfolded them. Throngs of admirers gathered
around her-mits like Eon de l’Étoile in Brittany or followed Peter the Hermit to disaster
on the First Crusade. Occasionally, these unstable groupings achieved a more regular and
enduring structure, as when Norbert of Xanten (d. 1134) and his followers gave rise to
the Premonstratensian order; far more often, these holy hermits left no trace in the
historical record, beyond a brief and disapproving notice from some ecclesiastical
chronicler.
Of much greater concern to the authorities was the spread of heresy, which in the 12th
century, for the first time since the conversion of the Franks, evoked a broad popular
response. Some heretics reacted violently to what they saw as an excessive
materialization of worship. Peter de Bruys attacked the central elements of Catholic
worship, rejecting infant baptism, the doctrine of the Mass as a sacrifice, the value of
intercessory prayers for the dead, and even the use of church buildings; he trampled on
the cross, and eventually was consigned to a bonfire that he had prepared to consume
crucifixes. But for the most part, heterodox spirituality was informed by the same
apostolic and ascetic ideals that inspired orthodox movements of reform and religious
revival. Between 1116 and 1145, Henry, a renegade monk from western France, called
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