chapter fourThe Spread of the Organized Peace
The peace of God
Ensuring the peaceful state of the church and realm was an ancient
obligation of western kingship. When Louis the Pious had shown him-
self incapable of preventing his three sons from pulling the Carolingian
commonwealth apart, he was condemned by the Church as a disturber
of the peace (perturbator pacis). At the nadir of royal power to the west
of the Rhine in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the bishops themselves
took the initiative in the defence of peace.^1 The chroniclers’ descriptions
of the fervent assemblies, at which the relics of the saints were paraded
and great shouts of ‘Pax, Pax, Pax’ sent up,^2 show the aspirations of the
peace movement quickly transcending the original purpose to protect
church property. The legislation of episcopal councils for its enforce-
ment throughout whole dioceses gave the ideal of peace a new social
depth and territorial definition.
It was promoted first by bishops drawn from the nobility of southern
France. At provincial councils held by the archbishops of Narbonne and
Bordeaux in 989–90, the robbers of churches and unarmed clerks were
anathematized, but also those who stole the goods of the peasantry. The
‘Miracles of Saint Vivian’ describe a ‘meeting of the saints and an
infinite gathering of people’ in the Auvergne at this period, to make pro-
vision ‘for the state of the commonwealth and the establishment of an
unbreakable peace’ (pro statu rei publicae ac pacis inviolabili firmitate);
in the diocese of le Puy bishop Guy summoned a placitum Deito apply
the council’s decisions.^3
(^1) On the peace movement generally, see H. Hoffmann, Gottesfriede und Treuga Dei, MGH
Schriften 20 (Stuttgart, 1964); H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘The Eleventh-Century Peace and Truce of
God’, Past and Present, 46 (1970); T. Head and R. Landes (eds.), The Peace of God: Social
Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000(Ithaca, NY, and London:
Cornell UP, 1992).
(^2) Rodolfus Glaber, The Five Books of the Histories, tr. J. France (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1989), 194–7.
(^3) Analecta Bollandiana, 8 (1889), 263–4;Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima
Collectio [Concilia], ed. J. D. Mansi (Venice, 1759), xix. 89–90, 103–4; Hoffmann, Gottes-
friede, 17; C. Lauranson-Rosaz, ‘Peace from the Mountains: the Auvergnat Origins of the
Peace of God’, in The Peace of God, 104–34; R. Bonnaud-Delamare, ‘La Paix en Aquitaine au
xiesiècle’, in La Paix, Recueils de La Société Jean Bodin, 14 (Brussels, 1961), i. 415–87.