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Garsington Road, Oxford OX

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Main Street, Malden, MA

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Was there a Carolingian anti-war
movement?

An absurd question, inviting the simple answer no? Perhaps! and those
who are looking forward to an uncovering of something like the Vietnam
War protest movement in the thickets of Carolingian hagiography or a
forerunner of Count Tolstoy

1

in the unpublished and often unindexed
minor exegetic and homiletic texts in ninth- and tenth-century manuscripts
will be disappointed. (I merely add here that if there were anything of
that kind, it is in these miscellaneous opuscula, often unique, that I would
expect to nd the evidence.) But raising the question seems a way of
testing some of the assumptions that underlie much recent discussion
of war, peace and the repression of violence in the period

c

.6001000,
and in particular the use of texts inherited from earlier centuries.
I begin with a remarkable episode in pre-Carolingian and English
history for which Bedes

Ecclesiastical History

is the only source. In 679
the kings Ecgfrith of Northumbria and thelred of Mercia, both third-
or second-generation Christians, fought a battle on or near their mutual
border, presumably for control over adjacent territory. In the battle,
Ecgfriths younger brother (a sub-king) was killed, thus according to
the earlier biography of Wilfrid of York fullling a bitter prophecy
made by the bishop on the occasion of his deposition in the previous
year. Further bloodshed involving the two people or nations seemed
now inevitable. But at this point Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury
intervened, completely extinguishing this great and dangerous re by
his healing advice:

2

to such an effect that although there was potential
for further ghting the kings agreed to a peaceful solution and no
further lives were demanded for the death of the kings brother, only
the appropriate money compensation being paid to the king who would
have been the avenger. As the wording shows, this was not quite a
straightforward episode of peace and war, since feud (vendetta) at the
highest level was possible with the additional complication that the

1

The Kingdom of God is within You

, Chapter 10, Uselessness of Violence for the Destruction
of Evil etc..

2

Bede,

Historia Ecclesiastica

IV, 21, ed. B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969) p. 400.
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Donald A. Bullough

Mercian king was married to a sister of the dead man and forestalled
by the payment of the appropriate compensation to the potentially
avenger-king. It is, however, consistent with Theodores reported
rulings on the penances due for revenge killing, i.e. quite high, but
sharply reduced when wergeld is paid. And it is reconcilable (just!) with
the surprisingly trivial penance (forty days only) prescribed for killing

in publico bello

:

3

for this is under orders, not the will of the killer and
not a stage in a revenge killing; and if the war in question had been
initiated

de furore, non legitima ratione

(to use Isidores basic formula-
tion) the sin and therefore the penance due would be that of the (royal)
commander.

4

Bede concludes his account with the statement that this
peace treaty between the kings and their kingdoms lasted a long time,
which may well be true: Wilfrids biographer says, less generously, that
in Ecgfriths remaining six years he won no more victories.

5

Is there anything comparable in Carolingian Francia? It is not easy
to detect it. One reason may be that Charlemagne and Louis the Pious
were happy to enter into relationships with other Christian kings
subsumed under the phrase

pax et amicitia

although the documented
examples are with kings who were not their territorial neighbours
(Northumbria, Mercia, Asturia) and fought most of their major wars
against non-Christians. But no bishop is reported to have intervened to
prevent the overthrow of the Lombard royal dynasty or the ultimately
less-successful campaigns against Benevento: although in both cases there
is evidence of the coming and going of clerical (and other)

legationes


including Alcuins pupil Joseph in attempts to nd peaceful settlements
without the necessity of military campaigns, and there is the complicating
issue of threats real or perceived to the

patrimonium Petri

. If Einhards
assertion that certain of the Frankish leaders had been utterly opposed
to Pippins earlier campaigns against the Lombards and were prepared
to desert

6

had any historic basis and the unusual statement in the Royal
Annals that in 773 Charles consulted with the Franks as to what he
should do suggests that it did have this probably simply means that
they judged that the risks and inconveniences of a campaign hundreds
of miles away far outweighed any prospective rewards.

7

Which is one
kind of anti-war statement, although hardly a principled one.

3

P.W. Finsterwalder,

Die Canones Theodori Cantuariensis und ihre berlieferungsgeschichte

(Weimar, 1929), U version I.iv.6, p. 294. The equivalent ruling in G (113) says

si in proelium
cum rege

; (

ibid

. 264) the U version is taken over by the eighth-century Continental penitential
known as the

Excarpsus Cummeani

, but I have not noticed it elsewhere.

4

Compare I.vii.2 surely specic to seventh-century England De pecunia quae in aliena
provincia ab hoste superato rapta fuerit . . . quia iussio regis est. Finsterwalder, p. 298.

5

Vita Wilfredi

,

c

.20,

MGH SRM

VI, p. 215.

6

Einhard,

Vita Karoli Magni,

ed. G. Waitz,

c

.6, p. 8.

7

Annales Regni Francorum

, ed. F. Kurze,

MGH

, p. 34.
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Was there a Carolingian anti-war movement? 367

Paul the Deacon, whose four years in Francia, 782786, were one of
the positive consequences of the Lombard kingdoms annexation, spent
his rst Christmas there with Charlemagne at Thionville. The next
year, however, the king and his armies wintered in Saxony. Apparently,
in a lost letter, Paul was summoned to join him and declined to go:
as a verse reproach composed for the king by some poet who was with
him reveals, Paul had declared that the frightfulness of war was not for
him, his right hand was effective neither in defence nor attack, and his
proper environment was

urbs

not

castra

.

8

Two years later he was on his
way back to the peace and quiet of Monte Cassino.
Alcuins earliest two letters (written, I believe, from York in 784) are
among the very few in which he refers to a campaign undertaken by
Christians against Christians;

9

but this is, after all, in northern Ireland
(a

natio perbarbara

, he remarks later

10

), and he tells the bishop of Mayo
that in no way must he allow himself to be involved in ghting with
secular weapons.

11

After his rst stay in Francia, he was back in England
while the royal court was in the German south-east, campaigning
against the Avars. But having rejoined the court as it took up residence
at Aachen and then departing for Tours, as the decade ended (798/9)
he found himself more than once begging to be excused from joining
the king at the front, the

terra dissensionis et belli

. As he puts it in the
earliest of his letters on the topic,

12

he understood the happiness of
being near the wise Solomon, but for him Jerusalem, land of peace and
joy, lay elsewhere: and what could a weak Flaccus do under arms, as
someone educated for peace, not trained for ghting.

13

Even the
subsequent invitation to come and soothe the savage breast of young
warriors with the sweet sound of verse (dulcem versicationis
melodiam inter horribilis armorum strepitus) could not tempt him.

14

It is, of course, arguable that Paul and Alcuin were closest to the
residents of Bloomsbury who in 1914 opposed involvement in the war
because they believed that members of an elite (themselves!) should be
exempted. Yet the refusal to be associated with military activities, and
not merely the desire for a comfortable, peaceful, existence could still

8

MGH Poetae

I, pp. 701, or the better edition by K. Neff,

Die Gedichte des Paulus Diaconus

(Munich, 1908) pp. 1068.

9

Alcuini Epistolae

,

MGH Epistolae

IV, Karolini Aevi, no. 2, p. 19.

10

Alcuini Epistolae

,

MGH Epistolae

IV, Karolini Aevi, no. 287, p. 446.

11

Alcuini Epistolae

,

MGH Epistolae

IV, Karolini Aevi, no. 287, pp. 4456.

12

Alcuini Epistolae

,

MGH Epistolae

IV, Karolini Aevi, no. 145, pp. 2315, at p. 234: this part is
end April 798.

13

There is a surely conscious contrast here with a letter written in my view a week or two earlier
in which he compliments an unknown

miles

at the court for being someone who although
trained to use his limbs can also use his head.

14

Alcuini Epistolae

,

MGH Epistolae

IV, Karolini Aevi, no. 149, pp. 2415, at p. 242. Did he or
his patron have epic or lyric in mind?
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Donald A. Bullough

have been a genuinely held position. But could these two, who were after
all among the best-read men of their day, or any of their contemporaries
or the generation of Alcuins pupils, have been familiar with any text
or texts that justied or supported it?
The Greek New Testament

eirene

(English peace), had at least
overtones of imperturbality irrespective of circumstances, a harmonious
state of mind, as well as meanings derived from the Hebrew

shalom

.

15

The Vulgate Latin

pax

had quite other semantic associations. Most
early and high medieval writers were unwilling or unable to explore the
theological dimensions and contented themselves with much more
limited, essentially pragmatic, notions of worldly

pax

. It is quite likely
that to many of them even Augustines celebrated denition of peace,
the one beginning Peace between mortal man and God is ordered
obedience, in faith, to eternal law; peace between men is ordered
concord was unknown: the early medieval manuscript tradition of the
concluding books of the

City of God is a much more tenuous one than
that for those that precede them, and this denition is in Book 19.
16
The seventh-century Defensors derivative Liber Scintillarum could
indeed claim to be more clearly rooted in Biblical theology. It has no
section on Peace as such; and Defensor quotes none of the more than
250 references to pax in the Vulgate Old Testament, not even from
Proverbs which is the book he uses most often. It is under Patience
that he quotes the Sermon on the Mount, one of Pauls references to
personal tranquillity and the Apostles call to good relations with others;
while the citations he credits to Basil are mostly concerned with the
inner peace achievable by created Man.
17
His other three quotations
from Pauls Epistles in which pax occurs are in the brief chapter on
Discord.
18
Bede, of course, was a familiar with a catholica pax which has some-
thing in common with Augustinian concord and right order: but his
immediate source is almost certainly (in some cases certainly) Pope
Gregory.
19
And elsewhere in his narrative, as in 679, pax and foedera
pacis may simply be the ending of ghting or the agreement not to
ght. In parenthesis, I am not sure quite what to make of the fact that
insofar as his use of epithets provides the evidence, Bedes view of the
15
Friede in Theologisches Begriffslexikon zum Neuen Testament I, pp. 5439. Frieden in Theologisches
Realenzyklopedie XI, pp. 60546.
16
Augustine, City of God, XIX, 13.
17
Defensor Liber scintillarum, ed. H. Rochais, CCSL 117, p. 7, II 1 (Sermon on the Mount); II
67 (Paul), II 3240 (Basil), p. 16.
18
Liber scintillarum, c.36 De Discordia quoting Paul at 46 ed. cit. p. 140. Since other long
chapters are on e.g. Silence, I am sceptical of claims that the compiler was also speaking to
the world outside the monastic enclosure: rather, he is underlining the contrast.
19
Catholica pax, Historia Ecclesiastica II, 2, p. 134.
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Was there a Carolingian anti-war movement? 369
wars he records is surprisingly neutral. His bella are neither horrida nor
saeva and only once acerba (which others thought a more appropriate
epithet for northern English ale), and they can but do not necessarily
produce desirable results.
20
Perhaps this is indeed because his model
is the wars fought by or against the Israelites in the books of the Old
Testament. Conversely the only claim that a war is iustum is put into
the mouth of Oswald before he defeated the Briton Caedwalla, whom
Bede had previously described as wreaking a just vengeance on his
apostate predecessors; and the one other just revenge is the collective
one of the invading English on the abominable Britons.
21
The literary
model in the last example, as Bede makes abundantly clear by departing
from the text of Gildas which he is using here, is certainly Old Testament
(and specically IV Kings XXIX) not Augustine. And Bedes inuence
on later historians can hardly be over-estimated if often difcult to
establish in detail.
Against this background, the intermittent pacist or anti-militarist
patristic interpretations of the Gospel precepts had little chance of
gaining a hearing. Now that Theodore of Canterburys exegetical glosses
are at last in print, it is possible to claim for him a familiarity with
some of Origens homilies on Numbers (in the original? or in Runuss
translation?), but probably nothing else of his writings.
22
Even the
most formidably learned of Carolingian scholars would have had little
opportunity of encountering the statements in that sense in writings of
the early Latin Fathers. Tertullians De corona was included in the
corpus of (Montanist period) writings of which an early ninth-century
copy was probably commissioned and certainly presented to his cathedral
church by the egregious Archbishop Agobard of Lyons.
23
It is a common-
place of manuscript studies that copying indicates interest: but that
interest can be of very different kinds. No quotation or even signicant
echo of Tertullian has been detected in Agobards own writings; and
although the manuscript was obviously read with some care by the
learned magister Florus, he does not seem to have annotated the text of
De corona. (The manuscript has no known progeny.) Tertullians
fellow-African Cyprian was widely circulated and quoted; but his one
explicitly pacist pronouncement is in one of the least-known of his
writings. The most generally accessible text would therefore have been
the passage in the sixth book of Lactantiuss Divine Institutions
20
acerua pugna I, 2, p. 20; aceruas inruptiones III, 24, p. 288.
21
Quia iusta pro salute gentis ostrae bella suscepimus: Historia Ecclesiastica III, 2, p. 214.
iustas de sceleribus populi Dei ultiones expetit and immo disponente iusto Iudice: I, 15, p. 52.
22
B. Bischoff and M. Lapidge, Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore
and Hadrian (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 37980, with discussion at pp. 21920.
23
Paris, Bibliothque Nationale, Lat. 1622: S. Tafel in Palaeographia Latina 4 (1925), pp. 48, 52.
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370 Donald A. Bullough
(VI.xx.16) which is (almost) unambiguous, although its author cannot
avoid a passing glance at the demands of civil society.
24
In the post-
Constantinian period, it was demands of that kind which made them-
selves most clearly heard, and not even the most popular of Christian
exemplars could prevail against them. Otherwise, Martin of Tourss
recorded refusal to ght and his weaponless exposure to the enemy
following his baptism (Christi ego miles sum, pugnare mihi non licet)
would have been determinative.
25
In fact, of course, it was not: although, as we shall see, it may have
inuenced Alcuin. How often it, and Alcuins rewriting of the passage,
were drawn on or cited (i.e. excluding complete copies of the two
Vitae) in the ve centuries 400900, or in what contexts, remains unde-
termined; but instances are rare to the point of invisibility.
26
The
eighth-century Vita Guthlaci s unusually full account of its heros
conversion to the monastic life after nine years leadership of an aggress-
ive warrior band owes nothing verbally to the Vita Martini, although
Guthlac is thereafter miles Christi as often as he is veri Dei verus miles,
armed with the purely spiritual weapons of Ephesians VI.
27
Patristic and
conciliar condemnation of the bearing of arms and the shedding of blood
beginning with the rst council of Toledos si quis post baptismum
decree
28
was effectively narrowed down in those centuries to ordained
clerics. Ambrose was unusual in suggesting that involvement in war was
damaging to the nature of man, although he added particularly to
priests; and this didnt stop him from praising Theodosiuss coercive
policies which at times involved something very close to war.
29
In the
post-Carolingian period Atto of Vercelli was equally unusual in quoting
Ambrose in the broader sense (Nam usus cito inectit naturam).
30
Moreover, if from the time of Paulinus of Nola the relics of saints as
well as prayers were arma pacis, it was assumed that they would bring
about the destruction of enemies more often than reconciliation; and
there did seem ample evidence in support.
31
24
The early ninth-century St-Amand copy in Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal.
Lat. 161 has marginal indications of thoughtful reading, but I do not know whether they
occur at this particular point. When, incidentally, Wallace-Hadrill declares War and Peace
in the Earlier Middle Ages, in J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Medieval History (Oxford, 1975),
p. 24 that the Fathers had been clear that the profession of war was entirely compatible
with Christianity. Lactantius, Origen, Tertullian and Ambrose had no doubt about it (!), the
most charitable thing that one can say is that he must have muddled his notes.
25
Vita Martini 4. 1, ed. J. Fontaine, Sources Chrtiennes 133, p. 260.
26
Alcuin, Vita sancti Martini, PL 101, pp. 657662.
27
B. Colgrave, Felixs Life of St. Guthlac (Cambridge, 1956), c. xxvii, p. 90.
28
XLVI Conclium Toletanum VIII si quis post baptismum militaverit et chlamyden sumpserit
aut cingulum . . . diaconii dignitatis non accipiat, PL 84, p. 330.
29
Ambrose, De Obitu Theodosii 1213, CSEL 73, pp. 3778.
30
Atto of Vercelli, De pressuris ecclesiasticis, PL 134, p. 61, quoting Ambrose, De Ofciis I xx.
31
Arma pacis is used by Paulinus, Epistola XVIII, PL 61, p. 240.
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Was there a Carolingian anti-war movement? 371
The recurrent prohibitions on clerics bearing weapons are regularly
(selectively) listed and familiar. Perhaps because they are familiar and
because, of course, late twentieth-century historians build on the
evidence of behaviour by individuals rather than on laws, they are not
taken very seriously. The preferred understanding expressed with
degrees of nuance, perhaps, but at its bluntest in some of the contribu-
tions to the recent admirable collective work on The Peace of God is
that rules of this kind had long been effectively superseded by the
aristocratization of the church and the transfer of a secular value
system to its episcopal leaders: their direct involvement in war was (on
this interpretation) already the norm in the Carolingian period.
32
And
by an easy transference it is assumed that such men for in this eld
only men are involved rationalized their involvement by appealing
to the doctrine of the just war which they would have found in several
different works of Augustines but may well more often have encountered
in the simpler formulation of Isidore.
33
It is surely this double leap that led Michael Wallace-Hadrill to the
assertion that: It is in Charlemagne [and] in Einhard . . . that one sees
the rst real triumph of Catholic teaching on war.
34
I have no difculty
in agreeing with him that we must not look for teaching in the record
of wars and rumours of wars in contemporary Annals, although I
believe that there is something to be found in the reshaping of that
material in the early ninth-century Annales Mettenses. I am, however,
blind to what he sees in the Vita. About one-third of Einhards text is
taken up by an account of Charlemagnes military campaigns and their
consequences, taken from the Annals, most of it relating to the years
before he had any rst-hand knowledge of his hero. When he comes to
the phase of campaigning that he does know about the nal destruc-
tion of the Avars as an independent gens it is the Frankish acquisition
of their material wealth, not the subsequent missionary activity (the
subject, of course, of several major letters exchanged between Alcuin
and Arno of Salzburg and one which offered an ex post facto justication
of the military triumph), that he emphasizes.
35
Yet it was surely those
campaigns more than any others that satised the Isidoran prescription
for a just war. Modern discussion of the echoes of Sulpicius Severuss
Vita Martini in the Preface of Einhards Vita has at least demonstrated
that they can be interpreted in sharply contrasting ways: and if I have
32
Thomas Head and Richard Landes (eds), The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious
Response in France around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, 1992).
33
Isidore, Origines XVIII. 23: Iustum bellum est quod ex praedicto geritur de rebus repetitis
aut propulsandorum hostium causa, a combined denition that goes back through two
different intermediaries to Cicero.
34
Wallace-Hadrill, War and Peace in the Earlier Middle Ages, p. 31.
35
Alcuin to Arno, MGH Epistolae IV, no. 107, pp. 1534; no. 112, pp. 1623, no. 113, pp. 1636.
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372 Donald A. Bullough
to make an either/or choice, I would certainly regard the Vita Karoli
as an explicitly secular counterpart to the traditional vita confessoris
rather than as (say) a secular pendant to the lauding of Martins anti-
war position.
36
In all these texts, clerics of any rank are mainly notable by their
absence, except when they are sent on embassies. Evidence of participa-
tion in expeditio must be sought elsewhere, in chance references. Both
Angilram of Metz, who was also arch-chaplain, and the bishop of
Regensburg died during the rst campaign against the Avars (791): but
the evidence is specic that this was on the way home, not in battle,
unlike lay leaders, then and later (Gerold of Bavaria and Eric of
Friuli, for example).
37
The responsibilities of such men were essentially
liturgical and penitential, even if the Frankish king expected and
got from them expressions of triumphalism, which were, however,
conspicuously outdone by the anonymous poem in celebration of
young Pippins victory over the Avars in 796.
38
I do not underrate the
importance of liturgical prayer rather the reverse and of the newly
composed mass-sets for the king and his army, in time of war and
eventually (post c.840?) pro persecutione paganorum. Initially at least,
these are re-arrangements and expansions of the orationes in tempore
belli (of Merovingian, even English, origin?) which are rst found in
the Old Gelasian sacramentary, where they follow prayers for peace.
39
I fear that many of the scholars who claim that in these masses the
Frankish church is turning the warlike aspect of kingship to its own
uses are unfamiliar with their place in the sacramentaries and missals
and in the recurrent pattern of Carolingian-period liturgical worship,
and even of some elementary characteristics of liturgical Latin. Nor, so
far as I am aware, do they refer in any way to the justness or unjustness
of wars, or of a war.
40
36
H. Beumann, Ideengeschichtliche Studien zu Einhard und anderen Geschichtsschreibern des
frheren Mittelalters (Darmstadt, 1969).
37
Annales Laursehamenses, MGH Scriptores I, pp. 345.
38
MGH Poetae I, pp. 11617, or better MGH Einhard, Vita Karoli Appendix, pp. 423.
39
Orationes pro pace, Liber Sacramentorum Romane Aeclesiae Ordinis Anni Circuli ed. L.C.
Mohlberg (Rome, 1981), nos 147277, pp. 21314; Orationes Tempore Bellis, nos 147882,
pp. 21415.
40
M. McCormick, A New Ninth-Century Witness to the Carolingian Mass Against the
Pagans, Revue Bndictine 97 (1987), pp. 6886. Pro in mass titles has two or three quite
different senses. Pro defunctis means for the deceased but pro sterilitate mulierum, pro tribu-
latione and the like, clearly dont mean for or to achieve female sterility or epidemic disease:
pro here (in the pro persecutione paganorum) clearly means against or in circumstances of .
The intention of the mass (to use a semi-technical term), as the Collect and Secret make
absolutely clear, is for the Christian faithful to be saved from the consequences of barbarian
attack. A uniquely triumphalist and ruler oriented Preface in the much older Sacramentary
of Gellone (no. 2755; ed. A. Dumas, Liber Sacramentorum Gellonensis, CCSL 159), which
could be the composition of a northern French bishop, had no afterlife.
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Was there a Carolingian anti-war movement? 373
The campaign-related penitential actions documented during the
reigns of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious are collective ones, although
including fasting with many individual exceptions. One of the few
extant sermons preached to the troops on the eve of battle, in the
Tironian-note portion of the court related (820s) Vatican City, Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. Lat. 846, urges on them the confession of
sins before a priest and before God.
41
But this, of course, is for the
protection of their own souls. I have noted no evidence that those who
survived the battle were encouraged to do penance for the killing of
others: I can say only that Salzburg is the home of heavily used late
eighth-/early ninth-century copies of both of the penitentials in which
the prescription is to be found in the Umbrensium-Theodore one,
indeed, with a slightly extended text!
A recurrent problem for historians (not always recognized) is that the
only letters to survive in any number from the two decades 790810 are
Alcuins in the years 795802, indeed, almost a letter a fortnight. The
search for consistent attitudes in them may well be misconceived:
although almost all the letters addressed to him are lost, it is demon-
strable that he frequently adjusted his comments on policies and
personalities according to the addressee. But this does not mean that he
automatically adopted the point of view which he supposed was that of
the intended recipient: manifestly he did not. Writing to the Frankish
king at Paderborn in the late summer of 799 Alcuin says bluntly that
he has neither desire nor intention to leave Tours and be involved in a
journey to Rome: he is rather enjoying the smoky townscape of Tours,
and smoke hurts his eyes less than iron (weapons); he expects Charles
to hurry off to Rome (he did not).
42
But in spite of his quoting the
famous line of the Aeneid (VI 853), parcere subiectis et debellare superbos
from Augustines City of God, where it is misunderstood, wilfully or
otherwise the mercy that Charles is asked to show is apparently to
his own subjects, not to the pagans; and the choice of a Scripture
reading better than the poet is the beatitude of the merciful not the
peacemaker, as in Defensors Patience. Indeed, Alcuin wants Charles to
be strengthened in his dealings with the pagans by resolving the issues
over the Bishop of Rome and his enemies.
It is the more noteworthy, therefore, that when (probably precisely
in this period) he composed a considerably abbreviated account of
Martins earthly life as a homily for his dies natalis (or its octave), he
described his conversion in these words:
41
W. Schmitz, Epistola consolatoria ad pugnandos in belllum, Neues Archiv 15 (1890),
pp. 6057.
42
Alcuini Epistolae, MGH Epistolae IV, Karolini Aevi, no. 178, pp. 2946.
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374 Donald A. Bullough
vir sanctus magis elegit Deo caelesti servire, quam sub imperatore
militare terreno; qui specialiter electus est, ut vexillum sanctae crucis
occiduas orbis portaret in partes et militiae sacramenta evangelicis
mutaret edictis: non pro regno armis saecularibus certare Romano,
sed specialibus doctrinis Christianum dilatare imperium; nec dura
Romanorum lege populos subicere feroces, sed leve Christi iugum
plurimarum collo inicere gentium.
43
In 796 and 797, and later, letters addressed to the king, to courtiers
and to ecclesiastics with missionary responsibilities reiterate the view
that the continuing use of force, pressure, punishment as criminals, etc.,
was not the way to convert defeated pagans into believing Christians.
Writing to the king(?) in 801, he is openly critical of hostilis expeditio
against the duchy of Benevento: it is better to work for the desired
result by diplomacy than by open attack.
44
Alcuin may well have shared
the view that wars against gentes (as distinct from Christians) are just
because they create the possibility of conversion. Despite his account of
St Martins vocation, this is a permissible (and the customary) inference
from his praise of a monarch and his military commanders who have
extended the bounds of Christian realms: but he never actually says so,
or anything approximating to it. For that we have to await his pupil
Hrabanus, monk, bishop, archbishop, exegete, encyclopedist, who does
offer a denition of a bellum iustum unsurprisingly from Isidore, not
from Augustine and (if you wish) from the end of Einhards Chapter 7.
45
That the gentes could be a menace Alcuin knew full well. When,
earlier, he had commented on the attack on Lindisfarne in 793 (by
Northmen, although Alcuin never actually says so), it was to character-
ize it as a God-willed punishment for the misconduct of Northumbrian
kings and others; and it could be argued that he believed that once
order had been restored in that society, the punishment ( agella(e))
would naturally end.
46
If he did hold such a view, it could of course
equally have been wishful thinking. An incidental comment in one of
his exegetical works shows that he accepted that one of the functions
of well-born young men was to be trained to ght.
47
Nor did he
renounce lawful violence at this social level: in his last years he praised
the man who had revenged his lord by killing a man, without any
suggestion that penance might properly follow.
43
PL 101, p. 659.
44
Alcuini Epistolae, MGH Epistolae IV, Karolini Aevi, no. 211, pp. 3512.
45
Hrabanus De Universo XX, 1; PL 111, p. 533.
46
Alcuini Epistolae, MGH Epistolae IV, Karolini Aevi, no. 16, pp. 424; no. 17, pp. 459;
no. 18. Cf. D.A. Bullough, Alcuin, Achievement and Reputation (Leiden, 2004), p. 300.
47
Alcuin, In Ecclesiasten, PL 100, p. 717.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd :cc, Early Medieval Europe :cc, ()
Was there a Carolingian anti-war movement? 375
What surely changed the situation was the main wave of Viking
attacks. The Franks were on the defensive, for which no one since
Martin had suggested passive resistance. Nor was there, initially, an
opportunity for, or possibility of, conversion. Church leaders, bishops
and abbots, were soon involved willy-nilly: and in these circumstances
the established boundaries may quickly have broken down. As in 793,
trusted saints often proved a disappointment. But they were not auto-
matically abandoned. Abbos account of Pariss resistance in 885886 is
regularly quoted for its portraits of a militant bishop and a warrior
abbot. Ordinary citizens, however, still placed their trust in the Virgin
Mary and St Germanus, the parading of whose relics made them milites
Christi relying on purely spiritual arms and armour.
48
Abbos account
is, however, also unusually graphic evidence of the death and suffering
on both sides: even the nal departure of the Northmen is not turned
into a heroic triumph, and the coda is hardly optimistic.
After all this I have, of course, failed to uncover a Carolingian anti-
war movement. It was, however, possible to express doubts about the
wisdom or effectiveness of hostilis expeditio and its corollaries (a distinction
perhaps between doves and hawks): and the common view that, even
before 830, clerics as well as Einhard and ordinary warriors regularly
lauded bellum, if it was for a good cause (however dened), requires
at least some qualication. The title of an unpublished contribution
to a Toronto conference some years ago, Carolingian Warfare: From
Glorication to Horrication could still be an overstatement in its rst
element. (As in other ages, it was a regrettable necessity.)
By mid-century there is probably better evidence for contemporary
clerical use of the language of aggression than misunderstood masses.
Lurking among the pseudepigrapha of Ambrose and printed as such
from the early sixteenth century to the nineteenth (PL 15, cols 220518)
is a Recapitulatio desolationis Iherosolimae, based substantially on passages
in the Latin Josephus, Hegesippus. There are strong, if not absolutely
conclusive, reasons for thinking that it was composed at Fleury in the
mid-ninth century, and it was certainly read there later at the Easter
midday meal hardly a preaching of reconciliation! It is surely no
accident, however, that the several extant copies of the work were written
between the mid-eleventh and early thirteenth centuries, when the fate
of the earthly Jerusalem was a major concern. Preaching the Crusade at
Clermont and elsewhere in France in 1095/96, Urban II almost certainly
invoked the example of the Franks. But he was doing so in an age in
which the main storyline of the Chanson de Roland, if nothing else, was
48
Abbo, MGH Poetae IV pp. 8993.
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376 Donald A. Bullough
fully formed, and Charlemagnes reputed journey to the Holy Land was
at least being canvassed. It would not be the rst or the last time that
a text harmless enough at the time of its composition acquired a more
sinister signicance later, or that versions of the past were appropriated
and refashioned to legitimate the policies of a new leadership.