Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (66 page)

One of the effects of the Crusades was to establish an extraordinary new variant on the monastic ideal. The hugely popular military saints of the early Church - Sergius, Martin, George - had gained their sanctity when they renounced earthly warfare; now the very act of being a soldier could create holiness. The mood is expressed in a fresco that can still be seen in the crypt of Auxerre Cathedral: here the Bishop of Auxerre, a protege of Pope Urban II and himself active in the First Crusade, commissioned a picture of the end of time in which Christ himself was portrayed as a warrior on horseback. It was an image impossible to imagine in the early Church, and at the time it was still alien to the Greek East; at much the same time, a Greek visiting Spain was offended when he heard St James of Compostela referred to as a 'knight of Christ'.
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It was against such a background of changed assumptions that in the wake of the First Crusade there emerged monastic orders of warriors dedicated to fighting on behalf of Christianity, principally the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller. Their names reveal their agenda: the Hospitallers were named from their Hospital headquarters in Jerusalem, and the Templars from the Temple. The Templars built churches in the circular plan of what they thought was Herod's Temple, puzzlingly ignoring the fact that it had been destroyed by the Romans, and not realizing that the building that they were imitating was actually the Muslim Dome of the Rock (with an equally puzzling triumph of wishful thinking, they confidently identified the Al-Aqsa Mosque, standing beside the Dome of the Rock, as Solomon's Temple). Western architects were anxious to reproduce Herod's Temple, but could not or would not build the dome which was its whole architectural point. Such circular buildings can be seen all the way into northern Europe, notably as the lawyers' twelfth-century Temple Church in London - for the military orders gained extensive lands and local administrative houses (preceptories) right across the continent to finance their work.

Between 1307 and 1312, the entire Templar Order was suppressed, once it was clear that the Templars had no chance of contributing to a reconquest of the Holy Land. It was an understandable reaction both to their failure and to the apparent lack of purpose of their continuing wealth and power in estates which extended not merely through the eastern Mediterranean but as far west in Europe as Dublin. Admiring eleventh- and twelfth-century monarchs and noblemen had provided all these lands; now their descendants were inclined to feel that this had not been a wise investment. Nevertheless, the Templars' destruction was contrived out of confessions extracted under torture on charges of blasphemy and sexual deviance, apparently trumped up by Philip 'the Fair', a peculiarly unscrupulous French king. The dissolution of the order was carried out, not merely in France, with a degree of ruthless cruelty which can only inspire pity for both the humiliated survivors and those who were tortured and burned as heretics, from the Master downwards. Since the eighteenth century, their fate has also been the inspiration for a large amount of deranged conspiracy theory.
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The Hospitallers managed to survive this crisis, and through the heroism of some of their rearguard actions against Islam from their bases in the eastern Mediterranean they continued to win Europe's respect into the seventeenth century.

A further military order, the Teutonic (that is, German) Knights, was alarmed by the fate of the Templars and reinvented itself after the Middle East defeats of the thirteenth century, relocating to northern Europe and recreating its Jerusalem hospital in great style not far from the Baltic coast at Marienburg (Malbork in Polish) on a branch of the River Vistula. Here the knights could fight against Europe's last surviving non-Christian power in Lithuania. Although not all Latin Christians admired their brutality and obvious interest in building up their own power, right into the fifteenth century there was a steady stream of volunteers to support them, not merely Germans, but from as far afield as England and France. The order created a series of colonies around the Baltic Sea which were as much culturally German as they were Christian, won at the expense of Christian Poland as well as of Lithuania. The Lithuanians' conversion to Latin Christianity in 1386 (see pp. 516-17) discomfited the order, robbing it of any real purpose, but it went on fighting to defend its very considerable economic and political interests against Poles and Lithuanians, despite the fact that the two peoples were now fully Catholic Christians owing allegiance to a single monarch. The effort earned the order crushing defeat from Polish-Lithuanian armies at Tannenberg in 1410, yet they did not disperse, and one fragment even survived the Protestant takeover of northern Germany in the sixteenth-century Reformation.
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Thus a form of holy warfare which had begun with Islam as its enemy ended up with Christians fighting Christians. There were plenty of precedents for this illogical development. Some of the earlier campaigns against Christians had been against deviants; from 1209, the Pope summoned crusaders against a threat to the Western Latin Church in southern France from a movement known as the 'pure' (in Greek,
Katharoi
or Cathars). Like Manichaeism facing the early Church (see pp. 170-71), the essence of Cathars' beliefs was dualist; they believed in the evil of material things and the necessity to transcend the physical in order to achieve spiritual purity. Their Greek name is one of many indications that this movement took its origin in the strain of dualist belief recurrent over many centuries in the Greek East, most recently in the Paulicians, who had been a presence in the Byzantine Empire since the eighth century, followed by the Bogomils (see p. 456). It may be that Catharism sprang from Latin contacts set up with Bogomils in Constantinople during the First Crusade. Certainly contemporaries made the connection with the East: the English word 'bugger' is derived from 'Bulgarian', and reflects the common canard of mainstream Christians against their opponents that heresy by its unnatural character leads to deviant sexuality. Cathars soon set up their own hierarchies of leaders in France, Italy and Germany: a direct criticism of the monolithic and powerful clerical structure created by the Gregorian Reform, for Cathar dualistic rejection of the flesh was a rejection of what could be seen as a fleshly hierarchy.
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The campaign to wipe out the Cathars soon turned into a war of conquest on behalf of the king and nobility of northern France. In its genocidal atrocity, this 'Albigensian Crusade' (the city of Albi was a Cathar centre, with its own Cathar bishop), ranks as one of the most discreditable episodes in Christian history; mass burnings at the stake were a regular feature of the crusaders' retribution against their enemies, who were by no means all Cathars.
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During the thirteenth century, the idea of crusade reached its most strained interpretation when successive popes proclaimed crusades against their political opponents in Italy - chiefly the Holy Roman Emperor and his dynasty - and in the end, when the papacy itself splintered, even between rival claimants to the papal throne. Such campaigns dragged on intermittently until the 1370s. For the papacy, these were just as much a logical defence of the Church as crusades in the East, but it was not surprising that crowds did not rush to support the Holy Father, and that plenty of faithful Christians were perfectly ready to fight papal armies.
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What still did galvanize people to support crusades was the continued reality of threats from Islam, and as late as the sixteenth century there was real popular enthusiasm for crusading ventures to the East along the shifting frontier of the two faiths, now creeping westwards in the Balkans. One of the great Christian achievements of the fifteenth century was the successful defence of Belgrade against Ottoman Turkish armies in 1456, achieved by a combination of aristocratic-led armies and crowds of ordinary people aroused to fight for Christendom by charismatic preaching, just as had happened in the classic crusades of earlier centuries. Yet at the same time theologians began expressing increasing qualifications or doubts about the rightness of waging war on non-Christians. It was an important symbolic moment in 1567 when the then pope abolished the sale (though not the principle) of the indulgences which had taken their origins from the Crusades.
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During the 1620s, the Medici Grand Duke of Florence made serious though in the end abortive preparations to demolish the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and re-erect it stone by stone in his own capital city: to have done this in 1099 might have saved Western Europe a good deal of trouble.
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CISTERCIANS, CARTHUSIANS AND MARY (1100-1200)

It was not long before the triumph of Cluny came under challenge. In a world which seemed by contemporary standards newly awash with wealth, with the institutional Church a chief beneficiary, it was natural for many devout and serious Christians to react by emphasizing simplicity and self-denial. Catharism was one such reaction, but the twelfth century abounds with different examples of the mood, not least among monks. The crowds on pilgrimage and in the armies of the Crusades represented a new, more widely practised Western Christian spirituality; what did that say about the aristocratic ethos of the great monasteries, with their sprawling estates and hordes of servants? For many, Benedictine abbeys were no longer the perfect mirror of God's purpose for the world. Benedictine houses did not disappear - they were too powerful and well established - but alongside them came a large variety of new religious orders, seeking to change the direction of monasticism. What is significant is how few of the new orders were confined simply to one region of the Western Church. They expressed the continent-wide character of the huge changes which the Church experienced during the Gregorian reforms.

An explicit return to Benedictine roots came in the Cistercian Order, so called from its original house in Citeaux (
Cistercium
in Latin) in Burgundy. Cistercian houses generally required endowment with lands on the same heroic scale as older Benedictine foundations, but they felt that contact with the sinful world had been their predecessors' downfall, so they sought lands far from centres of population, in wildernesses. There were advantages for donors in this: wildernesses were cheaper investments for benefactors than long-standing, well-cultivated estates - but the Cistercians did go to the length of creating wildernesses by destroying existing villages, sometimes not without a certain shamefacedness. One Cistercian chronicler of the foundation of his house during the 1220s at Heinrichau (now Henrykow in south-west Poland) went to the extent of asserting that villagers who were victims of monastic cleansing went away of their own accord after a murderous community feud; the two murdered men 'mutually killed one another' apparently. Later monks of the house less scrupulously asserted that the founders of Heinrichau had come into a classic Cistercian wilderness.
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This ruthlessness in the service of Christ is a mark of the militancy which the Cistercians brought to the religious life. They exhibited the new aggressiveness also to be seen in the crusading movement. Aggression was certainly one of the main characteristics of their most formidable early representative, Bernard of Clairvaux, and his electrifying preaching was influential in launching the Second Crusade in 1145.

Two years before those crusaders marched east, a Cistercian and former monk under Bernard had been elected pope as Eugenius III. By the end of the century, there were 530 Cistercian houses throughout Europe, tightly organized into a single structure centred on Citeaux. This was as much of an international corporation as the Cluniacs who had provided its model, but in conscious rejection of Cluniac splendour, Cistercian churches everywhere were built in the same austere style, without elaborate ornament, particularly any figure sculpture. They were nevertheless stylistically innovative: theirs were among the first major buildings to follow the lead set in Durham and St-Denis, moving from the circular-arched style of the Romanesque to the more efficiently load-bearing pointed arch of Gothic engineering, perhaps because its aesthetic effects were more dependent on sheer beauty of form than on sculptural enrichment. The Cistercians made enemies, but their spiritual severity won them admiration, particularly because they made the benefits of monasticism available to all: by basing the everyday work of their houses on teams of lay brothers sworn to a simpler version of the monastic rule than the fully fledged monks, they opened the monastic life once more to illiterate people.

The Cistercians began to decline at the end of the thirteenth century, when their fall in popular esteem was registered by a drastic reduction in those willing to be lay brothers: the reasons lay in their dilemma of success. They farmed their estates with such energy and innovation, for instance pushing forward the commercial development of English sheep farming, that they made huge profits. Their technologically resilient Gothic architectural style had the potential to create ever more soaring buildings to express Western Europe's constant aim of making its churches images of the heights of Heaven, and Cistercian monumental austerity tended towards sheer architectural magnificence little less than other church buildings. There is a sad sermon in stone in the surviving dormitory of one of their monasteries in western England, Cleeve, where the huge thirteenth-century chamber, originally an open space where all the monks slept communally, was divided up in the fifteenth century by wooden partitions so that everyone could have his own private space; grooves and settings for the partitions can still be seen on the walls. The world which the Cistercians had rejected thus crept back, and their houses became little different from the monasteries which they had begun by criticizing. Yet repeatedly the order has sought to find new ways of returning to its original ideals, particularly after the shocks of the sixteenth-century Reformation and the chaos created for monasteries by the French Revolution.