Radosław Kotecki, Jacek Maciejewski, and John S. Ott (eds)

Between Sword and Prayer: Warfare and Medieval Clergy in Cultural Perspective

(Brill, 2018) 564 pp. $172.00

Under normal circumstances, collected volumes with sixteen chapters and an introduction might seem, at first glance, burdensome to review. For the edited volume under consideration here, Between Sword and Prayer: Warfare and Medieval Clergy in Cultural Perspective, the greater burden for readers is rather to choose how to approach the volume. Scholars interested in any one region or period—the Ottonian Empire, twelfth century Iberia, or the Baltic kingdoms in their formative period—could sample what they like and leave the rest for later; those with a more concerted interest in the study of the medieval high clergy (bishops especially but not infrequently abbots) will find a broad array of stimulating work cover to cover. In their edited volume, Radosław Kotecki, Jacek Maciejewski, and John S. Ott deserve congratulations for bringing together such a broad sample of scholarship on the subject of the involvement of medieval clerics in military affairs; those congratulations need at least be double for the authors of the chapters for taking the time to do new and important work rooted in research, rather than succumb to the pressure of doing empirically-suspect but popularly-facing trendy writing. The volume’s contents are considerable and make a clear case that, whatever the legal or social impacts might be, clerics were involved in the processes of warfighting broadly across Medieval Latin Christendom; this is itself is an achievement, made all the more impressive by the detail of the individual chapters. Because most will pick the volume up only a chapter or two at a time, this review will confine itself to examining each of the chapters in suo situ.

In the first chapter (“Bishops as City Defenders in Early Medieval Gaul and Germany”) of the volume, Geneviève Bührer-Thierry argues that the engagement of the high clergy in warfighting had substantial roots in the late Carolingian and Early Ottonian Empire. Drawing on a corpus of hagiographical vita, the study suggests that the role of the episcopal see—that is, the city around which a diocese was organized and in which the bishop had his cathedral—was foundational in establishing how bishops engaged with wars. As defenders of their flocks, bishops were, “ideal protectors of the city” and that this coincided with “a growing militarization of the upper clergy” (p. 37) The impact, especially, of hagiographical traditions from late antiquity—reworked in the period under study by Bührer-Thierry—demonstrates, too, how the authors of the vita that comprised her sources were attempting to reconcile disparate notions of sanctity—usually of monastic and eremitical persuasion—with the role of bishops as holy protectors of their territories. The fusion of the material and spiritual molds of protection of the city is made clear on a number of occasions, especially in the examples of wall- and cathedral-building in the vita. These tensions underscore just how complex the source basses are, and how much the data presented in them resists the simplistic classification along a pacifism-bellicosity axis. For the Ottonian Empire, the idea that bishops had a complex relationship with warfighting, rather than an enthusiastic embrace of its most visceral realities, is a triumphantly simple observation, made all the more necessary by the clarity of Bührer-Thierry’s analysis.

Michael Edward Moore’s contribution to the volume (“The Frankish Church and Missionary War in Central Europe”) centers the role of the clergy as proponents of an early model of holy war in the Carolingian Empire. Working from a mix of hagiographical and annalistic sources from the period, Moore’s chapter demonstrates the profound zeal for conversion-warfare in the Carolingian world. Rather than embracing simplistic economic explanations for the Saxon Wars, Moore carefully demonstrates how both late antique and contemporary thought were marshalled around the Carolingian court and the missionaries it supported to render a defensive explanation for the Saxon Wars themselves. The killing of missionaries engaged in preaching and proselytizing in the eastern frontiers was a martyrdom that was felt on more than just the pages of texts, and Moore demonstrates that contemporary virtue cultivation around “fides” made for a doubled explanation of the Carolingian causus belli. The results were achieved, but not without a cost: “The aim was not simply to Christianize the Saxons but to end their independent cultural existence…Missionary warfare converted the Saxons to Christianity, but only with a maximum of cruelty.” (p. 76-77) While Moore’s case is strongest on the qualities of the warfighting itself, the connection to the contemporary clergy is clear: bishops, popes, abbots, and monks authored many of the justifications and influenced many of the policies that provide the source material for Moore’s study. While the chapter veers rather close to Saxon apologetics, it nevertheless shows clearly how engaged the contemporary clergy were with the root question of whether missionary warfare was licit (they thought so) and what boundaries could be imposed on it.

Chris Dennis offers the first of a trio of chapters on the Anglo-Norman clergy’s relationship to war with his chapter, “‘De clericis qui pugnaverunt, aut pugnandi gratia armati fuerunt’: Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances (1048-1093) and Clerical Partiicpation in the Battle of Hastings.” As with many of the chapters in the volume at large, Dennis is forced to grapple with the uncertainties and ambiguities of the evidence preserved in a number of chronicles about exactly how clergy pariticpated in military activity. With careful attention to the wealth of narrative information about the wider campaign by the Normans to take the Kingdom of England in the late eleventh century, as well as the campaigns that grew up in the aftermath of that conflict, Dennis is able to provide a strong circumstantial case that Geoffrey of Coutances was an active participant in the Battle of Hastings. He builds the strongest part of his case with “penitential ordinance setting out the penances imposed on clerics who had fought…and on the evidence of Bishop Geoffrey’s own penitential activities.” (p. 110) While the body of the chapter builds this case carefully, the endpoint of the chapter reaches the familiar, if unsatisfying, conclusion that many of the chapters in the volume reach, and which is the unfortunate refrain of many scholars studying episcopal involvement in war: “probably.” Dennis’s chapter, on these grounds, cannot be dismissed, however, since his efforts make the circumstantial case exceptionally strong. If a different standard were applied to historical judgement—perhaps along the lines of a “guilty until proven innocent” mode—then the case would be cinched; without positive evidence, however, Dennis’s work can only point to the high likelihood and socially-premissive atmosphere that suggests Geoffrey’s role at Hastings in the thick of things. Still, given the magnitude of the Norman Conquest, this is a praiseworthy feat for twenty-two pages of text.

In his chapter, Daniel Gerrard offers a kind of literature review to renew the spirits of readers that have finished the volumes first three chapters but wanted more architecture to support a historiographical comparison. With attention to the development of English-language historiography, Gerrard is able to draw out important insights about the connection between the debates over “feudalism,” knightly service, and the role of clerics as feudal lords. These connections, of course are crucial for the understanding of many of the more local and particular records used by the other chapters of the volume at large. If feudal lords, however we might title them, were responsible for providing a muster of soldiers to their superiors and bishops and abbots were feudal lords, then a logical inference would be that bishops and abbots who were feudal lords had military responsibilities. The corollary, of course, is that if they had responsibilities, they likely sought to fulfill them with some degree of diligence, perhaps including leading troops to war. Gerrard points to two areas of future research that might build on his review of the scholarship: first, the involvement of episcopal and abbatial familiares as delegates for this kind of service; and, the second is the ways that clergy engaged in the spiritual warfare elements on the material battleground. What makes Gerrard’s chapter useful in this context is that it address in a macro-historiographical fashion many of the ambiguities and contextual challenges encountered by many of the other chapters. In this regard, its place in the first third of the volume seems misplaced. A small adaptation to make the English historiography an example of the evolution of research on fighting clerics, when couple with Duggan’s final chapter, would have set the table for the other chapters to deliver on exploiting the ambiguities, exceptions, and challenges of the body chapters of the volume. Still, the fact that it is included at all makes the volume much stronger.

In the fifth chapter of the volume, Craig M Nakashian offers a careful comparison of two chronicler’s treatments of the issues surrounding clerical armsbearing. By comparing the accounts of Orderic Vitalis and Henry of Huntingdon, Nakashian clearly and carefully demonstrates that the historiographical devil was in the details. “Both men saw clerical participation in licit conflicts as acceptable, especially provided that the clerics in question did not emulate knights by seeking to win worldly glory. Active fighting was to be avoided, though not always condemned.” (p. 178) Laying out the idiosyncrasies of each author, Nakashian is able to show that the comparison presents similar conclusions to his monograph on a similar subject, and underlines the fact that individual commentator’s personal stakes in their narratives colored their perception more than any juridical frameworks. When paired with Gerrard and Dennis’s chapters that precede it, this fifth chapter, “Orderic Vitalis and Henry of Huntingdon: Views of Clerical Warfare from Inside and Outside the Cloister” demonstrates that the Anglo-Norman would was replete with complexity and examinations of clerical military engagement rest on strong foundations.

In the sixth chapter, Katherine Allen Smith offers a chapter on the conversio of knights to monastic life, and the ways in which they preserved some of their material connections to their knightly background, despite their new monastic vocation. Deploying a wealth of hagiographical evidence, her analysis shows that there were a number of ritual and material transitions—taking off a sword belt and putting on a monastic habit, for example—and that these transitions were often recorded as moments of extraordinary significance in the hagiographical evidence. The chapter, “Ungirded for Battle: Knightly Conversion to Monastic Life and the Making of Weapon-Relics in the Central Middle Ages,” focuses on the special role that weapon-relics, as the vestiges of monk’s former knightly vocation, in reifying the memory of the charismatic conversion of monks: “these discarded arms were regarded as holy objects in part due to their status as treasured possessions of the holy dead…medieval hagiographers recognized the value of the sacrifices entailed in conversion to the religious life, but also celebrated the transformative power of monastic vows.” (p. 198) Using weapon-relics as a liminal space to celebrate monastic conversion demonstrates, in this short study, that the laying down of material arms was a major sacrifice but that in doing so “they signaled their owner’s taking up of those ‘most strong and bright arms’ with which, as monks, they would henceforward defend themselves.” By exploiting this fruitful narrative space, Katherine Allen Smith shows that the material memory of monks of their former vocation still suffused much of their reliquary connection to their monasteries.

“The Episcopate and Reconquest in the Times of Alfonso VII of Castile and León,” by Carlos de Ayala Martínez, is the seventh chapter of the volume and examines the role played by the high clergy in one of the more storied periods of Iberian history. Surveying both the intellectual and military developments of the reign of the Emperor Alfonso VII, Ayala shows that the clerics of the realm assuredly played a powerful supporting role, but that their active participation in wars was less clear, owing in part to the fragmentary nature of the sources in the period. Where possible, however, potent examples are apparent. The Conquest of Almería—although short-lived in practice—was preserved in the important Poema de Almería, which attests to the key role played by Arnold of Astorga and peter of Palencia especially, but at least another ten bishops were on the warpath with the emperor. Ayala makes clear that the bishops played a “significant role…although without major successes.” The importance, Ayala notes, of the crusading context is clear and underlines the reasons why this participation—often more than half of the bishops of the realm—was without contemporary disapproval and appears to have been as widespread as it was.

When paired with the preceding chapter, Pablo Dorronzoro Ramírez’s contribution on the episcopate’s engagement with the wars of Alfonso “the Battler” of Navarra and Aragon makes the importance of the episcopate to the crusade-oriented campaigns in the Iberian Peninsula incontrovertible. Dorronzoro’s work in the chapter lays out three important tracks for the period: “in preaching and diplomatic mediation…in the formation of war institutions with the participation of the whole episcopate…and in their presence on military campaigns through personal or logistical support, either financial or through the supply of troops.” (p. 265) The variety of evidence from Alfonso I’s campaigns presented considerable variations in the activities of the episcopate, but Dorronzoro’s work shows the breadth of the episcopate’s engagement: from dying in battles to diplomatic missions to Rome. By avoiding the messy and complicated sources that detail the civil war between Alfonso I and Urraca of León-Castile after their separation, Dorronzoro’s work maintains a careful and nuanced view of the wars againt Iberian Islamic powers. Over the course of the chapter, it is quite clear, as well, that the trend did not abate in the latter half of the twelfth century, and Dorronzoro would do well to supplement this chapter with another on the reign of Alfonso II of Aragon. The value of the chapter is only undercut—alongside Ayala Martínez’s study—with the lack of a Portuguese chapter, since that would have filled out the Iberian Peninsula in a useful balance to the pairing of Baltic chapters later in the volume.
Robert Houghton’s ninth chapter in the volume examines the role of Parma’s bishops in the late eleventh and early twelfth century. In “Italian Bishops and Warfare during the Investiture Contest: the Case of Parma,” Houghton demolishes the notion that Imperially-aligned bishops were bellicose and Papally-oriented prelates were pacifists. Taking the example of several bishops of Parma and their participation on both sides of the conflict, Houghton is able to show that over time the episcopate took a decreasing role in the direct administration of the conflict while they engaged more directly with the macro-political struggles. But, this was not connected to the introduction of a “Gregorian bishop.” Instead, the evidence presents a much more complex historical reality. He notes that “we have no evidence that any of the bishops…acted as a military commander, much less participated in the fighting…Thee was no single model for the military behavior of imperial or Gregorian bishops.” (p. 297) The value of Houghton’s chapter is that, while also underlining the complexity and ambiguity of the evidence in concert with many of the other chapters, it shows that the stilted historiography of previous eras dramatically colored the reading of sources and misrepresented the activities of the episcopate.

In the tenth chapter of the volume, Radosław Kotecki’s “Lions and Lambs, Wolves and Pastors of the Flock: Protraying Military Activitiy of Bishops in Twelfth-Century Poland” untangles the evidence of two early Polish narrative sources, the Gallus Anonymous and the Chronica Polonorum of Vicentius of Cracow. As was the case with Nakashian’s chapter, the focus on a kind of “compare and contrast” model for the rich sources in question is effective for the task at hand: unravelling the ambiguities of contemporary social norms to demonstrate that the sources’ evidence “are literary constructs replete with ideas present in the debate taking place” about episcopal involvement in military activities. (p. 331) Working through the material carefully, Kotecki’s chapter is strongest when it used the sources echoed or refined by both the Gallus and the Chronica Polonorum to show the narrative implications of the revision. Indeed, working within the debate posed by both sources, the development of important caveats, provisos, and conundra occupies a large portion of the chapter. Because most readers would be less familiar with Polish historiography, Kotecki is careful to contextualize some of the material in the narratives, but deftly refrains from over-indulgent diversions about contemporary Polish events. In doing so, it makes the case that, while many of the events, the sources that describe them, and the ambiguities that complicate historical analysis may be particularly Polish, they were hardly exceptional. Because of this, the chapter provides useful comparanda for scholars working in regions that are not Polish whatsoever.

In the eleventh chapter, Jacek Maciejewski presents a deeper dive into Master Vicentius’s work, “A Bishop Defends His City, or Master Vincentius’s Trubles with the Military Activity of His Superior.” In his chapter, there are a number of deep dives into the content of Vicentius’s chronicle, and part of the impact of the chapter is to expand on the work done by Kotecki to expose the ambiguities. He notes: “Vicentius, although he never went as far as presenting a bishop wearing a hauberk with a weapon in his hand, was aware of Polish bishops’ active involvement in military matters.” (p. 353) The chapter makes clear that Vicentius’s narrative presented ambiguities precisely were “caused by the constantly changing political and ecclesiastical situation of the Polish lands at the turn of the century.” The chapter, following on Kotecki’s feels as though it covers a bit too much of the same ground as Kotecki’s, but the wealth of the material in question makes clear that this repetition is a product of needed emphasis rather than poor planning.

Monika Michalska’s chapter, “In the Service of Bellona: Images of ‘Militant Abbots’ in Late Twelfth- and Early Thirteenth-Century Historiography of St. Gall (continuations II and III of Casuum Sancti Galli),” argues that abbatial militancy should be treated with a similar caution as with episcopal examples. She patiently unfolds a number of examples that show that abbots of St. Gall frequently engaged in military activities, often at great expense, against the enemies of the monastery or those who resisted the monastery’s influence. Because most abbots were primarily monastic administrators, the question of military affairs was always secondary. That being said, Michalska shows that military affairs were neither clear negatives or positives, but which were circumstantially-inflected: “military expeditions conducted by their abbots resulting from military service to their rulers did not carry negative connotations.” (p. 397) For the monastic authors of the chronicle continuations, “authors…attempted to present the war expeditions conducted by the abbots against their enemies as a justified response to their enemies’ prior misdeeds.” (p. 397) Perhaps the most pertinent criticism of the chapter is its placement in the volume, since the chapter would have made more sense, contextually, near Robert Houghton’s chapter on Parma, given the common historical context of the papal-imperial wrangling of the late eleventh and early twelfth century.

“Bishops and Abbots at War: Some Aspects of Clerical Involvement in Warfare in Twelfth- and Early Thirteenth-Century Livonia and Estonia” by Carsten Selch Jensen is the thirteenth chapter of the volume, and would have fit very well in context with Kotecki and Maciejewski’s chapters as a cluster. Selch Jensen’s chapter is a careful reading of the dual missionary-crusade context of the early campaigns against the Livonian frontiers. The martyrdom of prelates presented a particular point for sources to comment on the role of the clerics in military affairs. In some cases, the bishops engaged with the battles through prayer and organization; in others, the importance of the clergy’s military background is highlighted in a way that makes clear the depth with which the prelates in the Livonian campaigns sought to engage with contemporary events. The careful use of the chronicle evidence for the chapter provides a strong base for showing the crusade context of the activities of these bishops and abbots, and makes clear the importance of the just war framework’s evolution as a factor for coloring the narrative treatments of the bishops and abbots in the period. In this regard, Selch Jensen’s chapter makes a potent contribution to the conversation about the ways in which crusade endeavors shaped the experience of clerics in medieval military theaters.

The fourteenth chapter of the volume, “Tending the Flock: Clergy and a Discourse of War in the Wider Hinterland of the Eastern Adriatic during the Late Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” by Ivan Majnarić argues that local factors influenced the development of a crusade context for military interventions by prelates in anti-heretical efforts in the region. While the chapter is the second longest in the volume, the outline of its material tries to connect anti-piracy discourses to anti-heretical pushes, these anti-heresy efforts were plagued by poor ecclesiastical organization, and this hamstrung organization presented a number of incidents where prelates were exposed to great risk and engaged in military activities. Although this connection runs thin in some sections, it does show that the influence of the Hungarian monarchy and the papal drive to organize the church worked in concert and in conflict on occasions. In a number of occasions, Majnarić’s argument about Bosnian heresy being used as a kind of vehicle for increasing papal and clerical network-building, which has a great deal in common with Mark Pegg’s larger argument about the nature of the Albigensian Cruasde. (Pegg is often criticized with too much drama, but he has rightly called into question the normative frameworks deployed in narrative and papal sources, which dovetails with Majnarić’s case study here.) The extensive appendix to the chapter needed more context—bolding or italicization to highlight similarities—to serve its purpose, but the chapter is perhaps the most isolated in its regional context and deserves a measure of slack on this regard.

Anna Waśko, in the penultimate chapter, “‘Freedom is the greatest thing’: Bishops as Fighters for Freedom in Fifteeenth-Century Sweden,” uses the context of late medieval and early modern Swedish independence efforts to show the ways in which prelates served as both vehicles of peasant anxieties about tax laws and as vectors for the nascent political projects of the Swedish aristocracy. With recourse to rich and complex sources, Waśko shows that the highest clerical actors in Sweden in the fifteenth century were active in wider struggles over the question of Swedish independence from Denmark, as well as in debates about tax policies. Just as with earlier chapters, the ambiguities of the causes for which the prelates battled makes discerning their exact context particularly challenging. The introduction of the Reformation context may have colored the sources and influenced their treatment of the questions in the text, and so Waśko’s caerful skepticism of the material is particularly expert, even if the chapter is the most chronologically isolated in the volume.

In the final chapter of the volume, Lawrence Duggan reprises much of the wider argument from his 2013 monograph, Armsbearing and the Clergy in the History and Canon Law of Western Christianity. The overarching argument of his chapter, like his volume, demonstrates that, while legal prohibitions and cultural permissiveness provided ample space for clerical military action prior to the twelfth century, the increasingly vibrant discourse about clerical conduct that accompanied the so-called “Gregorian Revolution” brought renewed attention to the legal strictures that prohibited, on face, clerical bellicosity. The pontificate of Alexander III witnessed a kind of inversion, then, of this trend: changing cultural attitudes about clergy participating in war narrowed the scope of which wars were licit for clerics, while new legal mechanisms made those narrower corridors of activity permissible. After this period, the infrequent circumstances that allowed men of the cloth to participate in the affairs military of their sovereigns (and occasionally, on their own behalf) presented narrative sources with the complex political equations that were resolved with textual ambiguities. If readers of the preceding fifteen chapters were left wondering why so many scholars were left offering up explanations of “but the text was ambiguous,” Duggan presents the framework where that ambiguity was intelligible. In that regard, a reorganized volume may have placed his chapter alongside Gerrard’s to frame the historiographical and narratological challenges posed by so many of the volume’s chapter authors. In this respect, the chapter is useful, albeit a short representation of his monograph.

For a collected volume of more than five hundred pages, presenting sufficient criticism might smack of either pedantry or presumptuousness. While I have, in the paragraphs above, made a few suggestions about reading the chapters in a different order than was presented by the editors, this is ultimately a small suggestion in view of the contributions of the volume as whole. The volume could have used, with an eye toward more comprehensive balance, chapters on Portugal, Byzantium, Scotland, Ireland and Sicily, but advocating for a twenty-one chapter volume after reviewing a sixteen chapter volume is surely a measure of scholarly Stockholm Syndrome. The volume could also have, in a few places, benefitted from a few more of the excellent maps designed by Kotecki for the contributors, as these were generally quite helpful for situating non-specialists in search of meaningful comparanda. The whole, however, of this collection of essays is quite praiseworthy: it presents a wide array of regions within a generally high-medieval context (two or three essays stray beyond the span of the ninth through thirteenth centuries) and the scholars involved presented meaningful attempts to deal with the textual ambiguities and source challenges of the period. Kotecki, Maciejewski, and Ott deserve considerable thanks for their work to collect so many quality scholars, and Brill deserve praise for putting these chapters together in one volume.

Kyle Lincoln
Norwich University (US)