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  • The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200 by Jehangir Yezdi Malegam
  • Warren C. Brown
The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200. By Jehangir Yezdi Malegam. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2013. Pp. xvi, 335. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-8014-5132-4.)

The Sleep of Behemoth follows the discourse about peace that framed the church reform movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Central to the project is the question of what “peace” actually meant. According to Jehangir Yezdi Malegam, true peace to reformist clerics did not mean tranquility, stability, and the absence of conflict. It meant right order, which would only be achieved when the ecclesiastical power governed the secular and laypeople participated in clerical modes of living (p. 22). Simple tranquility, when based on an accommodation between the Church and the world and on secular and especially imperial control of the Church, was not peace; it was violence clothed in a false stability. This “false peace” represented, in a phrase coined by Rufinus of Sorrento, “the sleep of Behemoth” (p. 3); within lay the disorder personified by the Old Testament monster. Creating and maintaining true peace required fighting the monster; it demanded insurrection against the status quo, conflict, and physical violence.

This vision of true peace, Malegam argues, explains the implacable behavior and unprecedented radicalism of Pope Gregory VII and his successors and their willingness to foment violence. Their opponents, the emperors, fought back by appropriating clerical ideas about peace for themselves; they presented themselves as protectors of true peace and the reform Church’s peace as inherently violent. Both, however, were overtaken by changes taking place around them. Malegam focuses in particular on the development of the urban communes. To the Church, the communes, whose “peace” was based on internally generated ideas of proper order and on oaths of mutual protection, subverted the divinely sanctioned political order and therefore threatened authentic peace (p. 231). The Empire, too, viewed the communes as a threat and in the same terms. In his Deeds of the Emperor Frederick, Otto of Freising declared that Barbarossa’s attack on the cities of Lombardy was necessary because they by nature threatened proper order: “their increasingly sophisticated structure breathed violence, for they overturned the rightful order of governance” (p. 272).

But by the thirteenth century, realities had forced accommodation. Rufinus of Sorrento also articulated the idea of an intermediate, worldly peace that lay between the peace of Behemoth and that of God: the “peace of Babylon” (p. 264). God’s peace could never be realized on earth, he argued. The Church had to work together with secular authorities, including the communes, to maintain the stability on which human society depended.

Malegam presents an original and revealing picture of the worldviews and motives that drove the great conflict between Church and Empire. Inevitably he leaves questions open. For example, why does this ideology of true peace and false peace spring into view when it does? By tackling this question directly, as he did in describing the context for the formation of the communes and their attitudes [End Page 147] toward peace and order, he could have helped us understand better the larger context from which the conflict between Church and Empire sprang.

Such questions notwithstanding, The Peace of Behemoth is a very important book. It leads us into the mental world of church reformers as well as their opponents, and explores ways of understanding peace and violence that are quite different from our own. In the process, it gives us a fresh view of what the ecclesiastical reform movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was all about and what drove both its protagonists and opponents to behave in the ways that they did.

Warren C. Brown
California Institute of Technology
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