The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200

Introduction

1 Introduction In 1324, a physician and scholar named Marsilius of Padua refuted papal sovereignty in the name of peace. In his soon-to-be notorious Defensor pacis (Defender of the Peace), Marsilius asserted the legitimacy of a secular monarch over the clergy, insisting that the only true peace was earthly tranquility, and that tranquility was the exclusive province of the prince. Priests who bandied about their own claims to peacemaking were obstructing genuine peace and must be constrained to a sphere outside politics and statecraft. So convinced was he of the truth of his argument that Marsilius accompanied an imperial invasion of Rome in 1328 and served as “spiritual vicar” to the citizens after the pope had been driven into exile. Like many before him who had pondered questions of political obedience, and many who would follow, Marsilius argued that successful maintenance of peace should override all other considerations about a ruler’s legitimacy. He invoked Saint Augustine, who had reminded Christians that the prophet Jeremiah himself had endorsed secular authority, regardless of the prince’s religion. Jeremiah had asked the Jews of the Babylonian Captivity to pray for the health of the gentile king Nebuchadnezzar. They must pray for the 2 THE SLEEP OF BEHEMOTH king and his sons,and for peace to his city. Ultimately,counseled the prophet, “in their peace will be your peace.”1 Defender of the Peace is widely regarded as one of the most important political treatises of the Middle Ages,and its appearance in 1324 marks a threshold in the evolution of Western political theory. Yet the ideas it espouses were long in the making. It should surprise no one that a political thinker in the fourteenth century would use peace as the fulcrum of an argument in which secular authority was elevated above clerical authority, or even that peace trumped all other considerations in the determination of a subject’s obedience . But ironically, centuries of intellectual spadework by clergymen had led to this state of affairs: their own valorization of a monopolistic peace had forged an extraordinary weapon for critics to use against them. By Marsilius’s time, peace could conceivably provide religious imperatives for exclusive obedience to a secular authority. How did this happen? If we were to ask one of the greatest patristic authorities on the subject,he might remind us that even in Babylon,prophets had received warnings about the dangers of experimenting with peace. In two works,his Homilies on Ezekiel and his near-ubiquitous Pastoral Care,Saint Gregory the Great described how the word of God instructed Ezekiel to take up a tile and sketch on it an image of Jerusalem. Although the city’s name translates as “vision of peace,” Ezekiel was instructed to depict it with towers and fortresses: to prepare, in effect, for a long siege. Gregory interpreted Ezekiel’s vision: when peace appears most clearly, then too do the forces of discord arise.2 To Gregory, Ezekiel’s vision of peace thus conveyed both a desired goal and an impending hazard. It pointed to an unattainable state of authentic concord, quietude, and delight in the divine embrace. On earth, such visions of peace could be hazardous, even misleading, when human beings confused imperfect reproductions of peace for the real thing. Heedless to the warnings of their patristic forebears, however, church reformers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries attempted the perfection of peace on earth. For centuries, Christian thinkers had considered harmony between kingship and priesthood the standard of peace in an imperfect world. Then, between 1000 and 1200, reformers in the papal curia and monks and canons in the intellectual circles of northern France began to reimagine the church as a body whose task it was eventually to absorb all peoples through 1. Marsilius, Defensor pacis 2.5.7, ed. C. W. Previté-Orton (Cambridge, 1928), 155. See Peter Lombard, Collectanea in omnes Pauli apostoli epistulas, epistolam I ad Timothaeum 1.2, PL 192:337A. Cf. Augustine, De civitate Dei 19.26, ed. Emanuel Hoffman, CSEL 40/2:421. Cf. Jer. 29.7. 2. Gregory the Great,Regulae pastoralis liber 2.10,PL 77:46C (henceforth Reg.past.). Cf. Ezek. 4.1. INTRODUCTION 3 progressive acts of revolutionary peacemaking. They envisioned this peace as faithful community, under a just regime, directed by spiritual authority, and comprising those who had been united by a turbulent transformation of desire and perception. “Turbulence...