Peace and Truce of God - Overview

Overview

The Peace and Truce of God movement was one of the ways that the Church attempted to Christianize and pacify the feudal structures of society through non-violent means. After the collapse of the Carolingian empire in the ninth century, France had degenerated into many small counties and lordships, in which local lords and knights frequently fought each other for control. At the same time there were often attacks from the Vikings, who settled in northern France as the Normans but continued to raid territory further inland.

Philip Daileader colorfully summarizes the situation:

Local clergy – abbots, the heads of monasteries, bishops – would hold church councils, and summon the regional nobility to these councils, send out invitations demanding that the nobles show up at a certain point in time. If the nobles showed up at these councils, which were often open air events because you'd expect a fairly substantial number of people to come, the clergy would bring all the saints' relics they could find from the neighborhood – bits of bone from the corpses of saints, vials of blood, pieces of clothing from the garments of saints, bath tubs – any item that had had physical contact with someone who is venerated as a saint. And often they would heap them up in a field, get as many relics as you could, or carry them among the crowd of knights and nobles who had shown up. They would attempt to use the fear of the saints and the retribution of the saints to intimidate the nobility into swearing to abide by the peace and truce of God, waving these relics in the faces of knights and nobles, and hopefully getting them the promise that henceforth they would obey the peace and truce of God. One should never underestimate the fear of saints in the Middle Ages and of saints' relics. People would travel from miles around to visit the shrines of which saints relics were venerated, seeking physical cures, seeking advice on what to do in the future. And the belief in the power of saints' relics to alter behavior is very, very real. Nonetheless, the peace and truce of God movement was highly limited in its effectiveness, in its ability to restrain the fighting of medieval nobles. It was limited because nobles were under no obligation to attend the Church council. You could get the invitation and simply tear it up, and not attend. Even if you attended, you might not swear to abide by the peace and truce of God. And even if you swore to abide by the peace and truce of God, well, it was one thing to be intimidated by the fear of the saints when all the local clergy were waving bones at you. It was another to be afraid when you got back to the castle with your pillaging buddies, and started to feel the old impulse return once again. The peace and truce of God had to be renewed decade after decade, after decade, in those areas in which it existed. And the mere fact of constant renewal suggests that it was not especially well-obeyed, or a particularly powerful weapon for restraining the medieval nobility.

The movement was not very effective. "In trying to control warfare without the use of physical coercion it rapidly foundered on the rocks of a violent feudal reality." (Richard Landes). However it set a precedent that would be followed by other successful popular movements to control nobles' violence such as medieval communes, and the Crusades.

In addition to the Peace and Truce of God movement, other non-violent, although less direct, methods of controlling violence were used by the clergy. By adding the religious oaths of fealty to the feudal act of homage, and in organizing rights and duties within the system, churchmen did their utmost to Christianize feudal society in general and to set limits on feudal violence in particular. This can be seen as combining the spiritual (potestas) and secular authority (auctoritas) in a dual concerted action that had defined the idea of Christian government since the fifth century.

The oaths to keep the peace sworn by nobles spread in time to the villagers themselves; heads of households meeting communally would ritually swear to uphold the common peace.

The two movements began at separate times and places, but by the eleventh century they became synonymous as the "Peace and Truce of God". "Germans looked with mingled horror and contempt at the French 'anarchy'. To Maintain the king's peace was the first duty of a German sovereign." The movement, though seemingly redundant to the duties of the crown, had a religious momentum that would not be denied. Holy Roman Emperor Henry III issued the earliest form of this in his empire while at Constance in 1043. In the Holy Roman Empire it was referred to as Landfriede.