The Medieval
Manichee
,
33
and with great forensic ingenuity as part of a highly organized
conspiracy of international dimensions by Poly and Bournazel.
34
The latter,
however, overlook or ignore what the former (in his first edition) had little
opportunity to consider. By the early
s a comprehensive and minutely
argued scholarly debate over some thirty years had convinced virtually every
serious student of the subject, East and West, that every link in this chain was
weak, if not fictitious. Rather, a variety of episodes, arising in various ways
from the disparity between the simple idealism of the Gospels which the
Church was beginning to preach more vigorously and the intimate entangle-
ment of its hierarchy with the structures of local power, wealth and kinship
which would tear Europe apart in the great struggle for ‘reform’ of the second
half of the eleventh century, were given a spurious unity by the habit of
classifying erroneous or troublesome teachings as heresies which had been
condemned by the Fathers, or as fulfilling the prophecy of Paul that in the
last times heretics would appear ‘forbidding to marry and the eating of meat’.
35
To the best of my knowledge, nothing that has been said in the last twenty
years weakens these well established conclusions in any way. On the other
hand, a good deal has emerged, and is still doing so, especially from the work
on the enormous surviving oeuvre of Ademar of Chabannes, who can now be
seen as one of the most prolific though still largely unexploited writers of the
entire medieval period, of Landes on his life and historical work, and of
Daniel Callahan and Michael Frassetto, who are editing his sermons, to show
that there was an intimate connection between the first signs of the emergence
of popular heresy in the medieval West and the movement for the Peace of
God in Aquitaine.
36
That movement began essentially as an attempt to recover
from lay control monastic and cathedral lands which had been alienated to (or,
in the ecclesiastical language of the moment, ‘usurped’ by) their lay patrons,
and to resist the continuing attempts of the
milites
to build up new lordships
for themselves at the expense of the churches, and of small free proprietors
who were being reduced to serfdom, many of whom flocked to the standards
of the peace in self-defence. Its leaders, however – the bishops and great
abbots of the region, and the Duke of Aquitaine himself – though certainly
opposed to such lawless self-aggrandisement on the part of others, were not
(as Barthélemy rightly insists) opposed to the construction of the seigneurie
per se,
so long as control of the process remained in legitimate hands, to wit
their own. Hence the disillusion which by
caused the Duke of Aquitaine
to summon a Council at Charroux, in Ademar’s words, ‘to wipe out the
heresies which the Manichaeans had been spreading among the people’
37
– in
stark contrast to the Peace Councils of the
s, which had so stirringly called
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Medieval Europe
upon the people to defend themselves and the churches against the trans-
gressions of the knights.
38
There had already been signs that the accusation
of heresy was being increasingly employed as a weapon in the struggle within
the elite for control of landed property – hardly surprisingly, when the leading
protagonists on one side of the dispute were bishops. We can see it, for
example, in the charter from St Hilaire of Poitiers which Landes and Bonnassie
reprinted in
.
39
Here Duke William V of Aquitaine, in
, is enforcing
the reform of St Hilaire of Poitiers – that is, passing control of its lands to
the bishop from the canons among whom they had been divided, as the
custom was, by requiring the latter to lead the common life (that is to abjure
private property and embrace the rule of celibacy, thus disinheriting any
children they might inadvertently produce). The division in the chapter which
might be anticipated in the circumstances was clearly present: the duke has
ordered, at the behest of certain canons, that none of their number should
sell goods or property belonging to St Hilaire, and any who disobey will be
guilty of the sin of Arius – classically, that is, of dividing the church. Hence
his reference to that heresy as responsible for ‘the pullulation of wicked deeds
sprung from the Arian heresy not only among the people, but even in Holy
Church’ is a rhetorical flourish which does not, as Landes and Bonnassie
concluded, indicate the presence of popular heresy, but does point the way
towards blaming popular resistance to ducal or episcopal authority for the
presence of ‘heresy’ among the people which we first find in Ademar’s
assertion of the appearance of Manichees which he places under the year
in his chronicle, but actually wrote about ten years later.
The most famous incident in the resurgence of the heresy accusation as a
political device – often misleadingly spoken of as part of the emergence of
popular heresy, though it contains no popular element whatsoever – is the
trial at Orléans in
which resulted in the burning of a large number of
people – ten, fourteen or sixteen in different sources – including several
canons of the cathedral. All were of the highest social standing, and one of
the two alleged leaders of the sect was a former confessor to Queen Constance
of France, the undermining of whose connection R.-H. Bautier showed long
ago to have been a major objective of those, orchestrated by the faction of the
Count of Blois, who unveiled the ‘heresy’ by infiltrating into the cathedral a
member of the Norman ducal house in the guise of a seeker after religious
illumination.
40
The affair, still in many regards mysterious, is too complicated
to follow further here. Enough has been said to indicate the remoteness of its
context from popular enthusiasm or discontent, while Barthélemy’s suggestion
that the accusation that the leaders of that group, Etienne and Lisois, denied
the validity of ordination probably arose from their having accused fellow
members of the chapter of simony further reinforces the general interpretation
140
Medieval and Early Modern Periods
offered here.
41
A campaign to extirpate simony would have been a normal
constituent of the political intrigue behind the affair. In that context we
might even regard the related ‘discovery’ of ‘Manichees’ at Toulouse in the
same year as another possible trace of the wider drive against the ‘alienation’
of ecclesiastical property whose most familiar expression is the movement for
the Peace of God.
In the first instances, therefore, allegations of heresy must be taken, like
those of sorcery in early medieval courts, as evidence of increasing tension
and widening sources of dispute within the social elite.
42
It is another matter
to make a case for real and widespread anxiety in the elite about the spread
of heresy among ‘the people’, let alone to establish that such alarm, if
expressed, was justified by any corresponding reality. Nevertheless, it would
be entirely unsurprising if the turning outwards of the accusation of heresy
as a justification of repression rather than a stratagem of rivalry within the
elite which we see reflected in Ademar’s writings in the late
s and early
s had its counterpart in the emergence of a popular leadership to articu-
late the bitterness and disillusionment which spread as it became apparent
that the Peace of God, far from heralding an era of peace and justice, was
being used to consolidate and legitimize the building of castles, the imposition
of seigneurial justice and labour services, and the other evils against which
such enthusiasm had been aroused in the
s. To speculate about the priority
between chickens and eggs would be as futile in this context as in any other.
The arguments which such popular spokespeople might be expected to have
deployed must also be largely a matter of speculation. But Michael Frassetto
argues
43
persuasively that a group of sermons composed by Ademar towards
the end of his life – that is, in the early
s – contains assertions about
‘heretics who secretly arise amongst us’ which, while consistent with the
famous entry in his chronicle
s.a.
also contain particulars which are not
obviously inspired by the Pauline prediction of the last days or standard
patristic accounts of Manichaeism. These heretics ‘say that nothing comes
from communion at the holy altar’, ‘deny baptism, the cross and the church
because they are messengers of Antichrist’, reject money, secular honours
and marriage. In other words, they repudiate the reassertion of ecclesiastical
authority and the manifestations and structures of the social transformation
with which it was so closely allied. What else should we expect?
The question remains whether, if there were such false prophets or sub-
versive preachers at work (and, however plausible, we cannot take it as proven
by such indirect reports, especially from a writer as imaginative, not to say
deranged, as Landes has shown the ageing Ademar to have been) their presence
is in any degree attributable to the circulation of apocalyptic or millennial
fears and expectations. It will be immediately obvious that the methodological
141
Medieval Europe
problems attendant upon both quantitative and qualitative assessment of such
ideas are similar in principle to those relating to heresy, and considerably more
difficult in practice. It is common ground, of course, that the anticipation and
the terror of the Last Judgment were central to Catholic teaching, and that
while any attempt to calculate its date in terms of earthly time was regarded
as potentially a dangerous heresy, the Church’s general interests were best
served by the view that it was neither imminent nor impossibly distant.
44
While there is room for debate as to whether or to what extent in our period
the increasing number and variety of references to the Last Judgment in
documentary sources, diplomatic, narrative and normative, is a function simply
of the increase in the documentation itself, we have only to think of the
tympana of the white cloak of churches which was cast over Western Christen-
dom in these decades to see its centrality in the Church’s message at the time.
Whether the sense of the imminence of the Last Judgment was lent either
greater force or greater precision by the approach of the millennium in the
literal sense, of the years
and
, is another question altogether, and
one which confronts us with a classic case of the irresolvable dilemma. From
what is contemptuously referred to as the positivist – its protagonists would
rather say, with what seems arrogance to their opponents, the rational – point
of view, no compelling evidence has been produced that the dramatic events
or the social crisis of the decades around the millennium (supposing either
to have occurred at all, which is certainly not granted by Barthélemy) were
triggered by messiahs prophesying the approach of the millennium. To
Landes this is because ecclesiastical and secular leaders were terrified of the
revolutionary potential of millenarian sentiment, and therefore suppressed or
reinterpreted anything that might stimulate or seem to validate it. Thus, for
example, there is a well-known incident recounted by Abbo of Fleury, when
c
.
he heard a preacher in Paris say that the Antichrist would appear after
One Thousand Years, and be followed shortly by the Last Judgment.
45
Landes
and Barthélemy agree that this is the orthodox Augustinian view, the thousand
years being equated with the reign of the Christian Church, but for Landes
the fact that it was said and is reported by Abbo with further comments on
the correct interpretation of the relevant passages of Daniel and the apoca-
lypse points to the existence of a literally millenarian opinion which the
sermon was designed to rebut.
46
The unbridgeable chasm between the two
positions is encapsulated by their reading of the famous account by Radulphus
Glaber of how vast crowds of pilgrims set out for Jerusalem in the year
:
for Barthélemy ‘it is the fact and not the date which catches the attention of
Radulphus Glaber: he does not speak of men and women setting out in
expectation of imminent Judgement, or of the tribulations which will precede
it, or of any “millenarian” sentiment in the widest sense’.
47
For Landes that
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Medieval and Early Modern Periods
is because Glaber wrote the final version in which his text survives
c
.
,
after he knew that the events which he had once anticipated at the Millennium
of the Passion did not come to pass. His account therefore represents his
attempt to come to terms with his own earlier failure of judgment, which
meant reinterpreting events to de-emphasize or even suppress what he had
previously thought to be signs of the rapidly approaching End. To understand
his hopes or fears at the time of the events in question, therefore, we must
reconstruct what with this hindsight he edited out about their causes and
significance.
48
To illustrate, Landes reproduces the text with interpolations to
indicate what Radulphus was not saying. His reconstruction begins thus,
what ‘Glaber assumed his readers would understand’ being italicized:
At this time an innumerable multitude of people from the whole world
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