Heather, The Triumph of Religion 300–1300
The 'one-party state' of western Christendom, an ideology to generate 'model behaviour'..
The Source:
Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300–1300, Penguin 2022
INTRODUCTION
[excerpt from history overview]
… [Following] the conversion of [Roman emperor] Constantine, the Christian faith recruited classical philosophy and the culturally coercive mechanisms of the imperial state to turn itself into a theologically coherent, institutionally effective phenomenon capable of demolishing (sometimes literally) classical paganism; and, in the process, begin to win converts – for the first time – on a mass scale. Often discussed as the Christianization of the Roman Empire, this process can be more accurately cast as the Romanization of Christianity: one in which the religion turned itself into a branch of the Roman state in the fourth and fifth centuries. …
… [The] disappearance of this Empire then necessarily plunged nascent Christianity into crisis. Not only did official imperial Nicene Christianity come much closer to being replaced in its former western provinces by an alternative definition of faith than is generally recognized, but the Church’s institutional and educational frameworks had become dependent on the parallel structures of Empire: both crumbled as the latter disappeared.
As a result, warrior values and broader cultural patterns, in which local congregations were relatively free to mix elements of intrusive Christian and their own existing belief, quickly became characteristic of early medieval Christianity, especially among the dispersed masses of Europe’s peasantry. An important additional perspective on the developments unfolding in what was broadly the western half of the old Roman Empire is provided by events to the south and east. Here, it is important to look closely at the medium- to longer-term fate of Christian populations resident in those provinces of the eastern Empire which were being simultaneously swallowed up by the rise of the Islamic caliphates.
These new patterns of post-Roman European Christianity then began to change again … when Carolingian and Holy Roman Ottonian emperors provided two initial centuries of more coherent religious leadership, between 800 and the end of the millennium. This second age of Christian Empire saw the religion spread for the first time, under imperial patronage, far beyond the borders of the old Roman Empire to capture much vaster tracts of the European landscape. Equally important, Charlemagne and his scholars laid down a new pattern for institutionalizing Christian learning, which quickly made western Europe – again for the first time – the intellectual powerhouse of a rapidly transforming Christendom.
Then, from the mid-eleventh century onwards, an extraordinary set of further transformations helped generate medieval Christendom in its fully evolved form. Techniques borrowed from Roman law, allied with spectacular legal forgery, allowed the papacy to transform itself into an institution capable of exercising effective religious authority across virtually the whole of Europe. A sequence of popes then weaponized this authority to define and enforce new patterns of Christian piety among both the clergy and the different lay constituencies of European Christendom, finally bringing into being the basic outlines of pre-Reformation medieval Christianity, many of which have been preserved to the present in the Roman Catholic communion.
CHAPTER 14 [final]
Christendom and Coercion
… A huge swathe of territory – stretching from Spain to Scandinavia, Iceland to Poland – was brought to a striking and utterly unprecedented degree of religious uniformity under the authority of the Roman papacy. All of which was the result of the two profound and intertwined journeys of cultural transformation explored in this book. The first brought the population of Europe from an original position of enormous religious diversity to Lateran uniformity, while the second transformed – in multiple ways in three great eras of revolution – the Christian religion itself.
In the fourth and fifth centuries, first of all, the pre-Constantinian Christian Church (which was itself already substantially different from the ‘Jesus Movement’ of first-century Palestine) was fundamentally reconfigured by the adoption of a Christian allegiance by the Roman imperial state and – consequently – large numbers of its constituent landowning elites.
This not only created the first Christian confessional state but set what was still a small sect of committed devotees, at the time of Constantine’s conversion, on its journey towards mass religious movement by acquiring new, more centralized authority structures – based on the administrative patterns of the imperial state and the religious authority of the imperial office – operating practices, and doctrinal articulation.
Such was the intensity of the practical and ideological intertwining of the Christian religion and the Roman imperial state that the latter’s unravelling could not but generate a second period of revolutionary transformation. The unmistakeable defeat of a Christian confessional Empire necessarily prompted an ideological crisis in both the western and eastern halves of the Roman world.
In the west, imperial Nicene orthodoxy survived, but by a narrower margin than is usually imagined, while in the east the Christian Roman Empire’s loss of ideological legitimacy and actual power eventually generated large-scale conversion to Islam (again especially among elites in the first instance, who faced the most immediate effects of the emergence of an alternative Muslim confessional state).
And even where Christian dominance survived, the accompanying practical consequences of the unravelling of the Roman imperial system were profound enough to push Christianity into a further bout of revolutionary transformation.
Christianity’s newly unified authority structure collapsed. This combined with the disappearance of the large-scale educational infrastructure that the imperial state had supported to generate a series of structural limitations within post-Roman western Christianity, which hampered both its own internal unity and the religion’s overall continuity of development. When new congregations of peasants and pagan warriors then came to be integrated into the faith in the same era, the result was another set of dramatic transformations in prevailing religious ideologies and standards of lay piety.
A third phase of revolutionary development was ushered in by a sequence of new imperial dynasties, who provided unified religious leadership to most of the Latin west again across the last quarter of the first millennium. Ultimately responsible for a massive geographical extension in Christian allegiance, they also oversaw an enormous increase in the educational and structural underpinnings of the religion.
In the end, however, their authority did not reach far enough, and reform-minded Churchmen – many from outside Italy – transformed the Roman papacy into a new institution, capable, for the first time in its history, of providing overarching religious leadership for the majority of Europe’s Christians.
This revamping of Latin Christianity’s authority structures was always closely tied to a desire to enact still more far-reaching changes to general Church practice and operating standards, and it was these desires – with important inputs from the new universities of the Christian west – which eventually came to fruition in the religious programme given unanimous approval at the fourth Lateran council of 1215.
In part … the successful implementation of this programme depended on directing and shaping the energies of spontaneous Christian religious enthusiasm in some very particular directions. But it relied on something else, too. At the same time as the new Franciscan and Dominican preaching orders were winning hearts and minds in the parishes of Catholic Europe, the ecclesiastical establishment also began to exercise much tighter corrective discipline against identified heretics, thought to pose a serious threat to the salvation of their own souls – and to those of any to whom they transmitted their beliefs.
ACCUSATIO AND INQUISITIO
… A first dramatic innovation in the pursuit of heresy came in 1208, when Innocent III adapted the existing concept of crusade for use not against external enemies of Christendom, but internal dissidents in the Languedoc, the large and fiercely independent province in what is now south-western France. When Innocent’s legate in southern France, Pierre de Castelnau, was murdered, officials blamed his killing on Cathar heretics. The Cathars, like the late Roman Manichaeans who had attracted St Augustine in his younger days, were dualists. They believed, contrary to the Book of Genesis, that there were two Divine principles at work in the cosmos: one good, the other evil. The physical world, they held, was a creation of the latter, which undermined fundamental Christian conceptions of Divine omnipotence. Traditionally, the Cathars of the Languedoc have been viewed as a well-organized alternative Church, with their own bishops and dioceses, and strong connections to parallel networks of fellow believers in other parts of the west and beyond – particularly northern Italy and the Balkans (where another dualist heretical group, known as the Bogomils, seems to have flourished from the late tenth century onwards). While there are reasons to doubt some of this, there was no doubt at all about the ferocity of Innocent’s response to the murder of his legate at the hands of dangerous heretics.
In declaring a crusade against the Cathars, Innocent appealed to the militarized landowning classes of northern France to intervene. Led by the zealous Cistercian abbot of Cîteaux, Arnaud Amaury, and a nobleman-adventurer by the name of Simon de Montfort – father of the Simon who later directed the Baronial Revolt against Henry III of England – campaigning started the same year. The so-called Albigensian Crusade (Albigenses was an alternative name for the Cathars, derived from the name of Albi, the town particularly associated with the heretics) would last fully twenty years and include episodes of extreme savagery. For the first seven years or so, up to 1215, the crusaders scored a series of military successes against their local peers, including de Montfort’s victory over King Peter II of Aragon in 1213, who had intervened from south of the Pyrenees. As ever, issues of power and wealth were wrapped up in the religious conflict. Most crusaders went to the Languedoc to take advantage of Innocent having declared open season on the region’s landowning establishment, who were generally opposed to the idea of having the French crown as overlord: Peter of Aragon became involved in the conflict to protect his own regional interests. Whether Peter and other local landowners were also acting to protect Cathar heretics is much less clear than the crusaders’ propaganda claimed.
The crusaders’ initial successes were brutal: their sack of the city of Béziers in July 1209 alone saw twenty thousand people killed. From mid-1215 the run of victories then stalled, especially following de Montford’s death in 1218, until King Louis VIII of France intervened in person in the mid-1220s, which finally stamped out the flames of resistance. In 1229, the king’s victory was confirmed by the Treaty of Paris, by which the local overlord, Count Raymond of Toulouse, confirmed his effective submission to the French crown.
But while the crusade had successfully extended the power of the French crown, which was why the king of France had become involved, it proved much less effective against heresy, which, Church officials reported, was still rife in the region in the 1230s. Overall, crusade proved a rather blunt, if certainly bloody, instrument for suppressing internal religious dissent, one which would be used only very occasionally over the subsequent centuries (against, for instance, the Hussites of Bohemia in the fifteenth century). In the war against entrenched religious dissidence, a second, legal innovation proved much more effective.
Before the thirteenth century, charges of heresy could be brought only under the old Roman legal action of accusatio. Classical Roman law functioned by defining a series of legal pathways, each with its own specific process. Under accusatio, plaintiffs had to make accusations in public – and the burden of proof fell on the accusers themselves, rather than on a court or public official. You could only call adult witnesses of good legal standing to testify. If your accusation failed and the defendant were found innocent, you faced serious personal jeopardy, for the accuser faced the same punishment that would have been meted out to the defendant in the case of a guilty verdict. Since the punishment for heresy could be being burnt alive, accusatio was never a very popular route into the problem.
In the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the investigation of heresy was revolutionized by the development of an entirely new form of legal action: inquisitio.
Inquisitio operated under different rules. It did not have to be triggered by a public accusation: anonymous denunciations were perfectly sufficient. And under the terms of this legal process, investigation and burden of proof fell not on the initiator (whose identity might never be known), but on the ecclesiastical officials who chose to take up the case. The range of allowable witnesses included children and convicted criminals – and no appeals were allowed against guilty verdicts.
The new legal process of inquisition was not originally developed to deal with heretics. Defined in the later twelfth century in the legal schools of Bologna, and sanctioned in 1215 at the fourth Lateran council, it was designed for use against simoniac priests [selling church offices] and other clerical transgressors. Only in the following generation was inquisitio turned against heretics. The catalyst for its redeployment was the continued existence in south-western France of Cathar heresy, which Pope Innocent III’s bloody and prolonged crusade had failed to extinguish. In 1231 – after lobbying by the founder of the Dominican order Dominic de Guzmán – Pope Gregory IX codified the regulations on inquisitio in 1231, repurposing the entire legal package for the prosecution of heresy.
Trying it out on the ground in south-western France led to a number of further innovations, which were duly sanctioned in the 1240s by local Church councils such as Tarragona, Narbonne and Béziers. It also resulted in papal rulings such as 1252’s Ad extirpanda, in which Innocent IV authorized the use of torture against heretics; and further legal treatises, such as those by the thirteenth-century Spanish canon lawyer and Dominican inquisitor Raymond de Peñafort, who was also responsible for the decretal collection of Pope Gregory IX. By the early fourteenth century, this interaction of theory and practice had matured into a tried-and-tested regime of investigation and punishment, as set out in the Dominican inquisitor Bernard Gui’s classic instruction manual for trainee inquisitors: the Practica Inquisitionis of the mid-1320s. (Bernard, who makes a significant appearance in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, finished his career as bishop of Lodève in south-western France.)
Alongside torture in the list of acceptable inquisitorial techniques, Bernard added indefinite imprisonment: both as a form of punishment and as a mechanism for securing confession. Its forms could be correspondingly punitive: solitary confinement, the systematic deprivation of food and water, and the loading of prisoners with chains were all recommended and papal-endorsed practices. It was also no longer sufficient for an accused just to confess their own guilt. To be legally admissible, a confession also had to denounce everyone in the prisoner’s circle who shared the same heretical beliefs.
Inquisitio, then, was specifically developed as a practical tool for enforcing compliance with the required set of religious beliefs and practices – the new Latin Christian orthodoxy – set out at the fourth Lateran council. Its immediate impact was dramatic. In the early days, it could also be chaotic. In the same year that Gregory IX redirected inquisitio against heretics, a local chronicler described the arrival of two would-be inquisitors in the Rhineland city of Worms, within the archdiocese of Mainz. ‘There came a certain friar’, the chronicler wrote, ‘called Conrad Dors, and he was completely illiterate and of the Order of Preachers, and he brought with him a certain secular man named John, who was one-eyed and maimed, and in truth utterly vile.’ The pair started denouncing heretics, ‘firstly among the poor … and they began to burn them …’. This ghastly episode illustrated typical inquisitorial practice, with Dominicans (the Order of Preachers referred to here) often taking the lead in running inquisitorial tribunals, as, too, did Franciscans and, occasionally, groups of bishops. …
… With the emergence of inquisition, the official hierarchies of the Church had developed a legal enforcement mechanism of unprecedented power, brutality and reach. Never before had licensed operatives of the official Church had the power to arrest at will, and – on nothing more than unsubstantiated suspicion – to imprison and torture their victims, and even to hand them over to the secular authorities for the ultimate punishment for heresy, burning alive. What unfolded in the Languedoc, in the century after [pope] Gregory IX’s rebooting of inquisitio in 1231, was extraordinarily horrifying in its scale and effect.
It is important, however, not to exaggerate its overall direct impact. Outside the inquisitorial epicentre of the Languedoc, commissions of inquisitio tended to operate for much more limited periods and affect the lives of much smaller numbers of people. When English bishops deployed it against the late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Lollards – who shared with other radical groups a desire to read the Bible in the vernacular and interpret it for themselves – only a few hundred people were caught up in its sporadic operations. Inquisitors could also face serious and sometimes effective resistance. The inquisitors’ progress in the Languedoc was held up from time to time by well-conceived plots to murder inquisitors, or to burn the interrogation records that were the root of much of their power. However, because there was secure secular support for the inquisitors in south-western France (at least in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade), Cathar resistance there usually provoked brutal military reprisals.
As so often in persecutions throughout history, the poor and disenfranchised were also disproportionately affected, as illustrated in the early inquisitio at Worms. Conrad and the one-eyed John were eventually joined by a second Conrad – of Marburg – who had developed a reputation as a harsh confessor (of Elizabeth of Hungary: 1217–31). When the three switched from burning the poor with impunity to bringing charges against some of the local nobility, resistance to their activities suddenly stiffened. The elites, as became clear, had power and influence of their own. When the regional archbishop of Mainz wrote to the pope to complain about the activities of the inquisitors, a Church council promptly dismissed the charges. A few days later, all three inquisitors were found murdered. The three had massively overplayed their hand, and, lacking support among or any strong ties to local elites, they made themselves easy targets.
Even where support for the inquisition was strong, inquisitors did not always resort to the most extreme measures. Bernard Gui’s Book of Sentences, compiled when he headed the inquisition at Toulouse between 1308 and 1323, records that, over a fifteen-year period, he condemned 930 individuals for heretical beliefs: 42 of them were burnt at the stake, 307 imprisoned for varying periods, 143 had to wear crosses sewn onto their clothing for life, 9 were sent on various pilgrimages, 69 corpses were exhumed and cremated (the punishment meted out on supposed heretics who were already dead), and 22 houses were demolished. The rest received more minor sentences. However, even if Bernard was not burning hundreds of people, the list of the punishments inflicted in the name of a supposedly loving God is horrific. It also played a role in creating a more general climate of repression and fear across western Christendom, without which the blanket implementation of the fourth Lateran council’s programmatic piety would have been impossible. …
[THE ‘VISITATIONS’]
… Another mechanism of constraint underpinned the widespread adoption of Lateran-style parish piety: the parish visitation. In the early tenth century, the reformed Benedictine abbot Regino of Prüm considered that parish visitations – where the bishop went round to each of the dependent parishes of his diocese in turn – should be a normal feature of a bishop’s job description …
… [The] new-style visitation process that emerged in England between 1250 and 1300, and which set a pattern for the rest of the Middle Ages.
According to canon law, visitations were meant to happen every three years, an expectation which seems to have been broadly met. Never before had the lives of the clergy and their provision of services been subject to such intense and regular scrutiny and punishment; nor had earlier visitations regularly searched out and punished offences against the Christian order committed by members of the laity. There remain questions over the extent to which such a visitation model was being followed across the rest of Latin Europe, since some details of the English process closely echoed particular contemporary developments in the operations of English government. But systemic pressure to conduct more intensive local questioning, homing in on clerical celibacy and the provision of the sacraments, and with a simultaneous focus on lay morality, was explicitly central to the Lateran programme.
Contemporary canon law not confined to English conditions devoted much attention to many of the issues raised by the new-style process: how much testimony constituted valid suspicion of immorality; and whose testimony, in general terms, could be trusted (canon law agreeing with English practice in its conclusion that wealthier peasants were the most reliable witnesses).
While there might well have been some significant regional variations, therefore, a similar transformation of the traditional episcopal visitation process was clearly underway right across thirteenth-century Latin Christendom.
Exploring how the Lateran agenda played out at parish level allows us to understand how its innovative programme of piety managed to take such a firm hold on the population of medieval Western Europe. Part of the story, as we’ve seen, was a substantial dose of religious excitement: the enthusiastic adoption, on the part of laity and clergy alike, of its coherent idea-sets, persuasively championed by the newly formed, papal-backed preaching orders.
The new theology of salvation developed in the twelfth-century universities carried an ultimately optimistic message: while humanity is deeply sinful, and all sins must be paid for, redemption can be achieved. And even if Purgatory will be a horrible experience, Heaven awaits. Visitation documents … focus on resistance to this theological process, more or less consciously articulated, by individuals whose lives were breaching the new standards in one way or another, and who were accordingly named and shamed. Implicit within the record, but an essential part of the overall story, is the much greater percentage of the population whom the inspectors found no reason to censure. Equally persuasive as the preaching of the friars, and drawing on the same bodies of zealous, disciplined manpower, was the utterly unprecedented level of repression that the newly unified ecclesiastical establishment was prepared to unleash against religious dissidence.
Unlimited imprisonment in brutal conditions, physical torture, burning at the stake – there was no limit to the violence that the Church was willing to deploy to eliminate perceived resistance. Meanwhile, as [one] report vividly shows, lower-level coercion, more pervasively distributed, was central to the new sacramental rhythm of the medieval parish. Alongside these direct applications of different levels of force, the new order rested upon a series of indirect but arguably still more effective pressures to conform.
The evident fear and anxiety generated by the activities of the inquisitors and the ‘othering’ of invented enemies, from Jewish communities to perceived heretics, were also evident at parish level, albeit at lower volumes. Here, the regime of visitation and informing was more than enough to enforce at least outward compliance with the new order over the long term. Highly instructive, I think, is the fate of the one group of dualist heretics recorded to have made it across the Channel to England in the twelfth century. They were neither arrested nor executed; rather, during the winter after their arrival, they perished from a combination of starvation and exposure. Sufficient discipline had been built into the operation of parish Christianity in England to cut them off from any community-level protection or support.
The full range of enforcement methods in play after 1215 has, to my mind, a peculiarly familiar ring to it. The general dissemination of an ultimately positive ideology was backed up by periodic witch-hunts of breath-taking brutality, justified by a process of paranoid fantastical othering. This invented enemies for the new Christian order, in the same way that the inquisitors’ methods might turn pretty much any individual into a transgressive heretic.
At the local level, the process of generating behavioural and ideological conformity was reinforced by regular tours of inspection, which both encouraged and depended upon a culture of informing. This has strong resonances of the mechanisms that allowed the security apparatuses of the old Soviet bloc countries to work so effectively before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Only afterwards, when the East German Stasi files were ripped open, did it become so apparent how much of the population – in the hope of gaining advantage for themselves or those they loved, or simply to stave off hostile official attention – had been willing to inform on their neighbours.
As the Lateran enforcement process gathered pace throughout the late Middle Ages, western Christendom increasingly resembled a one-party state.
Its universalizing, monolithic ideology was used to generate a clear profile of model behaviour. Those unwilling to conform were then forced into line by a whole series of positive and negative enforcement mechanisms, ranging from a cycle of enjoyable festivals to ruthless violence, enacted against a backdrop of manufactured fear and ongoing pressures to conform – not least by recruiting neighbour to inform on neighbour.
Medieval Latin Christendom was, however, an arthritic and deeply inefficient form of one-party state. The power of the Church hierarchy had always to co-exist with that of secular rulers, who could occasionally be constrained but mostly had to be negotiated with – and whose co-operation, particularly in carrying out the most extreme punishments, remained absolutely necessary. The geographical distances involved also meant that, while Rome may have set the rules from the late twelfth century onwards, it was often not in close control of what actually happened on the ground. Small-scale dissident movements such as the Waldenses could also operate between the cracks of the structure, even if its preachers and their hearers did periodically fall foul of inquisitors.
All the same, the overall picture is striking. Positive ideological enthusiasm and pervasive threat of punishment for any deviation were inseparable components of a powerful, two-pronged strategy of enforcement that, over the long term, brought much of Europe into line with patterns of religiosity sanctified by Innocent III’s great council of 1215. This overarching conclusion prompts two final lines of thought.
First, it adds a significant gloss to current understandings of pre-Reformation religiosity. The pattern of parish piety set out at Lateran IV may have been internalized and still vigorous in the late fifteenth century, but this was to a substantial extent an imposed set of cultural norms.
One-party contexts, by their very nature, massively complicate the identification of properly voluntary behaviour. If you turn the spotlight on any particular conforming individual, their actions will tend to appear voluntary. Since some individuals always did (and do) dissent from imposed cultural–political systems, this means that it is theoretically possible that any individual might do. And the existence of that possibility, however theoretical, makes any conformist behaviour look voluntary.
But if you think about the overall situation, the pressures to conform are so many and so varied that in fact most individuals will always choose to conform, to the extent that the system allows them to. Once proper account is taken of the constraining pressures, therefore, what might look like purely voluntary behaviour actually isn’t. People conform because, faced with this much pressure, nearly everyone does. Take away that force, and behaviour will change.
This has resonance for our understanding of the partial unravelling of Lateran piety that unfolded in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Given the degree of force that was required to hold Lateran piety in place, the fact that, once people understood that deviation – as licensed by Protestant critiques of the late medieval Church – had now become permissible, substantial elements of the population of western Christendom began to move in different religious directions becomes more explicable. In sixteenth-century England, for instance, large swathes of the population remained devoted to the old order. But that devotion did ultimately rest (all the same) on the application of a large amount of coercion, and when that coercion was removed it is no surprise to find that disenchantment began to emerge.
Second, the degree of coercion involved at the climax of European Christianization prompts some final reflection on the overall process which created this monolithic cultural edifice. ‘Conversion’ – when applied to this long-term process of religious transformation – has turned out to be a deeply misleading singular noun. In practice, it encompassed a wide variety of phenomena. At one extreme, Christian conversion could be the result of life-changing personal spiritual experience, after the classic model of St Paul on the road to Damascus. Such experience was a recurring feature in the spread of Christianity in every phase of its history, whether it was conversion in the sense of a total change of allegiance from a different religion, or in the sense of a new understanding of how ‘proper’ Christianity required you to behave.
There is of course nothing unique to Christianity in generating intense spiritual experience. Nonetheless, as we have seen, intense personal conversion stories represent only one strand within the many shifts in religious allegiance that brought European Christendom into existence. Many other conversion stories were completely involuntary.
The Saxons were battered into religious submission by Charlemagne; the Elbe Slavs were brought to Christianity by the combined sword power of the Holy Roman Empire and a recently converted Polish kingdom; the Northern Crusades spread the faith to the north-eastern Baltic at sword point.
Then there were the many individuals who found themselves the recipients of top-down processes of religious change instituted by ruling elites, who had accepted Christianity along with its inherent obligation to spread the faith. No doubt a significant proportion of the peasantry of early medieval Europe voluntarily embraced the resulting processes of religious change in the sixth century and beyond. But there is substantial evidence of passive and active peasant resistance, and we need to take seriously the willingness of Gregory the Great and other Church leaders to tax and beat their peasants into at least an outward show of Christian submission.
Similarly coercive processes, if not so fully documented, also played a central role in the mass peasant conversions – again top-down in nature – which followed the many cases of elite self-conversion recorded north of the Channel in the early medieval period, and east of the Elbe in the second age of Christian Empire.
In between documented cases of intense personal conversion and the many instances of larger groups being forced to adopt Christianity stands the fascinating phenomenon of ostensibly voluntary elite self-conversion. Encompassing everything from the adoption of Christianity by landowning Roman elites in the fourth century to the subsequent self-Christianization of a host of northern and central/eastern European warlords, these conversions played a fundamental role in the emergence of European Christendom. The Christian elites of early medieval western Europe – and, subsequently, northern and eastern Europe – eventually built the churches and monasteries, became higher-level church officials, and also constrained their subordinate peasantries into accepting their new religion. In terms of simple geographical extent, it was this kind of conversion process that initially brought Christianity to the majority of the European landmass, and to most of its population.
Some of this was certainly the result of spiritual conviction. The intensity of St Augustine’s experience in the garden was clearly shared by a number of his peers. But highly spiritual Christian biographies survive disproportionately in the source material because medieval monks were responsible for preserving ancient texts.
For every Augustine, there were unrecorded numbers of others who, faced with Christian emperors and the Christianization of the public life of the late Roman Empire, concluded that they needed to conform, at least outwardly, to protect their local standing. It remained possible to dissent entirely, and some did so, but the Roman imperial system had always demanded ideological conformity from its elites, operating as its own one-party state, and the penalties faced for not coming into line after its cultural structures had decisively shifted in a Christian direction in the final decades of the fourth century, directly threatened the individual’s continued elite status. Despite the many elite saints of the late Roman period, therefore, many contemporary elite conversions were the product of calculation rather than conviction, a point confirmed by the fact that many of their descendants would later convert again, to Islam, for very similar reasons.
A less direct but equally profound element of constraint also underlay the elite self-conversion processes that unfolded north of the Channel in the sixth and seventh centuries, and east of the Elbe in the ninth and beyond. Here the converting elites were responding to the preferences of powerful, neighbouring Christian rulers, and attempting to recruit those neighbours’ support. Again, there were varying degrees of religious enthusiasm on display, but some of the most enthusiastic – like ‘Good King’ Wenceslas – came to a bad end, and careful calculation was again a prominent theme. So it was, too, with the ebb and flow of the Christian missions to Scandinavia in the Viking period, which initially flourished – then failed – in direct relationship to the perceived power of the Carolingian and Ottonian dynasties.
In the end, the fully fledged Christian one-party state of high medieval Europe has to be seen as the culmination, therefore, of a long history of more and less directly forced conversion. Many processes of transformation came together to generate the unified religious mix of ideology and practice that constituted the programmatic piety of the fourth Lateran council, but from the time of Constantine onwards, the Christianization of Europe was closely linked to the exercise of power at every level: imperial, royal, ecclesiastical and, even, in the late medieval parish, of one peasant over another. Which, on reflection, is perhaps not such a surprising conclusion. Many people have religious beliefs and intense spiritual experiences, not least because the course of all human life, above all the inescapable interplay of love and death, has always generated existential reflection. But spirituality does not usually express itself within the defined norms of a monolithic cultural edifice. There’s still plenty of religion in the modern world, despite the combined impacts of science, rationalism and materialism – and plenty of Christianity too. Only in the unique circumstances of the first few centuries of the second millennium, however, was a unique level of social and institutional force assembled to sanctify one particular, detailed interpretation of the biblical texts as ‘correct’ Christianity, and to enforce an almost monolithic level of individual compliance with its required norms of religious belief and ritual practice.
[END of book]
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