Miracles, Political Authority and Violence in Medieval and Early Modern History

Matthew Rowley, Natasha Hodgson, Matthew Rowley, Natasha Hodgson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000473827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This volume examines how historical beliefs about the supernatural were used to justify violence, secure political authority or extend toleration in both the medieval and early modern periods.

Contributors explore miracles, political authority and violence in Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, various Protestant groups, Judaism, Islam and the local religious beliefs of Pacific Islanders who interacted with Christians. The chapters are geographically expansive, with contributions ranging from confessional conflict in Poland-Lithuania to the conquest of Oceania. They examine various types of conflict such as confessional struggles, conversion attempts, assassination and war, as well as themes including diplomacy, miraculous iconography, toleration, theology and rhetoric. Together, the chapters explore the appropriation of accounts of miraculous violence that are recorded in sacred texts to reveal what partisans claimed God did in conflict, and how they claimed to know. The volume investigates theories of justified warfare, changing beliefs about the supernatural with the advent of modernity and the perceived relationship between human and divine agency.

Miracles, Political Authority and Violence in Medieval and Early Modern History is of interest to scholars and students in several fields including religion and violence, political and military history, and theology and the reception of sacred texts in the medieval and early modern world.

1

‘WORDS THAT SUPPLY VALOUR’

God, warfare, and the rhetoric of persuasion in Carolingian history writing

Robert Evans

DOI: 10.4324/9781003168294-2

The numerous historians who wrote in the Carolingian Empire from the mid-eighth to the late ninth century all exhibited a shared interest in warfare.¹ Whatever other events they recounted, their works abounded with fierce battles, desperate sieges, and arduous campaigning, undertaken by the (largely) heroic Franks under the leadership of the mighty Carolingian dynasty.² In many ways, such a shared historiographical emphasis on military activity simply reflected the importance of warfare to Frankish political life in general. In Stuart Airlie’s words ‘the men who governed the empire were also warriors’.³ These governing elites defined themselves through their leadership in war and military service to their rulers.⁴ Their political identities and relationships were built on the shared memories of fighting together.⁵ Even the many ecclesiastical institutions of the empire had a military role, since they contributed to Carolingian governance and, by extension, military leadership.⁶ As a result, to write a history of this political community would always involve recounting its military exploits.

The same historians also bear witness to the close relationship between warfare and the Franks’ Christian beliefs.⁷ They describe how armies prayed or sang hymns before and after battle (religious practices to which contemporary liturgical manuscripts also attest).⁸ Even more frequently, Carolingian historians attributed the outcome of battles to God. This, however, was rarely presented in terms of ‘miracles’, in the narrow sense of God suspending natural laws. As Benedicta Ward pointed out, these historians did not seem especially concerned with distinguishing whether God worked with or against nature, simply with communicating that God had indeed acted.⁹ These historians thus regularly used the abstract phrase ‘with God helping’ to explain Frankish victories.¹⁰ In most cases, it was the narrator’s voice which affirmed God’s agency in this way, but some historians went further. They placed the same sentiments in the mouths of individual characters within their narratives, including soldiers on campaign. Several Carolingian historians, especially towards the end of the period, depicted generals addressing their troops before battle, declaring their confidence in God’s help and so encouraging their listeners to fight.

Such historians were hardly unusual in using battle speeches to invest their narratives with greater style and excitement; many storytellers throughout history have done so. It is significant, however, that almost all these speeches invoked supernatural agencies of some sort, usually divine. Although these historians already ascribed events in their narratives to God, their speeches went a step further. Instead of God’s agency appearing only in the author’s voice, it now appeared in the voices of the characters within the narrative. These characters appeared in these narratives as motivated by their convictions about God. Furthermore, it is striking that speeches appeared almost primarily in military contexts and in the mouths of lay military commanders and kings. Although many (but by no means all) Carolingian historians wrote from an ecclesiastical perspective, their accounts show an enormous interest in how Frankish commanders and armies went about their duties. These speeches suggest the importance of both Christian belief and rhetorical practice to this ambient military culture. The importance of rhetoric in later medieval battle speeches has long been noted, especially in the work of John Bliese.¹¹ This chapter seeks to use the evidence of these histories to explore the place of rhetoric and belief about God’s agency in Carolingian military culture.

For reasons of space, I shall confine myself to the genre of history known as annals (so called because the authors structured their narratives according to the years – or anni in Latin – of the Incarnation). Annals became a prevalent form of history writing from the late eighth century onwards, and while they have been subject to much recent scholarly discussion, the speeches they contain have not been examined in detail.¹² The annals certainly did not eclipse other genres of historiography, such as epic poetry and biographies, but examining the battle speeches in such histories must be left to another occasion. Four annalists provide examples of battlefield speeches.

The first is the Annals of Metz, written c. 806, either at Chelles or Metz.¹³ These annals recount the history of the Carolingian dynasty from Pippin II in the late seventh century down to the author’s present. They may have been written for Charles the Younger (d. 811), eldest son of the reigning Emperor Charlemagne (r. 768–814), as a guide to kingship and thus to military leadership.¹⁴ The text only survives complete in a single twelfth-century manuscript, so its impact must remain unknown apart from allusions in a few contemporary works, but it nonetheless reflects a growing literary interest in war among Carolingian historians.¹⁵ The second set of annals are known as the Annals of Fulda, written by several authors consecutively during the mid- to late ninth century and that can be located either at the monastery of Fulda or in association with the archbishopric of Mainz.¹⁶ Both institutions played a key role in the politics of the East Frankish kingdoms, for which the annals would have provided a valuable guide. A single author seems to have written the section covering 869 to 882, which contains three speeches, as well a strong interest in Christian themes. These annals circulated far more widely than the Annals of Metz and provided material for historians throughout the Middle Ages.¹⁷ Sometime in the early 880s, a copy of the Annals of Fulda left their place of origin and became part of our third set of annals, which continued until 901.¹⁸ This new author shows a great interest in Bavarian affairs and probably wrote in Bavaria, hence their modern label as the ‘Bavarian annalist’. Finally, a near contemporary of the Bavarian annalist, Regino of Prüm, completed a Chronicle in 908 which had an annalistic structure.¹⁹ Regino had been exiled as abbot of Prüm and wrote his Chronicle for Adalbero, bishop of Metz, to help educate the teenage East Frankish king, Louis the Child (r. 899–911).²⁰ As with the Annals of Fulda, this chronicle continued to be copied and read widely later into the Middle Ages.²¹

Roman rhetoric and Carolingian military culture

Before turning to the speeches in these annals, it is necessary to ask why these annalists associated speeches so closely with military leadership. As with much early medieval history, tensions quickly arise between text and reality. In 1970, Beryl Smalley dismissed these accounts of battlefield speeches as entirely fictional.²² It seems especially implausible for a general to have addressed his whole army on a noisy battlefield to any effect, and early medieval battles were certainly noisy. The Bavarian annalist recounts how at the battle of Leuven against the Vikings (891), the ‘shouts of the Christians rose to heaven, and the pagans after their fashion shouted no less’.²³ Regino also described the battle and has the Vikings taunting the Franks, and the Franks attacking ‘with yells of encouragement’.²⁴ Both historians (who wrote independently of each other) depicted the East Frankish king, Arnulf of Carinthia (r. 887–899), addressing his troops. Far from negating the value of speeches, however, both historians portray Arnulf’s speech as whipping up the emotions and noise with which battles were associated, alongside the singing of hymns and prayers. Various liturgical manuscripts containing battlefield prayers presumed an army could be silent for a few minutes while a bishop pronounced a blessing.²⁵ Collective speaking and listening formed part of the psychology of warfare.

Smalley also pointed out that these speeches simply showed medieval historians’ great debt to Roman theories about rhetoric.²⁶ Classical rhetoric certainly exerted a significant influence on early medieval culture, including the writing of history.²⁷ Carolingian libraries contained Roman rhetorical textbooks, especially those of Cicero, Quintilian, and the late antique writer Martianus Capella – textbooks which instructed their readers in techniques for speaking persuasively.²⁸ Carolingian libraries also included Roman histories which exemplified these rhetorical principles.²⁹ Sallust’s Jugurtha and Catiline, written in the first century BC, proved especially popular and contained numerous speeches by generals seeking to persuade their troops.³⁰ Sallust’s villainous Catiline speaks to his troops about ‘words that supply valour’.³¹ Sallust’s influence, however, paled in comparison to that of Flavius Josephus (c. AD 37–100), a Jewish historian in Roman service.³² His Jewish War contains many rhetorically crafted speeches about war, delivered both in deliberation and on the battlefield.

Smalley argued that since Carolingian historians simply imitated Roman historians (directly or indirectly), their speeches were mere literary artifices, irrelevant to their audiences’ lived experience. This partly reflects an older scholarly prejudice against ‘rhetoric’ in primary sources as somehow inauthentic, because they were fabricated. As Peter van Nuffelen and others have shown, however, rhetoric provided late antique and early medieval writers with a way of expressing what they saw as true in the most effective way.³³ The more important scholarly shift, however, concerns a growing appreciation for the relevance of rhetoric to early medieval political life itself.³⁴ Irene van Renswourde has recently demonstrated how far early medieval communities continued to value open debate.³⁵ Mayke de Jong’s recent study of the Epitaph of Arsenius (written by Pascasius Radbertus in the mid-ninth century) shows us a world where the Carolingian elites used classical rhetoric to shape the opinions and actions of their political comm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction: divine violence: from the ancient Near East to the assault on the United States Capitol
• 1 ‘Words that supply valour’: God, warfare, and the rhetoric of persuasion in Carolingian history writing
• 2 Bearded ghosts and holy visions: miracles, manliness and clerical authority on the First Crusade
• 3 Narrating ‘new wonders’: divine agency, crusade and Afonso I of Portugal’s 1147 conquest of Santarém
• 4 Miracles, divine agency, and Christian-Muslim diplomacy during the crusades
• 5 Divining God’s favour and diverting his wrath: supernatural intervention in the Hussite Wars under Jan Žižka, 1419–1424
• 6 The sword of God: tyrannicide as a providential and miraculous event from medieval debates to early modern religious conflicts
• 7 The place of miraculous images/icons in the confrontation between Christian confessions in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the sixteenth to seventeenth century
• 8 Providence and conscience during the Cromwellian conquest of Scotland, 1650–53
• 9 ‘Universal martyrdom’: resistance and religion in 1650s Ireland
• 10 Authority, toleration and miracles in the writings of Roger Williams, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke
• 11 ‘Our Almighty God is the over-ruling Generalissimo’: teaching and experiencing Providence in the British Army, 1688–1714
• 12 Immanent power and the conversion of kings
• 13 Pointillist proofs of divine agency in war
• Index