The Peace of God

Introduction

Historians have often characterized Western Europe in the 10th and 11th centuries as something akin to a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” The Carolingian Empire had disintegrated and a proliferation of unruly lords followed in its wake, most lacking anything resembling a legitimate claim to power. Notwithstanding the lack of legitimacy, these lords saturated the countryside with fortified castles, from which they could reach out to dominate the peasantry. Jurisdictions were poorly defined; conflict and violence were widespread (Bisson 1994, 1995, 2009).

While the disintegration of Carolingian public order into “feudal anarchy” has been seen as ruinous, scholars have also linked the politically fractured landscape that emerged in the High Middle Ages to the evolution of constitutionally limited government and rule of law (e.g., Anderson 1991; Baechler 1975; Berman 1983; Raico 1994; Fink 2012; Salter 2015a; Young 2021a). For example, Salter and Young (2019) recently argue that the High Middle Ages was characterized by polycentric and hierarchical governance structures, populated by political agents who were both sovereign and residual claimants to the returns on their governance. The medieval constitution of Western Europe was therefore likely to promote evolution of governance that was consistent with a generality norm (Buchanan and Congleton 2003 [1998]; Congleton 2004).

The sovereignty of political agents is a key part of Salter and Young’s (2019) argument. Sovereignty is here meant in the specific sense of Salter (2015b): the ability of a holder of political property rights to prevent others from encroaching upon those rights. ¹ When holders of such rights are sovereign, jurisdictional boundaries are clearly delineated and have integrity. Constitutional arrangements will generally remain stable. Alternatively, any exchanges in authority between political property rights holders—that is, constitutional changes—will be mutually beneficial. ²

However, the post-Carolingian feudal anarchy appears to have been the antithesis of constitutional stability: “kingdoms [were] fracturing progressively into principalities, counties, then most critically – at the end of the tenth century – into castellanies” (Bisson 1994: 6). Yet constitutional arrangements stabilized during the 11th and 12th centuries. By the 13th century, hierarchical governance structures had become more well-defined; jurisdictional lines less blurred; Western Europe’s medieval constitution had emerged from the ashes of the Carolingian Empire.

How and why the medieval constitution emerged is a question of great interest to both social scientists and historians. That emergence was a complex process in which many factors undoubtedly played a role. In this paper, I focus on one specific factor: the Peace of God movement. Initiated by Catholic bishops—and initially associated with an impressive popular element—this movement was a response to the political and social upheaval associated with feudal anarchy. I argue that the Peace of God movement was fundamentally important to delineating and stabilizing jurisdictional boundaries; also to providing them with perceived legitimacy. ³

The Peace of God movement involved the calling of councils at which oaths were extracted publicly from the armed men of the region. They were expected to swear off violence against the Church and the unarmed; they were also expected to refrain from “bad lordship” and the imposition of “evil customs” in the lands over which they claimed authority. (To wit, they were expected to respect others’ jurisdictions and limit predatory behavior within their own.) Founded on Church authority, spiritual sanctions such as excommunication and pronouncements of anathema (i.e., a complete separation of an individual from the Church) played an important role in enforcement of the oaths.

In an analysis of the Peace of God movement, I am focusing on the involvement of (what we would characterize today as) largely “private” interests in the delineation and stabilization of jurisdictional boundaries within geographically expansive realms. This research speaks, then, to the literature on privately provided (anarchic) law and governance. ⁴ A society associated with anarchic law and governance is inherently polycentric. When the polycentric institutional arrangements that emerge under anarchy are stable (persistent), they are efficient in the sense of Leeson (2020). The Peace of God movement can be interpreted as collective action to bring definition and stability to the polycentric institutional arrangements of medieval Western Europe. ⁵

To make this argument, I begin by setting the late 10th and early 11th century stage, upon which the Peace of God movement first made its appearance.

The post-Carolingian landscape

In the 8th century, a powerful Frankish family usurped power from the Merovingian monarchs and began expanding its power across Western Europe. The family’s empire-building reached its apogee under Charlemagne, who was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III on Christmas day 800. By the time he died in 814, Charlemagne had come close to consolidating the territories of the former Western Roman Empire.

Carolingian empire-building involved (1) large-scale distributions of confiscated and/or conquered lands to loyal vassals, (2) cultivation of mutually beneficial bonds with the Church in Rome, and (3) regularized assemblies of the leading men of the Carolingian realms. The legacies of these efforts were foundational to the feudal order and the estates system that characterized Western Europe in the High Middle Ages (Young 2021b). However, the Carolingian Empire proved to be short-lived.

The last Carolingian emperor (Charles III “The Fat”) died in exile in 888; having failed to defend his realms against Viking raids, there had been rebellion against his rule. In the 10th century, erstwhile Carolingian vassals competed with armed upstarts for power. Historians have used the term landed or noble to refer to lords who could claim authority based on Carolingian vassalage; these are contrasted to those lords whose authority was simply banal (from the Latin bannum meaning authority or jurisdiction; see Bouchard (2004: 145). Without overarching Carolingian rule, the lines between noble and banal lordship blurred. The proliferation of individuals claiming political authority of some sort was an “explosive phenomenon” (Bisson 1995: 749; also see Cowdrey 1970: 45–46; Sargent 1985: 219). This proliferation was not limited to secular claimants: “Bishops, cathedral chapters, and monasteries were also establishing more coherent lordships” (Koziol 2018: 3). ⁶ In the post-Carolingian power vacuum, any individual who could exert power—whether it be violent, spiritual, or some combination of the two—was putting forth a claim to political authority.

The post-Carolingian political landscape was obviously a fractured one. ⁷ It was characterized by pervasive uncertainties regarding the claimants to authority, whether their claims were legitimate, and what were the jurisdictional boundaries between them. These uncertainties were given visual representation as the proliferation of banal lordships went hand-in-hand with encastellation of the Western European landscape: “By the year 1100, any lordship with any pretension to importance needed to control more than one [castle]” (West 2013: 191). ⁸ As Koziol (2018: 130) observes:

Castles were everywhere, as were lordships. And the lordships were not territorially distinct and coherent. Lordship was not yet a territory; it was a power, the exercise of certain kinds of rights (military, judicial, and fiscal), with different rights asserted over the same lands and people by different lords (and different kinds of lords, from counts of viscounts to castellans and advocates to bishops, cathedral chapters, and monasteries).

According to Bisson (1994: 18), the unarmed found themselves in a precarious situation:

[T]he violence of castellans and knights was a method of lordship. In practice and expression it was personal, affective, but inhumane; militant, aggressive, but unconstructive. It had neither political nor administrative character, for it was based on the capricious manipulation of powerless people. ⁹

This characterization evokes a Hobbesian “war of all against all” between those with access to violence; with the unarmed left to “nasty, brutish, and short” lives. This was the so-called “feudal anarchy” that separated the early medieval era from the High Middle Ages. ¹⁰

The extent of “anarchy” in the feudal anarchy is controversial. For example, Koziol (2018: 2–3) expresses the following view:

[T]here probably was no great increase in ‘violence’ in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries[;] [t]here was, however, an increasingly dense implantation of lordships[;] [a]s a result, there was more friction locally among those who had claims to lordship, creating the perception that violence was a greater problem than it had been.

Consistent with Koziol’s view, however, even if the increase in actual violence has been exaggerated, there is no doubt that the late 10th century structure of political property rights was neither well-defined nor stable in Western Europe. The private war—or feud—was widespread: “the vacuum left by the creeping disintegration of public authority gave a new viability to the feud as a kind of ‘wild justice’ whereby the lay classes, and especially the lords of castles, might defend their own interests and set a limit to the worst consequences of lawlessness” (Cowdrey 1970: 47; see also White 1986).

Though individuals instituted feuds as a means to rectify and deter further violence against them, as Carolingian authority crumbled “the legitimate feud all too readily spilled over into mere disorderly violence” (Cowdrey 1970: 47). For example, Koziol (1987) discusses disruptions associated with the mid-tenth century war between Count Baldwin V of Flanders and the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry III. The war decimated the old Carolingian nobility of Flanders: “Once they were gone, a struggle ensued the redefine the pecking order […]” (p. 534). The struggle manifested itself via feuds: “Each assault, each murder, only embedded a feud deeper into a community since very attack called for further vengeance” (pp. 534–535).

It was within this uncertain, fractured, and ill-defined political landscape, rife with feuds, that the Peace of God movement emerged. As lay structures of authority crumbled, ecclesiastical structures retained their integrity. It was through the Church, then, that collective action was most likely to be organized. It was in the interests of clergy and monks to foster jurisdictional coherence and stability. This was true both for unarmed ecclesiastics who feared despoliation of Church property, as well as lord bishops who felt there were (to their minds at least) legitimate jurisdictional claims threatened. Furthermore, “the mounting disorder of society fell with particular severity on the peasanty,” whom ecclesiastics felt obligated to protect (Cowdrey 1970: 47; see pp. 45–48 generally). ¹¹

From a political economy perspective, the “feudal anarchy” involved perceived benefits to mitigating violence increase, for both commoners and ecclesiastics. The Church was the lowest-cost provider of collective action toward that end. The clergy were directly and negatively impacted by the violence; furthermore, their interests were linked to those of the general population (the Church’s “flock”). The Peace of God movement arose because perceived benefits of curbing violence came to exceed the costs of collective mitigation via ecclesiastical authorities.

Before discussing the ways in which the Peace of God movement responded and changed the uncertain, fractured, and ill-defined political landscape, I will elaborate on the constitutional ideal type elaborated on by Salter and Young (2019). This will provide a framework for interpreting the historical discussion of the Peace of God in the context of the emergent medieval constitution and its implications for the development of Western European political traditions.

Putting the sovereignty in polycentric sovereignty

Salter and Young (2019) provide a framework for analyzing constitutional change and elaborate on a constitutional ideal type that promotes governance innovations consistent with a generality norm (Buchanan and Congleton 2003 [1998]; Congleton 2004). ¹² This ideal type is characterized by a polycentric and hierarchical constellation of political agents who are residual claimants to their governance returns and also sovereign, in the sense that they are secure in their political property rights (Salter 2015b). Salter and Young have used the term polycentric sovereignty to describe this ideal type.

Salter and Young (2019) argue that the medieval of constitution of Western Europe was characterized by polycentric sovereignty. Polycentric, hierarchical governance has many beneficial qualities. Residual claimancy works to align the incentives of political agents with those of the governed. Polycentricity allows political agents to exploit local knowledge; it also allows the quality of governance to benefit from jurisdictional competition, of both the Tiebout (1956) and yardstick (Besley and Case 1995) types. ¹³ Furthermore, when there is a hierarchical arrangement of political agents, gains from exploiting local knowledge can be enjoyed without sacrificing the provision of common-interest public goods. While lower-level governance providers are exploiting local knowledge, higher-level governance providers can facilitate broader-based collective action. ¹⁴

A polycentric, hierarchical constellation of political agents will help to promote good governance. When political agents are sovereign, that constellation will generally be stable. However, opportunities can arise for holders of political property rights to make mutually beneficial exchanges of those rights (Congleton 2007, 2011). Only if such exchanges are mutually beneficial will changes in the structure of political property rights—that is, constitutional changes—be consistent with a generality norm. When political agents are sovereign, will exchanges between them necessarily satisfy this condition. Sovereignty, then, both provides stability to a constitutional order and only allows for constitutional change in the direction of better governance.

When the Carolingian Empire disintegrated, it is no surprise that Western Europe devolved into competing jurisdictional claims at many levels. The claims were often overlapping, not only in terms of upper-level claims that enveloped multiple lower-level ones but also in terms of adjacent claims will ill-defined boundaries. The relevant boundaries could be territorial and/or in terms of specific governance rights and obligations—what were broadly known as customs in the medieval era. ¹⁵ This paper is concerned with the role played by the Peace of God movement in delineating and stabilizing these boundaries; as well as establishing the sovereignty of agents within a polycentric and hierarchical structure of political property rights.

The Peace of God: The Council of Charroux

The first proclamation of the Peace of God is considered to have occurred in 989 at the Council of Charroux, in Aquitaine (western France). ¹⁶ This council was convened by Archbishop Gumbald of Bordeaux and the bishops of Angoulême, Limoges, Périgueux, Poitiers, and Saintes were in attendance; they lamented “the criminal actions that, because of our long delay in calling a council, have been sprouting through evil habit in our diocese […]” (Head 1999: 656). Also in attendance were regular clergy, who brought with them the relics (including the bodies) of saints from across the region; furthermore—as would become characteristic of early Peace councils—there were also a large number of (mostly unarmed) laypersons present.

Indicative its perceived importance, this was the first episcopal synod that had been called in Aquitaine in over 50 years (Head 1999: 667). The canons that the bishops issued at Charroux “pronounce[d] an anathema on anyone who attacks a church or steals from one, or who steals the livestock of a farmer or other pauper, or who strikes an unarmed cleric at home or on a journey” (Sargent 1985: 221).

To understand the “criminal actions” that the bishops at Charroux were alluding to, the feud between Boso I (“the Old”) and Gerald of Limoges is an illustrative example (Head 1999: 662–666). Boso had been granted the County of La Marche as a fief by William III, Duke of Aquitaine. (At the time—around 958—William did not have any royal acknowledgment of his ducal title; this did not stop Boso from taking the title of count.) Gerald was the viscount of Limoges. Despite the fact that La Marche lay to the north of Limoges, both Boso and Gerald had wide and ill-defined claims to authority. Around 975, Boso attacked Gerald, “not near his [Gerald’s] own seat of power to the south of Limoges, but rather in the northern reaches of Gerald’s lands, at the viscount’s castle of La Brosse [bordering the Île-de-France]” (Head 1999: 662).

At the time of the attack, both Boso and Gerald recognized William IV (“Iron-Arm”; Duke of Aquitaine; William III’s son) as his lord. According to the contemporary account of a Benedictine monk, Boso had sent his son Elias with “gifts and prayers” to seek William’s permission for the attack, though “[s]ubsequent events make it doubtful whether William granted his support" (Head 1999: 663). Regardless, in the process of Boso’s campaign, the priory of Saint-Benoît-du-Sault suffered devastation to its lands. For the priory, this was not an isolated incident. According to the same Benedictine source from above, it had “been threatened from castles that spread fear in the regions” (p. 663). In the end, Gerald prevailed, breaking the siege upon his castle and routing Boso’s forces.

However, Boso and his family were not finished. Elias captured the choir-bishop of Limoges and blinded him. This man, named Benedict, had been designated as successor to Bishop Elbes of Limoges, so this was a serious offense. ¹⁷ Elias, and also his brother, subsequently were captured and imprisoned by Gerald’s son, Guy. Consistent with the suspicion that Bosos never had William IV’s blessing to besiege Gerald’s castle—see above—Guy and William apparently decided that blinding Elias would be an appropriate tit-for-tat. In the event, Elias managed to escape but then died shortly thereafter. (He was on a pilgrimage to Rome at the time, suggesting that some sort of spiritual sanction had been placed upon him in lieu of the blinding.) Still, Gerald got the better of it when another of Boso’s sons, Aldebert, ended up with a lengthy stay in a Limoges prison, and a third son, Guazbert, was captured and turned over to William, who blinded him.

To say that Gerald “got the better of it” is to perceive of the feud in a narrow sense. Hostilities remained and continued to flare up between the two families. Ultimately, ecclesiastical influences became important: “Resolution finally came not simply through punishment, but through reciprocal acts of penitential gift giving” (Head 1999: 666). A college of canons was founded by Boso in Dorat and dedicated to Saint Peter, expressing the family’s penitence and hope of salvation. The college’s charter indicates the role played by Bishop Gilbert of Poiters, who oversaw it as an act of reconciliation for, among other things, the blinding of Benedict.

The four preceding paragraphs are too brief to do justice to the feud between Boso and Gerald. However, they do suggest the pertinent details that would have been relevant to the bishops meeting at Charroux. First, there were dispersed and overlapping claims on the part of the two noble families. Second, not only were the claims not clearly delineated; when they came into conflict the presumed “higher authority” (in this case the duke) was not particularly effective in mitigating the conflict. Third, ecclesiastical interests were caught up in and detrimentally affected by the conflicts occurring due to the jurisdictional uncertainties and lack of third-party enforcers.

The canons produced by the Council of Charroux were novel in that they emphasized spiritual sanctions as a means of third-party enforcement. ¹⁸ Being formidable lords in their own rights, individual bishops had often called upon their own military resources to quell the squabbles of armed laymen. However, the bishops at Charroux instead ostensibly relied on their collective action backed by the threat and excommunication or anathema, setting the precedent to be followed by subsequent Peace councils (Head 1999: 668). That being said—and as discussed below—spiritual sanctions were always, in the context of a Peace council, “a complement and inducement to mediation and judicial settlement” (Koziol 2018: 80).

Putting forth spiritual sanctions as a means of enforcing of constitutional arrangements may have also bootstrapped ecclesiastical legitimacy. The Church’s authority ultimately rested on being the gatekeeper to the afterlife. Ekelund and Tollison (2011) characterize the promise of afterlife as a “metacredence” good. While a credence good is typically defined as one for which its quality cannot be determined before it’s purchased, the quality of a metacredence good “cannot be discerned for the short or (lifetime) long run” (p. 34). Therefore, consumers of such a good rely largely on observing the behavior of others to for their estimates of the quality. In addition to being a metacredence good, the promise of afterlife also has the characteristics of a club good, and one that exhibits positive returns to “participatory crowding” (Iannacone 1992). ¹⁹

The Peace councils provided a forum within which elites made public oaths—“devout pormise[s] offered to almighty God” (Koziol 2018: 24)—for all good Christians to see. The fact that these oaths were being made (at least implicitly) directly to God was “one of the strangest aspects of the Peace of God”:

If they were described as a constitutio [a constitution], its legitimacy and enforcement derived first and foremost from the oaths of those who swore to uphold what had been established. Their oaths were not made to the king nor even to the bishops or counts and apparently not even to the other swearers (p. 23).

This was dramatic public participation of society’s most powerful individuals in the Catholic faith. ²⁰

The Council of Charroux affected the political landscape of Aquitaine in important ways. In particular, the Council demonstrated that collective action on the part of leading ecclesiastics could facilitate constitutional bargains. For example, Duke William had been taxing the lands of the Nouaillé monastery. He admitted as much but claimed that he had a legal right to do so as lay abbot (i.e., a non-ecclesiastic who was bestowed the rights to income from a monastery and its lands) of the neighboring Saint-Hilaire monastery, which exercised authority over Nouaillé. Indeed, William claimed that it was his “public function” (publico functio). However, Nouaillé was not buying the legality of William’s claimed right. (Whether the rights to income from Saint-Hilaire implied the rights to tax Nouaillé was a matter of century customs. Nouaillé believed that William’s claim fell into the category of “evil customs,” i.e., rights claimed by lords that were perceived to be unjust.) Following the Council of Charroux, William relinquished his right to tax Nouaillé (notably, while maintaining that it was legitimate to begin with) (Head 1999, 670–672). The bishops, then, facilitated a constitutional bargain between William and the monks of Nouaillé. Constitutional bargains of this sort could have wide-ranging implications for the region. Of the developed lands in 10th century Aquitaine, about a third were under the lordship of ecclesiastics (Callahan 1977).

The Peace of God: Eleventh and 12th centuries

The Peace of God movement was borne of the perceptions of ecclesiastics—in regard to themselves and also the defenseless who claimed obligation to—that lesser (typically banal) lords were creating increased violence and injustice throughout the lands. While there may not have been an actual increase in the level of violence, these perceptions were rooted in the fact that the Carolingian political order had been fractured and remained in flux. A major goal of the Peace councils, then, was to define and make stable the jurisdictional boundaries. Peace councils dealt with conflicts between quite powerful lords (e.g., that between Boso and Gerald described above in section 3) as well as “petty castellans [that] oppressed church and peasantry with growing brutality” (Bowman 1999: 102).

Two major tools employed by the councils were the extraction of oaths and the use of spiritual sanctions. The latter could be “ordinary” excommunication, which excluded an individual from the sacraments, including the Eucharist; or it could take the form of anathema where an individual was fully excluded from the Christian community. ²¹

A number of councils took great care to define exactly what the effects of excommunication were; and a few took even greater care to define the differences between excommunication and anathema. And eternal damnation was the threat only for anathema – a greater spiritual penalty imposed only for those who refused to obey the strictures of the Peace even after they had been excommunicated. Ordinary excommunication was first and foremost a social penalty (Koziol 2018: 77–78).

These sorts of spiritual sanctions—particularly anathema (for obvious reasons)—were taken very seriously by medieval Christians (e.g., Asbridge 2004: 5–11). This was especially true for those claiming to be lords. They were essentially defined by their access to violence, which was inherently sinful unless constrained in the particular ways dictated by the Church. ²²

In regard to oaths, an important component of Peace councils was to assemble the armed men of the region and get them to swear against the use of violence in certain ways. Most particularly, they swore to not use violence against Church properties and, more generally, the unarmed (both clergy and commoners). Importantly, the Peace movement did not decry all applications of violence and did not seek to suppress lords’ extractions and their provision of governance generally. Rather, it sought to prohibit “evil customs” and “bad lordship” (Koziol 2018: 1; Bisson 1995: 752).

As mentioned above, there were 24 Peace Councils in France between 989 and 1038; there were also three in Catalonia. During the latter part of this period—first at the Council of Elne (or Toulouges) in 1027—there was additionally proclaimed a Truce of God (Treuga Dei). Whereas the Peace sought to put limitations on violence generally, the Truce prohibited violence generally during specific periods of religious significance (Head and Landes 1992: 7–9). As an important exception, though, “often the police forces of the prince were specifically exempted from the proscription on combat” (p. 8):

[O]ver the course of the twelfth century, the Truce of God was inexorably co-opted by secular authorities and became part of the emergent constitutional order of governance and peacekeeping. [… In fact, truce days became the first moments at which, at least in theory and by legal definition, public authority held a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence (p. 8).

The Peace and Truce (which I will simply refer to as the Peace in what follows) spread east to Germany in the 12th century. ²³

At Peace councils, the arbitration of secular claims to political authority was at the fore. Ecclesiastical powers played the role of both arbiters and third-party enforcers. As Goetz (1992: 272) states: “Ecclesiastical powers were […] subordinated to secular jurisdiction: but, when secular jurisdiction and, above all, private legal agreement failed and when atonement was lacking, those ecclesiastical powers could add the threat of spiritual sanctions.” With the proliferation of banal lordships, Peace councils provided a forum for their jurisdictional contestations, both amongst each other and with members of the old Carolingian nobility. Bishops negotiated settlements of jurisdictional boundaries and extracted oaths to respect them; threats of excommunication and/or anathema were in place to emphasize that breaking oaths amounted to severing relationships with God.

Bishops were concerned with the constellation of claims to political authority—its definition and its integrity—because they were included amongst the claimants. They were holders of political property rights whose returns were threatened by the post-Carolingian uncertainty. While not denying that bishops had sincere interests in protecting the poor and unarmed per se, they were at least “partly self-interested, for attacks upon the peasants as upon the other protected classes were bad for the ecclesiastical income that came from them both in cash and by way of services” (Cowdrey 1970: 48). ²⁴

The Peace council of Le Puy in 994 provides an illustrative example (Koziol 2018: 58–59). Bishop Wido organized at least eight bishops and several “princes and nobles” (p. 58). The bishops represented “vast regions that had been left ‘princeless’ by the demise of the old Auvergnat dukes of Aquitaine and the growing powerlessness of the margraves of Gothia at Toulouse” (p. 58). In the stead of the aforementioned princes and nobles, there emerged numerous lesser lordships:

The result was not so much feudal anarchy in the sense of unrestrained violence[. …] The real problem was the absence of any structured forum within which political decisions could be made – in Toulousain, the Narbonnais, and the Viennoise and the Velay itself (p. 58).

The Peace council provided just such a forum: “the powerful could come together to make agreements that would regulate their actions during conflicts and would be binding because they had agreed to and swore to them” (pp. 58–59). ²⁵ The bishops wanted this because the “anarchy” threatened their claims to authority, as it also did the claims of the higher nobility who were able to manage the lesser lords “only by setting some against others and constantly campaigning and negotiating[;] [t]heir sponsorship of the Peace of God was another weapon in their arsenal” (p. 59). ²⁶

We can also get a sense from the Peace canons of how councils were focused on the definition and enforcement of jurisdictional boundaries. The canons of the Peace of God from Saint-Paulien (993 or 1994) have survived more or less complete. They explicitly include prohibitions against “hold[ing] a serf (villanum, villanam) for ransom,” and “exact[ing] any ‘evil custom’ (mala consuetudine) from lands of churches, bishops, chapters, and monasteries” (Koziol 2018: 51). Serfs were, by definition, tied to particular lords. The prohibition against holding them was clearly aimed against others (i.e., not their own lords); it was about delineating jurisdictional boundaries. Furthermore, while the prohibition on evil customs is straightforward, the emphasis on religious estates is notable. Clearly, the bishops were concerned with the jurisdictional boundaries directly relevant to themselves.

Further evidencing the emphasis on jurisdictional delineation, Peace canons did not seek to prohibit violence between lords in general; indeed, they recognized the “legitimate, publicly declared and acknowledged state of conflict between two lords” (Koziol 2018: 67; pp. 66-67 generally). In such a state of conflict (werra; war or feud), “although personal hatreds and vengeance for personal affronts were part of it, it was also fought for control of territory and public jurisdiction over territory and subjects” (p. 67). During a werra, not only were the participating lords fair game so were their lands and other property. And the unarmed residing on a lord’s lands was considered to be a form of his property. But Peace councils recognized that violence against the unarmed could be excessive and, importantly, uncertainty of its legitimacy followed from uncertainty of jurisdictional boundaries. As such: “What the Peace of God did was set limits to actions during legitimate wars and disputes. Its intention was not to end werrae but to restrict the range of persons and places subject to their harm” (p. 69).

Setting of limits to werrae amounted to setting limits to governance rights. As observed by White (1986: 202):

Feuding could be identified as an activity of the ruling class, regardless of whether it was considered to be fully legitimate. Indeed, the prevalence of feuding among upper-class males may have provided a sort of rationale for their efforts to establish, consolidate, and perpetuate their own political and ideological hegemony.

For example, regarding the early council at Saint-Paulien (993–994) Moore (1992: 312) notes: “the two first and most important [canons] forbade the exercise of certain powers of taxation and coercion except by those – counts and bishops – to whom they properly pertained.”

The Peace of God movement involved lay magnates from the get-go. (Like bishops, lay magnates had an interest in banal upstarts running amok in territories over which they claimed authority.) However, they were initially not the primary organizers of Peace councils. Furthermore, kings were largely removed from the early Peace Movement: “[D]uring the classic phase of the Peace and Truce of God the king had nothing to do with either the promulgation or the enforcement of their stipulations. Instead, the Peace and Truce developed as the product of consensual agreements between the ecclesiastical and secular elites” (Koziol 2018: 23).

However, “counts and indeed kings could appropriate the practice as well, and did so quite quickly” (Wickham 2016: 112). ²⁷ Over time, the greatest of the lay lords (counts and especially dukes) increasingly took the lead in organizing Peace councils. In Aquitaine, Duke William V (r. 990–1029) “was a zealous sponsor of the Peace councils, and it was his intention by their means to win for the ducal authority some of the prestige that the peace activities were winning for [bishops]” (Cowdrey 1970: 59). Also, it was Norman dukes who took the lead in organizing the Peace councils that subsequently spread in the north. The kings of France—in terms of lay lords, the greatest amongst equals—were not slow to recognize the value of Peace councils in delineating and stabilizing jurisdictional boundaries: “Kings Louis VI [r. 1108–1037] and Louis VII [r. 1137–1180] followed more resolutely the path of the dukes of Normandy” (Cowdrey 1970, 63).

The above is evidenced by the general pattern of Peace councils over time. Peace councils originally arose in areas where the authority of the greatest lords was relatively unfelt. (This is unsurprising given that the Peace of God was a response to feudal anarchy.) Up through the mid-eleventh century, the vast majority of Peace councils in France were south of the Loire (see Goetz 1992). The Peace was introduced into Flanders only after 1024 (Koziol 1987). Generally, the early Peace of God movement was removed from the Île-de-France and the effective authority of French kings. That, of course, changed moving into the 12th century.

The eventual involvement of kings (and also the emperors in Germany) meant that the Peace movement had come to incorporate multiple levels of the amorphous governance hierarchy, including participants from both the first and second estates. Taking the turn of the 11th century as the nadir of early medieval (Carolingian) governance structures, the Peace movement was key to redefining and stabilizing a new (or modified) polycentric arrangement of political property rights in the High Middle Ages:

[T]he Peace and the Truce increasingly assisted the process, sometimes epitomized as “concentric concentration,” by which temporal authority was slowly rehabilitated in western Europe. […] [I]ts political structures began to be renewed when growth points of authority and jurisdiction gradually appeared in the lesser and greater fiefs, whose lords used the resources that they found to hand. The kings in due course followed suit and so moved towards the balanced feudal polity of the thirteenth century (Cowdrey 1970: 58–59).

The “renewal” of political structures was evidenced by their legitimization over time. For example, in the latter eleventh and twelfth centuries, there was an “assimilation of nobility to lordship” (Bisson 1995: 754). Whereas the 10th century had witnessed a disconcerting devolution of Carolingian lordship to a proliferation of banal castellans and their evil customs, during the course of the 12th century: “Lords possessed of powers to command, judge, and tax were deemed noble ipso facto”:

It became harder to dominate simply by possessing and rewarding while bad lordship incurred the contempt of an ever more influential church. Lord-kings were best placed to benefit from the assimilation of nobility to lordship. [This] thinking was itself a cause of the progress of dynastic monarchy at the expense of lesser lordships in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Bisson 1995, 754). ²⁸

By providing a forum via which jurisdictional boundaries were delineated—and transgressions were sanctioned—the Peace movement helped to enshrine the structure of political property rights within the conventions and norms of the time.

It is important to emphasize that monarchs’ involvement with later Peace councils did not correspond to centralized state formation in Western Europe. Such correspondence is put forth by Bates (2017) who begins from the general hypothesis that, in order to achieve security along with prosperity, societies “remove the provision of security from the hands of private families and place it in the hands of a central authority” (p. 18). Regarding medieval France, Bates associates the Peace of God movement with centralization of authority under a monarch (rather than definition and stabilization of jurisdictional boundaries within a polycentric order) (pp. 19–20). He points specifically to the ideas and influence of the Abbot Suger of St Dennis (d. 1151):

Through wise counsel, devoted service, and persuasive preaching, Suger gained influence over the monarchs of his time. Not surprisingly, kings found attractive Suger’s claims that their power was a gift from God. From this it followed that the means of coercion were therefore to be vested in their hands; power was to be centralized and rendered hierarchical; and force was to be used not for private advantage but rather in the service of the social order (p. 20). ²⁹

The result, according to Bates: “Rather than the means of violence remaining in private hands, then, the means of violence increasingly fell under the control of a central authority [i.e., the monarch]” (p. 20).

There are a number of problems with Bates’ interpretation of the facts. First, it is unclear to what extent Suger’s ideas arose from the Peace movement (versus the Abbot attributed them to the movement after the fact in the service of his French monarchs). Second, Bates is referring to developments that are rather past the heyday of Peace councils (mid-twelfth century). Third—and more importantly—the ideas espoused by Suger had a nebulous connection to political reality. ³⁰ Granted, Louis VI (d. 1137) and Louis VII (d. 1180) (both of whom Suger counseled) were relatively strong kings; but to characterize them as having by and large consolidated and centralized power in France is to stretch credulity. As Wickham (2016: 103) notes, through the mid-twelfth century, the “history of France [is] the separate histories of its duchies and counties.” Fourth—and also importantly—when the French monarchy did gain in strength, Bates’ straightforward attribution of it to the Peace movement is questionable. Wickham (p. 103) argues that it was only after “the wealth of fast-expanding Paris became a real royal resource” did Louis VII’s son, Philip II “Augustus” (r. 1190–1223), “establish the king of France as the major player in his own kingdom for the first time in 300 years.” Strayer (2005 [1971]) agrees in characterizing Philip II as “the king who was the real founder of the French state” (p. 50). ³¹ However, while Wickham emphasizes the growth of wealth in Paris, Strayer emphasizes the (complementary) development of legal and financial institutions by the monarch.

To the extent that the Peace of God played a role in French monarchs’ centralization and consolidation of power, its effects were indirect and were not contemporaneous to the primary era of Peace councils. Furthermore, its relative contribution is unclear. From the late 10th century into the 12th, the Peace of God movement served to define and stabilize the jurisdictional boundaries within a polycentric order of governance.

Was the peace movement effective?

There is no doubt that the Peace movement was a prominent development in the 11th and 12th centuries of Western Europe. However, there have inevitably been questions regarding its efficacy. And unfortunately, such questions have often been addressed from a very different perspective than the one taken in this paper. For example, Collins (2013: 177) is typical:

While the rapid spread and effectiveness of the peace of God has been widely acknowledged, there is considerable debate as to its ultimate effectiveness. […] The energy that drove the peace movement could not last forever, and there were always warlords who ignored ecclesiastical threats. But the real threat to the movement came when the aristocracy institutionalized it into the truce of God, which simply limited warfare to specific days and seasons [emphasis added].

Many historians have been primarily concerned with the Peace of God as a religious and popular movement; its “institutionalization” by lay magnates and kings was, by definition, a failure of efficacy. As Koziol (2018: 89) puts it, the reason that the Peace of God is sometimes deemed a failure is that “not only did it not bring peace, in some ways it codified the right to violence.”

Here, of course, I have been concerned with the Peace movement’s role in facilitating the definition and stabilization of political property rights structures. ³² A “codifi[cation of] the right to violence” is precisely what one has in mind by a definition of political property rights structures. ³³ Its institutionalization was likely, if anything, a positive toward that facilitating role. As Head and Landes (1992: 5) state: “[O]ver the course of the twelfth century, the Truce of God was inexorably co-opted by secular authorities and became part of the merging constitutional order of governance and peacekeeping.” And Koziol (2018: 3) reaches a similar conclusion: “The Peace of God was one of the first and most fruitful means by which lords created the territorialization of local power that became a hallmark of the Middle Ages.”

I am unaware of historians that take serious issue with the above, at least in regard to France and the northern Iberian Peninsula. (There were 18 Peace councils during the 11th and 12th centuries in Spain; of these, all but one was in Catalonia (Kosto 2003, p. 146; see Bisson (1977) for a discussion of the Peace of God in Catalonia).) ³⁴ However, there are some who discount its impact outside of those regions. For example, Cowdrey (1970: 63–64) states:

If the Peace of God […] quickly spread into the kingdoms of Burgundy and Italy, it had no appreciable consequences there for the structure of temporal authority. In Germany the strength of the Saxon and early Salian monarchy and its institutions, and the place of the bishops in the imperial church system, were so much in contrast with conditions in the south of France that the Peace movement could scarcely have found a place there.

While the point regarding Italy does not seem to be seriously contested, Cowdrey is actually not discounting the Peace movement’s impact in Germany but, rather, noting that it was the Holy Roman Emperor who most effectively co-opted it: “The Emperor, too, in the long run drew upon the legacy of the Peace movement to his own considerable advantage” (p. 63). ³⁵ The Peace was all the more important to imperial authority given that its introduction closely corresponded to an interregnum that created a perceived need on the part of “the inhabitants of many localities to protect or assert their own rights” (MacKinney, 1930: 199). ³⁶

Ultimately, there seems to be broad agreement that the Peace movement had important and enduring effects on medieval European political structures. Paxton (1992: 40) concludes as such: “The Peace of God did not create the circumstances that led to the monumental changes of the eleventh century, but it acted as a focus for all the forces – social, economic, political, religious, popular, ideological – that did.” And Moore (1992: 326) summarizes more succinctly: “the Peace of God was, for better or for worse, the harbinger of a new age.” More recently, Koziol (2018: 132) concludes his book on The Peace of God by stating: “It was Europe’s first true legislation and its first law of war.”

Conclusions

Numerous scholars have argued that the politically fractured landscape of medieval Western Europe was foundational to the evolution of rule of law and constitutionalism. Salter and Young (2019) are amongst those scholars. They emphasized that the constellation of political property rights in the High Middle Ages was polycentric and hierarchical; holders of those rights were residual claimants to the returns on their governance and sovereign.

Residual claimancy and sovereignty imply a clear delineation of jurisdictional boundaries and their integrity. And it is fair to say that scholars alluded to above generally assume that such clarity and integrity were more or less the case in Western Europe’s High Middle Ages. However, historians’ characterizations of the “feudal anarchy” that followed the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire in the 10th century do not suggest clearly delineated and stable boundaries. Indeed, they suggest that such boundaries were thrown open for contention, uncertain, and precarious.

In this paper, I have highlighted the role of the Peace of God movement in the 11th and 12th centuries in delineating and stabilizing the structure of political property rights. The historical progression from the Roman Empire, through the early barbarian successor kingdoms and then the dominant Carolingian Empire, and into the High Middle Ages is an intriguing one. How Western Europe got from “here to there”—where “there” is the medieval constitutional order that has received so much scholarly attention—is an important question. The Peace of God movement was an important part of that journey.