Conquest, holy war, and crusade. The plan of the military campaign against the Slavs. A new interpretation of the so-called Magdeburg Letter of 1108

The authors of Polish medieval narrative accounts from and about Poland communicated episodes of Christian holy war and proto-crusades in a distinct and consistent way from the early twelfth century. In this article I will argue that the anonymous author of the Gesta principum Polonorum presented the Polish conquest of Pomerania as a holy war, and that a hundred years later, the learned Vincentius Bishop of Cracow in his Chronica Polonorum depicted three military campaigns against the Prussian pagans and apostates as crusading expeditions. I will also argue that the first Polish historian Jan Długosz, deliberately celebrated and highlighted these earlier accounts to his contemporary fifteenth century readership, using these histories to position Poland’s rulers as having a longstanding and consistent commitment to crusading, at a time when participation in crusades was a central concern of Poland’s ruling elites. This article will conclude that each of these written works was a commissioned text and part of a deliberate strategy by the rulers of Poland to communicate their engagement in Christian holy wars at the periphery of Christian Europe.

Reviewed by: Poland, Holy War, and the Piast Monarchy, 1100–1230 by Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński Mariusz Bęcławski von Güttner-Sporzyński, Darius, Poland, Holy War, and the Piast Monarchy, 1100–1230 (Europa Sacra, 14), Turnhout, Brepols, 2014; hardback; pp. xiv, 294; 7 b/w illustrations, 9 b/w line art; R.R.P. €80.00; ISBN 9782503547947. In his recent monograph, Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński traces the evolution of the concept of holy war and its change into crusading, within the context of the reign of the Piast dynasty in Poland, from 1100, to the settlement of the Teutonic Order within the borders of Poland and Prussia, in 1226. In the Middle Ages, the demarcation line between holy war and crusading rested on the difference between pacifist Christian theology and the rather more violent nature (and reality) of human existence. The idea of holy war incorporated the understanding that the use of force was not always automatically unacceptable, and what is more, in some cases it was ordained by God. Still, as von Güttner-Sporzyński observes, ‘Before the thirteenth century, the difference between holy war and crusade is often blurred; it is certain, however, that whilst all crusades were holy wars, not all holy wars were crusades’ (p. 1). For von Güttner-Sporzyński, the Christianisation of Pomerania by the Piasts during this period was an important factor in the change of concept. The book is divided into seven chapters. The first two present the early history of Poland from 996, and the baptism of Mieszko I, to 1102, and the death of Władysław I Herman, in order to set the scene for an examination of the evolution of the concept of holy war in a Polish perspective. These two chapters also describe the introduction of Christianity into Poland, and that religion’s substantial influence on the Piast realm and its culture. Chapter 3 discusses the dissemination of the idea of holy war among Polish elites of the early twelfth century, and examines ‘“the right and just” wars waged by Bolesław III against the Pomeranians’ as examples of holy wars and proto-crusades taking place at the same time. Chapter 4 lists the events of the civil war between Władysław II and his younger half-brothers before the Wendish Crusade and the circumstances of Polish involvement. Chapter 5 investigates the evidence of the involvement of the Poles in the Second Crusade and [End Page 400] their contribution to it of at least one powerful army. Chapter 6 explores Polish participation in Christian holy wars, and describes the autumn 1147 expedition led by Bolesław IV into Prussia, which has not previously been discussed in English-language historiography. Chapter 7 describes the missionary attempts of the Cistercian Order to convert Prussia in view of the fragmentation of the Piast patrimony. This volume is a valuable study of the Piast dynasty and their holy wars. Mariusz Bęcławski Kozminski University Copyright © 2015 Mariusz Bęcławski

Gratian's Tractatus de legibus and Torino, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria D.V.19 Ken Pennington Gratian introduced his students to basic concepts of law in his Tractatus de legibus. He defined ius naturale, ius gentium, Roman civil law and its terminology, custom and ecclesiastical legal norms. Ius naturale, which he took from Roman law, was particularly important. Except for Isidore of Seville, early medieval theologians had always used the term Lex naturalis, which did not have the same penumbra of meanings as Ius naturale.1 Gratian place Ius naturale firmly into the canonical tradtion. One might argue that Gratian's Tractatus de legibus was his most important contribution to medieval jurisprudence. It was not, it seems, a part of the earliest versions of the Decretum.2 The first versions of the Decretum contained very little Roman law. This was a significant departure from other late eleventh and early twelfth-century canonical collections that had contained significant numbers of Roman law texts. There are small pieces of evidence that Gratian knew and used Roman law in the earliest recensions of his text.3 Over time, Gratian gradually [End Page 199] expanded the Decretum by adding several thousand texts in stages and among these additions were excerpts from Roman law.4 The texts that he added to his expanded recensions seem to have circulated as appendices.5 In his final, vulgate recension Gratian inserted over one-hundred texts taken from all parts of Justinian codification and from Justinian's later legislation, the Novellae. However, Gratian's most important Roman law excerpts were not from Justinian but from Irnerius' translations and adaptions of texts from Justinian's Novellae that were inserted into the margins of the Institutes and the Codex.6 Irnerius had carefully crafted these texts to adapt the legislation in the Codex to twelfth-century society. Gratian saw that they were also very important for his project and inserted thirty 'authenticae' into his Decretum. Although there is no debate today that Gratian used Roman law and that the glossators of the Decretum had frequent recourse to Justinian's legacy, there are differing opinions on when, how and to what degree Gratian and the early canonists bowed to the authority of Roman law.7 Very little work has been done on the influence of canon law on Roman law in the early twelfth century. To put the question slightly differently, when did the current begin to flow in the opposite direction, when did jurists who were not canonists begin to use and cite canonical texts in their work? Two manuscripts of working jurists that contain primarily Roman law texts in Torino, [End Page 200] Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria D.V.19 and also to a lesser extent, Paris, Bibliothèque Natioanle de France lat. 4709, give us intriguing evidence that provide some answers to that question. Two other early twelfth century manuscripts, Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana Plut. 29.39 and Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Reg. lat. 435 also provide proof of canonical jurisprudence's usefulness to these jurists who were primarily interested in Roman law.8 The Torino manuscript is especially important for gaining some insight into the interest in canon law that these jurists had in the early twelfth century. More than one hundred years ago Fitting described the manuscript as a 'highly interesting and rich' manuscript.9 He called attention to the texts of canon law in the manuscript, but the manuscript remained of greater interest to scholars of Roman law than to historians of canon law because it contained more Roman law than canonical texts.10 Historians of canon law did not pay much attention to it.11 In 1895 Emil Seckel analyzed the canonical texts in the manuscript and demonstrated were taken from the canonical collection, Panormia, Gratian's [End Page 201] Decretum, or from related sources.12 It is signifcant that the Panormia as well as Gratian were important sources. Use of the Panormia is evidence that the manuscript was assembled before Gratian's Decretum dominated the scene. Scholars have not been unanimous in dating or localizing the manuscript. The individual pieces of the manscript were not written in one scriptorium, but the scripts are all fairly similar and date...

III The Central Middle Ages (900–1200)

Origen’s Story: Heresy, Book Production, and Monastic Reform at Saint-Laurent de Liège

Reviewed by: Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World by David A. Wacks Albert Lloret Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World. By David A. Wacks. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. The introduction to Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World has two goals. The first is to assert the critical framework of the study—that is, researching the interaction of the territories, cultures, and politics of the Mediterranean basin—and, in subsequent chapters, the relevance of this Mediterranean-centered approach becomes apparent in the geographical background of the literary works under scrutiny as much as in their discursive and political relevance. The second is to define the place of the Iberian Peninsula with respect to the medieval wars of conquest of the holy sites of Christendom in the Middle East. The focus of this second goal is not so much placed on military or apologetical contributions coming from Iberia to the Middle Eastern Crusades. Rather, Wacks concentrates on explaining how the history of those contributions affected the way in which the military campaigns of the Iberian Christian kingdoms against Al-Andalus were ideologically conceived, imagined, and predicated as a holy war. Thus, medieval Iberian chivalric works engaged with the Crusades in clearly distinct discursive forms. Given the book’s focus on literary prose works written in Arabic, Castilian, and Catalan, the introduction pays particular attention to the ideology of the Crusades and to practices of proselytization and conversion of Muslim and Jewish populations in the Christian-dominated territories of the Iberian Peninsula. It ends with a cursory catalogue of mainly Castilian examples of Crusade fiction; and, in my opinion, a lyric subgenre such as the Occitan canso de crozada, a variety of sirventes, would also yield interesting responses to the kinds of questions the author entertains in the introduction. I mean this as a remark on the monograph’s relevance beyond its intended scope, not as critique of Wacks’s choice of works. Chapter 1 advances an interpretation of the Ziyad ibn ‘Amir al-Kinani—an Andalusi work written in Granada c. 1250—as an example of Crusade fiction. Ziyad is a significant but neglected example of the complexity of cultural hybridity in medieval Iberia. The work was generically indebted to both Arab popular epic and Arab popular narrative texts such as the 1001 Nights. But its anonymous author drew, too, on Christian Crusader and Arthurian fiction to create a narrative led, paradoxically, by an Arab and Muslim hero. This reliance on Christian [End Page 143] chivalric fiction explains many of the work’s features, from its detailed descriptions of combat to the mass conversion of pagans to Islam. For Wacks, Ziyad emerges as an outstanding work in its context because of the way in which it evinces a degree of cultural assimilation of Muslim Granada to the Christian north. He argues that this assimilation was an aesthetic choice, not an ideological one, because it is exemplified in other artistic and literary products of the time. The author of Ziyad maintained the religious values of Arab epic, negotiating and adapting them to the generic features of Christian chivalric fiction. Chapter 2 centers on the Castilian Libro del caballero Zifar, dated to the first quarter of the fourteenth century. A thorough reading of a fragment of Zifar’s prologue gives Wacks a starting point for unpacking the book’s political and ideological agenda. He contends that Zifar embodies a cultural translatio. Its Christian author’s appropriation of Andalusi culture is interpreted as spolia—that is, as a way of enhancing the cultural capital of his work, one that accounts for key formal aspects of the text, such as its Arabizing toponyms and anthroponyms and its transformation of Arthurian fiction into a vehicle for sapiential literature. At the same time, the prologue of Zifar is understood to be performing a vindication of the Mozarabic elites of the Church of Toledo over adventitious Castilian dominance. This political maneuver—the affirmation of Mozarabic identity—may have been allegorized in the plot of the romance. Finally, Wacks suggests how two of the Arthurian motifs that the book contains, the only fantastic ones in the work (whose source is debated), could...

The great expansion in monasticism in Normandy and England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is a commonplace of medieval history, as is the marked diminution in monastic grants after c. 1200. Far more attention, however, has been paid to the religious houses than to their founders, and it is only by looking at a baronial family over a long period that one can discern the fashions which undoubtedly existed in monastic benefaction and the changes in attitude of successive generations. The Clare family were both long-lasting and prolific, and, because of the numerous changes in the landed position of various members of the family, it is possible to see how closely in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the acquisition of new territories and the endowment of monasteries went together. Moreover, we are able to trace the changing preferences for different monastic orders and, to some extent, the reasons for this, and, in addition, to see this in the context not only of Normandy and England, but of Wales and Ireland as well. Whereas in the eleventh and early twelfth century, the Clares' gifts passed to Benedictine houses, many of them Norman or with Norman connections, they became more interested later in the new orders of the Augustinian canons and Cistercians which were spreading rapidly over Europe. At the same time they made grants to the military orders of the Hospitallers and Templars which, by giving knights the opportunity to combine fighting with a monastic life, fused two ideals of the twelfth-century world. In contrast to the variety and amount of these monastic benefactions, the Clares were content in the thirteenth century to make only the occasional grant, but they were insistent on maintaining their rights of patronage. In addition, their interest turned to the new orders of friars. There is, however, no indication here of continuous family interest from one generation to the next as would have been the case in the early twelfth century.

The early medieval kingdom of Powys, which had by tradition extended over much of central and eastern Wales, had effectively ceased to exist in the course of the ninth century. Parts of the kingdom had fallen to English incursions, while much of the remainder appears to have been absorbed into Gwynedd. For some two hundred years Powys appears to have existed as a region rather than as a polity. Mid-twelfth-century sources, however, reveal a very different situation. A vigorous, though more restricted, realm of Powys had re-emerged, ruled by a dynasty that traced its origins to the formidable and talented Bleddyn ap Cynfyn who had died in 1075. According to the poet Gwalchmai, Bleddyn's grandson Madog ap Maredudd had ruled a kingdom that extended from the summit of Pumlumon to the gates of Chester, and from Bangor (on Dee) to the border of Meirionnydd. His realm was very similarly described in the later Dream of Rhonabwy . The twelfth-century Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan refers to a king of Powys in the late 1070s and to princes of Powys in the early years of the twelfth century, while Meilir Brydydd's elegy for Gruffudd ap Cynan (1137) refers to ‘kings of Powys’ at the battle of Mynydd Carn in 1081. It is noteworthy that all of these designations are retrospective. In this resurgence of a kingdom of Powys it seems at first sight that the late eleventh and very early twelfth centuries were crucial.

Flemish Immigration and Geoffrey of Monmouth's <i>De gestis Britonum</i>

<i>Christianity and War in Medieval East Central Europe and Scandinavia</i>

This essay examines Prima Causa, a case unique to Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, 673, and its place in the broader conversation about the emergence, spread, formation, and imparting of legal knowledge in the twelfth century. It argues that Prima Causa, despite sharing some of the same texts found in the Distinctiones of the first recension of the Decretum, forms a tightly woven case that engages directly with issues central to those working in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries – clerical celibacy, the worthiness or unworthiness of candidates for the major orders, and election to the prelacy. However, it does not engage other issues of concern, specifically the importance of ecclesiastical hierarchy and papal primacy. The version of the Decretum found in Sg is thus a fascinating witness to the fluidity of legal knowledge that predates the relative standardization of the text.

Historians generally date the medieval period in Japanese history as starting at the end of the twelfth century when the Kamakura bakufu was established, marking the emerging dominance of warrior government over aristocratic rule. In peasant history, however, the latter half of the eleventh or early twelfth century, however, is a more appropriate point of division between the ancient and medieval periods. The shōen system of land control had extended throughout Japan around that time, bringing entirely new conditions for the peasants and making them henceforth truly “medieval.” The introduction and development of the shōen system had a much greater impact on the living conditions of peasants in Japan than did the founding of the Kamakura bakufu nearly a century later. The shōen system, therefore, is of great significance in peasant history and is the central defining characteristic of the medieval period. The momentous changes for the peasants brought about by the shōen system must be understood in the context of the earlier conditions pertaining to the land of the ritsuryō system in the eighth century. Under the ritsuryō system, the central government claimed ownership of all land; cultivators were allotted paddies on an equitable basis; and taxes were collected according to specific categories of goods; for example, grain, labor, and silk. But these conditions began to break down rapidly early in the tenth century and had disintegrated entirely by the time the shōen system had spread throughout Japan in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.

sources and modern scholarly discussions of the large-scale military attacks upon religious enemies mounted by medieval Christian authorities describe these attacks by terms such as 'just war', 'holy war', 'crusade', and 'sacred violence'. Twentieth-century writers still use these categories to describe modern conflicts that they wish to justify by invoking idealistic motives that purport to legitimize hostilities. When General Eisenhower entitled his memoir of the Second World War Crusade in Europe, he doubtless meant to use 'crusade' as a metaphor in this way.1 When the Franco government entitled its account of the Spanish Civil War A History of the Spanish Crusade, however, the work was predicated on the belief that the struggle had been quite literally a crusade, because it was authorized by ecclesiastical authorities and fought in the name of religion.2 This essay, therefore, addresses a recurring problem in legal and historical taxonomy. On a different level, international public law continues to distinguish between just (or legitimate) wars and what are now called 'wars of aggression',3 and that distinction can entail significant legal consequences.4 The status of a conflict in international law may substantially affect such concrete matters as, for example, the public property of hostile states, the assets and other property rights of enemy aliens,5

The most striking expression of the surge of military and economic aggression of the Christian West in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries was the establishment by the armies of the First Crusade of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch, and the two counties of Edessa and Tripoli. These Crusader states on the mainland of Syria and Palestine were not all to be finally exterminated until 1291, almost two hundred years later. Their survival during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was very largely a product of the fact that their essential resources of manpower and financial revenues could be replenished constantly through their maritime connections to the Christian West. From very soon after the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 the majority of the pilgrim traffic, which brought both unarmed pilgrims to worship at the holy places and also armed pilgrims, Crusaders, to participate in military campaigns, came by sea. It is true that the major Crusading armies came overland for the First Crusade, the Crusade of 1101, and the Second Crusade, and that the German armies did so also for the Third Crusade. However, the constant trickle of Crusaders arriving in small groups or as individuals to spend a time campaigning against the infidel almost invariably came by sea. Pilgrims of both kinds provided forces for war, settlers to secure the land, and liquid capital to establish a Frankish social and economic infrastructure.

At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II (1088–1099) called for a holy war against the Muslims who had wrested Jerusalem from Christian rule and who continued to threaten the Byzantine Empire. His audience responded enthusiastically and undertook a campaign commonly known today as the first crusade, which established several crusader states in the Levant. Some 10 years after the council, a Damascene jurisprudent named ‘Alīb. Tāhir al-Sulamī (d. 499–500/1106) publicly dictated the earliest extant call for a Muslim counter-offensive against these states. Al-Sulamī's message met with little success, unlike Urban's: only 14 years later, at the Battle of Balat (also called Ager sanguinis or the Field of Blood), do Islamic calls to jihād (holy war) seem to have started to have significant effect.Despite marked disparities between the religious traditions of each faith, the entreaties of Urban II and al-Sulamī parallel one another in many ways. On the most basic level, they have identical purposes: both call for a military campaign against people of another faith. Yet their similarities go much deeper than this. The two preachings reveal a common mindset toward religious or holy war that is all the more striking because Christian views on holy war and Muslim doctrines of jihād developed in isolation. Moreover, both demand similar responses from their listeners – responses that subordinate secular interests to sacred ones. So although these calls to action came out of separate theological traditions and addressed audiences in quite disparate social contexts, their similarities appear to reflect cross-cultural medieval attitudes toward holy war. Indeed, they suggest that there were certain basic ideas associated with holy war that were common to the medieval mindset, regardless of the individual's cultural background.