Ademar of Chabannes and the Peace of God
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CHAPTER 7 Ademar of Chabannes and the Peace of God Michael Frassetto In late 1031, according to the monk of Angoulême and Limoges Ademar of Chabannes (989–1034), a great meeting of the bishops and other clergy of Aquitaine was held in Limoges to declare God’s peace.1 The council was one of a number of similar councils of the Peace of God, a movement, or more perhaps a series of movements that emerged in two waves during the late tenth and early eleventh century to address the unsettled social conditions of the day.2 The assemblies, often held in the presence of the relics of the saints, drew together the secular and religious aristocracies and large crowds of the populus of Aquitaine, Auvergne, and other regions of France.3 Although the various constituencies participating in the councils surely arrived with competing agendas, they most likely shared the goal of reforming society and establishing order in Aquitaine and the other regions where the Peace took hold.4 To accomplish this end, the councils used a variety of spiritual sanc- tions, including the threat of excommunication, to guarantee the peace and called on the nobility both to adhere to the legislation passed at the councils and to enforce this legislation. Councils like the one at Limoges, drawing on both secular and spiritual resources, were held to limit violence done to the clergy, churches, and even the poor, to define the nature of and relationship 1 The account of the council has been published as Consilium Lemovicense, Mansi, 19, cols. 507–548. The autograph copy of the council is now bound in B.N. ms 2469, fols. 97r–112v. 2 A useful introduction to the Peace of God is Thomas Head and Richard Landes (eds.), The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, NY, 1992. A more critical view of the Peace and its influence can be found in Dominique Barthélemy, L’an mil et la paix de Dieu: La France chrétienne et féodale 980–1060 (Paris, 1999, and Marcus Bull, Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade: the Limousin and Gascony, c. 970–1130 (Oxford, 1993), 11–69. 3 On the role of the saints in the Peace, see below. The important role of the populus was dem- onstrated in Loren MacKinney, “The People and Public Opinion in the Eleventh-Century Peace Movement,” Speculum 5 (1930): 181–206. 4 On the goals of the movement see, among others, Georges Duby, “Laity and the Peace of God,” in The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (Berkeley, CA, 1977), 123–33; and R.I. Moore, “Postscript: The Peace of God and the Social Revolution,” in Head and Landes, The Peace of God, 308–26. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004274167_009 <UN> Ademar Of Chabannes And The Peace Of God 123 between the orders of society, and, merging with the broad eleventh-century reform movement, to restore the right order of the world.5 The Peace was in many ways a significant movement in the early eleventh century, but the documentary record is not without its challenges. Along with the few extant copies of conciliar acta, accounts of the Peace are found in brief passages in hagiographic works and chronicles that provide only a partial pic- ture of the movement and its councils.6 Ademar’s record of the council of Limoges in 1031, which contains the canons of the Peace council of Bourges of the same year, appears to be a notable exception to this more slender docu- mentary base. Comprising some fifteen folios in manuscript (some twenty-four pages in the modern edition), Ademar’s account of the council provides exten- sive commentary on the goals and ideals of the Peace of God as well as a com- plete description of the inner workings and organization of the councils associated with the movement. Although the most detailed account of a Peace council, Ademar’s is also the most problematic. His record of the council of Limoges has been accepted almost at face value by some scholars or approached with only minor caveats,7 but its utility as a source for the Peace has also been 5 The evolution of the Peace movement and its impact on the development of society in the eleventh century has long been debated. See Thomas Bisson, “The Organized Peace in Southern France and Catalonia (c. 1140–c. 1233),” Speculum 53 (1978): 460–78; Adriann Bredero, “The Bishop’s Peace of God: A Turning Point in Medieval Society?,” in Christendom and Christianity in the Middle Ages, trans. Reinder Bruinsma (Grand Rapids, MI, 1994), 105– 29; H.E.J.Cowdrey, “The Peace and Truce of God in the Eleventh Century,” in Popes, Monks, and Crusaders (London, 1984), 42–67; and Carl Erdmann, The Origins of the Idea of Crusade, trans. Marhsall Baldwin and Walter Goffart (Princeton, 1977), 57–94, Jean Flori, La guerre sainte: La formation de l’idée de croisade dans l’Occcident chrétien (Paris, 2001), 59–99, among others. On the Peace and eleventh-century reform see Kathleen G. Cushing, Reform and the Papacy in the Eleventh Century: Spirituality and Social Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 39–54; Michael Frassetto, Medieval Purity and Piety: Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform (New York, 1998), and Amy G. Remensnyder, “Pollution, Purity, and Peace: An Aspect of Social Reform between the Late Tenth Century and 1076,” in Head and Landes, The Peace of God, 280–307. 6 The problematic nature with the documentation has been noted, for example, by Barthélemy, L’an mil et la paix de Dieu, 43. 7 Barthélemy, L’an mil et la paix de Dieu and Flori, La guerre sainte, 82–85, seem to accept Ademar’s version relatively uncritically, as does Cowdrey, “The Peace and the Truce of God in the Eleventh Century,” 42–67; Duby, “The Laity and the Peace of God,” 123–133, and Steven D. Sargent, “Religious Responses to Social Violence in Eleventh-Century Aquitaine,” Historical Réflections/Reflexions Historiques 12 (1985): 219–240, especially 223–224, fail to recognize the document as a forgery. Michel Auburn, L’ancien diocèse de Limoges: dès origines au milieu du XIe siècle (Clermont-Ferrand, 1981), p. 74, fn. 11 and pp. 204–217, recognizes Ademar’s <UN>.