View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by SJSU ScholarWorks San Jose State University SJSU ScholarWorks Master's Theses Master's Theses and Graduate Research Summer 2015 Holy Warriors and Bellicose Bishops: The hC urch and Warfare in Early Medieval Germany Nicholas Edward Friend San Jose State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/etd_theses Recommended Citation Friend, Nicholas Edward, "Holy Warriors and Bellicose Bishops: The hC urch and Warfare in Early Medieval Germany" (2015). Master's Theses. 4585. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31979/etd.h7db-86zn https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/etd_theses/4585 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Master's Theses and Graduate Research at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HOLY WARRIORS AND BELLICOSE BISHOPS: THE CHURCH AND WARFARE IN EARLY MEDIEVAL GERMANY A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of History San José State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Nicholas E. Friend August 2015 © 2015 Nicholas E. Friend ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The Designated Thesis Committee Approves the Thesis Titled HOLY WARRIORS AND BELLICOSE BISHOPS: THE CHURCH AND WARFARE IN EARLY MEDIEVAL GERMANY by Nicholas E. Friend APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY August 2015 Dr. John Bernhardt Department of History Dr. Jonathan Roth Department of History Dr. Allison Katsev Department of History ABSTRACT HOLY WARRIORS AND BELLICOSE BISHOPS: THE CHURCH AND WARFARE IN EARLY MEDIEVAL GERMANY By Nicholas E. Friend The Frankish kingdoms of the early Middle Ages were the inheritors of both Germanic warrior culture and the Christian institutions of the late Roman Empire. Under Charlemagne, the Franks conquered most of Western Europe by the early ninth century and established a new empire of their own. To do so, they had to reconcile the Christian doctrine of peace with the necessity of killing the enemy during war. This was especially challenging for the highest ranks of the clergy. Though forbidden by canon law to commit violence, bishops and abbots were responsible for defending the property and people in their jurisdictions. The pious Carolingian kings endowed the Church with more property but required service of their land-holding prelates in exchange, which included providing troops for the royal army and, frequently, leading those troops themselves. By the time of the Ottonians (919-1024), rulers of the East Frankish kingdom that developed into the medieval German empire, the participation of bishops and abbots in war had become institutionalized. Even so, opinions within the Church remained divided on the morality of clerics taking an active part in combat. The context of Ottonian rule and the complex relationship between the German emperors and their ecclesiastical magnates are examined in this study. This is followed by an analysis of the primary narrative sources from the period. The textual evidence shows the range of opinions held by the clerical authors and the extent of Ottonian prelates’ military roles and allows a conclusion to be formed as to how common the phenomenon of the “warrior bishop” actually was. For Elizabeth, imperatrix domum meam v ABBREVIATIONS AB Annales Bertiniani AF Annales Fuldensis ARF Annales Regni Francorum FSGA Freiherr vom Stein-Gedächtnisausgabe MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica Capit. Capitularia DO III Charter of Otto III Epist. Epistolae Poet. Lat. Poetae Latinae SS Scriptores SSrG Scriptores rerum Germanicum in usum scholarium SSrG NS Scriptores rerum Germanicum, Nova series vi CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS………………………………………………………... vi INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………. 1 PART I: THE ORIGINS OF MEDIEVAL GERMANY AND ITS CHURCH 1. The Paradox of the Christian Soldier……………………………………………... 6 2. The Birth of the Frankish Kingdom……………………………………………... 12 3. Bishops and Abbots under the Carolingians………………….…...…………….. 19 4. The Lingering Moral Dilemma of Christian War……………………………….. 25 5. Textual Evidence for Carolingian Churchmen in Combat……………………….31 PART II: CHURCHMEN AT WAR UNDER THE OTTONIANS 6. The Last Carolingians and the First Saxons………………….…………………..57 7. Otto II, Otto III and Henry II……………..………………………………………70 8. The King and the Imperial Church…………….…………………………………84 9. The View from Outside: Flodoard and Liudprand……………………………… 91 10. Partisan Monks: Adalbert and Widukind……………….……………………… 110 11. Holy Allies: Brun and Udalrich………………………………………………... 124 12. Witness to War: Thietmar………...……………………………………………. 140 13. Faithful Shepherds: Burchard and Bernward…………………..………………. 154 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………….. 175 APPENDIX………………………………………………………………………… 181 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………….. 182 vii 1 INTRODUCTION One of the great reifications of history is that society in the European Middle Ages was organized into the “three estates”: the armed nobility who fought for the defense of all, the Christian clergy who prayed for everyone’s souls, and the commoners who farmed and worked so that all should have food and the material necessities of life. Though simplistic, this understanding is based on a vision of an ordered society that began to inspire the pens of clerical thinkers with increasing frequency beginning in the late tenth century.1 The reality of medieval social structure was, of course, more complex and varied according to time, place and socio-economic conditions. This was especially true in the Medieval German Empire. As in the rest of Christian Europe, bishops and abbots belonged almost to a man to the same social stratum as secular counts and dukes, so that the division between “the Church” and “the nobility” was often blurred. The conditions that prevailed in early medieval Germany produced a clerical class that not only tended to have worldview similar to that of the armed aristocracy but was obliged to fulfill many of the same military duties in service to the emperor and the Reich, up to, and sometimes including, fighting in person. Such at least is the lingering impression. The literati of the High Middle Ages, looking at their own generation, could be as guilty of oversimplification as moderns looking back over several centuries, and the “fighting bishops of the Empire” seems to have become something of a self-effacing joke. German 1 Timothy Reuter, “Carolingian and Ottonian Warfare,” in Medieval Warfare: A History, ed. Maurice Keen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 34. 2 moralists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries often harped on the sins of militant ecclesiastics; Caesarius of Heisterbach, writing in the 1220s, told of a Paris student who was prepared to believe anything except that a German bishop could achieve salvation, since such a man was more apt to think on the wages of his troops than the souls of his flock.2 This caricature of the warrior prelate was not just a product of high medieval imagination but an image that evolved from reality. It was based on a practice that originated in the Frankish empire founded in the fifth century by the Merovingian kings and continued under the Carolingian dynasty that came to rule nearly all of Christian Europe—first as uncrowned warlords, then as kings, and ultimately as “Roman” emperors—from the early eighth century through the end of the ninth. Frankish society was very much defined by war and its bishops and abbots were frequently involved in military matters in apparent contradiction to the teachings of the church. After the Carolingian empire fragmented, the royal bloodline faded away in East Francia and gave way to a dynasty of Saxon lineage, which ruled the nascent German Reich during the tenth century and the first quarter of the eleventh. History knows them as the Ottonians. The idea of the martial prelate is most commonly associated with Ottonian Germany. 2 Dialogus Miraculorum II.27, ed J. Strange (Cologne, 1851), vol. 1, 99. Cited in Timothy Reuter, “Episcopi cum sua militia: The Prelate as Warrior in the Early Staufer Era,” in Warriors and Churchmen in the High Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Karl Leyser (London and Rio Grande: The Hambledon Press, 1992), 79. 3 Until relatively recently,3 the study of the period has hinged on the premise of the Reichskirchensystem (imperial church system). This approach assumes that the German monarch had the power to appoint prelates to positions of his choosing and that he relied on the lords of “his” church to serve as the principal ministers of government in preference to the lay nobility and to provide troops for the empire’s defense. This notion of the “fighting churchman” raises a series of questions which are examined and answered in this study. In the first place, how did early medieval society reconcile the sin of killing with the necessity of waging war, and how particularly did the leading churchmen of the Frankish empire come to be tasked with military duties? Having established this, what evidence can be found in primary source documents for churchmen in early medieval Germany participating in war, and what form did such participation take? In simplest terms, did these bishops and abbots actually do battle with weapon in hand? If so, was this the rule or the exception? Finally, since the literate of the European Middle Ages were overwhelmingly clerical, what opinions were held by the authors of the above sources regarding the morality of war? How did they understand the role(s) played by fellow men of the cloth in war, and did they approve? These questions are best understood through the narrative sources, that is, chronicles and histories, personal accounts of events, and the vitae (lives) and gesta (deeds) of great men (and occasionally women). A significant number of these were written under the 3 For Timothy Reuter’s 1982 rebuttal of the Reichkirchensystem, see Chapter 8. 4 Ottonians. In particular, the biographical works of leading prelates have survived in quantity unmatched by the Carolingian era.