A World Lit Only by Fire (3 page)

Surrounding them was the vast, menacing, and at places impassable, Hercynian Forest, infested by boars; by bears; by the hulking
medieval wolves who lurk so fearsomely in fairy tales handed down from that time; by imaginary demons; and by very real outlaws,
who flourished because they were seldom pursued. Although homicides were twice as frequent as deaths by accident, English
coroners’ records show that only one of every hundred murderers was ever brought to justice. Moreover, abduction for ransom
was an acceptable means of livelihood for skilled but landless knights. One consequence of medieval peril was that people
huddled closely together in communal homes. They married fellow villagers and were so insular that local dialects were often
incomprehensible to men living only a few miles away.

The level of everyday violence—deaths in alehouse brawls, during bouts with staves, or even in playing football or wrestling
—was shocking. Tournaments were very different from the romantic descriptions in Malory, Scott, and Conan Doyle. They were
vicious sham battles by large bands of armed knights, ostensibly gatherings for enjoyment and exercise but really occasions
for abduction and mayhem. As late as the year 1240, in a tourney near Düsseldorf, sixty knights were hacked to death.

Despite their bloodthirstiness—a taste which may have been acquired from the Huns, Goths, Franks, and Saxons—all were
devout Christians. It was a paradox: the Church had replaced imperial Rome as the fixer of European frontiers, but missionaries
found teaching pagans the lessons of Jesus to be an almost hopeless task. Yet converting them was easy. As quickly as the
barbaric tribes had overrun the empire, Catholicism’s overrunning of the tribesmen was even quicker. As early as
A.D
. 493 the Frankish chieftain Clovis accepted the divinity of Christ and was baptized, though a modern priest would have found
his manner of championing the Church difficult to understand or even forgive. Fortunately Clovis was accompanied by a contemporary,
Bishop Gregory of Tours. The bishop made allowances for the violent streak in the Frankish character. In his writings Gregory
portrayed his protégé as a heroic general whose triumphs were attributable to divine guidance. He proudly set down an account
of how the chief dealt with a Frankish warrior who, during a division of tribal booty at Soissons, had wantonly swung his
ax and smashed a vase. As it happened, the broken pottery had been Church property and much cherished by the bishop. Clovis
knew that. Later, picking his moment, he split the warrior’s skull with his own ax, yelling, “Thus you treated the vase at
Soissons!”

Medieval Christians, knowing the other cheek would be bloodied, did not turn it. Death was the prescribed penalty for hundreds
of offenses, particularly those against property. The threat of capital punishment was even used in religious conversions,
and medieval threats were never idle. Charlemagne was a just and enlightened ruler—for the times. His loyalty to the Church
was absolute, though he sometimes chose peculiar ways to demonstrate it. Conquering Saxon rebels, he gave them a choice between
baptism and immediate execution; when they demurred, he had forty-five hundred of them beheaded in one morning.

That was not remarkable. Soldiers of Christ swung their swords freely. And the victims were not always pagans. Every flourishing
religion has been intermittently watered by the blood of its own faithful, but none has seen more spectacular internecine
butchery than Christianity. In
A.D
. 330 Constantine I, the first Roman emperor to recognize Jesus as his savior, made Constantinople the empire’s second capital.
Within a few years, a great many people who shared his faith began to die there for their interpretation of it. The emperor’s
first Council of Nicaea failed to resolve a doctrinal dispute between Arius of Alexandria and the dominant faction of theologians.
Arius rejected the Nicene Creed, taking the Unitarian position that although Christ was the son of God, he was not divine.
Attempts at compromise foundered; Arius died, condemned as a heresiarch; his Arians rioted and were put to the sword. Over
three thousand Christians thus died at the hands of fellow Christians—more than all the victims in three centuries of Roman
persecutions. On April 13, 1204, nearly nine centuries later, medieval horror returned to Constantinople when the armies of
the Fourth Crusade, embittered by their failure to reach the Holy Land, turned on the city, sacked it, destroyed sacred relics,
and massacred the inhabitants.

C
HRIST’S
missionary commandment had been clearly set forth in Matthew (28:19–20), but in the early centuries after his crucifixion
the flame of faith flickered low. Wholesale conversions of Germans, Celts, and Slavs did not begin until about
A.D
. 500, after Christianity had been firmly established as the state religion of the Roman Empire. Its victories were deceptive;
few of its converts understood their new faith. Paganism—Stoicism, Neoplatonism, Cynicism, Mithraism, and local cults —
continued to be deeply entrenched, not only in the barbaric tribes, but also among the Sophists, teachers of wisdom in the
old imperial cities: Athens, Alexandria, Smyrna, Antioch, and Rome itself, which was the city of Caesar as well as Saint Peter.
Constantine had tried to discourage pagan ceremonies and sacrifices, but he had not outlawed them, and they continued to flourish.

This infuriated the followers of Jesus. They were split on countless issues—Arianism, which was one of them, flourished
for over half a century—but united in their determination to raze the temples of the pagans, confiscate their property,
and subject them to the same official persecutions Christians had endured in the catacombs, including the feeding of martyrs
to lions. This vindictiveness seems an incongruity, inconsistent with the Gospels. But medieval Christianity had more in common
with paganism than its worshipers would acknowledge. The apostles Paul and John had been profoundly influenced by Neoplatonism.
Of the seven cardinal virtues named by Pope Gregory I in the sixth century, only three were Christian—faith, hope, and charity
—while the other four—wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance—were adopted from the pagans Plato and Pythagoras. Pagan
philosophers argued that the Gospels contradicted each other, which they do, and pointed out that Genesis assumes a plurality
of gods. The devout scorned reason, however. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the most influential Christian of his
time, bore a deep distrust of the intellect and declared that the pursuit of knowledge, unless sanctified by a holy mission,
was a pagan act and therefore vile.

Ironically, the masterwork of Christianity’s most powerful medieval philosopher was inspired by a false report. Alaric’s sack
of Rome, it was said, had been the act of a barbaric pagan seeking vengeance for his idols. (This was inaccurate; actually,
Alaric and a majority of his Visigoths were Arian Christians.) Even so, the followers of Jesus were widely blamed for bringing
about Rome’s fall; men charged that the ancient gods, offended by the empire’s formal adoption of the new faith, had withdrawn
their protection from the Eternal City. One Catholic prelate, the bishop of Hippo—Aurelius Augustinus, later Saint Augustine
—felt challenged. He devoted thirteen years to writing his response,
De civitate Dei
(
The City of God
), the first great work to shape and define the medieval mind. Augustine (354–430) began by declaring that Rome was being
punished, not for her new faith, but for her old, continuing sins: lascivious acts by the populace and corruption among politicians.
The pagan deities, he wrote, had lewdly urged Romans to yield to sexual passion—“the god Virgineus to loose the virgin’s
girdle, Subigus to put her beneath a man’s loins, Prema to hold her down … Priapus upon whose huge and beastly member the
new bride was commanded by religious order to stir and receive!”

Here Augustine, by his own account, spoke from personal experience. In his
Confessions
he had described how, before his conversion, he had devoted his youth to exploring the outer limits of carnal depravity.
But, he wrote, the original sin, and he now declared that there was such a thing, had been committed by Adam when he yielded
to Eve’s temptations. As children of Adam, he held, all mankind shared Adam’s guilt. Lust polluted every child in the very
act of conception—sexual intercourse was a “mass of perdition [
exitium
].” However, although most people were thereby damned in the womb, some could be saved by the blessed intervention of the
Virgin Mary, who possessed that power because she had conceived Christ sinlessly: “Through a woman we were sent to destruction;
through a woman salvation was restored to us.” He thus drew a sharp line. The chief distinction between the old faiths and
the new were in the sexual arena. Pagans had accepted prostitution as a relief from monogamy. Worshipers of Jesus vehemently
rejected it, demanding instead purity, chastity, and absolute fidelity in husbands and wives. Women found this ringing affirmation
enormously appealing. Aurelius Augustinus—whose influence on Christianity would be greater than that of any other man except
the apostle Paul—was the first to teach medieval men that sex was evil, and that salvation was possible only through the
intercession of the Madonna.

But there were subtler registers to Augustine’s mind. In his most complex metaphor, he divided all creation into
civitas Dei
and
civitas terrena
. Everyone had to embrace one of them, and a man’s choice would determine where he spent eternity. In chapter fifteen he explained:
“Mankind [
hominum
] is divided into two sorts: such as live according to man, and such as live according to God. These we mystically call the
‘two cities’ or societies, the one predestined to reign eternally with God, the other condemned to perpetual torment with
Satan.” Individual, he wrote, would slip back and forth between the two cities; their fate would be decided at the Last Judgment.
Because he had identified the Church with his
civitas Dei
, Augustine clearly implied the need for a theocracy, a state in which secular power, symbolizing
civitas terrena
, would be subordinate to spiritual powers derived from God. The Church, drawing the inference, thereafter used Augustine’s
reasoning as an ideological tool and, ultimately, as a weapon in grappling with kings and emperors.

T
HE
H
OLY
S
EE’S
struggle with Europe’s increasingly powerful crowned heads became one of the most protracted in history. When Augustine finished
his great work in 426, Celestine I was pope. In 1076—over a hundred pontiffs later—the issue was still unresolved. Holy
Fathers in the Vatican, near Nero’s old Circus, were still fighting Holy Roman emperors, trying to end the prerogative of
lay rulers to invest prelates with authority. An exasperated Gregory VII, resorting to his ultimate sanction, excommunicated
Emperor Henry IV. That literally brought Henry to his knees. He begged for absolution and was granted it only after he had
spent three days and nights prostrate in the snows of Canossa, outside the papal castle in northern Italy. Canossa became
a symbol of secular submission, but improperly so; the emperor’s contrition was short-lived. Changing his mind, he renewed
his attack, and, undeterred by a second excommunication, drove Gregory from Rome. Bitterly the pontiff wrote, “
Dilexi justitiam et odi iniquitatem; propterea morior in exilio
”—because he had “loved justice and hated iniquity” he would “die in exile.” Another century passed before the papacy wrested
independence from the imperial courts in Germany. Even then conflicts remained, and they were not fully resolved until early
in the thirteenth century, when Innocent III brought the Church to the height of its prestige and power.

Nevertheless the entire medieval millennium took on the aspect of triumphant Christendom. As aristocracies arose from the
barbaric mire, kings and princes owed their legitimacy to divine authority, and squires became knights by praying all night
at Christian altars. Sovereigns courting popularity led crusades to the Holy Land. To eat meat during Lent became a capital
offense, sacrilege meant imprisonment, the Church became the wealthiest landowner on the Continent, and the life of every
European, from baptism through matrimony to burial, was governed by popes, cardinals, prelates, monsignors, archbishops, bishops,
and village priests. The clergy, it was believed, would also cast decisive votes in determining where each soul would spend
the afterlife.