In recruiting allies or raising their own troops, later eleventh-century popes were fully aware of the theoretical implications as much as the political necessities. The moral standing of those who fought for the pope became a matter of acute concern. In 1053, Leo IX (1048–54) offered German troops who fought (unsuccessfully) under his personal command against the Norman bandit lords of southern Italy remission of penance and absolution of sins. In 1059, as a result of a major diplomatic revolution, these same Normans became papal vassals, with the obligation to fight for their new lord. Papal banners were granted the Norman invaders of Sicily (in 1060) and England (in 1066) and to Milanese street gangs, the Patarines, engaged in a violent and protracted struggle for the eradication of clerical abuses and control of the archbishopric of the city in the 1060s and 1070s. Holy war became part of the papal programme. The Patarine conflict was called a bellum Dei, a war of God, the fallen Patarine leader Erlembald (d. 1075), a martyr. The key testing ground of papal reform and power was in Germany, where any loosening of the link between church and state or challenge to imperial authority was fiercely opposed by Emperor Henry IV. From the late 1070s disagreements turned to war, the so-called wars of the Investiture Contest, although the issues were far broader than whether or not kings should invest bishops with ring and staff. To fight for papal interests, the most militant of the reforming popes, Gregory VII, even attempted to recruit knights from across Europe to form a papal army, a militia sancti Petri, a Militia of St Peter.
Gregory VII significantly developed the theory and practice of holy war and holy warriors. Although not given to citing Augustine of Hippo himself, his loyal henchman Bishop Anselm II of Lucca, in his Collectio canonum (i.e. Collection of canon law) of c.1083, brought together the Augustinian theories of just war in one contained, intelligible and coherent place for the first time, although its circulation was limited. Gregory, one of whose favourite scriptural quotations was ‘Cursed is he who keeps back his sword from bloodshed’ (Jeremiah 48:10), preferred a moral rather than legal approach. He identified two forms of occupation for arms-bearers, one secular, selfish and sinful, the other penitential, justified by legitimate rights, loyalty to a lord, protection of the vulnerable or defence of the church. Writing in the decade after Gregory’s death, a vigorous papalist propagandist, Bishop Bonizo of Sutri, in his Liber de Vita Christiana, identified those who, ‘for their salvation and the common good’, fought schismatics, heretics and excommunicates and protected the poor, orphans and widows, as members of an ‘ordo pugnatorum’, an order of warriors to rank in the social hierarchy, precisely the group implied by the Militia of St Peter and to whom Urban II sought to direct his appeal in 1095.29 By the end of his stormy pontificate, Gregory VII offered all who fought for his cause, in whatever fashion, absolution of their sins and the prospect of eternal salvation. Provided their motivation was grounded on selflessness and faith not gain, such soldiers could combine penance and violence. In castigating his opponents and encouraging his followers Gregory extended his rhetoric, likening service in such a just war as an imitation of Christ’s sufferings against ‘those who are the enemies of the cross of Christ’.30
Gregory was not merely a rhetorician or theorist. Even before becoming pope, as archdeacon of the Roman church, he had taken a keen interest in wars on behalf of the church, in Sicily, England and Milan. As pope, this continued. In 1076, he offered absolution of all sins to the knights of Count Roger of Sicily on a projected campaign against the Saracens as he did to those joining an attack on Byzantium in 1080 to restore, as Gregory mistakenly thought, the rightful emperor. Throughout the 1070s and 1080s, he tried to enlist milites in Italy, Germany and France to coerce clergy contumaciously clinging to unreformed practices of simony and fornication as much as he encouraged the civil conflict in Milan and, after 1080, armed resistance to Henry IV in Germany and Italy. Beyond the specific justifications of war and the function of the arms-bearer, this extension of papal approval and rhetoric lent these conflicts a sustained ideological quality Gregory deliberately fostered and publicized. Those involved were bombarded with rhetoric from all sides insisting on the principles for which they were fighting, conceived in terms of service to God. Many, like the fidelis beati Sancti Petri Raymond IV of Toulouse or the duke of Lower Lorraine, Godfrey of Bouillon, who fought for the emperor in Italy against the pope in the 1080s, were to answer the call to Jerusalem in 1096. The level of this propaganda war was such as to indicate that catching the imaginations of the knights themselves was no accident. Not all was conducted on the highest intellectual plane. One imperialist propagandist nicknamed Godfrey of Bouillon’s predecessor but one as duke of Lorraine, another Godfrey, but a staunch papalist, as ‘Prickfrey’ or ‘Shitfrey’.31
The ideological rhetoric of the Investiture Contest wars and the recruitment of knights to establish and protect the Peace and Truce of God depended on the susceptibility of western knights to a religiously framed ideology of war. The Anglo-Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis left a sharp portrait of one such pious warlord. Hugh, count of Avranches in western Normandy and earl of Chester in north-west England, a nephew of William the Conqueror, had done very well out of the Norman conquest of England, a classic example of that eleventh-century aristocratic mobility and fluid opportunistic careerism that fuelled the First Crusade. In establishing his power on the fringes of the Anglo-Norman realm, Hugh, called by some ‘the wolf’, acquired a foul reputation; vicious, violent, addicted to gambling, a lecher and a glutton, so fat he could hardly move, he was ‘a great lover of the world’ (not a recommendation in the eyes of the monk who used the phrase). Brave, extravagant and generous to the point of prodigality, he attracted around him a rowdy household in which many were as debauched and sybaritic as he. Yet Hugh was also a patron of monks and an old and close friend of the saintly abbot and archbishop Anselm. He employed a chaplain, Gerold, who furthered the moral instruction of his household with stories of ‘holy knights’ from the Old Testament and of Christian military heroes, including the legendary William of Orange, a saintly warrior in one of the earliest cycles of chansons de geste. Some in Gerold’s audience were so moved that they became monks; Hugh himself died (in 1101) in the habit of a Benedictine.32 Such figures were found across western Christendom, from Denmark to Sicily. In such a raucous atmosphere of passion, carnality, militarism and piety was nurtured the mentality of the holy warriors of 1096, among them friends and relatives of Hugh, possessed of the self-righteousness of ideological conviction to add to the heady brew of hedonism, brutality, guilt, obligation, spirituality and remorse. These were precisely the skilled soldiers Gregory VII had hoped to recruit and Urban II did.