Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (42 page)

That Christians viewed Islam as a threat was hardly new. Indeed, Europe came to understand itself as a distinct civilization in large part by defining itself against Islam, once the Muslim armies had stormed out of the Arabian Peninsula to conquer Syria, Persia, Egypt, all of North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and into Aquitaine. Europe's first great political dynasty, after the fall of Rome, began when the Frankish leader Charles Martel (c. 688–741) defeated the Muslims at Tours in 732, saving the heart of Europe for Christianity. The Germanic tribes that had swept across the Roman Empire in the time of Augustine had, during the intervening centuries, established numerous kingdoms, but eventually the Franks had come to dominate the north and west of Europe, and now that power was consolidated by the victory of Martel. After his death, his son Pepin was elected king of the Franks, and when Pope Stephen II went to Paris, in 754, to anoint him (the first pope to travel across the Alps), the show of deference to another monarch strained the papacy's tie to the emperor in Constantinople.

The pope had thrown in with the Frankish king because he needed help in fending off from Italy assaults by the Lombards, another Germanic tribe. The emperor in the East was doing all he could to fight the Islamic armies attacking through Armenia. Under a terrible siege itself, Constantinople would be no help to Rome. When a subsequent pope, Leo III, then crowned Pepin's son Charles, to be known as Charlemagne (c. 742–814), in Rome on Christmas Day in 800, he proclaimed him the Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne would guarantee the pope's position. Indeed, he quickly took control of all of Europe, except Spain, Britain, and Scandinavia. He would reward his allies with grants of land, the basis of European nobility. Encouraging especially the careful transcription of manuscripts, he would preside over a cultural renaissance, centered in Aachen, his birthplace, a city seventy-five miles north of Trier. But Charlemagne's reign would mark the final political division between East and West, and the papacy's support for Charlemagne, whom the emperor in Constantinople regarded as a usurper, would lead to the breakup of the Church, although that split would not become formal until 1054. All of these events were consequent to the assault on Christendom by Islam.

Now at last the moment had come for Christian Europe to strike back. The Christian
reconquista
had begun in Iberia; this was the time of the legendary El Cid (Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, c. 1043–1099), whose capture of Valencia in 1094 had encouraged the Christian world. When Urban II (pope, 1088–1099), a Frenchman raised to the martial tradition of chivalry, spoke at a gathering of bishops at Clermont in November 1095, he lifted up the image of Jerusalem, and it instantly became a kind of screen onto which Christians could project an overpowering millennial fantasy. The legacy of Saint Helena, in particular the cult of the True Cross and relics attached to the Holy Land, had found niches in which to thrive in every devotional impulse of the Church, and the dream of things associated with the life and, especially, death of Jesus took on new power. Of the reconquest of Jerusalem Pope Urban cried, "God wills it!" He sparked an awakening that has left an imprint on the consciousness of Western civilization to this day.

A hundred thousand people dropped everything to join. As a proportion of the population of Europe, we might imagine a comparable response today prompting well over a million people, as the expression put it, to "take the cross."
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Northwestern Europe had been devastated by bad harvests that autumn of 1095, and no doubt the crusading impulse rescued many serfs, but also landowners, from desperate economic straits. Populations had markedly increased in the previous century, expanded social networks had lifted gazes, and an ethos of violence, originating with marauding invaders from the north, had taken hold at all levels of society. No one knew it, but Europe was ready for something like the Crusades.

So were individual Europeans. Still traumatized by the spiritual dread associated with the millennium, and given to a cult of penitential abnegation, reflected in the new practice of secret confession of sins to priests, Latin Christians were obsessed with personal redemption. Urban II's Clermont summons promised rewards in the afterlife, including a guarantee of eternal salvation to those who died in the struggle against the infidel. For the first time in Christian history, violence was defined as a religious act, a source of grace. And, as it had been before, so was suffering. "You shall help me carry my cross," Jesus said to crusaders in one lyric of the era.
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Not surprisingly, such bloody mysticism had tremendous appeal in that rough world.

A political nerve had been touched as well, one that had lain exposed for centuries. After Charlemagne had been crowned by the pope on that Christmas Day in 800, his triumph had come fast. He was the most powerful ruler since the Age of Constantine. But the Carolingian Empire had quickly become overextended. The nobles and bishops whom Charlemagne empowered had soon enough turned on each other, and the Germanic custom of dividing estates among all male heirs—Charlemagne's domain had been partitioned among his four grandsons—had exacerbated the climate of dispute. The Germanic polity was not based on law, as Rome's had been, but on undefined tribal customs, which emphasized loyalty over justice but depended on an enforcement that now came sporadically. These stresses, when matched by new invasions from the north, with Vikings sweeping down from Scandinavia, had led to a disintegration of European unity. Charlemagne's heirs were still kings of the Frankish kingdom, and they carried the title of emperor, but they had little power.

Only recently, the papacy had been embroiled in a savage dispute with the emperor, who now was more rival than protector. In 1075, in a controversy over who had the right to appoint abbots and bishops, and therefore control their vast holdings of land and treasure, the reforming Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085) had excommunicated Emperor Henry IV. In the Apennine snows, the chastised emperor stood barefoot, in sackcloth, seeking the pope's pardon. Gregory required of Henry the ultimate act of penitence, a prostration. The emperor had to lie facedown on the frozen ground, his arms outstretched in imitation of the cross. (The cross is everywhere in this story.) Only then, on January 25, 1076, did the pope lift the excommunication, absolving the emperor. This humiliation seemed a victory for the papacy, but it also helped to prompt Henry's brutal invasion of Rome in 1083. Another tribe, the Normans, came to the pope's defense, but then they too sacked Rome, in 1084. With such disputes at the highest level of society, it is no wonder that the feudal lords of Christendom had made a habit of savaging each other in fratricidal wars for a century.

The pope's impulse was to unite the warring princes and the divided Church against a common enemy outside Christendom. In a sense, it was a replay of Constantine's effort to unify the divided empire, which involved the identification and condemnation of its enemies. Constantine's program had led immediately to Nicaea, where the unifying and univocal creed was first articulated. Ironically, the ignited crusading energy also led back to Nicaea. Situated on the eastern shore of the Bosporus, it was a kind of fortress outpost of Byzantium, guarding Asia Minor. For sixteen years, Muslim warriors had occupied Nicaea. This was a double outrage, given the city's status as a symbol of the One True Faith and—thinking of Constantine's oration at the Council of Nicaea—as the birthplace of the cult of the cross. In June 1096, thousands of crusaders laid siege to the city with rams and scaling ladders.
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They set up their catapults and hurled over the wall, in addition to small boulders, the severed heads of Muslim defenders.
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After six weeks, the Muslims surrendered. Nicaea was the first victory of the Latin crusaders, but their brutality—a thousand other decapitated heads were sent to the Greek emperor as a proof of the victory—had to seem ominous to the rescued Byzantines. Such unleashed ethnic and religious hatred would turn soon enough against Greek Catholics, making permanent the half-century-old East-West division of Churches.

Nicaea had featured in that schism too, a further irony, because a papal legate had accused the Christians of Constantinople of violating the sacrosanct Nicene Creed by eliminating the crucial word
filioque
from its definition of the Trinity. The deletion implied that the Holy Spirit "proceeds" from the Father alone, instead of from the Father "and the Son," which would undercut the full divinity of the Son. But were the affirmations of the original creed so cut-and-dried? "At Nicaea," as Jaroslav Pelikan puts it, "the doctrine of the Holy Spirit had been disposed of in lapidary brevity: 'And [we believe] in the Holy Spirit.'"
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The eleventh-century Latin legate did not know, apparently, that (as we saw) the "faith of Nicaea" had evolved over decades and that
filioque
was not part of the original formulation at all. Yet on this issue the Church wrecked itself—another instance of that early pattern, how one generation's absolutism perverts a misremembered prior generation's considered relativism.

The Nicaean controversies of 1054 were not centered on the cross of Christ as such. Rather, the dispute between the Greeks and what they called the Frankish Church concerned the "nature" of Christ. To the Byzantines, the Latin insistence on the
filioque
implied an overemphasis on the Second Person of the Trinity at the expense of the Father and the Holy Spirit. In the Eastern Church to this day, the focus of worship is not Jesus Christ but the Trinity. The Eucharistic prayer is clearly addressed not to Jesus, not to the Father, but to the triune God. But in the West, beginning now, Christian liturgy and theology became increasingly centered on Jesus, and this is surely reflected in the symbolism attached to the Crusades and in the heightened devotion to the idea of Jesus' death, as opposed to his life or Resurrection, as the key to salvation.

All this amounts only to a matter of emphasis, but that is true of the most savage disputes. What the Byzantines took to be a tilting away from the ancient tradition of Nicaea, reflected in the Latin legate's ignorant charge, had its real meaning in Rome's having already tilted away from the Eastern emperor. The schism between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church continues to this day.
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By 1096, that schism had itself become a
casus belli,
as Crusaders, who had set out to defend Byzantine Christians, ended up by attacking them. That violence inflicted further scars, ones that still fester, as the Balkan wars of the 1990s demonstrate. The mid-twentieth-century religious violence in Cardinal Stepinac's Croatia, with Catholics targeting "schismatics," as the Serbian Orthodox were called, is also part of the crusaders' legacy.

If history shows us anything, it is that violence is the price of the totalitarian impulse, whether religious or political. Referring to Constantine's achievement at Nicaea and the political consolidation it enabled, Augustine had noted, as we saw, that absolute social and religious cohesion comes, in his word, at a cost: "But think of the cost of this achievement! Consider the scale of those wars, with all that slaughter of human beings, of all the human blood that was shed!"
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The cost is borne mainly by those at odds with the new solidarity. By the eleventh century, there was a long history of marginalizing misfits of various kinds: lepers and cripples, vagabonds and prostitutes, magicians and jesters.
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When society was ordered by the categories of Roman law, the idea of citizenship had enabled peoples of various classes and backgrounds to have a sense of common membership, but in the culture of Germanic tribalism, with custom replacing law as the basis of social structure, the category of "stranger" had taken on new force in Europe. "According to Germanic Custom, a stranger was an object without a master. Insofar as he was not protected, either by a powerful individual, or by inter-tribal or international arrangement, he did not enjoy the most elementary rights. He could be killed, and his murderer could not be punished ... his property was ownerless, and his heirs had no rights of inheritance."
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As the Roman Empire mutated into the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, individuals had learned to live in dread of being so identified.

Now marginalization would become exclusion, and its definitive note would be a rigid expression tied to religion—rigid as stone, since the new emblems of this development were the churches that began to be erected in burgeoning cities throughout Europe. Urbanization itself accentuated feelings of Christian solidarity, and, in the words of the historian H. Liebershütz, the "great city churches, designed especially to hold large audiences listening to popular sermons, became a lasting monument of this situation."
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To stand outside the new Christian consensus of the crusading era was literally to stand outside the new cathedral, which was not only a temple of a self-consciously univocal society, but also a gathering place capable of holding an entire urban community. The outsider was now defined as such. As in the Age of Constantine, he was the heretic. There would be a violent papal crusade against Catholic heretics, the Albigensians, in the south of France in the thirteenth century, but in the late eleventh century, heretics were still hard to ferret out. Muslims were outsiders too, of course, but with the Pyrenees on one side and the stretch of Anatolia on the other, the borders between Saracen and Christian were well defined and, for most Europeans, far away. That left only one easily labeled category of outsider close at hand—the Jew.

The consolidation of a continent-wide European identity that was a mark of Charlemagne's reign in the ninth century had brought with it the final closing down of what remained of Jewish citizenship rights dating to Roman antiquity. In both eastern and western Europe, laws were passed to make sure that Jews did not exercise authority over Christians, and restrictions of numerous other aspects of Jewish life were enacted. Jews were, in the formulation of one early medieval Church council, "subject to perpetual serfdom."
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This meant that Jewish communities were dependent on the benevolence of princes, bishops, and popes who, it is not too much to say, thought of themselves as owning Jews. The rights of an evolving feudal system, such as they were even for peasants, were not extended to Jews. Instead, to survive in Europe, Jews had to seek privileges granted by their Christian lords and prelates. "Court Jews" were those who found ways to be of particular use to such rulers, winning privileges for their extended families. Over time, with the coming of money-based economies, Jewish communities became necessary as financial centers. Numerous factors led to the implication-laden association of Jews with money: they had been forbidden to own land; frequently expelled, always marginal, Jews were more mobile than Christians, which made them a ready source of currency exchange; lending at interest was seen as sinful by many Christians, yet the new economy required it, which led to the Jew as designated usurer.
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Recent scholarship has established that Jews were not the only moneylenders in medieval society and that many Jewish moneylenders, unlike Shylock, were magnanimous and widely respected.
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Yet the unnuanced figure of the oppressive debt-holder Jew took hold of the popular imagination, with special force during times of economic contraction. This underwrote an entirely new reason for attacks on Jews, not only by peasants but by petty merchants who could feel the pinch of debt. If kings, princes, bishops, and popes protected Jews from Christian mobs and the competing burgher classes, as with some consistency they did over many centuries, rulers did so, in part at least, in the way they protected their valuable herds of cows and sheep.