Peace of God and the Commune

By the ninth century, all state power had collapsed in Western Europe, ruined by attempts to emulate ancient models. Local warlords and mafia chiefs took the opportunity to establish their own areas of power, not unlike what happened in Yugoslavia some thirty years ago. Farmers and artisans were affected not only by ordinary protection rackets but also by constant small wars.

It was the Church that took the initiative as a counter force. The clergy themselves were affected by the looting, but in order to make any political force of the counter-movement, the clergy must appeal to the congregations – peasants and craftsmen.
The counter-movement took the form that the clergy, with the support of the churches, revoked God’s curse on those who did not keep the peace. Large mass meetings were held, the first known in Charroux in western France on June 1, 989. But in some places the movement went further, and people tore down the castles the looters had built to keep their riches in peace.

But in some places the parishioners were forced to take the initiative themselves, because the clergy were either unwilling to offend or because they themselves participated in the looting. The first documented cases took place in Le Mans and Cambrai in 1077. The parishioners swore an oath to jointly protect the peace and punish those who broke it. Such a conspiracy was called a commune, after the Latin word communis, common.

Such initiatives from below frightened many in the higher church hierarchy, who instead began negotiating with the mafia leaders that they should undertake to protect peace – not unlike when some environmental organizations let corporations monitor environmental degradation. It is from that process that the so-called the knightly ideal is derived. Other elements were to trick the mafia into turning outwards, in the so-called crusades, and to entrust the most powerful of them to become king and ensure that the less powerful kept peace among themselves. The latter, of course, led to different kings fighting with each other for power, over time with a violence that made the peace-disrupting 900s-1000s seem like a children’s game.

But the municipalities of the congregations would survive, at least the memory of them, and in time give rise to the idea of citizenship during the French Revolution.

Reading
Thomas Head & Richard Landes: The peace of God, Cornell University Press 1992
Albert Vermeersch: Essai sur les origines et la signification de la commune dans le nord de la France, Heule 1966