Diarmaid MacCulloch: A History of Christianity – The Age of the Crusades (1060-1200)
Previous posts; here, here, here, here and here.
Another snippet from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book: A History of Christianity – The First Three Thousand Years.
Pages 381 -382
When Cluny Abbey fostered European pilgrimage to St James in Compostela, it was offering ordinary people the chance of access to holiness, like so much of the Gregorian Revolution. After all, the great attraction of pilgrimage was that it opened up the possibility of spiritual benefit to anyone who was capable of walking, hobbling, crawling or finding friends to carry them. But Cluney was also annexing to that thought another new and potent idea. St James had become the symbol of the fight-back of Christians in Spain against Islamic power. It is still possible in Hispanic cultures as far away as Central or South America to watch Santiago’s image triumphantly processed on horseback, with a second image, the corpse of a Muslim, pitched over his saddle.
The Cluniacs’ investment in the pilgrimage routes to Compostela was a major influence in the balance of power between Christians and Islam in Spain. Thanks to the effective collapse of the Muslim caliphate of Cordoba in 1031, the Christian cause was becoming increasingly successful, and that was one reason why the crowds swelled across the pilgrimage trails to Spain. The order allied itself closely with the Christian Kings of Leon-Castile and Aragon-Navarre who were winning victories against the Muslims. A network of Cluniac houses grew in Christian Spain, and among the Cluniac monks who came to lead the Church in Spain was one who rose to be primate of the Spanish Church as Archbishop of Toledo as well as papal legate (representative) in Spain: Bernard, abbot of the chief Spanish model of Cluney, the monastery at Sahagun. The Cluniacs became familiar with the idea that God might wish Christians to initiate was against his enemies, and under Pope Gregory VII and Urban II, the Western Church took a dramatic new direction in its attitude war.
While Christian leaders had once simply tried to stop Christians from being soldiers, now the Church came to see warfare as something it might use for its own purposes. The notion of a holy war, crusade, entered Christianity in the eleventh century, and was directed against the religion which from its earliest days had spoken of holy war, Islam. The Carolingians had done their dubious best to present their campaigns in Northern Europe as wars for Christianity, but the difference now was that Christian warfare could actually be seen as the means to win salvation…..
Tags: Christianity, Religion Society
July 26th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
[...] posted another snippet from A History of Christianity. I’ve mentioned before that this blog is fairly new to me. I’ve really liked what [...]