Towards the end of the tenth century, with the breakup of carolingian structures

underway, most of Western Europe enters the era of feudalism and the concept of
royal justice disappears as counts first and castellans after them take advantage of
the process of decentralisation to seize the power and impose their rule over rural
Europe.

In such an atmosphere, the Western Church of the Kingdom of France fights back
and struggles to impose a Christian morality to the population. What had been the
job of carolingian capitularies and the charters of counts, dukes and those who
profited from the dislocation of the carolingian power structures, the Church, at the
break of the new millenium, takes the powerless under its protection. This evolution
is paralleled by the establishment of the trifunctionalist model of those who combat
(bellatores), those who pray (oratores) and those who work (laboratores), within a
mainly agricultural framework.

It is within this ideology and under political and religious factors that the institution of
the Peace of God is born. Determined by the theological thinking of clerics from
northern France, the Pax Dei movement tries to regulate the use of violence by the
belligerent aristocracy to protect, first of all, church property and resource, material
and human, and all those who cannot protect themselves, that is, the unarmed
(inarmes).

The local clergy in different parts of France decide to hold assemblies where they
force, under pain of excommunication and other ecclesiastic sanctions, the local
aristocracy to abide by a code of warfare that forbids violence in spatial
circumstances, both spatial and temporal, and attempts to set up a world order
where, inevitably, the Church and the churchmen would have the last say in matters
of violence and warfare.

Interdiction is at the heart of such establishments. There are places that are
protected by the Peace of God against the use of violence; there are sanctified days
where blood is not to be spilt, according to the liturgical calendar. Categories of
people are to be protected against armed warriors, thereby reducing the extent of
arbitrariness to which most armed aristocrats would abandon themselves to,
according to sources that come mainly from the ecclesiastical milieu.

This essay will attempt to explore two documents composed by two famous
historians of the eleventh century. The first document is drawn from the Historiae of
Radulf Glaber, to which we owe most of our knowledge of social history of the period
around the year 1000 AD. Radulf is a monk, "the best historian of the year 1000AD",
according to the French medievalist Georges Duby. In his Histories, Glaber is
concerned with the state of the world from an eschatological perspective. Reading of
Glaber should take into consideration the importance of millenarianist anticipation
that was the rule among church scholars in the first half of the eleventh century.

Our second text belongs to Sigebert of Gembloux, a monk from Lorraine, writer,
among others, of a "Universal Chronicle", relating events dating back to the year 381
AD. Sigebert's chronicle proved to be a bestseller in the Middle Ages and one point
where it excelled was the use of sources and the quest of historical truth.

I. A new alliance
A. The bishop: artisan of the new order
- the absence of a king
- the trifunctionalist theory
- who called the councils
- within the framework of the bishopric
- the judicial powers of the clergy
B. Signs of divine approbation
- the proliferation of relics
- miraculous healing
- clemency of climate conditions
C. The collective aspect of councils
- collective fear and expectation
- popular jubilation
- the alliance of the clergy and the peasantry against belligerent aristocracy

II. The content of peace councils

A. The positive side
- against abuses
- the formation of the salvamentum
- protecting the travellers
B. The negative side
- weekly fasting and penitence
- charity and alms-giving
C. Ecclesiastical sanctions
- the aristocracy must swear an oath
- penitence
- excommunication and various sanctions

III. The detractors

A. The spread of peace assemblies
- diffusive model
- it all takes place within the dioceses
B. The case of Gerard of Cambrai and the hypothesis of an opposition to the Peace
of God assemblies
- also, Adalbero of Laon
C. Towards a more evangelical spirituality
- "false peace" versus "true peace"
- reconciliation in the name of the Gospels
- challenging the Cluny model