The Deeds of God Through the Franks

by Abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy Guibert

Gentibus invisis proprium praebere cruorem? (Lucan 1.8,9)

What madness was this, my countrymen, what fierce orgy of slaughter… to give to hated nations the spectacle of Roman bloodshed?[51]

and:

Bella geri placuit, nullos habitura triumphos.

It was decided to wage wars that could win no triumphs.[52]

If they were taking up the cause of protecting liberty or defending the republic, they would be able to offer morally acceptable excuse for fighting. Indeed, in the case of an invasion of barbarians or pagans, no knight could rightly be prevented from taking up arms. And if these conditions were not the case, then simply to protect Holy Church they waged the most legitimate war. But since this pious purpose is not in the minds of everyone, and instead the desire for material acquisitions pervades everyone's hearts, God ordained holy wars in our time, so that the knightly order and the erring mob, who, like their ancient pagan models, were engaged in mutual slaughter, might find new way of earning salvation. Thus, without having chosen (as is customary) a monastic life, without any religious committment, they were compelled to give up this world; free to continue their customary pursuits, nevertheless they earned some measure of God's grace by their own efforts. Therefore, we have seen nations, inspired by God, shut the doors of their hearts towards all kinds of needs and feelings, taking up exile beyond the Latin world, beyond the known limits of the entire world, in order to destroy the enemies of the name of Christ, with an eagerness greater than we have seen anyone show in hurrying to the the banquet table, or in celebrating a holiday.[53] The most splendid honors, the castles and towns over which they held power, meant nothing to them; the most beautiful women were treated as though they were worthless dirt; pledges of domestic love,[54] once more precious than any gem, were scorned. What no mortal could have compelled them to do by force, or persuade them to do by rhetoric, they were carried forward to do by the sudden insistence of their transformed minds. No priest in church had to urge people to this task, but one man urged another, both by speech and by example, proclaiming his determination, both at home and in the streets, to go on the expedition. Every man showed the same fervor; the chance to go on the trip appealed both to those who had little property, and to those whose vast possessions or stored-up treasures permitted them to take the richest provisions for the journey. You would have seen Solomon's words clearly put into action, "the locusts have no king, yet they march together in bands."[55] This locust made no leap of good works, as long as he lay in the frozen torpor of deep sin, but when the heat of the sun of justice shone, he leaped forward in the flight of a double (or natural)[56] movement, abandoning his paternal home and family, changing his behaviour to take on a sacred purpose. The locust had no king, because each faithful soul had no leader but God alone; certain that He is his companion in arms, he has no doubt that God goes before him. He rejoices to have undertaken the journey by the promptings of God's will, who will be his solace in tribulation. But what is it that drives a whole community unless it is that simplicity and unity which compels the hearts of so many people to desire one and the same thing? Although the call from the apostolic see was directed only to the French nation, as though it were special, what nation under Christian law did not send forth throngs to that place? In the belief that they owed the same allegiance to God as did the French, they strove strenuously, to the full extent of their powers, to share the danger with the Franks. There you would have seen the military formations of Scots, savage in their own country, but elsewhere unwarlike, their knees bare, with their shaggy cloaks, provisions hanging from their shoulders, having slipped out of their boggy borders, offering as aid and testimony to their faith and loyalty, their arms, numerically ridiculous in comparison with ours. As God is my witness I swear that I heard that some barbarian people from I don't know what land were driven to our harbor, and their language was so incomprehensible that, when it failed them, they made the sign of the cross with their fingers; by these gestures they showed what they could not indicate with words, that because of their faith they set out on the journey. But perhaps I shall treat these matters at greater length when I have more room. Now we are concerned with the state of the church of Jerusalem, or the Eastern church, as it was then.

In the time of the faithful Helen, the mother of the ruler Constantine, throughout the regions known for the traces of the Lord's sufferings, churches and priests worthy of these churches were established by this same Augusta.[57] From church history we learn that, for a long time after the death of those just mentioned, these institutions endured while the Roman Empire continued. However, the faith of Easterners, which has never been stable, but has always been variable and unsteady, searching for novelty, always exceeding the bounds of true belief, finally deserted the authority of the early fathers. Apparently, these men, because of the purity of the air and the sky in which they are born, as a result of which their bodies are lighter and their intellect consequently more agile, customarily abuse the brilliance of their intelligence with many useless commentaries. Refusing to submit to the authority of their elders or peers, "they searched out evil, and searching they succumbed."[58] Out of this came heresies and ominous kinds of different plagues. Such a baneful and inextricable labyrinth of these illnesses existed that the most desolate land anywhere could not offer worse vipers and nettles. Read through the catalogues of all heresies; consider the books of the ancients against heretics; I would be surprised if, with the exception of the East and Africa, any books about heretics could be found in the Roman world. I read somewhere that Pelagius, unless I am mistaken, was a British heretic; but I believe that no one has ever been able to compose an account of the mistaken people, or their errors. The Eastern regions were lands cursed on earth in the work of its teachers,[59] bringing forth thorns and prickly weeds for those working it. Out of Alexandria came Arius,[60] out of Persia Manes.[61] The madness of one of them tore and bloodied the mantle of holy Church, which had until then no spot or wrinkle,[62] with such persistence that the persecution of Datian[63] seemed shorter in time, and more narrowly confined in space. Not only Greece, but, afterwards, Spain, Illyria, and Africa succumbed to it. The fictions of the other, although ridiculous, nevertheless deceived the sharpest minds far and wide with its trickery. What should I say about the Eunomians, the Eutychians, the Nestorians, how can I represent the thousands of hideous groups whose frenzy against us was so relentless, and against whom victory was so difficult, that the heresies seemed to be beheaded not with swords but with sticks? If we examine the early histories of the beginnings of their kingdoms, and if we chatter about the ridiculous nature of their kings, we must wonder at the sudden overthrowing and replacing of rulers brought about by Asiatic instability. Anyone who wants to learn about their inconstancy may look at the Antiochi and Demetrii, whirling and alternating in and out of power; the man flourishing in power today may be driven tomorrow not merely from power, but from his native land, exiled by the fickleness of the peoples whom he had ruled. Their foolishness, both in secular behavior and in religious belief, has thrived until this day, so that neither in the preparation of the Eucharist, nor in the location of the Apostolic see do they have anything in common with us. But if making the sacrament out of leavened bread is defended with the apparently reasonable argument that using yeast is not harmful when it is done in good faith, and that the Lord had put an end to the old ways by eating lamb with unleavened bread, and celebrating the sacrament of his own body with the same bread, because there was no other bread, and he could not fulfill the law at that time in any other way, to them the use of unleavened bread, necessary at the time, did not seem a central part of the mystery, just as the dipping of the mouthful[64] was an indication not of the carrying out of the sacrament but of Judas' betrayal. If, I say, these things and others also can be proposed as either true or false, then what will they say about the Holy Spirit, those who impiously argue, in accordance with the vestiges of the Arian heresy, that He is less than the Father and the Son, and who disagree, both in thought and in many of their actions, with the ancient laws of the fathers, and with the holy ritual of the Western Church, they have added this increment to their damnation: they claim that God limps, having inflicted upon him an inequality of his own nature. For if one is baptized according to the teaching of the Son of God, "in the name of the Son and the Holy Spirit," it is for this reason, that the three are one God; arguing that any of the three is less than the other is to argue that he is not God. Therefore the herd of such bulls among the cows of the people now shuts out those who have proved themselves worth their weight in silver, since some of our countrymen, stirred by the debate with the Greeks, have published splendid books on the office of the Holy Spirit. However, since God places stumbling-block before those who sin voluntarily, their land has spewed forth its own inhabitants, since they were first deprived of the awareness of true belief, and rightly and justly they have been dispossessed of all earthly possessions. For since they fell away from faith in the Trinity, like those who fall in the mud and get muddier, little by little they have come to the final degradation of having taken paganism upon themselves; as the punishment for their sin proceeded, foreigners attacked them, and they lost the soil of their native land. Even those who managed to remain in their native land must pay tribute to foreigners. The most splendidly noble cities, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Nicea,[65] and the provinces, Syria, Palestine, and Greece, the seed-beds of the new grace, have lost their internal strength at the roots, while the aborted[66] Italians, French, and English, have flourished. I am silent about the fact that so many abuses have become customary in those worthless churches, that in many of these regions no one is made a priest unless he has chosen a wife, so that the apostle's statement that a man who is to be chosen should have only one wife be observed. That this statement does not concern a man who has and uses a wife, but does concern man who had a wife and sent her away, is confirmed by the authority of the Western church. I am also silent about the fact that, against Latin custom, people of the Christian faith, regardless of whether they are men or women, are bought and sold like brute animals. To add to the cruelty, they are sent far from their native country to be sold as slaves to pagans. Finally, worse than all these, it appears that imperial law among them generally sanctions young girls (a freedom permitted everywhere as though to be just) being taken to become prostitutes. An example: if a man has three or four daughters, one of them is put in a house of prostitution; some part of the smelly lucre derived from the suffering of these unhappy women goes to the wretched emperor's treasury, while part goes to support the woman who earned it in such a base way. Hear how the clamor ascends mightily to the ears of the Lord of Hosts.[67] Moreover, the priests who are in charge of celebrating the divine sacraments prepare the Lord's body after they have eaten, as I have heard, and offer it to be eaten by anyone who is fasting. While they wander in these and similar paths of evil, and while they "follow their own devices,"[68] God has set up over them a new law-giver, "so that the people may know that they are mortal."[69] And since they, more wanton than the beasts of the field, have knowingly transgressed the limits set by their fathers, they have become objects of opprobrium. But just let me tell something about the authority upon which the nations of the East rely when they decide to abandon the Christian religion to return to paganism.

According to popular opinion, there was a man, whose name, if I have it right, was Mathomus, who led them away from belief in the Son and in the Holy Spirit. He taught them to acknowledge only the person of the Father as the single, creating God, and he said that Jesus was entirely human. To sum up his teachings, having decreed circumcision, he gave them free rein for every kind of shameful behavior. I do not think that this profane man lived a very long time ago, since I find that none of the church doctors has written against his licentiousness. Since I have learned nothing about his behavior and life from writings, no one should be surprised if I am willing to tell what I have heard told in public by some skillful speakers. To discuss whether these things are true or false is useless, since we are considering here only the nature of this new teacher, whose reputation for great crimes continues to spread. One may safely speak ill of a man whose malignity transcends and surpasses whatever evil can be said of him.

An Alexandrian patriarch died, I'm not sure when, and the leaderless church was divided, as usual, into various factions; the more eagerly each argued for the person whom he favored, the more strongly he argued against the person whom he opposed. The choice of the majority was a hermit who lived nearby. Some of the more discerning men often visited him, to find out what he was really like, and from these conversations they discovered that he disagreed with them about the Catholic faith. When they found this out, they immediately abandoned the choice they had made, and, with the greatest regret, set about condemning it. Scorned, torn apart by bitter grief, since he had been unable to reach what he had striven for, like Arius, he began to think carefully how to take vengeance by spreading the poison of false belief, to undermine Catholic teaching everywhere. Such men, whose whole aim in life is to be praised, are mortally wounded, and bellow unbearably, whenever they feel that their standing in the community is diminished in any way. Seeing his opportunity with the hermit, the Ancient Enemy approached the wretch with these words, "If," he said, "you want certain solace for having been rejected, and you want power far greater than that of a patriarch, look very carefully at that young man who was with those who came to you lately—I shall recollect for you his clothing, his face, his physical appearance, his name—fill his vigorous, receptive mind with the teaching that lies near to your heart. Pursue this man, who will listen faithfully to your teachings and propagate them far and wide." Encouraged by the utterance, the hermit searched among the groups that visited him for the identifying signs of the young man. Recognizing him, he greeted him affectionately, then imbued him with the poison with which he himself was rotting. And because he was a poor man, and a poor man has less authority than a rich one, he proceeded to procure wealth for himself by this method: a certain very rich woman had recently become a widow; the filthy hermit sent a messenger to bring her to him, and he advised her to marry again. When she told him that there was no one appropriate for her to marry, he said that he had found for her a prophet who was appropriate, and that, if she consented to marry him, she would live in perfect happiness. He persisted steadily in his blandishments, promising that the prophet would provide for her both in this life and in the next, and he kindled her feminine emotions to love a man she did not know. Seduced, then, by the hope of knowing everything that was and everything that might be, she was married to her seer, and the formerly wretched Mahomet, surrounded by brilliant riches, was lifted, perhaps to his own great stupefaction, to unhoped-for power. And since the vessel of a single bed frequently received their sexual exchanges, the famous prophet contracted the disease of epilepsy, which we call, in ordinary language, falling sickness; he often suffered terribly while the terrified prophetess watched his eyes turning upward, his face twisting, his lips foaming, his teeth grinding. Frightened by this unexpected turn of events, she hurried to the hermit, accusing him of the misfortune which was happening to her. Disturbed and bitter in her heart, she said that she would prefer to die rather than to endure an execrable marriage to a madman. She attacked the hermit with countless kinds of complaints about the bad advice he had given her. But he, who was supplied with incomparable cleverness, said, "you are foolish for ascribing harm to what is a source of light and glory. Don't you know, blind woman, that whenever God glides into the minds of the prophets, the whole bodily frame is shaken, because the weakness of the flesh can scarcely bear the visitation of divine majesty? Pull yourself together, now, and do not be afraid of these unusual visions; look upon the blessed convulsions of the holy man with gratitude, especially since spiritual power teaches him at those moments about the things it will help you to know and to do in the future." Her womanly flightiness was taken in by these words, and what she had formerly thought foul and despicable now seemed to her not only tolerable, but sacred and remrkable. Meanwhile the man was being filled with profane teaching drawn by the devil's piping through the heretical hermit. When the hermit, like a herald, went everywhere before him, Mahomet was believed by everyone to be a prophet. When far and wide, in the opinion of everyone, his growing reputation shone, and he saw that people in the surrounding as well as in distant lands were inclining towards his teachings, after consulting with his teacher, he wrote a law, in which he loosened the reins of every vice for his followers, in order to attract more of them. By doing this he gathered a huge mob of people, and the better to deceive their uncertain minds with the pretext of religion, he ordered them to fast for three days, and to offer earnest prayers for God to grant a law. He also gives them a sign, because, should it please God to give them law, he will grant it in an unusual manner, from an unexpected hand. Meanwhile, he had a cow, whom he himself had trained to follow him, so that whenever she heard his voice or saw him, almost no force could prevent her from rushing to him with unbearable eagerness. He tied the book he had written to the horns of the animal, and hid her in the tent in which he himself lived. On the third day he climbed a high platform above all the people he had called together, and began to declaim to the people in a booming voice. When, as I just said, the sound of his words reached the cow's ears, she immediately ran from the tent, which was nearby, and, with the book fastened on her horns, made her way eagerly through the middle of the assembled people to the feet of the speaker, as though to congratulate him. Everyone was amazed, and the book was quickly removed and read to the breathless people, who happily accepted the licence permitted by its foul law. What more? The miracle of the offered book was greeted with applause over and over again. As though sent from the sky, the new license for random copulation was propagated everywhere, and the more the supply of permitted filth increased, the more the grace of a God who permitted more lenient times, without any mention of turpitude, was preached. All of Christian morality was condemned by a thousand reproofs, and whatever examples of goodness and strength the Gospel offered were called cruel and harsh. But what the cow had delivered was considered universal liberty, the only one recommended by God. Neither the antiquity of Moses nor the more recent Catholic teachings had any authority. Everything which had existed before the law, under the law, under grace, was marked as implacably wrong. If I may make inappropriate use of what the Psalmist sings, "God did not treat other nations in this fashion, and he never showed his judgements to any other people."[70] The greater opportunity to fulfil lust, and, going beyond the appetites of beasts, by resorting to multiple whores, was cloaked by the excuse of procreating children. However, while the flow of nature was unrestrained in these normal acts, at the same time they engaged in abnormal acts, which we should not even name, and which were unknown even to the animals. At the time, the obscurity of this nefarious sect first covered the name of Christ, but now it has wiped out his name from the furthest corners of the entire East, from Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, and even the more remote coasts of Spain—a country near us. But now to describe how this marvelous law-giver made his exit from our midst. Since he often fell into sudden epileptic fit, with which we have already said he struggled, it happened once, while he was walking alone, that a fit came upon him and he fell down on the spot; while he was writhing in this agony, he was found by some pigs, who proceeded to devour him, so that nothing could be found of him except his heels. While the true Stoics, that is, the worshipers of Christ, killed Epicurus, lo, the greatest law-giver tried to revive the pig, in fact he did revive it, and, himself a pig, lay exposed to be eaten by pigs, so that the master of filth appropriately died a filthy death. He left his heels fittingly, since he had wretchedly fixed the traces of false belief and foulness in wretchedly deceived souls. We shall make an epitaph for his heels in four lines of the poet:

Aere perennius,