Abstract
The desires for unity that emerged in considering the pilgrimage policies of Alfonso II and Peter II also influenced their work in the political arena. Enactments providing for the Peace of God and Truce of God occupied the core of these activities. Both movements began in the tenth and eleventh centuries as attempts to deal with local difficulties in southern France, which, in turn, caused breakdowns in local authority and order. These movements began as instruments of ecclesiastical initiative and remained so when they spread into Catalonia early in the eleventh century. Soon thereafter, though, the need for lay and clerical collaboration became important. The Counts of Barcelona, for example, invoked the Peace and Truce in their generales curiae sessions to fulfill their aims of preserving order and stability. These counts, moreover, worked in conjunction with the ecclesiastical authorities; such enhanced cooperation continued in Catalonia as a result of the ecclesiastical reforms of the eleventh century. Alfonso and Peter worked with a legislative system tightly focused on the movements of the Peace of God and the Truce of God. Both Alfonso and Peter shared another objective. For measures dealing with the Peace and Truce to work well, they needed the input and support of ecclesiastical officials. This is one reason why these movements began within regional church councils.
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Notes
“Les assemblees de Pau i Treva i l’origen de la Cort General de Catalunya,”, Les corts a Catalunya: Actes del congrés d’historia institutional, ed. Gener Gonzalvo i Bou, (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Department de Cultura, 1991), 72.
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Claude Devic and Joseph Vaissette, Histoire générale de Languedoc (Paris, 1737) [hereafter cited as HGL], 3:108.
Gerónimo Zurita y Castro, Anales de la Corona de Aragón, mod. Antonio Ubieto Arteta and María Desamparados Pérez Soler (Valencia, Spain: Anubar, 1967), 2:132.
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For an important study of utilitas, see Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State, 1100–1322 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 241–309, especially 253–276 for this period.
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repr. with original pagination as section VII of H. E. J. Cowdrey, Popes, Monks and Crusaders (London: Hambledon Press, 1984).
Carl Erdmann also mentions the Carolingian precursors to the Peace of God movement in The Origin of the Idea of Crusade, trans. Marshall W. Baldwin and Walter Goffart (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 60.
Cowdrey, “Peace and the Truce of God,” 43–44; Bisson, “Peace of God, Truce of God,”, Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 9 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), 473.
Cowdrey, “Peace and the Truce of God,” 43. There is an account of these proceedings in the Chronicon Monasterii Sancti Petri Aniciensis, in Cartulaire de L’Abbaye de St-Chaffre du Monastier Ordre de Saint-Benoît suivi de la Chronique de Saint-Pierre du Puy, ed. Ulysse Chevalier (Paris, 1888), 152–154.
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Digest 9.3.1.1. Bruce W. Frier provides a discussion of this quasi-delict in A Casebook on the Roman haw of Delict (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 228.
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Jean Gaudemet has shown that many ancient and early medieval authors declared an interest in public utility or other similar terms; “Utilitas Publica,” Revue historique de droit jrançais et étranger 29 (1951): 465–499.
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Ernst H. Kantorowicz discusses Oldradus de Ponte’s work on this issue in The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 287–288.
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The twelfth century remains a pivotal period for examining these trends; see Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; pap. ed., 1998).
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© 2012 Ernest E. Jenkins
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Jenkins, E.E. (2012). Law, Spirituality, and the Practice of Ethics. In: The Mediterranean World of Alfonso II and Peter II of Aragon (1162–1213). The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137078261_4
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