which Galahad succumbs in the presence of the saint is so intense that he begs to die in its embrace and is taken up to heaven by angels.
Talk still turned to the crusades, as it did to any means of propitiating the divine, and the ideals described in The Book of Chivalry remained as influential as they were when first listed by Geoffroi de Charny in the middle of the fourteenth century: largesse, prowess, courtesy, and loyalty. Chivalry was a system of ethics that applied to both war and love, a system that governed all of noble life. That this code was, like the strictures of the Church,“about four parts in five illusion made it no less governing for all that.” The trial record shows the reward Joan anticipated for her faith and service in the armies of God was the same as what Pope Urban II promised the sixty thousandcrusaders he dispatched from Europe in 1095 to save Jerusalem from the infidels: absolution from sin and eternal salvation. She, too, believed that“the worst conceivable crime for a member of a Military Order was apostasy, denying the Cross, even to save his life.” An army sixty thousand strong was extraordinary in its size; the sight of it was enough to inspire terror in a people for whom an army of five thousand was large.
Writing during the twelfth century, the prelate William of Tyre described the conditions that inspired the crusades, the first of which emerged during a period of violence and unrest analogous to that of the Hundred Years War. Eleventh-century Europe had yet to emerge from the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire: raids were the rule; murder went unpunished; the Church presented the sole means of social cohesion. The only story that could be relied upon not to change was the one at the center of the Church, the Gospels that gave meaning to the sufferings of the Church Militant and pointed the way to paradise. In the name of Christ, crusaders took up their swords and rode east to reclaim Jerusalem, where the Son of God rose from the dead and where they practiced siege warfare little different from that of fifteenth-century Europe, waged for heavenly gain and characterized by“massacre and torture,” “the mounting of heads on posts or even use of them as missiles.” Raymond d’Aguilers, contemporaneous chronicler of the First Crusade, wrote,“Dismembered bodies lay in the houses and streets, trampled by knights and men-at-arms … Crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses.” By the time the war was won, they had murdered thirty thousand Muslims, who still hear the word “crusade” as twenty-first-century Westerners do “jihad,” *4 an act of terrorism perpetrated by benighted barbarians living in a dark age of superstition and fear.
The Church Militant had officially endorsed mass murder, whitewashing it as an act of piety.
Dressed in her new finery, Joan was ready for her visit to the Duke of Lorraine, who, having heard of the divine company she entertained, summoned and provided her safe conduct because he was ill and wanted her to intercede with God on his behalf. For her part, Joan accepted the duke’s invitation as an opportunity to campaign for his support and, as Marguerite La Touroulde, Joan’s hostess for three weeks following Charles’s coronation, testified, “told him she wished to go to France. And the duke questioned her about the recovery of his health; but she said she knew nothing about that … She told the duke nevertheless to send his son and some men to escort her to France, and she would pray to God for his health.” The widow of Charles VII’s financial adviser, Marguerite said Joan told the duke“he was sinning and that unless he reformed his ways he would not be cured. She urged him to take back his good wife,” the notoriously pious Margaret of Bavaria, whom he’d abandoned for a mistress, Alison Dumay, in the town of Nancy, a quick coach trip to the south. If the duke knew anything at all
Talk still turned to the crusades, as it did to any means of propitiating the divine, and the ideals described in The Book of Chivalry remained as influential as they were when first listed by Geoffroi de Charny in the middle of the fourteenth century: largesse, prowess, courtesy, and loyalty. Chivalry was a system of ethics that applied to both war and love, a system that governed all of noble life. That this code was, like the strictures of the Church,“about four parts in five illusion made it no less governing for all that.” The trial record shows the reward Joan anticipated for her faith and service in the armies of God was the same as what Pope Urban II promised the sixty thousandcrusaders he dispatched from Europe in 1095 to save Jerusalem from the infidels: absolution from sin and eternal salvation. She, too, believed that“the worst conceivable crime for a member of a Military Order was apostasy, denying the Cross, even to save his life.” An army sixty thousand strong was extraordinary in its size; the sight of it was enough to inspire terror in a people for whom an army of five thousand was large.
Writing during the twelfth century, the prelate William of Tyre described the conditions that inspired the crusades, the first of which emerged during a period of violence and unrest analogous to that of the Hundred Years War. Eleventh-century Europe had yet to emerge from the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire: raids were the rule; murder went unpunished; the Church presented the sole means of social cohesion. The only story that could be relied upon not to change was the one at the center of the Church, the Gospels that gave meaning to the sufferings of the Church Militant and pointed the way to paradise. In the name of Christ, crusaders took up their swords and rode east to reclaim Jerusalem, where the Son of God rose from the dead and where they practiced siege warfare little different from that of fifteenth-century Europe, waged for heavenly gain and characterized by“massacre and torture,” “the mounting of heads on posts or even use of them as missiles.” Raymond d’Aguilers, contemporaneous chronicler of the First Crusade, wrote,“Dismembered bodies lay in the houses and streets, trampled by knights and men-at-arms … Crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses.” By the time the war was won, they had murdered thirty thousand Muslims, who still hear the word “crusade” as twenty-first-century Westerners do “jihad,” *4 an act of terrorism perpetrated by benighted barbarians living in a dark age of superstition and fear.
The Church Militant had officially endorsed mass murder, whitewashing it as an act of piety.
Dressed in her new finery, Joan was ready for her visit to the Duke of Lorraine, who, having heard of the divine company she entertained, summoned and provided her safe conduct because he was ill and wanted her to intercede with God on his behalf. For her part, Joan accepted the duke’s invitation as an opportunity to campaign for his support and, as Marguerite La Touroulde, Joan’s hostess for three weeks following Charles’s coronation, testified, “told him she wished to go to France. And the duke questioned her about the recovery of his health; but she said she knew nothing about that … She told the duke nevertheless to send his son and some men to escort her to France, and she would pray to God for his health.” The widow of Charles VII’s financial adviser, Marguerite said Joan told the duke“he was sinning and that unless he reformed his ways he would not be cured. She urged him to take back his good wife,” the notoriously pious Margaret of Bavaria, whom he’d abandoned for a mistress, Alison Dumay, in the town of Nancy, a quick coach trip to the south. If the duke knew anything at all
Similar Books
