As members of an elite corps of spiritual warriors, medieval monks modeled the virtues of the true soldiery of christ for other members of christian society, and held themselves to be superior to all lay arms-bearers, even the most pious crusaders and members of the military orders, whose spiritual warfare was tainted by physical violence and bloodshed. Historians have long recognized the role of clerics in the promotion of saintly warriors as exemplars for pious arms-bearers and have linked the cults of various warrior-saints to the development of Christian knighthood and crusading ideology. What has been less appreciated is the extent to which monastic writers also found in holy warriors spiritual role models worthy of celebration and emulation by fellow religious. We have already seen that the warriors of the Hebrew Bible, their military campaigns spiritualized by medieval exegetes, were embraced as models for monks. This chapter will survey other groups of warriors who attracted the admiration of monastic writers in the central Middle ages: the legendary warrior-saints of Late antiquity; lay armsbearers of the distant and not-so-distant past who had renounced the world to enter the cloister; and the loricati (‘mailed ones’), ascetics who donned actual armor to engage in spiritual combat with the forces of evil.

The following discussions are based largely on the evidence of hagiography, and specifically consider how saints' Lives articulated new models of spiritual development. Though concerned primarily with the miraculous, monastic vitae evince an active engagement with lived experience. Many Lives of holy warriors demonstrate knowledge of (even, on occasion, a relish for) medieval combat, the obligations of arms-bearers to wives, lords, and brothers-in-arms, and the various circumstances under which men of war entered the cloister. But the focus of this chapter is not on what hagiography can reveal about the lives of warrior elites, but how monastic writers remembered and manipulated the memory of saintly warriors for their own purposes.