The Concilium Germanicum was convened in 742, probably at Cologne.Footnote 1 Bishops and priests gathered to counsel Carloman (d. 754), the majordomo, or mayor of the palace, and de facto ruler of the eastern Merovingian kingdom of Austrasia. The outcome ‘represents the first ever extant legislation by a Carolingian.’Footnote 2 Its second canon ruled that clerics could serve with the army only if they were unarmed and had been chosen to carry relics such as the cloak of Martin of Tours (d. 397),Footnote 3 or to say mass, or to hear confession and set penance.Footnote 4 During the First World War, a German ecclesiastical historian, Albert Koeniger, identified this canon as the legal genesis of Carolingian military chaplaincy.Footnote 5 In what has become the standard account, David Bachrach dubbed it ‘the legal origin of the chaplain’s office in the Latin West’, arguing that the priests were appointed to satisfy soldiers’ hunger for confession and to allay their anxiety that killing in war meant damnation.Footnote 6 Bachrach’s account, however, has been skewed by an outdated theory of the evolution of penance and a dubious assumption that Christian soldiers were morally distressed. The Concilium Germanicum was certainly a defining moment for chaplaincy, but this article contends that these priests were actually appointed to purify the army and thereby secure divine providence in war.
At the time of the council, the praesbiteri (priests) who were assigned to individual army units were not technically ‘chaplains’: that title belonged to the cappellani praesbiteri who cared for the relics and attended the bishops. Across the ranks, though, bishops, ‘chaplain-priests’ and unit priests probably all heard confession and set penance.Footnote 7 Koeniger drew attention to the use of books of penance in this context.Footnote 8 Originating in western Britain and Ireland, these ‘penitentials’ or ‘tariff books’ made it ‘possible to work out exact scales of what penance was appropriate for what sin: tariffs of forgiveness.’Footnote 9 In Bachrach’s account, this repeatable system, combined with doctrinal concessions on wartime killing, headed off a threat to Frankish military morale:
Over time, the obvious and intolerable strain of forcing Christian soldiers to choose between damnation and military service gave way to compromises on the nature of penance and the sinfulness of homicide. The once-in-a-lifetime rite of sacramental penance was augmented through the development and spread of repeatable penitential exercises culminating in the tariff books. Within the context of this new penitential regime, church leaders also relaxed official teaching about the nature of homicide, bringing nuance to the formally absolute prohibition against taking human life.Footnote 10
Bachrach was drawing here on the work of Catholic church historians such as Bernhard Poschmann, who viewed penance mainly in terms of sacramental rituals overseen by the clergy.Footnote 11 A year after Bachrach’s work appeared, however, Richard Price argued that early medieval penance was ‘at once richer and more flexible’,Footnote 12 noting, for example, that John Cassian (d. c.435) – who transmitted the influence of the desert fathers to the West – considered practices such as almsgiving, forgiving the sins of others, ‘acts of mercy and faith’, and the shedding of tears to be penitential.Footnote 13 Lay Christians could atone in repeatable ways long before the tariff books appeared, while holy laymen and -women, as well as priests, could hear confession.Footnote 14 Poschmann – and thus Bachrach – overlooked many alternative forms of atonement.
Untenable too is Bachrach’s view that killing in battle was treated as homicide until the sixth century.Footnote 15 At no stage were the two commonly equated. In the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman empire, Basil of Caesarea (d. 379) acknowledged that ‘homicide in war our fathers did not consider as homicide’.Footnote 16 In the Latin West, Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) similarly observed that soldiers who killed the enemy were ‘not usually called murderers’.Footnote 17 While homicide, adultery and idolatry had crystallized as a triad of ‘mortal’ or ‘capital’ sins in a treatise on purity by Tertullian (d. c.230),Footnote 18 even Tertullian did not equate battle with homicide. (Nor, in a loosely-organized church, was there a way for it to become ‘official teaching’ even if he had.Footnote 19) On the contrary, Tertullian accepted that military violence by non-Christians was necessary to defend the empire, and he prayed for ‘brave armies’,Footnote 20 which seems inconceivable if he believed that they were committing mortal sin.
Bachrach’s work has shed light on Carolingian chaplaincy,Footnote 21 but his reliance on traditional accounts of penance and his conflation of killing in battle with murder has resulted in the misapprehension that the first chaplains were appointed to maintain soldiers’ morale.Footnote 22 Framing medieval religious experience in terms of morale raises interpretative issues of its own: ‘morale’, like ‘religion’, is culturally enmeshed, having expanded from early twentieth-century military thought into wider social, political and industrial life as a psychological property to be managed.Footnote 23 Interpretations of chaplaincy in terms of morale, moreover, have been coloured by pacifist sentiment, especially since the Vietnam War.Footnote 24 The conclusion reached by Mayke de Jong is that acts presented as religious matters by medieval sources ‘should be taken on precisely these terms’: religious phenomena should not be treated as being ‘actually’ about something else.Footnote 25 As Michael McCormick has observed, ‘as paradoxical as it appears to the modern military historian, the Carolingian warriors fasted for three days to purify themselves before battle.’Footnote 26 Carloman and subsequent Carolingian rulers, for their part, ‘took to heart the lesson of the Old Testament kings, namely that the security of a king’s rule and the stability of his kingdom depended on God’s favour’.Footnote 27
An Irish ‘preference for the Old Testament’ – of which the penitentials were one manifestation – helped shape this Frankish outlook.Footnote 28 Rome was a more fundamental reference point for the Carolingians than Jerusalem,Footnote 29 but Irish ascetical exiles (the peregrini) found a receptive audience among the Franks, who were already familiar with the Old Testament texts.Footnote 30 In light of the work of Holger Zellentin and Daniel Weiss, this article connects that Irish and Frankish inclination to an older Christian interest in Levitical-style purity regulations which was characteristic of the Greek East and which persisted in the Latin West despite Augustine’s opposition.Footnote 31 Drawing on the work of Rob Meens,Footnote 32 the article then tracks the penitentials as they reinforced practices of purity along their routes of transmission. A sense of how and when the books reached the Frankish army has remained vague, but a connection is proposed here between a specific penitential and the Concilium Germanicum. Lastly, the military significance of such books is recast in terms of their role in purifying clerics and soldiers, as the Carolingian endeavour to make the Franks worthy of God’s providence gained traction.
Theologies in Conflict
Two types of impurity have been identified in Leviticus: impermanent ‘ritual impurity’ caused by non-sinful actions such as contact with human corpses, which could be washed or burnt away ritually; and long-lasting if not permanent ‘moral impurity’ caused by sinful actions such as murder, which required punishment or sacrificial atonement.Footnote 33 Over time, the distinction between ritual and moral defilement became blurred and debatable.Footnote 34 Rules for Gentiles concentrated on moral impurity, ‘yet often without leaving “ritual” purity discourse behind.’Footnote 35 The recognition of sources of ritual impurity by the Jerusalem Council in about the year 50 (Acts 15) contrasts sharply with the rejection of ritual purity observance by the Epistle to the Hebrews, but it nonetheless established ‘a first marker of a Christian tradition of Gentile ritual purity.’Footnote 36
In its prohibition of blood, Acts 15 ‘evokes the twofold prohibition against shedding and consuming blood’ found in Genesis 9 and Leviticus 17.Footnote 37 Christian legal efforts to interpret Acts in relation to Genesis and Leviticus lasted at least to the late seventh century,Footnote 38 profoundly influencing ecclesiastical approaches to war and bloodshed. Thinkers such as Tertullian and Origen of Alexandria (d. c.254) seemingly treated the Levites’ distinctive identity as a template for Christians in time of war.Footnote 39 Given their responsibilities at the tabernacle – which helped to ensure Israel’s victory in battle – the Levites had had to distance themselves from corpse-impurity during military campaigns.Footnote 40 Origen and Tertullian similarly prohibited Christians from going to war. They nonetheless saw the empire as part of God’s providential plan.Footnote 41 For Origen in the Greek East, as for Tertullian in the Latin West, Christians still had a key role to play in wartime: ‘while others fight, Christians also should be fighting as priests and worshippers of God, keeping their right hands pure and by their prayers to God striving for those who fight in a righteous cause and for the emperor who reigns righteously.’Footnote 42 For Basil, Christians who did serve as soldiers might not be committing homicide, but he remained cautious: ‘perhaps it is well to advise that men with unclean hands abstain from communion alone for three years.’Footnote 43
From the fourth century, however, ‘the prohibition of blood was continuously undermined by Western church fathers’.Footnote 44 Most moral cultures have retained rituals of purity,Footnote 45 but Jerome (d. c.420) and Augustine initiated a Western theological tendency to emphasize guilt rather than pollution:Footnote 46 ‘the history of the Christian theology of warfare … can be understood as the history of a gradual decline of pollution ideas and a gradual rise of familiar ideas of moral responsibility … . The pollution-orientated ban on contact with blood became a guilt-orientated ban on intentional bad acts.’Footnote 47 Augustine saw the prohibition on the shedding of blood as a relic of the early church.Footnote 48 God commanded different things at different times, and as the authorities had now embraced Christianity (as providentially ordained), blood spilled by Christians generated neither ritual nor – in certain circumstances – moral impurity.Footnote 49 In Augustine’s diocese, a Christian soldier shedding blood in the course of his just duties faced no episcopal penance, so long as he had acted without personal interest or passion.Footnote 50 To a degree, Augustine addressed ‘the challenges of Christian ritual theology by drawing on the resources of the Roman philosophy of good government.’Footnote 51
With the breakdown of Roman government in the West, however, Christian thinkers on the old imperial frontiers began to look back to Jerusalem rather than to Rome. Whereas Eusebius had linked Rome providentially with Israel, the British ecclesiastic Gildas (d. c.570) twinned Israel with Britain, demonstrating from the Old Testament that ‘obedience to God brought divine aid, food, and military victory and disobedience brought defeat.’Footnote 52 Peter Brown has charted the emergence of ‘micro-Christendoms’ in which a sense of the Roman past was replaced by that of ‘the turbulent warrior kingdom of ancient Israel.’Footnote 53 Roman rule had never reached Ireland, but a similar outlook emerged there too.Footnote 54 The insular penitential texts that appeared as a new literary genre in the sixth century were pastorally preoccupied with penance as ‘medicine for sin’,Footnote 55 but, as Brown has observed: ‘They also represent an attempt to mold society according to ideals found in the Old Testament. In the “holiness code” of the Book of Leviticus the wise men of the British Isles found an all-embracing code of behavior, based on the avoidance of various forms of “pollution”.’Footnote 56 This promotion of ritualistic ways of tackling moral impurity lit a long fuse. It again reflected the compound nature of impurity, but it contradicted Augustine’s theology of grace, becoming an issue ‘which helped permanently to split the Western Church in the sixteenth century Reformation’.Footnote 57
The early Irish church has left us no manuscripts of Leviticus,Footnote 58 while Finnian (d. 579),Footnote 59 the author of probably the oldest text containing detailed tariffs for specific sins,Footnote 60 declared simply that he wrote according to Scripture and ‘the opinion of some very learned [doctissimorum] men’.Footnote 61 Nevertheless, the influence of Leviticus is evident in Ireland from at least the sixth century, in the making of Europe’s greatest concentration of early medieval concentric curvilinear enclosures.Footnote 62 Irish clerics identified closely with the Levites and modelled the layout of their ecclesiastical sites on Jerusalem.Footnote 63 The early Irish legal system also drew on Levitical law.Footnote 64 Apart from Leviticus, a cluster of British penitential texts – including one associated with Gildas – possibly influenced Finnian, although those monastic texts paid no attention to the laity.Footnote 65 Basil’s penitential advice would also appear to be a precursor, but that material – including the ruling about soldiers – is not reckoned to have reached the Latin West until the late seventh century. Basil’s monastic rule, however, was known to Columba on Iona in the sixth century.Footnote 66 Finnian’s penitential, moreover, has ‘echoes of Cassian’, indicating at least indirect contact with Eastern monasticism.Footnote 67
The Eastern custom of personal disclosure and spiritual direction, bequeathed by Origen,Footnote 68 was also known in monasteries such as Finnian’s, where the practice was extended to the laity. Everyone who was dependent on a church was required to have a ‘soul friend’.Footnote 69 Frequent lay confession probably took root initially among ‘para-monastic’ tenants of church land.Footnote 70 As kings and aristocrats began to patronize the religious foundations, conflict mediation by clerics possibly brought monastic-style penance to bear on them too.Footnote 71 Although laymen were not on a path to perfection, ‘penitents seem to have shared to a large extent in the monastic life’,Footnote 72 and in Ireland, ‘the line between monks and those remaining in the world is more blurred than elsewhere.’Footnote 73 Tariffs typically entailed periods of fasting and praying. For Finnian, ‘there is no crime which cannot be expiated through penance’.Footnote 74 This attitude, applied pragmatically to a violent society, resulted in harsh but relatively short penalties. Finnian envisaged even the worst of lay sinners being ‘joined to the altar’ after three years,Footnote 75 whereas Basil had assigned twenty years of penance to a wilful murderer.Footnote 76
However, Finnian tackled violence among kindred and neighbours, not the violence of battle. ‘If someone was a layman and free – still more if he was noble – he was expected to fight.’Footnote 77 Until the eighth century in Ireland, tariff books had nothing to say on the subject of warriors killing warriors.Footnote 78 An attribution of a forty-day penance for killing in ‘public war’ to a seventh-century Irish penitential by Cummean (d. 662), possibly the bishop of Clonfert, is mistaken:Footnote 79 it actually belongs to an eighth-century tariff book, the Excarpsus Cummeani. Footnote 80 Fashioned from Irish, Anglo-Saxon and Frankish penitential material, this tariff book emerged in Austrasia around the time of the Concilium Germanicum. Its oldest source material, though, had reached continental Europe with the Irish monk Columbanus (d. 615), ‘the first individual of whom we can say with some confidence that he took books out of Ireland.’Footnote 81
Texts in Transmission
Tariff books were ephemeral. None have survived in Ireland itself. On the Continent, specimens of the first wave, which were probably unbound and penned in decreasingly legible insular script, no longer exist either.Footnote 82 The leading edge of that wave came ashore in Brittany with Columbanus in about 590.Footnote 83 His satchel seems to have contained Finnian’s tariff book (directed at secular clergy and the laity), British penitential material by the likes of Gildas (directed at monks and secular clergy), and rudimentary notes that augmented British monastic rules with Finnian’s clerical rules.Footnote 84
Around 590, parts of Brittany were in turmoil as the army of Guntram (d. 592), the Merovingian king of Burgundy, marched against the Bretons.Footnote 85 The campaign was dysfunctional, but for Gregory of Tours (d. 594), Guntram was a model Christian king. In terms reminiscent of Leviticus 26, Gregory attributed to him the following remarks after a failed campaign in 585, lamenting the providential implications of his soldiers’ godlessness:
How can we expect to win a victory nowadays … when we no longer keep to the conventions of our forefathers? They used to build churches, for they placed all their hope in God, doing honour to His martyrs and respecting His priesthood: the result was that, with God’s help, they won victories and were frequently able to conquer hostile peoples with sword and shield. Not only do we not fear God, but we lay waste His holy places, we slaughter His ministers, and in our contempt we scatter far and wide the relics of His saints and so allow them to be destroyed. As long as such deeds are being done, we can never expect to be victorious: there is no strength in our hands, our swords lose their bite, our shields no longer defend and protect us as they used to do.Footnote 86
Prefiguring the Carolingians, Guntram summoned royal councils in the 580s to initiate religious reforms, which were enshrined within a canon law collection, the Collectio Vetus Gallica, and promoted at diocesan level by the likes of the synod of Auxerre (585).Footnote 87 ‘One of the main aims of this synod seems to have been to set apart the clergy from the laity, but it also tried to improve the moral life of the laity.’Footnote 88 Guntram could therefore be portrayed as being like a ‘good bishop providing the remedies by which the wounds of a common sinner might be healed’.Footnote 89 Such a king would have viewed Columbanus as a godsend. Royal patronage saw monasteries established in quick succession and in close proximity at Annegray, Luxeuil and Fontaine, heralding a sense of Frankish royal accountability before God for the salvation of the Christian people,Footnote 90 and converting the purity of monastic prayer into ‘a crucial source of spiritual power to Merovingian rulers’.Footnote 91
Columbanus was especially receptive to secular clergy and the laity.Footnote 92 His monks’ purity attracted them in droves, seeking assurance that their sins were truly forgiven.Footnote 93 Later, as an exchangeable currency arose from the tariff books, monasteries ‘could use their round of prayer to carry out these penances on behalf of the noblemen and warriors’,Footnote 94 but Columbanus himself expected both lay and clerical penitents to model their lives on monks and to atone even for offences that were not socially disruptive.Footnote 95 Two monastic rules are associated with him. According to Albrecht Diem, ‘No other monastic Rule is as explicit about performing intercessory prayer for the outside world, for kings, kingdom and stabilitas as Columbanus’s Regula monachorum, and no monastic Rule is as concerned about purity and the proper execution of rituals as the Regula coenobialis.’Footnote 96
The latter rule addressed how monks should live together and can be regarded as a monastic penitential.Footnote 97 Redacted by Columbanus’s followers, it possibly drew on the Paenitentiale Ambrosianum, an insular tariff book which contains regulations regarding the ritual purity of priests,Footnote 98 and which could be as early as Finnian’s work.Footnote 99 Directly or indirectly, half of the eight so-called ‘simple Frankish penitentials’ also made use of the Ambrosianum. Footnote 100 Enabling priests to reacquire ritual purity was apparently a popular innovation of Columbanian monasticism.Footnote 101 Cummean’s penitential, which combined Finnian’s penitential and the Ambrosianum, likewise used the latter’s purity material, making it more widely known on the Continent.Footnote 102 The link between priestly purity and sacramental efficacy, which Augustine had severed in his clash with puritan Donatists, thereby gained a new lease of life.Footnote 103
Cummean’s penitential was also circulating in Anglo-Saxon England,Footnote 104 where it was known to Theodore, the archbishop of Canterbury (d. 690).Footnote 105 Theodore in turn introduced a penitential ruling that was unknown in Ireland, or indeed anywhere else in the Latin West at that time. Anyone who killed on his lord’s orders, or in ‘public war’, should do penance for forty days.Footnote 106 Back in the fourth century, Martin of Tours had been unable to deny that soldiering had left him ‘defiled’.Footnote 107 Reflecting this persistent mixture of concerns over moral and ritual purity, Pope Leo I (d. 461) had declared it contrary to the church’s rules to return to military or state service after doing penance, which was echoed by a Merovingian council in 538.Footnote 108 By no later than the seventh century, however, the Augustinian reconciliation of military service with Christian life had prevailed in the West: ‘the idea that state service was inherently contaminating seems to have disappeared.’Footnote 109 Anglo-Saxon kings (probably under Irish influence) did relinquish their thrones for monasteries or pilgrimages throughout the seventh century, but that seems to have been stimulated by a sense of life’s transience compared to heaven, rather than a newfound revulsion at battle.Footnote 110
Arriving in England in 669, Theodore brought Basil’s sense of the ritual impurity caused by battle to bear on the Anglo-Saxons (albeit without the metaphor of ‘unclean hands’).Footnote 111 Born in Tarsus, Theodore’s roots were not Augustinian or even Western. Under his archiepiscopate, Greek attitudes to impurity became aligned with Irish attitudes brought to England by missionaries, and possibly with indigenous attitudes too.Footnote 112 Anticipation of resistance among Anglo-Saxon warriors would account for Theodore’s shortening of Basil’s tariff to forty days, but the tariff’s survival in the manuscript tradition presumably reflects some degree of acceptance of it among those warriors. Across the North Sea in Frisia, another tariff book with Anglo-Saxon roots was also encouraging penitence by fighters. Tentatively attributed to Willibrord (d. 739), a Benedictine monk from Northumbria (who must have become acquainted with penitentials during a decade spent in Ireland), the Paenitentiale Oxoniense II reveals that warriors were seeking penance before military campaigns.Footnote 113 They were to be treated like the dying, but also had to be reminded to fulfil their penance if they returned safely.Footnote 114 Twenty-two weeks were prescribed for murder during a campaign, but if fighters killed in self-defence or in defence of their homes, penance (in the form of fasting) was left to their discretion.Footnote 115 Pastoral leniency characterizes this tariff book.Footnote 116
It is unclear if the author of Oxoniense II knew any Theodorian penitential texts,Footnote 117 but around 700 a penitential based (albeit indirectly) on Theodore’s teachings was written by a ‘Disciple of the Northumbrians’. One of five manuscript traditions – none of them penned by Theodore himself – this Discipulus Umbrensium or ‘U-version’ transmitted the war ruling to Ireland, where it was quoted in the eighth-century ‘Bigotian’ and ‘Old Irish’ penitentials,Footnote 118 and to parts of the Continent north of the Alps.Footnote 119 In the second quarter of the eighth century, at Corbie Abbey, a daughter house of Luxeuil,Footnote 120 the ‘U-version’, the Collectio Hibernensis,Footnote 121 and the Regula Coenobialis of Columbanus were used in a revision of the Collectio Vetus Gallica. Footnote 122 Created there in parallel was the aforementioned Excarpsus Cummeani. Footnote 123 Boniface (d. 754), another Benedictine monk from England, was probably involved in this penitential’s composition.Footnote 124 A combination of the ‘U-version’, material from Cummean, and Columbanian material from a ‘simple Frankish penitential’, it dealt extensively with clerical purity,Footnote 125 but it also echoed Columbanus and Theodore in demanding that the laity comply with ecclesiastical regulations.Footnote 126 Crucially, it also included Theodore’s forty-day tariff, perpetuating Basil’s sense that soldiers were somehow polluted.
This approach to killing in war cannot be deemed the ‘official’ position of the Western church: penitentials were private works of nebulous authority, while the tariff in question stemmed from just one tradition with a limited geographical range in the West.Footnote 127 The composition of the Excarpsus Cummeani at Corbie nevertheless gave Theodore’s penalty a foothold in Carloman’s Austrasia. Priests serving with the Frankish army may have been using tariff books already,Footnote 128 but the new penitential (or extracts of it) feasibly became their main handbook in the wake of the Concilium Germanicum. Boniface convened the council (on Carloman’s instructions),Footnote 129 and the abbot of Corbie probably attended it.Footnote 130 It seems that these ‘Carolingian efforts to discipline Frankish Christians, cleric and lay, initiated by Boniface’, contributed to what Meens has judged the ‘huge success’ of the Excarpsus Cummeani. Footnote 131 ‘The Church had to be purified’,Footnote 132 and this particular penitential appears to have been integral to Boniface’s efforts.Footnote 133
Providence in Prospect
In addition to the Excarpsus Cummeani, the Concilium Germanicum enabled Boniface to promote the Rule of Benedict,Footnote 134 which eventually became ubiquitous in Columbanian monasteries.Footnote 135 Nothing in the original rule, however, aimed at ‘ensuring the level of purity that enables monks and nuns to perform intercession’.Footnote 136 In Diem’s assessment, elements such as ritual purity, intercessory prayer, royal patronage and sacred space suggest that ‘the Regula Benedicti promoted by Carolingian reforms might be best described as a “Regula Columbani” in disguise.’Footnote 137 The harshness of Boniface’s penitential discipline also owed more to Columbanus than Benedict. Clerical and monastic sinners could be jailed on a diet of bread and water, with priests ‘flogged to bleeding’.Footnote 138 Penance was ‘an important means to educate and to discipline the clergy and through them the populace at large.’Footnote 139 As with Columbanus, kings were not spared either: ‘amend your life by penitence,’ Boniface wrote to a Mercian king, ‘purify yourself’.Footnote 140
A few months before the Concilium Germanicum, Boniface informed the pope that ‘certain bishops … are drunkards and shiftless men, given to hunting and to fighting in the army like soldiers and by their own hands shedding blood, whether of heathens or Christians.’Footnote 141 This kind of anxiety about clerical indiscipline, with elements of both moral and ritual impurity, had been amplified as late Roman aristocrats and Germanic nobles assumed ecclesiastical positions, accelerating the militarization of the Western episcopate.Footnote 142 Predating the first council of Clovis I in 511,Footnote 143 the anxiety eventually triggered Guntram’s reforms. Columbanus similarly took a dim view of episcopal standards in Gaul.Footnote 144 Between 500 and 750, the church acquired over a third of the country, which ‘was bound to attract attention of the wrong sort’.Footnote 145 By the time of the Concilium Germanicum, there was a growing sense that ‘only those who lived … in a state of ritual purity, could be effective mediators between God and mankind.’Footnote 146 Under Boniface, immediate steps were taken to purify clerics serving with the army. ‘We have absolutely forbidden the servants of God to carry arms or fight, to enter the army or march against an enemy,’ declared Carloman, ‘except only so many as are especially selected for divine service’.Footnote 147
Parochial clergy were candidates for such service: statutes issued under Charlemagne in 800 reveal the deployment of parish priests on campaigns.Footnote 148 Twenty-five priests, by Bachrach’s calculation, could have heard five thousand soldiers’ confessions in ten hours, if confessions lasted for three minutes on average and priests worked without a break.Footnote 149 For the mid-eighth century, however, this seems an improbable workload. Beyond the orbit of ritually pure monastic communities and charismatic religious figures, lay confession in the Carolingian realms remained rare until the late eighth or early ninth century.Footnote 150 The role of clerics was increasingly emphasized from the seventh century, and Carolingian authorities eventually demanded confession to a priest or bishop, but as late as 813 a council acknowledged confession to God alone.Footnote 151 At the time of the Concilium Germanicum, confession to a priest was still a novel if not an alien practice for most laity. Soldiers’ exposure to confession in the army is likely to have fostered the development of confession in the parishes, rather than the other way around as Bachrach has suggested.Footnote 152 Most Carolingian soldiers served on a part-time basis, ‘and thus lived lives very similar to those of their family and neighbours’.Footnote 153
Distinguishing top-down penitential policies from bottom-up demand for penance is not straightforward.Footnote 154 Carolingian soldiers conceivably acquired a taste for confession as Carolingian religious discipline took hold and battle rites shaped their self-understanding.Footnote 155 The Concilium Germanicum, however, was not seeking to satisfy a popular appetite for penance in the ranks. (Neither, apparently, was Boniface interested in the pastoral care of soldiers.Footnote 156) Even by the end of the eighth century, troops still had to be urged ‘to do what they knew they were supposed to do’, with one preacher repeatedly stressing the importance of confession and pointing out to the soldiers that priests were standing by to cure their souls.Footnote 157 Twenty-first century British soldiers, without persuasion, become more religious in proximity to combat:Footnote 158 a medieval preacher applying such pressure is a sure sign that many soldiers were not resorting to what the clergy had to offer.
Bachrach has argued that what the clergy were offering served the ‘ends’ of morale, esprit de corps, and discipline: ‘These ends were certainly helped by offering the promise of divine aid in battle, tying this aid to proper behaviour, and reminding the men through participation in common rites of their ties to each other and to the army as a whole.’Footnote 159 Carolingian morale, however, would hardly have been raised by the imposition of a penalty for killing the enemy, especially if it entailed fasting. At a time when even bishops were keen on fighting, ‘the attitude lying behind this provision directly affronted Frankish amour propre, stigmatising as sinful that which a militarized aristocracy regarded as its most honorable role’.Footnote 160 The eleventh-century reconfiguration of killing in war as a penitential act in itself, culminating in the launch of the First Crusade in 1095, proved much more palatable to the Franks.Footnote 161
Bachrach’s managerial interpretation misses the religious point. What the clergy were offering was a protean combination of moral and ritual purification for the sake of providence: securing divine aid in battle was the end in itself. As recognized by Bachrach himself at one point, the ends of the army’s religious rites were ‘to purify the fighting force, to propitiate God, and to beg for divine assistance in battle’.Footnote 162 Long after the medieval era, such an approach still made sense, both theologically and militarily. In eighteenth-century Britain, for instance, a deeply providentialist outlook and biblical warnings about Israel’s victories and defeats made it ‘simply inconceivable that the nation’s military fortunes … should be hostage to the conduct of a godless and wrath-provoking rabble.’Footnote 163 Days of prayer, fasting and ‘Humiliation before Almighty God’ were proclaimed, ‘For obtaining Pardon of Our Sins, and for averting those heavy Judgements which Our manifold Provocations have most justly deserved, and imploring His Blessing and Assistance on the Arms of His Majesty by Sea and Land’.Footnote 164
Frankish soldiers as well as clerics had to be purified and made worthy of divine aid. ‘If you are clean’, an early ninth-century preacher told the troops (when again urging them to confess): ‘as the Lord says, “I will stay with you and my angel will precede you and he will be your protection.”’Footnote 165 Driving this was the ‘crucial notion that the sins of individuals tainted the whole Christian community (ecclesia), be it a monastery or a Christian realm’.Footnote 166 Monasteries with their traditions of penance offered Carolingian rulers a ‘model for Empire’.Footnote 167 Particularly in the northern and eastern regions of the Frankish empire, where the Carolingian family had its centre of gravity, the second half of the eighth century witnessed a proliferation of penitential texts and manuscripts that ‘must be related to Carolingian efforts to forge a truly Christian empire … . To retain divine favour it was important that the Franks lived a genuinely Christian life, and sins were seen as endangering that favourable relationship with the Deity.’Footnote 168
Carloman’s own religious convictions were arguably as significant as those of Boniface in priming penance for this central role in Carolingian affairs. Even if his entry into monastic life in 747 – associated with his role in a massacre – was not as voluntary as the sources maintain,Footnote 169 Carloman’s piety should not be underestimated.Footnote 170 His promulgation of the decisions of the Concilium Germanicum in a royal capitulary was innovative.Footnote 171 Its opening remarks, moreover, presaged Charlemagne’s overt invocation (in the Admonitio Generalis of 789) of King Josiah purging Judah after the discovery of the ‘Book of the Law’.Footnote 172 In an age of belief that mixed piety with strategy, Carloman’s pronouncements, as de Jong has noted, ‘reflect the ambitions of a new ruler who saw himself as a guardian of the correct cult and the salvation of the Christian people’.Footnote 173 The second canon of his legislation of 742, to which chaplaincy owes its legal origin, stemmed ultimately from the Old Testament’s warning that victory depended on divine favour, and that in turn required purity.
Conclusion
In the Carolingian army, according to the standard account, tariff books made it ‘no longer necessary for soldiers either to wait until their final days to confess their sins or, if they chose to confess earlier, to enter a secluded or monastic life.’Footnote 174 As we have seen, this has been distorted by traditional histories of penance and the idea that ‘forgiveness for sins committed after baptism is obtained first and foremost through confession to a priest and absolution by a priest’.Footnote 175 Repeatable penitential alternatives had long been available, as well as monastic possibilities that involved neither permanent confinement nor even personal participation. In addition, there were no doctrinal grounds for Frankish soldiers to fear damnation for killing in battle: it was generally not the case that ‘bishops refused to distinguish between types of killing, and grouped together all forms of taking a human life, including killing in the course of war, under the rubric homicidio’, as Bachrach claims.Footnote 176
Devout soldiers doubtless did feel the burden of other sins as battle loomed. However, they would have sought atonement through tried-and-tested techniques rather than the relative novelty of confessing to a priest. According to one of Bachrach’s own hermeneutic principles, ‘it would seem highly unlikely that soldiers who faced the possibility of being called on to kill or to die in battle would turn to new or fundamentally unfamiliar rites’.Footnote 177 Penitents had flocked to Columbanus’s monasteries, but they represented only a minority of the lay world. Half a century after the Concilium Germanicum, Carolingian soldiers still had to be strongly encouraged, if not driven, to confess. For Carloman and his successors, penitential practice was not an instrument of military morale: it was a matter of salvation or damnation. ‘God’s grace had to be preserved by leading a life pleasing to God and by atoning for every serious misdeed. This was no longer true only for religious men and women, but also for lay people, kings as well as persons of lesser status.’Footnote 178 Carolingian penance, in short, was not a managerial tool in the hands of secular authorities.
Published under wartime conditions in Munich in 1918, Koeniger’s ground-breaking study of military chaplaincy in the Carolingian era concluded with a veiled tribute to those engaged in a more contemporary conflict. In acknowledging the role of pastoral care and purity of heart in the Great War, Koeniger reflected both aspects of the medieval penitential literature itself.Footnote 179 In the appointment of confessors by the Concilium Germanicum, however, purity was the dominant consideration. Tariff books would regulate the cleansing that underpinned divine providence. The books have been dismissed as serving merely to ‘codify’ existing practice,Footnote 180 but codification enables transmission beyond personal reach, as well as uniformity, repetition, standardization, scalability, exchangeability, revision, and reduced supervision.Footnote 181 All these factors would have facilitated the purification of the Frankish army, in a prelude to the formation of what has been termed a ‘penitential state’.Footnote 182 ‘The religious and imperial ideologies of the Carolingians, which so influenced the early medieval West, owe much to the processes set in motion by the work of the Columbanians.’Footnote 183 Columbanus declared himself ‘no brave soldier’,Footnote 184 but the penitential process he brought to continental Europe would leave a lasting impression on medieval soldiering.
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