The Peace of God appeared at the very moment when our sources increase markedly in both variety and number, so we are not poorly informed about the movement: we have conciliar decrees, chronicle accounts, hagiographical narratives, charters, and letters. Why, then, has the Peace of God been so difficult for historians to grasp? The most important reason is that different types of sources give us significantly different representations of the movement. And somewhat paradoxically, the fullest, most circumstantial accounts are among the most problematic, even though they are the ones most frequently relied upon by historians to describe the movement and its purposes.

Take, for example, the most famous of these accounts, that offered by Raoul Glaber in his Histories. He describes a series of troubling events at the approach of the millennium of Christ's Passion (that is, 1033): first the deaths of many important men, then three years of heavy rains that made it difficult to plant crops, and a famine so severe that people turned to cannibalism. It seemed clear that “the order of the seasons and the elements … had fallen into perpetual chaos, and with it had come the end of mankind.” But when the millennium of the Passion arrived, the weather cleared and the famine ended. And now Peace councils were summoned, first in Aquitaine, then in Provence, then in Burgundy, eventually reaching “the furthest corners of the French realm.” Everyone attended the councils when summoned, “great, middling, and poor … rejoicing and ready, one and all, to obey the commands of the clergy no less than if they had been given by a voice from heaven speaking to men on earth.” At these councils lists of prohibited actions were drawn up and oaths were sworn “for keeping an inviolable peace.” All men, no matter what their status, were free to go about without fear of armed attack. Seizure of the property of others was to be sanctioned by fines and harsh corporal punishment. Churches were to be held in honour, and the asylum offered by churches to fleeing criminals was to be respected, save for someone “who violated the pact of the peace.” Clerics, monks, and nuns were to be free from attack while travelling, as were those travelling with them. At these gatherings the sick were healed, the limbs of the lame and crippled were straightened.

The majority of books and articles on the Peace and Truce of God are devoted to the period between 989 and ca. 1050—from the first clear appearance of the Peace at Charroux to the time when the articles of the Peace and Truce became fairly standardized. Beyond the mid-eleventh century historians rather lose interest in it. One reason may be a sense that the Peace of God was a failure; for not only did it not bring peace, in some ways it codified the right to violence. A German Peace of 1103 stated this paradox baldly:

If this is what the Peace of God became, it is hard to see it as any kind of turning point in European history. Then, too, the program itself changed, mutating into something recognizably the same yet different. In Bisson's words, it became not just an “instituted” Peace but an “institutionalized” Peace. And increasingly, secular leaders inserted themselves into its proclamation until by the twelfth century one is no longer dealing with a Peace of God at all. It is now the peace of the king, the peace of the prince, the peace of the territory, or the peace of the commune.

The changes did not happen overnight. From the beginning the Peace and Truce had tended to evolve in fits and starts. There was a great surge of Peace activity in the 990s followed by an apparent waning of interest until the development of the Truce in the late 1020s, when a new spate of councils defined the articles of the Peace and Truce more concretely, particularly with respect to enforcement. After the 1050s the movement seemed to ebb again, until a new round of declarations began in the last decade of the eleventh century. Bisson associates this new activity with Urban II's call for a crusade in 1095 at the Council of Clermont, where he promulgated the Truce of God in order to protect the lands of crusaders during their absence. In fact, Norman bishops did establish a Peace and Truce in 1096, spurred on by some of their colleagues who had brought back the decrees of Clermont.

When the Apostle Paul wrote that “the peace of God … surpasses all understanding” (Phil. 4:7), he did not have in mind the historical movement known as the “Peace of God.” But he might as well have, for few subjects in medieval history have received so many contradictory interpretations. Many have believed that it was a response to a surge of violence among the aristocracy; just as many deny there was any surge of violence at all. Some think it was fundamentally a millenarian movement that marked the first appearance of “the common people” on the political stage; others think it was neither millenarian nor popular. It has been seen as a movement in which bishops wrested responsibility for maintaining social order from secular political leaders; as a movement used by secular political leaders to reassert their responsibility for social order; as a movement spearheaded by monks for the reform of society and the church. It has been thought one of the most transformative events of the Middle Ages. It has been thought a sideshow.

Given such disagreements, it is hard even to define exactly what the Peace of God was, since any definition requires one to take a stand on the above debates, at least implicitly. So for the moment one must keep to a very open definition. The Peace of God was a program originating in the last years of the tenth century that protected certain specified categories of persons and places from certain kinds of actions. Broadly speaking, the places protected were churches and their environs; the persons protected were the unarmed. Speaking even more broadly, the actions prohibited were the kinds that historians have tended to classify as “violence” of the sort habitually perpetrated by a warrior aristocracy. The movement began in southern France (specifically, in Aquitaine), soon took root in Burgundy, and from there spread widely: to Provence, Catalonia, Languedoc, and Septimania; to Normandy, Flanders, and the royal domain. Ultimately it even entered Germany, where it soon evolved into a slightly different institution known as the “territorial peace” or Landfriede. As it spread, its stipulations became more precise and new limitations were established.

According to the Gospel of John, peace was Christ's principal bequest to his apostles and through them to his church: “Peace I leave you, my peace I give you” (John 14:27). The context makes it clear that this peace was a tranquillity of the heart, not a peace of the world. Yet as Augustine saw, the church was necessarily a political society, existing in the world even while waiting for it to end. What, then, did the peace of God mean for the church on earth, a mixed community of saints and sinners?

There were two basic answers. One was a Stoic idea which was taken over by Neo-Platonists, from whom it was received by Augustine, who gave it its most famous formulation.

This was a kind of Grand Unified Theory of peace. It brought together microcosm and macrocosm in a single whole, so that cosmology, political theory, and psychology all obeyed the same principle: in peace, the inferior willingly conformed itself to the superior. Throughout the entire history of the Middle Ages, no learned person would have disputed the truth of this formulation. On the other hand, simply because it was a Grand Unified Theory, Augustine's notion of peace was not particularly helpful in solving the problems of real life and so was not often explicitly discussed, even though it was nearly everywhere assumed.

Aware of the many flaws in the idea of a sudden “feudal mutation” around the turn of the millennium, Thomas Bisson proposed instead a “crisis of lordship.” The diffi-culty is that his crisis lasted for some 350 years, too long a time for the idea of “crisis” to be meaningful. What if we spoke instead of the “problem” of lordship? This might be more useful, because it calls attention to the very issue that critics of a “feudal mutation” have insisted on: most of the developments adduced as signs of a muta-tion in the decades surrounding the millennium actually appeared well before 900. That is when we find increasing evidence of the powerful controlling the labour of depen-dent peasants on estates in ways so systematic that in aggregate it constitutes a new mode of production. It is when we begin to find fortifications constructed not by kings against Viking raiders but as military structures built by the locally powerful to hold territory against rivals. The garrisons manning those castles and the military expe-ditions launched from them required provisions; so this was also the time when we find references to “customs” that were really exactions for military requisitions levied in excess from peasants. In other words, the second half of the ninth century saw the creation of the foundations of what we think of as “lordship.” It was also when, out of the many Carolingian usages of “peace,” Hincmar of Reims seized on one called “the peace of the army” that pro-hibited unlawful military requisitions. Hincmar described such requisitions as acts of violentia, depraedatio, raptio— the very language that would later be applied by the Peace of God to very similar actions. The reason historians can argue that the Peace of God was essentially Carolingian is because the kind of lordship addressed by the Peace was, in its fundamental structures, a development of the late Carolingian period in the West Frankish kingdom.

It was also in the later ninth century and in the same kingdom that we begin to find a propensity to the fragmen-tation of political authority. At first, this did not pose a prob-lem locally, since the great princes were able to maintain order within their territories. By the later tenth century that was no longer the case.