Religion and war, historically compared: the Japanese Far East and the European Far West in the longue durée of two Middle Ages

Philippe Buc

p. 287-302

Note de l’auteur

I thank Professor Saitō Keita for the Japanese translation of this article.


Texte intégral

1Comparative history has had a difficult genealogy. Max Weber, the sociologist and historian, produced – partly thanks to comparisons – sharp conceptual instruments, in particular types and ideal types that we still use. However, like so many monuments of his era, Weber’s thought was embedded in a widespread European exceptionalism; it aimed at explaining bourgeois modernity, democracy, and its liberties. But it also fed the hegemonic enterprises of emerging sociology. Weber’s French contemporary Émile Durkheim’s claim is famous: “History can be a science only insofar as it can explain, and one can explain only through comparison. Even mere description is otherwise impossible […]. As soon as it compares, history can no longer be distinguished from sociology.”1 This attempted disciplinary Anschluss, as it were, may account for many historians’ distaste for comparison. Yet other historians embraced the Durkheimian program. In 1958, Frédéric Joüon des Longrais introduced assertively his L’Est et l’Ouest. Institutions du Japon et de l’Occident comparées: “A science can be only of general [patterns]; there is therefore only one method that allows synthesis, the comparative method.”2 This claim came with a charge against grand narrative histories as “vast pseudo-historical frescoes produced by talented artists who strive to paint chains of facts driven by a teleological, evolutionary process”.3 Events chained together to compose an “end-driven evolution”: Joüon des Longrais may have been interested in general formulas as opposed to diversity, but his choice of words show that he rejected historical teleology. Alongside the oxymoronic combination of Western universalism and Western exceptionalism, historical teleology has become in the past three decades historians’ favorite whipping boy.4 Yet the comparative method espoused here is an efficient way to explode flawed crypto-teleological models (often, as is the case with Max Weber’s impressive work, built on faulty comparisons),5 to produce generalizations of limited ambition, and to highlight the specificities of individual societies’ individual cultural logics. The following considerations, that put face to face medieval Western Europe and medieval Japan in the dimensions of warfare and religion, take a stand alongside anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’ “it takes another culture to know another culture”.6

2At first sight, medieval Japan and the medieval European West look similar in many ways. This similarity famously led Marc Bloch to ponder whether they were not the only two societies to have known what he called “feudalism”.7 Both were dominated by warriors (in the case of Japan increasingly after c. 1150 and certainly by the fourteenth century). Both were shaped by universalist axial faiths, on the one hand medieval Christianity and its cult of the saints, on the other Mahayana Buddhism exported from China but syncretically related to native cults.8 Both had powerful religious institutions, a clergy, and monks. Finally, as recent comparative work has shown, both had peasant communities as major social building blocks.9 But as we shall see, sometimes with quite different outcomes.

3On the background of these similarities, differences emerge, which in turn produce deeper understanding of each, Eurasia’s Far West and Far East. Three cases will be comparatively discussed: first, the relationship between religion and warfare, in particular the sacralization of war, second, the measures taken when one had killed at war (What sort of responsibility did one incur in shedding human blood, and how was it dealt with?), and third, the existence – or lack – of “bridge figures” between the social functions (given our topic between warriors and religious specialists).

The relationship between religion and warfare

4Western medieval Europe is well known, if only through popular polemics, for its crusades and, later, wars of religion. The manicheanism inherent in Christianity – the firm belief in the existence of a radical good and a radical evil – and its sense that only proper dogma and practices might ensure salvation lent European wars a specifically contoured ferocity, involving, for instance and importantly, an ascetic component. Heresy was understood as Satan’s best weapon to destroy the Church, since it produced a Doppelgänger imitating the truth but leading away from it. For this reason, Catholics fought with greater ferocity against fellow Christians than against pagans and Muslims. In the thirteenth century, the great canon lawyer Hostiensis prioritized the crux cismarina, the taking of the cross to fight enemies on the European side of the Mediterranean, over the crux transmarina, the crusade “overseas”, that is, in North Africa or the Holy Land. It was more important “to preserve the unity of the Church” than to wage war against Islam or paganism.10 The best examples of the harshness with which such “intracultural warfare” was waged are the Albigensian crusade of 1209–2911 and the Hussite wars in Central Europe (the latter, starting in the 1420s, opposed Bohemian partisans of a reformed Christianity to the German Emperor).12 In these holy wars, prisoners were more likely to be killed than in regular warfare. Hussites and Catholics threw captives, including priests, into pits or burned them alive; French and English crusaders also burned or otherwise massacred, the most famous example being the sack of Béziers (1209), well studied by Jacques Berlioz.13 I have suggested elsewhere that this notion of the inner religious traitor ended up coloring perceptions and treatments of the political traitor. Just as one spoke of “false Christians” (starting with the Apostle Paul’s “false brethren”), by the late Middle Ages one could speak of “false Frenchmen”, meaning “traitor Frenchmen”.14 There is a remarkable obsession with treachery and, as it were, a secularized religious stigma attached to the inner political enemy that I surmise is without parallel in a Japan that did not know Satan, the master demon deceiver and father of deceivers.

5Yet Japan also had its demons; Buddhism has a place for them. The Tendai abbot Jien 慈円 (1155–1225)15 came close to the medieval European position, in the sense that he considered that the Amidist teacher Hōnen 法然 (1133–1212), founder of Jōdo-Shū 浄土宗, had been possessed by a “deceptive demon”. Jien lived, he asserted, in a phase of dharmic history in which “deceptive demons” spread false teachings promising easy salvation.16 Jien could indeed observe in his early thirteenth-century environment the rise of demotic sects, first within the older established Shingon 真言宗 and Tendai 天台宗 schools, then without, among courtiers and the populace. Yet remarkably, while Hōnen did not escape persecution (two of his disciples were executed and he was exiled), one does not see anything like a religious war opposing Japanese schools to other Japanese schools, all the way into the Sengoku period 戦国時代. In other words, we have nothing like the Albigensian crusade, the Hussite wars, or that first of all Christian religious wars, the fourth- to fifth-century Donatist controversy.17 Or perhaps one does, even if faintly. For fantasies of destruction of other Buddhist schools did exist among Nichiren 日蓮 (1222–82) and his disciples. For the sake of the realm that was threatened by false teachings, or so they believed, they assaulted verbally members of other sects, rebuked powerful lords for their tolerance of bad monks, and at one point Nichiren even proposed to execute en masse monks of rival institutions.18 For Nichiren, as well as, it seems, for Hōnen, there was an exclusive, single path to salvation. Nichiren Hokke school 法華宗 ended up controlling Kyōto, and embroiled itself in warfare against the monastic compound of Mount Hiei 比叡山 and sectarians of another school, the Jōdo-Shinshū 浄土真宗. The latter is famous owing to the ikki leagues banding together its sectarians, important players in Sengoku combats.19 The Jōdo-Shinshū too, like the Hokke-Shū, proclaimed that its form of Buddhism was the exclusive method to obtain salvation. Of course, one can hardly say that either the Hokke-shū or the Jōdo-Shinshū came close to the violence perpetrated by the Taborite Hussites, the radical militant wing of Hussite Christianity. The latter fought for God and a pure Christianity. And as underlined by Mikael Adolphson for monastic institutions in general, usually the conflicts involving Japanese religious leagues were motivated by economic or political interests.20 Even the Jōdo-Shinshū, bitter adversary to Oda Nobunaga 織田信長 (1534–82), cannot quite be said to have waged religious wars, in the sense of “wars to spread the faith”.21 Yet if a daimyō focused on suppression of the sect, it could react by demanding that its members fight to the death to defend the buppō, the Buddhist Law, identified with the sect. Such was the case in the 1520s, when the priest Rengo 蓮悟 (1468–1543) mobilized against Nagao Tamekage 長尾為景 (1486-1543) and his allies, and later, in the 1570s, when the sectarians faced Nobunaga. The Patriach Kennyo 顕如 (1543–92) and his son Kyōnyo 教如 (1558–1614) accused, several times, Nobunaga of being an “enemy of the [Buddhist] Law” (hōteki 法敵), and of wanting to destroy the school. The believers were to protect it with their lives if needed.22 Carol Tsang, who does minimize any potential holy war dimension in these confrontations, still remarks on the great willingness of the Jōdo Shinshū devotees to “fight on behalf of the sect”.23 No matter what the nuances, the Hokke-shū and Jōdo-shinshū’s fighting members come closest to medieval Christian holy warriors, likely because of the two sects’ exclusivism and refusal of syncretism.24 Exceptional in their broad-based militancy for Buddhism in the Far East, the Jōdo-Shinshū and Hokke-shū would fit well into the general configuration of the Far West, where religion was also exclusive and non-eclectic.25

The measures taken when one had killed at war

6The Japanese reader will be familiar with the onryō (怨霊), the angry spirits of harmed or defeated humans, dead or alive. Here again one can cite Jien: “In this human world there is necessarily the misery of resentment and hatred (onzō eku 怨憎会苦). […] The main point about a vengeful soul is that it bears a deep grudge and makes those who caused the grudge objects of its revenge […].” This vengeance could strike both the realm and individuals, during the lifetime or after the death of the person harmed.26 Jien’s brother, the high courtier Kujō Kanezane 九条兼実 (1149–1207), agreed. He noted in his journal after Dan-no-Ura (1185), which saw the death of the child-emperor Antoku 安徳天皇 (r. 1180–5) and of many Heike leaders, that it was customary “to grant a Kaimyo” (戒名, posthumous name) to a defeated ruler, and “for the sake of those who die in battle […] perpetual [Buddhist] offerings”.27 This belief explains the costly placatory measures taken both by the Minamoto victors and the Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa 後白河上皇 (r. 1155–8) after the demise of the Heike 平家.28 They involved, on the mythic model of the Indian King Ashoka’s expiations after a bloody victory, the erection of thousands of stupas,29 the building of temples and shrines, religious dances, and other rites.30 A half-generation earlier, in 1178, Taira no Kiyomori 平清盛 (1118–81) had had to placate the angry spirits of those he had defeated, and either exiled or killed during the Hōgen Disturbance 保元の乱 (1156) and by suppression of the Shishigatani-plot 鹿ケ谷の陰謀 (1177), in particular Ex-Emperor Sutoku 崇徳上皇 (r. 1123–42) and Minister of the Left Fujiwara no Yorinaga 藤原頼長 (1120–56). And no wonder: Kiyomori’s daughter, an imperial consort pregnant with a potential future emperor, had fallen sick.31

7In the West, killing at war was also problematic. It soiled those who had killed, and demanded some form of religious cleansing. This was the case whether the dead was a pagan or a Christian. The uncommon slaughter that took place at Fontenoy, in 841, in a pitched battle opposing the armies of Charlemagne’s grandsons, shocked contemporaries. Janet Nelson has proposed that the victors in 841 may have wondered whether they had not been the tool of the Devil. This was at least the opinion of a poet on the other, losing side.32 The occasion, rather densely documented, allows a good glimpse into contemporary conceptions.33 The victors, advised by their bishops, proclaimed a three-day penance, involving fasting, for the souls of the dead who had killed, whether with their will in the deed or not. The survivors who feared they had either advised killing or perpetrated killing for vicious reasons were to confess in private and observe whatever the priests enjoined as penance. The crusade, starting in 1095, would lift these penalties. Death at war against pagans or Muslims led to paradise.34

8Buddhism focused on negative emotions involved in conflicts, courtly or military. As just discussed, some emotions were powerfully dangerous for others. The discussions among the clergy after Fontenoy show that over and above the mere shedding of human blood, shedding it for personal hostilities or negative emotions35 added great guilt, and called for more expiation. Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856), archbishop of Mainz, called for penance for those who had fought “because of greed, […] and who in order to obtain the favor of their secular lords […] had perpetrated homicide not accidentally but purposefully”, regardless of the justice of the cause.36 Comparatively seen, Western European negative emotions at war sullied those who were moved by them, and were spiritually dangerous to them alone. It has been suggested that concern for onryō curbed violence in early medieval Japan, and even limited killing. But I suspect, in the light of Ōta Gyūichi’s 太田牛一 biography of Nobunaga, that it was lapsing by the Sengoku era. Nobunaga at least honoured only one defeated enemy, Imagawa Yoshimoto 今川義元 (1519–60), and this at the very beginning of his military career37. Later, he placated his own anger (says Ōta Gyūichi) through destruction and killing, for instance when he sacked the Enryakuji 延暦寺 in 157138. In the West, the developing theory of just war mandated right intention (intentio, animus) and forbade vicious thoughts; theologians sometimes assumed that few soldiers could escape greed or hatred, thus war called automatically for the individual warrior’s penance39.

9Thus in Western medieval Europe, defeated opponents and enemy war dead were not dangerous. Thirteenth-century collections of popular tales meant to be preached to lay audiences (the exempla) feature now and then a ghost, a figure returning from the realm of the dead to annoy the living. But as opposed to devils, the dead are not dangerous to the living40. The Japanese experience highlights the importance of the early medieval, post-Roman Christian clergy’s work of domestication of the dead, which led to their exclusion from the world of the living. With a major exception: the saints, Peter Brown’s “very special dead41”. Until the twelfth-century emergence of the papal canonization, the saints were produced by local pressure groups. They healed, helped humans against calamities. They also protected their devotees, especially monks and the peasants working for the monks, from armed violence. Oftentimes this protection itself was violent. In the late eleventh-century crusade, the saints even came to fight on the battlefield to protect not monks but the crusader-pilgrims42.

10Exemplary for violent saints, wrathful like any Japanese onryō is Benedict. The saint was worshipped by the monks of Fleury near Orléans. Holy lord of the abbey, Benedict was, to cite Dominique Barthélemy, un être vindicatif et jaloux (“a vengeful and jealous being”) protecting monastic lordship. In the multi-authored book of the saints’ miracles, covering from the second half of the ninth to the eleventh century, his actions to avenge and impose what the monks considered justice, like those of Saint Faith of Conques further south, are more numerous than cures and healings. The saint’s action is often linked to local politics; and the authors set it oftentimes in the context of kings and “public order”. Barthélemy further underscores the entanglement of Benedict’s vengeful actions and local politics conducted in part via judicial assemblies (plaids, placita43). In twelfth-century Japan, supernatural interventions can also be a component in politics, those of the court or warrior factions. Yet there is a difference: In the Miracles of Saint Benedict,44 the monks’ enemies can be possessed, but by demons who belong to the world of fallen angels and their master, Satan. They are not, unlike in Japan, possessed by the onryō of some disappointed courtier or emperor. In one story, under King Henry I (r. 1031–60), a young warrior daemoniaco actus furore, “impelled by a devilish fury”, plunders Benedict’s lands (likely for military provisioning), and feasts in his tents on food stolen from Benedict. He is killed by a lance thrust in battle.45 In another story, also under Henry I, a warrior, out of anger (conversus in iram) insulted a monk who had refused to open to him the doors of the abbey’s domain in Abbeville, calling him a “fat toad on fat horseback”. The monk then queried Benedict why he “tolerates that insults against his people [the monks] remain unavenged (inultas)”. Once ensconced in the domain, the warrior helped himself to the monks’ wine in great quantities. And so, the hagiographer tells us, he “drinks down with this wine to the dregs the cup of God’s anger”. Drunk, he sets fire accidentally to the house and dies burnt alive, along with two servants and five mounted warriors of his.46 In yet another story, a man who, inspired by his wife, had tried to expropriate a church from Fleury, and had threatened with death any monk who would file a judicial complaint against this, is warned by the land’s nobles “not to provoke deservedly the anger of one so beloved by God”, i.e. Saint Benedict. Thus when he pushes his claims at an assembly (conventus), Benedict strikes the wife with a paralyzing and defacing disease, forcing him to abandon their claim. Yet to mark the woman’s guilt she will never recover perfect health.47 In that world, people may become angry, but only the saints’ anger has miraculous effects. As said, this notion blossomed – ephemerally – with the white-clad saints who fought against Muslim armies at Dorylaeum and Antioch, saving the crusader armies. Some of those heavenly warriors were recently martyred crusaders.48

Bridge figures

11A third point of comparison is the existence of bridging figures, combining attributes of the warrior and of the religious specialist. We have just seen the dead Christian warrior saint as a rare but possible combination. In Japan, one has a vast gradient of possibilities to belong to the monastic community. A courtier or warrior can undergo some Buddhist ordination and yet remain active in politics and (more important for the topic at hand) warfare.

12In the pages of the Taiheiki 太平記 (likely composed c. 1360/70), an envoy of Emperor Go-Daigo 後醍醐天皇 (r. 1318–39) exhorts the emperor’s son, the Prince of the Great Pagoda (ōtō no miya 大塔宮), Moriyoshi 護良 (1308–35), who had taken up arms to restore imperial power, to “cut off his hair quickly, resume […] black-dyed garments, and go back again” to his abbacy.49 Go-Daigo’s implicit argument is that the struggle to restore the imperial office had allowed the abbot to take up arms as an emergency transgression; the emergency was, however, over. Moriyoshi’s answer is equally revealing. He invokes the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas’ two ways to help humans: on the one hand, “being mild and forbearing, and thinking first of all of mercy”; on the other hand, “subduing evil”, which “means being powerful and angry, and thinking first of all of punishment”. Then Moriyoshi asks: “Which is best for the sake of the state: that as an abbot I should dwell in a retired valley on Mount Hiei, or that as chief of His Majesty’s imperial government I should keep peace in all the realm?” At this point the Taiheiki interlaces two stories, each involving a monk: one is contemporary, Monkan 文観 (1278–1357), who, likely possessed by “demons and heretics”, meddled in the affairs of war and was punished; the other belongs to the past, Gedatsu Shōnin 解脱上人 (d. 1213), who stayed away from the Jōkyū Disturbance 承久の乱 (1221) and remained a saint.50 In the end Moriyoshi falls and is killed though deceit, even though he should have obtained pardon. Thus the chronicle approves him for taking up arms, even at the risk of sinning, but he should indeed have returned to religious life once peace had been restored.

13Yet the exemplarity of divine beings, claimed by the prince in the Taiheiki, was to become, by the end of the fourteenth century, an argument for the militarization of monasteries.51 Indeed from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, one sees figures straddling the monastic institution and warfare, along with the coexistence of approval and critique. The Heike Monogatari portrayed negatively Taira no Kiyomori, who had taken priestly orders, wearing a resplendent armour and battle-robe, and holding a halberd. “He seemed an incarnation of wrath.” When his pious son Shigemori 重盛 (1138–79) came to admonish him not to fight against Go-Shirakawa, Kiyomori tried to hide the armour under silken monastic robes, to no avail. Shigemori then delivered a tearful rebuke. Since time immemorial, “those who have held the office of premier have never been so arrogant as to appear in warlike attire. Above all [and here we come to what interests us in this alleged speech] you are a priest. Despite this fact, you are about to take off your priest’s robe, the robe that is sacred to the Buddhas of the Three Worlds. It is the garb of those who have been liberated from the passions”.52 On the other hand, the same source does not seem to be negative when it depicts the reaction of the monks of Miidera and Nara to Prince Mochihito’s 以仁王 (1151–80) appeal, seeing the situation as a sign of the gods, including Hachiman, to protect him. The Imperial Law and the Buddha’s Laws are threatened; the letter of Miidera 三井寺 to Nara’s Kōfukuji 興福寺 mentions as an example the reaction of the Chinese monks of Mount Ch’ing-Liang, who “took up arms” when the Emperor “ordered his soldiers to put an end to the Buddha’s Law”, an example that the recipients in Nara also invoke.53 In another case, during the Kenmu era 建武 (1334–6), the monks of Hiei also pleaded exception: “Although we who are monks have shaken off the dust of the world, how can we fail to render faithful service to the state?” And so they armed themselves and moved against the Hōjō 北条家.54 Clearly, an argument was available to justify monastic warfare – the good of the state (although monks could not do just anything: when the Miidera monks act excessively, “as if possessed by an evil spirit”, forgetting that Kiyomori is Emperor Antoku’s grandfather, retribution will strike).55

14In medieval Europe, while one finds periods with more fighting clergy, the prohibition against monks or clerics bearing arms was stricter. With the exception of the military orders such as Templars or Teutonic Knights, one was either a layman or a monk or cleric;56 Western Christianity lacks the long gradient of monastic and priestly ordinations existing in Japan. Prohibitions do not mean the absence of de facto transgressions, as the fighting bishops of the Carolingian era (c. 750 to c. 900) show.57 One hears later of a German bishop deposed not so much for having fought against the pagan Hungarians in defense of the realm, and killed, but because he had been defaced in the course of combat.58

15In the High Middle Ages, the boundary between clergy and warriors hardened. It became part of the former status group’s definition that it would abstain from sex and from bloodshed.59 At the same time, the First Crusade opened up – ephemerally – a window allowing participants to be simultaneously quasi-monks through penitential asceticism and blood-shedding warriors. This combination was institutionalized in the religious military orders, the most famous being the Templars, the Hospitallers of Saint John (later Order of Malta) and the Teutonic Knights.60 The combination was attractive as it allowed the oxymoronic joining of two callings; but it also opened the Knights Templar to criticism as their military-political activities might be judged according to the dominant standards of monastic religion. These censures bore on the order in general; they resemble those the Heike Monogatari levied against Taira no Kiyomori and against Japanese monks who engaged in fighting. They appeared early on: there was no honeymoon period following immediately the foundation of the Templars.61 An early partisan had even to defend the young order and reject comments suggesting that the higher fight was contemplative and spiritual, and that fighting militarily for Christ was worthless, as tricks of the Devil. Satan, he wrote, “now tells the knights of Christ to lay down their arms, not to wage war, to flee tumults, to seek out the wilderness”.62 Both cultures had conceptions of “callings” or “status”. But how influential and present were these conceptions? The Western medieval ideology of the social “orders” (ordines), in particular the “three orders” of those who pray, those who fight, and those who till (but also the binary of governing orders, sacerdotes and principes63), has tended to mask the actual complexity of European societies. Still, one may wonder whether this ideology’s dichotomous opposition between those who pray and those who fight was not stronger than its counterpart in Japan. There, perhaps, ideologically and de facto, until the Edo period, the boundaries between callings were much more fluid.

16This three-part comparison-and-contrast between Eurasia’s Far West and Far East will, it is hoped, justify the comparative method itself as making less evident the categories and phenomena that historians of respectively Japan and Western Europe would take for granted. First, there was no holy war, or almost, in Japan, unlike in the West, despite notions of religious corruption inspired by negative supernatural powers. Second, religious concerns about war and victory had different foci, and supernatural vengeance came from different actors. Third, the combination of a warring role and holy orders took different forms in the two cultures. In Eurasia’s Far West, it was limited, monopolized, and institutionalized via the military orders; in its Far East, it was more common but by no means institutionalized.

Notes de bas de page

1 See Maurice Aymard, “Histoire et comparaison”, in Hartmut Atsma, André Burguière (eds), Marc Bloch aujourd’hui. Histoire comparée et sciences sociales, Paris, Éd. de l’EHESS, 1990, p. 271–8; Émile Durkheim, “Préface”, L’Année sociologique, 1, 1896–8, p. i-vii, esp. p. ii-iii: “L’histoire ne peut être une science que dans la mesure où elle explique, et l’on ne peut expliquer qu’en comparant. Même la simple description n’est guère possible autrement […]. Dès qu’elle compare, l’histoire devient indistincte de la sociologie.”

2 “Il n’y a de science que du général, il n’y a donc qu’une méthode permettant une synthèse, la méthode comparative” (Frédéric Joüon des Longrais, L’Est et l’Ouest. Institutions du Japon et de l’Occident comparées [six études de sociologie juridique], Tōkyō/Paris, Maison franco-japonnaise/Institut de recherches d’histoire étrangère, 1958, p. 1).

3 “Larges fresques pseudo-historiques où des peintres de talent […] s’efforcent d’enchaîner les faits dans une évolution finaliste” (ibid.).

4 An example, Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998.

5 An example, Hinnerk Bruhns, Wilfired Nippel (eds), Max Weber und die Stadt im Kulturvergleich, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000.

6 Marshall D. Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 5.

7 Marc Bloch, La société féodale, vol. 2, Paris, Albin Michel, 1939–40, p. 610–13 (American transl. Feudal Society, vol. 2, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1961, p. 446–7).

8 See the survey by Richard Bowring, The Religious Traditions of Japan 500–1600, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

9 See now the panorama in Satō Hitomi, “Peace or not? Power and communities in late medieval Japan”, Storica, 65, 2016, p. 101–21. I thank Professor Hattori Yoshihisa for having brought this to my attention. See his “Community, Communication, and Political Integration in the Late Medieval Alpine Regions. Survey from a Comparative Viewpoint”, in Marco Bellabarba, Hannes Obermair, Satō Hitomi (eds), Communities and Conflicts in the Alps from the Late Middle Ages to Early Modernity, Bologna/Berlin, Dunker & Humblot, 2015, p. 13–38; id. (in Japanese), Konflikte in der bäuerlichen Gesellschaft im alpinen Raum (2009), with a comparative discussion at page 379–85 (in German). And see the contribution by Satō Hitomi and Serena Ferente to the present volume.

10 Henrici de Segusio cardinalis Hostiensis Summa Aurea, book 3, ch. 19, Venice, J. Vitali, 1574, p. 1141–2, and the discussion in Philippe Buc, Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, p. 15–16 and 220 (French transl. Guerre sainte, martyre, et terreur. Formes chrétiennes de la violence en Occident, Paris, Gallimard, 2017, p. 36–7 and 337–8).

11 Detailed narrative history by Laurence W. Marvin, The Occitan War: A Military and Political History of the Albigensian Crusade, 1209–18, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008; survey in Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 563–605.

12 The key survey is Frantisek Šmahel, Husitská revoluce, Prague, Univerzita Karlova, 1993 (German transl. Die hussitische Revolution, Hannover, Hahn, 2002, 3 vol.).

13 Jacques Berlioz, Tuez-les tous, Dieu reconnaîtra les siens. Le massacre de Béziers (22 juillet 1209) et la croisade contre les Albigeois vus par Césaire de Heisterbach, Portet-sur-Garonne, Loubatières, 1994.

14 Philippe Buc, “Christianity’s Stamp. Of Hybrids, Traitors, False Peace, Massacres and other Horrors”, 2017 Vienna Workshop paper, submitted for publication.

15 Jien was a scion of the Fujiwara courtier line, son of the Kampaku and Sesshō Fujiwara no Tadamichi (d. 1164), and brother of Kujō Kanezane (d. 1207), also Kampaku.

16 American transl. by Delmer M. Brown, Ishida Ichirō, The Future and the Past: A Translation and Study of the Gukanshō, an Interpretative History of Japan Written in 1219, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979, p. 171–3. Voir Bowring, The Religious Traditions of Japan, op. cit., p. 251–2.

17 See now Brent Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christans and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

18 Nichiren Daishonin, The Selection of the Time, English transl. edited by the Gosho translation committee (Gosho Honyaku Iinkai), The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, vol. 2, Tōkyō, Sōka Gakkai, 2003, p. 579.

19 See Katsumata Shizuo, Ikki. Coalitions, ligues et révoltes dans le Japon d’autrefois, transl. by Pierre-François Souyri, Paris, Éd. du CNRS, 2011 (orig. Tōkyō, Iwanami Shoten, 1982); id., “Ikki. Ligues, conjurations et révoltes dans la société médiévale japonaise”, Annales HSS, 50/2, 1995, p. 373–94.

20 Mikael Adolphson, “Violence, Warfare and Buddhism in Early Medieval Japan”, Questiones Medii Aevi Novae, 21, 2016, p. 65–89, here summarizing his earlier work on the topic.

21 Carol Richmond Tsang, War and Faith. Ikkō ikki in late Muromachi Japan, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007, esp. p. 112–14. See her conclusions, p. 237–44.

22 Neil McMullin, Buddhism and the State in Sixteenth-Century Japan, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984, p. 100–45, Kennyo’s words at p. 106.

23 Tsang, War and Faith, op. cit., p. 152–4 and 156. Was this more developed among Honganji sectarians, or (as Tsang suggests, p. 155), a general pattern: “religious armies were too common”?

24 See David C. Kang, “Why Was there no Religious War in Pre-Modern Southeast Asia?”, European Journal of International Relations, 20/4, 2014, p. 965–86.

25 The argument in Philippe Buc, “Religions and Warfare. Prolegomena to a Comparative Study”, Questiones Medii Aevi Novae, 21, 2016, p. 9–26, esp. p. 21–4.

26 Brown, Ishida, The Future and the Past, op. cit., p. 219–121, esp. p. 221.

27 Cited by Naoko Gunji, “Horrified Victors. Spirit Pacification of Heike Losers”, in Mikael Adolphson, Anne Commons (eds), Lovable Losers: The Heike in Action and Memory, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2015, p. 166–94, esp. p. 170.

28 Ibid., p. 173–6, passim.

29 For Yoritomo’s stupas, see also Brian D. Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes: Buddhist Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan, Cambridge, Harvard University Asia Center, 2000, p. 236–40.

30 Claire-Akiko Brisset, “Le Heike monogatari dans le Japon médiéval. Un ‘chant pour les morts’?”, in Julie Labarthe (ed.), Formes modernes de la poésie épique. Nouvelles approches, Brussels, Peter Lang, 2004, p. 451–66, gives a tally of portents and reactions in the Azuma Kagami and in the diary of Jien’s brother Kujō Kanezane, the Gyokuyō.

31 Heike no Monogatari, book 3, ch. 1, transl. by Kitagawa Hiroshi, Bruce T. Tsuchida, The Tale of the Heike. Heike Monogatari, Tōkyō, University of Tōkyō Press, 1975, p. 158–9. The responsible evil spirits are identified through mediums. “They were the spirit of Sanuki-no-In [Sutoku], the departed spirit of […] Yorinaga, the departed spirit of the [just executed] new councillor, Narichika, the spirit of Priest Saikō, and the living spirit of the exiles of Kikai-ga-shima [like the two just named, losers in a plot against Taira dominance at court].” The deposed emperor gained back his imperial name, Sutoku; a promotion to Premier with the rank of first senior court was read on the tomb of Yorinaga. Parallels in Brown, Ishida, The Future and the Past, op. cit., p. 124.

32 Janet L. Nelson, “Carolingian Violence and the Ritualization of Ninth-Century Warfare”, in Guy Halsall (ed.), Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2002, p. 90–107, esp. p. 101, referring back to her own “The quest for peace in a time of war. The Carolingian Brüderkriege, p. 840–3”, in Johannes Fried (ed.), Träger und Instrumentarien des Friedens im Hohen und Späten Mittelalter, Sigmaringen, Thorbecke (Vorträge und Forschungen, 43), 1996, p. 87–114. See Angilbert’s poem: Ernst Dümmler, Poetae latini aevi Carolini, vol. 2, Berlin, Weidmann (Monumenta Germaniae Historia), 1884, p. 138: “This made the army of hell rejoice with Cerberean appetite” (unde manus infernorum gaudet gula Cerberi).

33 Nelson, “Carolingian Violence”, art. cit.; see also John Gillingham, “Fontenoy and After. Pursuing Enemies to Death in France between the Ninth and the Eleventh Centuries”, in Paul Fouracre, David Ganz (eds), Frankland: The Franks and the World in the Early Middle Ages. Essays in honour of Dame Jinty Nelson, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2008, p. 242–65, esp. p. 255–6, with earlier bibliography.

34 This is a development interestingly arrested in Byzantium by Constantinople’s elite, uninterested in giving frontier warriors the aura of martyrdom. See most recently Yannis Stouraitis, “Jihâd and Crusade. Byzantine Positions towards the Notion of ‘Holy War’”, Byzantina Symmeikta, 21, 2011, p. 11–63; id., A Companion to the Byzantine Culture of War, Leiden, Brill, 2018 (with relevant bibliography).

35 In the words of Nithard, who fought at Fontenoy, “either out of anger, hatred, or vainglory, or any passion” (aut ira aut odio aut vana Gloria). Nithard, Histoire des fils de Louis le Pieux, book 3, ch. 1, ed. by Philippe Lauer, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1964, p. 80–3, American transl. in Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilization: A Reader, Peterborough, Broadview Press, 1993, p. 349–50.

36 Hrabanus Maurus, Letter 32 to Otgar, in Epistolae Karolini aevi, vol. 3, Berlin, Weidmann (Monumenta Germaniae Historica), 1889, p. 464: “[…] propter avaritiam […] atque propter favorem dominorum suorum temporalium, aeternum Dominum contempserunt, et mandata illius spernentes, non casu, sed per industriam homicidium perfecerunt.”

37 Ōta Gyūichi, The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga, initial book, ch. 24, transl. by Jeroen Pieter Lamers, Jurgen Elisonas, Leiden, Brill, 2011, p. 91–2.

38 Ōta, The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga, book 4, ch. 5, op. cit., p. 165–6.

39 The classic study is Frederick Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975; see, e.g., p. 17–18, 128–9, 217–18, and 268–73.

40 Jean-Claude Schmitt, Les revenants. Les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale, Paris, Gallimard, 1994 (American transl. Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998).

41 The title of ch. 4 in Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints. Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 198.

42 See Jean Flori, La guerre sainte. La formation de l’idée de croisade dans l’Occident chrétien, Paris, Aubier, 2001, and the classic Carl Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, Stuttgart, W. Kohlhammer, 1935 (American transl. The Origins of the Idea of Crusade, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1977). Good discussion of fighting saints in the otherwise flawed book by Elizabeth Lapina, Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade, University Park, Penn State University Press, 2015, see my review in the Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 125, 2017, p. 445–7.

43 Dominique Barthélemy, Chevaliers et miracles. La violence et le sacré dans la société féodale, Paris, Armand Colin, 2004. See earlier Paul Rousset, “La croyance en la justice immanente à l’époque féodale”, Le Moyen Âge, 54/3, 1948, p. 225–48; Henri Platelle, “La violence et ses remèdes en Flandre au xie siècle”, Sacris erudiri, 20, 1971, p. 101–73; id., “Crime et châtiment à Marchiennes. Étude sur la conception et le fonctionnement de la justice d’après les Miracles de sainte Rictrude”, Sacris erudiri, 24, 1980, p. 155–202.

44 Eugène de Certain (dir.), Miracula Sancti Benedicti / Miracula sancti Benedicti, Paris, Jules Renouard, 1858.

45 Ibid., book VI, ch. 16, p. 242–3.

46 Ibid., book III, ch. 8, p. 148–50.

47 Ibid., book V, ch. 16, p. 215.

48 Best point of entry into this apocalyptic moment, Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse, New York, Basic Books, 2011.

49 Mikael S. Adolphson, The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha: Sōhei and Monastic Warriors in Japanese History, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2007, p. 110–13 (“Moriyoshi represents the complete joining of three political spheres – noble, religious, and military”); Andrew Edmund Goble, Kenmu: Go-Daigo’s Revolution, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 75–6 and 143–5.

50 Taiheiki, transl. by Helen McCullough, book 12, p. 342, 366–7, and 370–1.

51 Paul Demiéville, Le bouddhisme et la guerre, in id., Choix d’études bouddhiques (1229–70), Leiden, Brill, 1973, p. 261–99, esp. p. 290–2; American transl. “Buddhism and War”, in Michael K. Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer (ed.), Buddhist Warfare, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 17–57, esp. p. 39–40. See Buc, “Religions and Warfare”, art. cit., p. 19–21.

52 Heike no Monogatari, book 2, ch. 6, transl. by Kitagawa, Tsuchida, The Tale of the Heike, op. cit., p. 107–11.

53 Ibid., book 4, ch. 7–8, p. 252–7: “We can see that among the people the Buddha’s Law has declined and the Imperial Law has languished. If we do not now chastise Kiyomori Nyudo for his evil doings, when shall we have another opportunity? The prince has come to our temple. Is this not a sign from Sho-Hachiman-Gu or Shinra Dai Myojin [Susanoo o-Mikoto] for us to protect him? The attendants of the god of heaven will surely appear before us. The Buddhas and gods will enable us to destroy our enemies.” Writing to Nara and the Enryakuji, they said that “Kiyomori is about to nullify the Imperial Law and destroy the Buddha’s Law at his own will”.

54 Taiheiki, book 8, transl. McCullough, p. 218–19. Note that the monks consider that a former example of armed monastic struggle was under Ryōgen (Jie), when we “pulled the autumn forest of forged weapons over our garments of forbearance, that we might destroy interfering demons therewith. And thenceforth through the power of the Buddhist Law we expelled the evil that appeared in the realm, and through the strength of our god drove back treachery that disordered the state”. For the continental origins of the notion that monks in an emergency should protect the state with arms, see Adolphson, Teeth and Claws, op. cit., p. 21–4, for what Ryōgen actually may have done, ibid., p. 29–35.

55 See the Heike Monogatari, book 3, ch. 14, transl. by Kitagawa, Tsuchida, The Tale of the Heike, op. cit., p. 340. This remark I owe to Michelle Lau’s seminar paper, January 2017.

56 My thanks here to David Bachrach: law and practice differed for clergy under the grade of deacon, and for clergy above and including the grade of deacon.

57 Eugen Ewig, “Milo et eius similes”, in Sankt Bonifatius. Gedenkgabe zum zwölfhundertsten Todestag, Fulda, Parzeller, 1954, p. 412–140; Friedrich Prinz, Klerus und Krieg im früheren Mittelalter. Untersuchungen zur Rolle der Kirche beim Aufbau der Königsherrschaft, Stuttgart, Hiersemann, 1971.

58 Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, book 2, ch. 27, ed. by Robert Holtzmann, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum, nova series 9, Berlin, Weidmann (Monumenta Germaniae Historica), 1935, p. 72, with in general Prinz, Klerus und Krieg, op. cit., p. 143, n. 95.

59 The impact of the so-called Peace of God on status boundaries is well explained in Amy Remensnyder, “Purity, Pollution, and Peace. An Aspect of Social Reform Between the Late Tenth Century and 1076”, in Thomas Head, Richard Landes (eds), The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1992, p. 21–40.

60 Good English-language introductions by Helen Nicholson, The Knights Hospitaller, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 2001; id., The Knights Templar: A New History, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2001; in French, Alain Demurger, Les Hospitaliers. De Jérusalem à Rhodes, 1050–1317, Paris, Tallandier, 2013; id., Les Templiers. Une chevalerie chrétienne au Moyen Âge, Paris, Seuil, 2005; id., Chevaliers du Christ. Les ordres religieux-militaires au Moyen Âge (xie-xvie siècle), Paris, Seuil, 2002; Hartmut Boockmann, Der Deutsche Orden. 12 Kapitel aus seiner Geschichte, Munich, Beck, 1981; Jürgen Sarnowsky, Der Deutsche Orden, Munich, Beck, 2007.

61 Leads in Katherine Allen Smith, War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2013, p. 107–9.

62 Nunc militibus Christi dicit ut arma deponant, bella non gerant, tumultum fugiant, secretum petant, Letter of Hugo Peccator, § 6, ed. in Jean Leclerq, “Un document sur les débuts des Templiers”, in id., Recueil d’études sur saint Bernard et ses écrits, Rome, Storia e Letteratura, 1966, p. 87–99, esp. p. 96; English transl. by Malcolm Barber, Keith Bate, The Templars: Selected Sources, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002, p. 54–9.

63 George Duby, Les trois ordres, ou L’imaginaire du féodalisme, Paris, Gallimard, 1978 (American transl. The three orders: Feudal Society Imagined, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980). Critique in Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Die ‘Wirklichkeit’ und das “Wissen’”, Historische Zeitschrift, 232/1, 1981, p. 61–91.


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