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La Chanson de Roland
And 12th Century Society
Ryan Renfro
History 4b
The 29th day of January in the year of our Lord 1998
Thursday, about dawn
On the 15th
of July, 1099 Christian crusaders laid siege to the holy city of
Jerusalem, capturing it and putting all of its inhabitants to the
sword. Chivalric knights, pious and savage, lead wave after
wave of colossal armies to the Holy Land, killing or converting
anyone and everyone they encountered. This was the world in
which the Song of Roland was written. The tale
of Roland and Oliver and their great king Charlemagne was a tale
of a time when once before the armies of Christendom had fought
against the Muslim hosts. In composing this song, however,
the Christians of the 12th century imbedded their
ideas and ideals, as most cultures are apt to do, leaving the
reader with a clear picture of what a good Christian in the 1100s
acted like. It is through this understanding of the ideal
Christian, a warrior fighting for God, that the Song of Roland
conveys a glimpse of how religious beliefs influenced the feudal
politics and crusading society of the 12th century.
The perfect Christian in the Song of Roland is the pious
warrior, the knight who fights in a holy war against the enemies
of the faith, in this instance the Muslims. This idea of
holy war is given both directly by God, who commands Charlemagne
through Gabriel to invade the lands of Islam to protect
Christians[1], and through the
Archbishop Turpin, who calls them to battle and confession,
declaring all who will die to be martyrs bound for heaven.[2] But the knight was
not only required to kill as many infidels as possible. Charlemagne
is specifically mentioned to have attended mass in the morning on
two occasions[3] during the campaign in
Spain, suggesting that piety and religious devotion were
important characteristics at that time. It is also manifest
within The Song of Roland just how great the faith of
these people is. They truly believe that God has a real
presence in their affairs, from the angel Gabriel aiding
Charlemagne in battle[4] to the tempests which
arise in France while Roland fights in Spain[5].
Killing
pagans may have been pleasing to this warrior culture, but it
should be noted, however, that the ideal Christian was also to be
merciful to those who asked for quarter and who wished to be
converted to the true religion, but to a pagan one “must
render neither peace nor love.”[6] Thus we get what seems to a modern to be
a Christianity that contradicts itself, with the ideal Christian
being summed up the character of Archbishop Turpin, who says mass
then slaughters the heathens by the thousands. At most
other times in history a fighting church official would have
seemed somewhat unchristian. The fact that an Archbishop is
fighting shows how strongly this crusading spirit was imbedded
into the society and religion of the 12th
century.
Due
to its initial explosion, in which it conquered most of the
southern and eastern parts of the Roman and Persian empires,
Islam was perceived as a threat to Christendom, at first mainly
on the Spanish frontier but then later to the Byzantium Empire
and to pilgrims headed for the holy city of Jerusalem itself.
It is because of this threat that Islam became to be seen as
something foreign and hostile to Medieval Europe. The
Muslims viewed Christians as fellow people of the Book, but the
Christians of The Song of Roland saw them as wicked
polytheists who serve Mohammed and Apollo and who do not love God[7]. The only thing it
does manage to get right is their great wealth. This
indicates that there was a great cultural, political, and
religious rift between the lands which had formerly comprised the
Roman Empire and that there was far less understanding and
exchange of ideas between these peoples then there had been 900
years before.
The
greatest duty of a Christian at this time, above all else, was to
be loyal to God. The ways in which one went about doing
this was to be loyal to God’s Church, headed by the
Christ’s Vicar in Rome, and by loyalty to the king. The
Song of Roland contains numerous references to Saint Gabriel
guarding Charlemagne and giving him orders from God, making him a
divine representative on earth. It was therefore a
religious duty to be a allegiant vassal, for the will of your
lord was the will of the Lord since power came down from God
through Charlemagne and proceeded down the feudal ladder.
This suggests that it was necessary in these times to tie the
bonds between a lord and his vassal with religious ties in order
to hold a society together which depended entirely upon these
bonds.
Angelic visitors were not the only way which temporal power was
linked to spiritual forces. The Song of Roland shows a society
that has little separation of church and state. Indeed,
Charlemagne was crowned Roman Emperor by the Pope for whom in the
song he “won the poll-tax for Rome(the Pope)’s own
use.”[8] Charlemagne, as the
ideal Christian king, gets his power from the Pope and therefore
owes allegiance to the descendant of St. Peter. By the 12th
century the papacy had claimed to be head of the entire Church,
creating a religious and in some ways political united entity
known as Christendom. It was this and particularly the
kingdom of France which Roland and Oliver were said to have died
fighting for.
Perhaps the greatest cause for the development in the west of
this idea of fighting against the pagans was the peoples of which
Western Europe was comprised during these centuries. The
followers of Latin Christianity had not been fully Christianized
and were the descendents of barbarian invaders who had in the
previous centuries sacked the Western Roman Empire and
established small barbarian kingdoms where war was central.
The vast majority of the characters in The Song of Roland are
warriors, who seem to love nothing so much as violence. But
this is a poor basis for a stable society, and would it not then
appear fitting that their aggression should be used against the
enemies of the faith instead of against the faithful? With
this in mind it doesn’t seem all that strange that Christian
warriors should be encouraged to fight the infidel in order to
bring relative peace and prosperity to their homelands.
There is an example in the song of how disputes where settled
within this feudal system with the trial by combat of Count
Ganelon. The notion of fighting for God was extended to the
justice system in the Middle Ages in that each side of a dispute
would be represented by a combatant who would fight the
other’s representative, and it was believed that God would
“make justice shine forth!”[9] This means that it was every good
Christians duty to, when the occasion arose, fight for the just
side in a case and would, just as Thierry did to the stronger
Pinabel[10],
overcome and slay him.
In the end, Roland and his contemporaries are depicted in The
Song of Roland as the idealized Christian of the 12th
century. They have all of the crusading zeal of knights of
the 1100’s and not one of Charlemagne’s. It
is perhaps the inability of each age to recognize it’s own
bias, and so they rewrite the past on their own grounds. This
may be for the best, for from these tales as much, if not more
can be learned about how they view the world than from any of
their accounts of their own world because they are more likely to
write their ideals and not their realities.
Bibliography
Burgess, Glyn. The
Dong of Roland. Penguin Books, London.
1990.
Hallam, Elizabeth.
Chronicles of the Crusades. Weidenfeld and
Nicolson,
New York. 1989.
[1] The Song of Roland, p. 156
[2] Ibid., p. 65
[3] Ibid., p. 34 and 50
[4] Ibid., p. 144
[5] Ibid., p. 74
[6] Ibid., p. 143
[7] Ibid., p. 29
[8] Ibid., p. 40
[9] Ibid., p. 153
[10] Ibid., p. 154