|
S i d e b a r
Brutality Replaces Chivalry as Church’s Influence Wanes
|
This Rock
Volume 18, Number 5
 May-June 2007 
|
|
|
The Hundred Years’ War witnessed the passing of the age of chivalry and feudalism. One of the great qualities of feudalism was the restriction that it placed on war fighting. Feudal lords could require of their knights no more than forty days of service at a stretch, a code that limited their capacity to make war. The Hundred Years’ War ushered in the age of paid soldiers who did not live by any feudal code and who could remain in the field as long as kings could afford to pay them. Moreover, these soldiers were drawn from all classes, making warfare a more democratic than aristocratic enterprise, thus more violent and unrestricted. Such soldiers made their living by terrorizing civilian populations when real fighting was unavailable. Compounding this unrestricted quality was the development of gunpowder artillery, even a few breechloading pieces by the end of the war. Artillery became mobile and fire more accurate. Since this time, artillery has been responsible for more casualties than any other battlefield arm. Artillery made walled cities increasingly obsolete and shifted the advantage from the defense to the offense in siege warfare. Heavy cavalry, and with it, heavy armor, also began to fade as gunpowder weapons became more refined and body armor useless against them.
The war also marked the passing of kingdoms and the early stages of the nation-state. To be sure, the Joan of Arc story takes on the role of myth in creating the French nation. But more significant is the eclipse of Church authority. The years during which the papacy languished in Avignon contributed mightily to this, as did the subsequent Western Schism, so that the Church, though it repeatedly tried, lacked the power and force to broker any peace between England and France.But the passing of Church authority meant not only a loss of a voice that could temper international political quarrels, but also the loss of a voice that could dictate how they were resolved.
The Church had, for example, in 1139, at the Second Lateran Council forbidden Christians from using the bow and arrow in warfare against other Christians: "We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowman and archers, which is hateful to God, to be employed against Christians and Catholics from now on."
The Church that had forbidden fighting on Sundays, holy days, and during Lent and Advent watched warfare grow more brutal and noncombatants suffer more and more. Like clerics today who condemn naval embargoes and nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, the Church of the mid-fifteenth century went unheard. It is not mere coincidence that warfare became more unrestricted as the Protestant Reformation took shape. Chivalry was, ultimately, a religious code that fell when the Church in whose bosom it was nurtured suffered the blows of dissent.
|
C A T H O L I C A N S W E R S :
[TOP]
