Peace and Truce of God
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Peace and Truce of God was a movement in the Middle Ages led by the Catholic Church and the first mass peace movement in history. The eastern half of the former Carolingian Empire did not experience the same collapse of central authority, and neither did England.
The Peace of God was first proclaimed in 989, at the Council of Charroux. It sought to protect ecclesiastical property, agricultural resources and unarmed clerics. The Truce of God, first proclaimed in 1027 at the Council of Toulouges, attempted to limit the days of the week and times of year that the nobility engaged in violence.The movement survived in some form until the thirteenth century.
Other strategies to deal with the problem of violence in the western half of the former Carolingian Empire include Chivalry and the Crusades.
Georges Duby summarized the widening social repercussions of Pax Dei:
- The Peace and Truce of God, by attaching sacred significance to privacy, helped create a space in which communal gatherings could take place and thus encouraged the reconstitution of public space at the village level ... In the eleventh and twelfth centuries many a village grew up in the shadow of the church, in the zone of immunity where violence was prohibited under peace regulations.
See also
- Catholic peace traditions
- Cluniac Reforms
- Anglo-Saxon law (King's Peace)
- Landfrieden
- Religion and peacebuilding
- Cáin Adomnáin
