In every Western society from ancient Greece until the present, soldiers’ needs have entailed the incorporation of ceremonies and rites designed to seek the aid of higher powers on behalf of individual soldiers and, in some cases, the army as a whole. Soldiers in the Western tradition of warfare have always found it necessary to trust in something greater than themselves or even than their armies or nations in order to summon the courage necessary to risk their lives in combat. In the modern world, every Western nation has a chaplain corps whose primary responsibilities include preparing soldiers for the stresses of battle because military planners clearly understand the adage, “There are no atheists in foxholes.”
The Ancient World
Religious piety among soldiers was such a well-accepted norm of behavior in classical Greece that the authors of military manuals took it into account when discussing prebattle preparations. Onasander argued in his Strate-gikos that “soldiers are far more courageous when they believe they are facing dangers with the will of the Gods” (Aeneas . . . 1923, 309). Many Greek field commanders took this advice to heart when leading their troops into battle. The Spartans routinely brought herds of goats with them on campaign so that sacrifices could be offered not only as a preparation for every battle, but whenever a major military decision had to be made. Similar sacrifices were performed by most of the other Greek city-states. In his Anabasis, Xenophon noted that before the Ten Thousand forced a crossing over the Centrites River, sacrifices were held under a hail of enemy fire. Similarly, Alexander the Great held back from assaulting the fortified city of Gaza until he had received favorable results from animal sacrifices performed by the priests serving with his army.
We are even better informed about the religious rites and ceremonies performed by and for Roman soldiers in the field. Roman soldiers swore sacred oaths to the gods and to the emperors upon entering service and renewed these oaths according to a regular daily and yearly schedule. They participated in the cultic life of the official army religion by attending sacrifices at camp altars. The soldiers also participated in a yearly liturgical cycle, which corresponded to the rites celebrated by the colleges of priests at Rome. The unit standards and eagles that led the army into battle were imbued with sacred power (numen) from which Roman soldiers drew strength and courage. In addition, the Roman State held public religious celebrations intended to secure the support of the gods for Roman military victory.
One of the most important symbols of the Roman army at prayer was the legionary eagle. Religious practice in the army inculcated the belief among Roman soldiers that their military standards were imbued with sacred power. Officers stressed that this power was transmitted to soldiers who venerated their eagles and other unit symbols, including the cavalry banners and cohort standards. Official military practice reinforced the reverence that the men felt for their eagles by utilizing them as a focus of religious rituals. The standards were kept in sacred shrines at the center of military camps. Military regulations also demanded severe punishments for soldiers who were responsible for the loss of unit standards and even required the removal from service of units that lost their eagles. The importance of the eagles for the morale of the Roman soldiers is neatly characterized by Tacitus in an account of a Roman campaign against the Germans during the reign of Tiberius. Germanicus, the Roman commander, was holding his troops tightly in check because he faced a numerically superior force. But when he saw a flight of eight eagles pass overhead he ordered his men to follow the great birds into battle because they were the protection gods of the legions.
Late Antiquity
As the Roman rulers following Constantine pursued policies that transformed the empire into a Christian state, the religious practices of the Roman army also evolved to take on Christian forms. Christian emperors understood that religion had played a crucial role in maintaining both military discipline as well as morale among the troops. Therefore, the new Christian leadership of the state and army found it necessary to keep the essential forms of the older military religious practices, while changing the content to meet the demands of Christian doctrine. Thus the imperial government modified the traditional oath of military service so that it would be understood as a Christian oath. Vegetius’s military manual, the Epitoma Rei Militaris (Epitome of Military Matters), composed in the late fourth century, recorded the basic elements of the oath of service that had been in use during the Roman Republic and had remained virtually unchanged up through the fourth century. Soldiers swore to be faithful to the emperor, never to desert from military service, and not to refuse to die for the good of the Roman State. However, Vegetius’s Christianized text included an additional clause in which soldiers swore to carry out their duties by God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit.
A knight of the crusades in chain mail kneels in homage, his helmet being held above his head by another, ca. 1275.
In addition to adapting the pagan traditions of Roman army religion to fit within the new Christian paradigm, Constantine and his successors also maintained the tradition of mobilizing public religious celebrations on behalf of the soldiers in the field. Whereas pagan emperors held games and dedicated new temples in order to gain the favor of the gods for their military undertakings, Christian emperors invoked divine aid through Christian rituals. Churches all over the empire were required to say prayers on behalf of the emperor and his army while they were in the field. On one occasion, during the campaign of his general Priscus against the Avars in 593, Emperor Maurice went to Hagia Sophia and personally led the prayers to God.
Military planners and officers of the Christian Roman army also recognized that battle standards had an important role to play as a focus of unit reverence and pride for soldiers. The old battle standards and legionary eagles were tainted by their association with the pagan gods. However, Christians had a perfect substitute in the symbol seen by Constantine at the Milvian Bridge—the Christian cross. Over the course of the fourth century the cross was introduced wholesale into military usage and was applied to shields and flags. The Roman army also introduced large marching crosses to act as standards for soldiers while they served on campaign. The utilization of the cross as a military standard and marker was meant to identify the Roman army with its new god and the Romans as Christian soldiers—a tradition that was to have a long history in the West.
One further development in the Christianization of the Roman army was the introduction of priests to serve as chaplains for the soldiers. In the old pagan army, officers and centurions had undertaken most of the religious leadership. But the Christian religion demanded that only those with special sacred qualifications presume to serve the holy mysteries and tend the spiritual needs of the men. However, the Roman army of the fourth and fifth centuries was composed of a heterogeneous mix of Nicene Christians, Arian Christians, and various kinds of pagans. In order to accommodate the religious needs of soldiers from these various faith traditions, the army allowed a certain degree of religious freedom to its troops. Prosper of Aquitaine reports in his chronicle that during a campaign against the Visigoths in 439, Litorius, the Roman commander, allowed the Hunnic cavalry under his command to perform their own sacred rites, including using auguries and summoning spirits. In other cases, Nicene bishops were forced to allow Arian troops serving as garrisons in their cities to support Arian clergy. Bishop Ambrose of Milan, for one, complained to Emperor Gratian that he had no control over the Arian bishops serving among the Gothic troops in his city.
Early Middle Ages
As they did with so many other aspects of Roman military organization, the rulers of the Romano-German successor states adopted Christian religious practices. The first surviving statement of Carolingian governmental policy treating the recruitment and service of priests and bishops to serve as military chaplains was issued in 742. The Carolingian government ordered that every unit commander in the army was to have on his staff a priest capable of hearing confessions and assigning penances. In addition, the command staff of the army was to include one or two bishops with their attendant priests who were to form the leadership cadre for the provision of pastoral care. The duties of the bishops included celebrating public masses and bringing sacred relics into the field.
The soldiers in Charlemagne’s field armies relied very heavily upon government efforts to secure the support of God for their military campaigns. In addition to the personal preparations of each soldier, which frequently consisted of confession and communion, the army as a whole benefited from a systematic program of public prayers, fasts, almsgiving, and religious processions. These public displays of religious behavior carried out by the soldiers themselves and by the civilians remaining at home were designed to gain God’s favor for Carolingian arms. Thus Charlemagne wrote to Fastrada, his wife, noting the matrix of religious rites and ceremonies in which his soldiers and priests had participated, including singing psalms, fasting, and singing litanies. He then told Fastrada to mobilize similar prayers and other ceremonies among the leading magnates of the kingdom.
Carolingian military traditions, including religious traditions, were continued in both the eastern and western successor states of the Frankish imperium. During the prelude to the famous battle on the Lech River between King Otto the Great of Germany and Hungarian invaders in 955, the latter laid siege to the city of Augsburg. While preparing his men for the fighting, Bishop Oudalric of Augsburg established an entire program of religious rites and ceremonies that were designed both to bolster the morale of the individual soldiers and to obtain God’s support for the defense of the city. To this end the bishop organized processions of nuns around the inner walls of the city. These religious women carried crosses and prayed to God and the Virgin Mary to bring safety and victory to the defenders. Oudalric also celebrated a public mass and ensured that each of his soldiers received the Eucharist. He then preached to his men, assuring them that God was on their side. A very similar program of religious ceremonies was organized for William the Conqueror’s army in 1066 before the battle at Hastings. William of Malmesbury reported in his Deeds of the Kings of the English that the Norman soldiers spent the entire night before the fight confessing their sins. In the morning, the men went to mass and then received the host. While the soldiers were securing their own personal salvation, William’s priests prayed to God on behalf of the army as a whole. They spent the entire night in vigils singing psalms and chanting litanies. Then during the battle itself the priests continued to pray for victory.
The Crusades
Much like their fellow soldiers fighting in profane wars, soldiers serving in crusading armies against the Church’s enemies in the Holy Land, Spain, southern France, and Prussia required a panoply of religious rites and ceremonies to maintain their morale and military cohesion. From the very early stages of planning for the great armed pilgrimage to the East, Pope Urban II and his advisors were concerned about the pastoral arrangements for the army. The soldiers required priests to hear their confessions, assign penances, celebrate mass, intercede with God on their behalf through prayers and public religious rites, bless their weapons and battle flags, and carry holy relics along the line of march and into combat. These were the standard elements of Western military religion before Pope Urban preached the mobilization of an expedition to liberate Jerusalem, and they continued to play a fundamental role in the religious experience of crusaders during the entire first century of crusading warfare.
Fulcher of Chartres recorded in his Jerusalem History that during the battle of Dorylaeum (June 30, 1097) the crusaders were convinced that they would all die during the fighting against the superior Muslim force. They crowded around the priests, including Bishop Adhemar of le Puy, the papal legate, in order to confess their sins and prepare themselves for death. Similarly, at the battle of Antioch, priests dressed in their white vestments moved among the crusaders and comforted them. They poured out prayers on behalf of the soldiers while singing psalms and openly weeping before the Lord. In the aftermath of the battle, the crusade commanders, including Bohemond, Count Raymond of Toulouse, and Duke Geoffrey of Lotharingia, wrote a letter to Pope Urban in which they explained their victory as a vindication of their trust in God and their actions as good Christians. In particular, they emphasized that the army did not go into battle until every soldier had confessed his sins.
The religious behavior of the soldier during the First Crusade is reflected in the exceptionally popular epic poem, The Song of Roland. In both the Latin and vernacular traditions of this famous story, the poets consistently emphasized the prebattle religious preparations made by soldiers about to fight the Muslims in Spain. Roland is depicted confessing his sins and receiving communion. The narrator commented that Roland acted in this manner because it was customary for soldiers to fortify their souls before going into battle. After preparing himself with the sacred rites of confession and communion, Roland with the other soldiers sang psalms and prayed to the cross so that God would give them victory in battle and accept them into heaven if they died in the field.
One major benefit that accrued to crusading soldiers and which was not available to their contemporaries fighting in profane wars was the indulgence. Popes offered indulgences, or remissions of sins, to those soldiers who volunteered to fight against the enemies of the Church. In its more limited sense the indulgence was meant to serve as an alternative to penances that a soldier already deserved for sins he had previously committed. However, from the very outset of the crusading movement soldiers believed that the indulgence freed one from both purgatory and hell and that it further served as a kind of direct pass to heaven if one died in battle. A large corpus of canon law was developed to treat the various ramifications of indulgences in relation to the Christian economy of salvation, much of which debunked the more generous popular beliefs about the power of indulgences. Nevertheless, throughout the Middle Ages most soldiers and their families believed that indulgences were a guarantee of salvation.
In 1215, Pope Innocent III summoned the largest religious council held up to that point in the Western world for the purpose of reforming the Church and organizing a crusade to save the Holy Land—a crusade that was launched in 1218. As a result of Pope Innocent’s efforts, the papal government imposed norms of behavior on the crusading movement, including such areas as finance, military organization, and religious care for soldiers. In addition, Pope Innocent III and his successors began to launch “political crusades” against their Christian opponents in Europe. The combination of these two factors led to a breakdown in the distinctions between crusading and profane warfare.
The most obvious example of this breakdown was the granting of indulgences to soldiers who participated in wars that by contemporary standards had all the attributes of profane conflicts. During the late 1220s and early 1230s the bishops of Utrecht consistently utilized the promise of remission of sins as a tool for recruiting soldiers to serve in a war of aggression against their neighbors. Their recruits were very eager to accept promises of heavenly reward and guarantees of salvation in return for fighting against the temporal enemies of Utrecht. The author of the Deeds of the Bishops of Utrecht recorded that Frisian troops received their indulgences from Bishop Willibrand of Utrecht with great reverence and devotion for their spiritual father.
A further consequence of the deterioration of the boundaries between holy and profane warfare was the effort by secular rulers to have their military campaigns declared to be crusades. Papal crusades against Christian princes, including Emperor Frederick II, helped to eliminate the former standards that had constrained the targets of crusade campaigns. Now Christian princes could appeal to the pope and obtain moral justification for their campaigns, which not only permitted extensive taxation of the Church but also offered a significant bundle of religious benefits to their soldiers. Count Charles of Anjou, the brother of King Louis IX of France, used this system to exact enormous concessions from both the pope and the French Church in support of his campaign against the papacy’s traditional Staufen enemies in southern Italy. Count Charles refused to go to war unless Pope Urban IV declared his campaign to be a crusade, with all of the spiritual benefits that accrued to such an undertaking. His men received full indulgences for their services. In addition, the pope issued order to both the Dominican and Franciscan orders that they were to send brothers to serve as chaplains for the French troops.
The High Middle Ages
While the papal government’s efforts to control the crusading movement helped to dissolve the boundaries between holy and profane warfare, the desire of Christian princes to maintain their power vis-a-vis the popes led to a virtual nationalization of the Church in a wide spectrum of European polities. The kings of France and England frequently used their increased power over their respective national churches to mobilize an extensive array of religious rites and ceremonies on behalf of troops in the field. These ceremonies included public masses, liturgical processions, almsgiving, and special prayers. During the series of wars that he fought against Scotland in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, King Edward I of England ordered that every parish priest in the kingdom preach to his congregation about the justness of this war and then lead the parishioners in public processions in support of the troops. Edward also ordered the archbishop of York to offer indulgences to every layman or -woman who would participate in liturgical rites and pray on behalf of the army in the field. Furthermore, the English king authorized the service of parish priests as chaplains in his army for the purpose of celebrating the sacraments in the field and in garrisons throughout Britain as well as in Edward’s continental holdings.
The English royal government also launched a successful effort to free the chapels in royal fortresses and the priests serving in them from the oversight of both local bishops and papal authorities. This freedom permitted English kings to appoint the most suitable candidates to serve as garrison chaplains, rather than being forced to accept priests belonging to the networks of episcopal or papal patronage.
King Philip IV of France, King Edward’s leading competitor for leadership in Europe, also pursued religious policies that allowed him to mobilize clergy all over his kingdom in support of the French army. Philip issued frequent edicts ordering his bishops to hold special religious services on behalf of troops in the field and requiring that special litanies be celebrated in royal abbeys for the same purpose. Philip also commissioned an entire series of sermons to be preached across the kingdom in which French military actions in Flanders were compared to the Maccabean holy wars against their Hellenic oppressors.
