Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

though the weapons were blunted, the martial passion of the combatants
led to some brutish duels. The tournament remained a display center for
knightly courage and prowess until the Renaissance.
When warfare came to feudal Europe, whether from land disputes,
breaches of contract, or other contentious causes, it was often a brief local
affair. The ones who suffered most from these internecine clashes were the
defenseless peasants and the Church, whose lands were often bound up in
the network of feudal dependencies. It was the Church that tried to subdue
the violence of an unruly society when it proclaimed the Pax Dei (Latin;
Peace of God) in 989, and a half century later, the Truga Dei (Truce of
God). The first banned warfare against the weak and so sought to save
women, children, and priests from the brutalities of the age. The second,
more ambitious, decree attempted to mark out whole religious seasons of
the year when fighting would be prohibited. Neither decree was entirely
successful, but each lessened to some degree the incessant warfare of the
armed nobility.
Toward the end of the eleventh century, European knighthood was to
receive a challenge from the Near East that would extend knighthood’s
conventions and its belligerency as far as the Holy Land and even beyond.
The Seljuk Turks, a menacing military force arising out of Asia made up of
warriors who embraced Islam fervently, overran the exposed eastern borders
of the Byzantine Empire. The Greek emperor, Alexius Comnenus, appealed
to Pope Urban II to send military aid for the Christian cause; the
events that followed revealed the quixotic essence of medieval knighthood.
The pope, himself a man of France, gathered about him an assembly
of Frankish leaders at Clermont in 1095. He first reminded them that they
were of the Frankish race “chosen and loved by God” and that the deeds
of their ancestors should inspire them to take the road to the Holy Land
and wrest it from the accursed Turks who had mutilated their Christian
brethren and desecrated the holy places. Urban, sorely mindful of the intermittent
warfare that was despoiling Europe, severely reproached the
gathering of French nobility: “You, girt about with the badge of knighthood,
are arrogant . . . you rage against your brothers. You, the oppressors
of children, plunderers of widows . . . vultures who sense battles from afar
and rush to them eagerly. If you wish to be mindful of your souls, either lay
down the girdle of such knighthood or advance boldly as a knight of
Christ” (Krey 1921, 30).
The papal speech created a mild hysteria that aroused Western
chivalry to advance upon Jerusalem as a great crusading army, shouting its
battle cry: “God wills it!” Urban did not know that he had set into motion
a prolonged war between the cross and the crescent that would continue
well into the thirteenth century.
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