1 Joseph S. Jewell H 99 Thesis Final Draft June 7, 2004 Prof. Warren Brown Violence in the Medieval Church Before the First Crusade The history of violence and attitudes towards violence within the medieval Catholic Church has often been interpreted through the lens of the Crusades. 1 The beginning of campaigns to counter growing Muslim influence in the Middle East provides a defining moment when a certain class of full-scale war was not only explicitly endorsed, but also declared holy at the highest levels of the institutional church. 2 However, the early and medieval church’s attitudes on violence before Pope Urban II called the first crusade in 1095 were often ambivalent, and in some cases directly contradictory. At different points throughout the period between the New Testament in the 1 st Century A.D. and the Peace of God movement at the turn of the 11 th , various churchmen both endorsed and condemned violence under a wide variety of circumstances. The institutional church’s stance on violence often seemed to depend as much on temporal conditions as it did on spiritual principles. However, the work of Augustine of Hippo, who influentially interpreted the Bible in a substantial corpus of books, sermons, and other writings, can be shown to provide the basis for many of the medieval church’s actions and positions on violent activity. Augustine’s teachings on violence, just war, and the duties of Christians with respect to both give us a common thread to follow from the 5 th Century to the eve of the Crusades. 1 F. Donald Logan, A History of the Church in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 118. 2 F.H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 38.