1. One particularly notorious instance of
this occurred in 298 at Tangier when a centurion, Marcellus,
on the parade ground in full
view of the whole army, threw down his weapons, renounced his
oath of allegiance and 'put on record insane statements' as the
offical record says. (The Roman Empire, ed. Lewis and
Reinhold, p. 595).]
2. The first reference Jean Flori found to
this division was in a letter Pope Zacharias wrote to Pepin the
Short in 747. The first reference he found to three orders was
in the writing of the monk Aymon of Auxerre, (p. 59-60), near
the end of the ninth century - just in passing he refers to the
three orders of modern society, the priests, the fighters and
the farmers. At the end of the ninth century, King Alfred the
Great's translation of Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae
referred to the three instruments through whom the king must
govern: those who pray, those who fight and those who work (p.
61).
3. It should still have been very limited
violence, as in the case of Gerald of Aurillac: in 1054, at the
Council of Narbonne, it was stated: 'No Christian should kill
another Christian, for whoever kills a Christian undoubtedly
sheds the blood of Christ'. [Quoted by Cowdrey, 'The Peace and
Truce of God', Past and Present, 46 (1970), 53.] Yet,
as they were carrying out God's will in restoring peace, obviously
sometimes they would have to shed blood. The canonist Burchard
of Worms, writing in around 1012, wrote that a soldier fighting
in a just war is 'God's minister' provided he had right intention;
as would be the case here. Yet, soldiers could still sin through
greed for booty or anger, and then they would have to perform
penance. [Burchard, in PL 140, quoted by J. Gilchrist,
'The papacy and war against the "Saracens"', International
History Review, 10 (1988), 174-97.]
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