Mind-Munitions

54
Propaganda in the Middle Ages
issued a decree against religious images. This precipitated the
Iconoclastic (‘image-breaking’) Schism with the papacy. This clash
irrevocably sundered the bond between the Church in Rome and
Byzantium. It may seem ironic that the old Roman Empire, which
had done so much to develop the use of imagery, both pagan and
Christian, was finally broken in two by a dispute over the role such
propaganda could play. As a consequence of the split, the papacy
began to look to the successor states of the West as allies. Even as
those states began to acquire new strength, their kings realized that
the Church could make a powerful ally in legitimizing their regimes.
Transport affected both warfare and propaganda. But it did not
mean that either went into decline. The ability of migratory tribes
to move from east to west and, later, of crusading armies to travel
from Western Europe to the Middle East bears witness to that. In
many places in Europe, warfare was endemic, the interludes of
peace being so unusual that they earned the special attention of
commentators, which makes it virtually impossible to separate war
propaganda from all other forms. As in antiquity, wars were brief
and largely confined to the summer campaign season. Money
remained important to pay the troops, but armies were comparatively
small – forces of 10,000 men were unusual – and plundering
campaigns were perhaps the most common type of warfare in the
early Dark Ages. The Germanic hordes which wrested western
Europe from Roman grasp may appear barbaric when compared to
‘civilized’ Rome (i.e. ‘Christianized’ Rome in which ‘peace on
earth’ was regarded as a virtue), and their propaganda was
certainly less well developed. But they fought in clans, alongside
people they had been brought up with. This inevitably tightened
the bond between them in battle. It was not just peer pressure on
the battlefield that motivated them to fight effectively, but social
pressure to do well amongst their friends and relatives. Their
leaders in peace were the same leaders in war. As Tacitus (our best
source for the Germanic peoples) wrote in the first century:
On the field of battle it is a disgrace to the chief to be surpassed in valour
by his companions, to the companions not to come up to the valour of
their chief. As for leaving a battle alive after your chief has fallen, that
means lifelong infamy and shame. To defend and protect him, to put
down one’s own acts of heroism to his credit – that is what they really
mean by ‘allegiance’. The chiefs fight for victory, the companions for
their chief.