Justice, Conflict, and Dispute Resolution in Romanesque Art: The Ecclesiastical Message in Spain

Abstract

This article examines the iconography of militarized violence in Christian art as a reflection of turbulence and peacemaking during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Despite the message of peace urged by Christ’s Beatitudes, churches of that time displayed depictions of violent disputes between individuals and groups in a wide array of examples on both the exterior and the interior, often in positions available to clergy and laity for viewing and instruction. Focusing especially on Spain, we offer a survey of these representations and an analysis of the message they conveyed to viewers. The pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela had a major role in connecting France and Spain and their religious and artistic communities, but other factors, such as the Gregorian reform and the frontier conflict against the Islamic South, are considered as well. Although the iconography has often been associated with such pacifist movements as the Peace and the Truce of God, we argue that these images assert the Church’s active role in earthly justice, whose methods utilized violent means. The involvement of the Church in the struggle for precedence over the secular nobility resulted in conflicts about landed power and patronage, with the ordeal by combat used to settle legal disputes and find justice. Depictions of confronted warriors, and particularly the inclusion of an intervening figure, expressed not the Church’s banning of conflict but its adoption of a judicial method to impose its rule and uphold the virtue of divine justice.