ABSTRACT
The Pax Dei was a conciliar movement which began in southern France in the late tenth century and spread to most of Western Europe over the next century, surviving in some form until at least the thirteenth century. It combined lay and ecclesiastical legislation, which regulated warfare and established a social peace. The participation of large, enthusiastic crowds marks it as one of the first popular religious movements of the Middle Ages. The timing (two waves in the decade preceding the year 1000 and the year 1033), the language used by some of the ecclesiastical sources (hagiography and historiography), and the descriptions of the populace at these councils (penitence giving way to mass expressions of joy) indicate a strong millennial element. The sources use images from Jubilees and the prophetic works, including Isaiah’s famous depiction of messianic peace, suggesting that participants in these councils, both lay and (some) clerical believed that, at the advent of the millennium, God’s peace was at last descending on earth.
