What must strike the historian as curious is that neither western nor eastern Christianity developed missionary orders. Until the sixteenth century, Christian enthusiasm, which took so many other forms, was never institutionally directed into this channel. Christianity remained a universalist religion. But its proselytizing spirit expressed itself throughout the Middle Ages in various forms of violence. The crusades were not missionary ventures but wars of conquest and primitive experiments in colonization; and the only specific Christian institutions they produced, the three knightly orders, were military. This stress on violence was particularly marked in the West. Eastern Christians tended to follow the teachings of St Basil, who regarded war as shameful. This was in the original Christian tradition: violence was abhorrent to the early Christians, who preferred death to resistance; and Paul, attempting to interpret Christ, did not even try to construct a case for the legitimate use of force. Again, it was St Augustine who gave western Christianity the fatal twist in this direction. As always, in his deep pessimism, he was concerned to take society as he found it and attempt to reconcile its vices with Christian endeavor. Men fought; had always fought; therefore war had a place in the Christian pattern of behavior, to be determined by the moral theologians. In Augustine's view, war might always be waged, provided it was done so by the command of God. This formulation of the problem was doubly dangerous. Not only did it allow the existence of the ‘just’ war, which became a commonplace of Christian moral theology; but it discredited the pacifist, whose refusal to fight a war defined as ‘just’ by the ecclesiastical authorities became a defiance of divine commands. Thus the modern imprisonment of the conscientious objector is deeply rooted in standard Christian dogma. So is the anomaly of two Christian states each fighting a ‘just’ war against each other. What made the Augustinian teaching even more corrupting was the association in his mind between ‘war by divine command’ and the related effort to convert the heathen and destroy the heretic - his ‘compel them to come in' syndrome. Not only could violence be justified: it was particularly meritorious when directed against those who held other religious beliefs ( or none). The Dark Age church merely developed Augustine's teaching. Leo IV said that anyone dying in battle for the defense of the Church would receive a heavenly reward; John VIII thought that such a person would even rank as a martyr. Nicholas | added that even those under sentence of excommunication, or other church punishment, could bear arms if they did so against the infidel. There was, it is true, a pacifist movement within the Church as well. But this, paradoxically, was canalized to reinforce the idea of sanctified violence. The motive behind it was to protect innocent peasants from the aimless brutality of competing lords. The bishops of Aquitaine, meeting in 898, said it was the duty of the Church to guarantee immunity for such poor folk. In 1000, William the Great, Duke of Guienne, summed a peace council at Poitiers, which threatened excommunication for anyone who sought to resolve disputes by force of arms. Various oaths were taken by landowners at public assemblies, while the priests and congregations shouted 'Peace, peace, peace’. Leagues of peace were organized, and every male of fifteen or over asked to swear to take up arms against peace-breakers. But mobs of peasants interpreted the campaign as a license to smash castles, and after one such incident were massacred, 700 clerics with them. Throughout the eleventh century the Church tried to keep the peace movement alive, but the popes eventually surrendered to the temptation to divert what they regarded as the incorrigible bellicosity of western society into crusades against the infidel. The idea of Catholic Christians exercising mass-violence against the infidel hardly squared with scripture. Nor did it make much sense in practical terms. The success of Islam sprang essentially from the failure of Christian theologians to solve the problem of the Trinity and Christ's nature. In Arab territories, Christianity had penetrated heathenism, but usually in Monophysite form - and neither eastern nor western Catholicism could find a compromise with the Monophysites in the sixth and seventh centuries. The Arabs, driven by drought, would almost certainly have used force to expand anyway. As it was, Mohammed, a Monophysite, conflated the theological and economic problems to evolve a form of Monophysite religion which was simple, remarkably impervious to heresy, and included the doctrine of the sword to accommodate fe.