Chivalry may sometimes seem to slip through our fingers and separate into discrete spheres. This quicksilver quality may tempt scholars to jettison use of the term altogether, considering it too fragmented to sustain meaning. This view, emerging from understandable impatience with sweeping generalization, resembles what medieval philosophers would have termed nominalism with its focus on specific phenomena alone as having meaning, while the general, classifying category is granted no genuine existence. Adopting this view, martial or honor culture might be granted existence in particular traits, attitudes, and acts, but an overarching idea of chivalry would be thought to fail to catch anything general for historical analysis.

Yet the very term chivalry was continually and confidently spoken and written throughout half a medieval millennium. Not all the terms we employ as modern scholars studying those centuries can make this claim to reality in the society they are meant to describe. Feudalism as an abstract noun is a modern construct intended to encapsulate basic aspects of medieval society; but it was not a word used in the Middle Ages and has caused seemingly unending debate among scholars. Chivalry, however, was a term used reflexively by medieval people from the late eleventh century and the twelfth century through the remainder of what we consider the medieval period and beyond. It was their term. They thought it could and should convey important meaning. Their reliance on the term sets our goal of understanding what it meant to them and why they used it.

If some scholars imitate nominalists and avoid the term as overly general, other scholars avoid the term for nearly opposite reasons. They would grant that the values we analyze in chivalry were real, but insist that in fact the ideas or behaviors we are observing in certain medieval centuries represented nothing more than the eternal warrior code. In this view, how warriors think and how they act remain at base a constant, and this enduring code represents what is truly important in scholarly analysis: doughboys in the First World War, Greek hoplites, Native American dog soldiers of the Plains, Carolingian milites, Japanese samurai, high and late medieval knights – all were a part of the grand procession of warriors whose essence is not dependent on specific social and cultural context of time and space.

Modern cinematic audiences must feel they understand knightly emotions. The righteous wrath of knights fills screens with a swirl of bodies, blades, and blood. In fact, “getting medieval” on someone has come, in common parlance, to suggest unrestrained violence fueled by equally unrestrained emotions. Yet from another angle and with little sense of contradiction, the imagined chivalrous show deliciously amorous sensitivity; with hearts thumping in ample chests, they speak soft, poetic lines about intense feelings of love, or perhaps even sing them with lute accompaniment, to demure ladies on balconies. Although usually strong, silent types, when standing tall amidst a courtly audience the knights express finely felt pride in birth and accomplishment, or project outrage at any imputed dishonor, employing elaborate speech, with dramatic gestures to match.

Such popular views can claim at least some historical merit, catching a panoply of intense emotions that infused chivalric thought and actions. Distinct traces of such feelings and consequent actions appear throughout a wide range of sources, from narratives within chronicles to vividly dramatic scenes in imaginative literature. All this evidence presents displays of intense emotions that accompanied important occasions and conveyed or enhanced their meanings.

Yet popular books and films assume that our medieval forebears were in essential ways and at all times and social levels just like us. Is this not how they appear in popular media? Their costumes may be more dashing and colorful, their speech charmingly quaint, but their emotions appear simply cut along lines of an eternal pattern. From such an ahistorical viewpoint, any questions about medieval emotions simply self-destruct. Why should emotions among the chivalric elite require any special focus when we can look within ourselves and understand all?

In fact, medieval evidence contradicts this common line of thought. Even if some broad affective human traits appear in every era, the relative importance of particular emotions and their embodiment in social roles and relationships have surely varied. A modern emotional template cannot be force fit upon medieval society in general or on the knights in particular. Contrary to the modern commitment to casualness and informality (coupled with at least theoretical egalitarianism), medieval emotions proudly operated in formal and heroic mode and in the service of social, political, and religious hierarchy. Speech best conveyed meaning and secured assent when delivered in the high style; actions that were formally dignified and dramatically presented best secured results.

Insight into chivalric continuity and change can be found in what might seem a minor incident described in one of our finest sources, the History of William Marshal. As the great rebellion broke out against Henry II in 1173, his eldest son, Henry the Young King, turned against his father and prepared to fight for a degree of autonomy he had never been granted, Henry being a prudent father. The Young King's entourage reminded him that he had never been knighted and argued that taking this formal step in the crisis “would make the whole of your company more valorous and more respected, and would increase the joy in their hearts.” According to Marshal's biographer, the Young King accepted their advice and declared he would be knighted by “the best knight who ever was or will be, or has done more or who is to do more…” This was, of course, William Marshal, his biographer tells us. Stepping up to the Marshal with sword in hand, the Young King says, “From God and from yourself, My lord, I wish to receive this honour.” William girded him with the sword and “asked that God keep him most valorous, honoured and exalted…” The entourage viewing this short and simple ceremony is studded with counts and barons (you may be sure!), but the poet proudly says of the Marshal, “And yet he had not one strip of land to his name or anything else, just his chivalry.”

Strong ideas about chivalric function, status, and ideology animate this narrative of an affecting ceremony. The function of the warrior stands out clearly. The Marshal is chosen to knight the Young King because he is the best, and this evaluation comes from a celebrated patron of valorous deeds in tournament on the eve of a civil war in which even more intense fighting could be expected and enacted for higher stakes. In short, the Young King was considered a good judge of the knightly function of prowess; the poet/biographer assures his audience that the Young King, through his generosity to masterful warriors, even those who were landless, will revive chivalry.

The ideal process for reconstructing the working chivalric notions we seek would require the assistance of Merlin, with whose incomparable help we might assemble in one room a group of leading knights from various periods and regions. Prudently requiring these heroic if slightly touchy men to check their swords at the door, we could pose basic questions and surreptitiously record their eloquent answers, and perhaps even their grand gestures as they spoke with knowledge and feeling.

This chapter will argue that considerable agreement on basics would emerge from such a group, whatever the differences in point of view on some particulars. Since Merlin, sadly, is no longer available, we might best arrive at this understanding of working notions of chivalry – rather than abstract reform plans – by assembling information from and about a set of knights undoubtedly regarded as models in their lifetimes. They ideally should be drawn from various regions of Europe and various chronological points in the “age of chivalry.” Finding suitable great knights is not difficult, though surviving evidence does not provide as fully satisfying a chronology and regional distribution as might be desired.

To be most useful, those chosen should represent men highly praised by contemporary practicing men-at-arms as well as by clerics or intellectuals. We seek figures who were, in fact, elevated as model knights suitable for emulation. Clearly their lives and views must be recoverable. This requires that they formed the subjects of extensive accounts by others who knew them well (or had access to such knowledge) or wrote serious discussions on chivalry themselves. In short, we are searching for knights with detailed evidence available on active historical careers and as much information as possible about motivating ideals.

Five figures come quickly to mind as amply meeting these criteria. The first must be the cross-Channel hero William Marshal (d. 1219), whose life is recounted in the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, our earliest nonroyal, nonclerical biography (completed in 1226) by an anonymous writer employed by the Marshal's family. Second, we can turn to the warrior-king Robert Bruce of Scotland (d. 1329), whose biography, Barbour's Bruce, was written in 1375–1377.

Two extreme views stand out in sharp contrast when knighthood and piety are placed within the same analytical frame. The cynical view merely dismisses the importance of piety to the arms bearers, whose entire thought went in other directions; the flagrantly romantic view asserts that the link between knighthood and religion not only was close, but took the ideal form desired by clerics. These distortions represent twin nightmares of any scholar hoping for close analysis and genuine understanding of a complicated and fascinating relationship that was undoubtedly essential to medieval civilization.

Those expressing the first, cynical view (with a shrug of the shoulders and upraised hands) assert that of course a gaping chasm separated religious ideals from actual knightly conceptions and behavior. The gap can surely come as no surprise, for these were hard men of war operating in a tough environment, and they were worldly men thinking of dominance, wealth, and courtly pleasures, not of spiritual values, not even of divine retribution for sin. Enthusiastic violence and a relaxed view of sexuality could scarcely be eliminated from their lives. Abstract religious ideals in general, this view might conclude, seldom change behavior in any historical period, at least not when their enactment would prove inconvenient to those socially dominant. Never in the least troubled by abstract thought, the medieval arms bearers simply and impatiently brushed aside homilies and warnings from carping clerics and tiresome intellectual reformers and got on with it. Religious or reforming ideals could only have touched them in the most superficial manner, and religion could only mean unwelcome constraints on behavior as usual (Figures 10 and 11).

To the contrary, this chapter will argue that the knights needed and knew they needed religious ideals. In significant ways, the knights were fully cooperative with clerics and were traditionally religious, often enacting the pious and obedient role ascribed to them as sons of Holy Mother Church in the pages of medieval (and much modern) writing. From childhood knights would have learned the omnipresence of sin and its dire consequences and regularly experienced the directive and mediatory role of the clergy, with some representative likely residing in the family household.

TAKING THE PULSE OF KNIGHTLY EMOTIONS

What might seem, from an idealistic modern perspective, a triumvirate of the nasty emotions – anger, wrath, and a thirst for vengeance, hot emotions working in tandem with their first cousin, icy fear – actually constituted sturdy pillars upholding structural elements of chivalric ideology. In fact, this daunting trident of emotions (with fear ever hovering) addressed basic chivalric concerns about acquiring and preserving honor and status and avoiding dread shame. The chivalric life, says Wolfram von Eschenbach in his Parzifal, gives two rich possessions to its practitioners: one is good faith (the loyalty we have repeatedly encountered); the other gift is “a true sense of the shame which brings honor, today as of old.”

Any challenge on these fronts could spark these emotions into living flame. As men obsessed with status and honor, knights knew they must show enemies – and also demonstrate to their fellow arms bearers in a competitive world – that they would not submit to any perceived debasement; that they would vigorously enact appropriate responses in order to secure social position; and that they, with a little help from friends, subordinates, or right-minded superiors in the military–tenurial hierarchy, would restore their corner of the world to its rightful state. In Middle High German, to take only one relevant case in point, the noun leit can mean not only sorrow, but insult and dishonor. Our sources thus focus on these emotions as correctives to intolerable challenges. And the case of fear provides the spur, showing deep worries about the possibility of loss.

That these powerful forces were abundantly active in the mental framework at the peak of elite lay society can readily be seen in the emotions and political actions of kings. Their vigorous personalities inspired or provoked a relatively rich supply of sources. Wrath, anger, and revenge functioned as expected and lauded royal traits. Their wrath easily enacted mini-dramas of power; their desire for vengeance could move armies. Contemporary medieval sources point to a furor Teutonicus, a rage in battle that marked German combat. With reason pushed aside, this battle fury could motivate fighters. Wrath was often, of course, displayed by individuals, especially those in power.

Chivalry did not suddenly wither and die in the final, traditional medieval centuries. Strenuous combat involving knights in full battle armor could be attested by the classic account of Philippe de Commynes (d. 1511). It could be even more personally attested by the Burgundian lord Louis de la Tremoille in 1525, if we could interview him before the fatal shot on the battlefield of Pavia ended his intensely chivalric life, at that point devoted to the ill-fated French campaign in northern Italy. He died in a full suit of armor and with a full sense of religious no less than royal blessing upon his life's work.

The ideas and ideals of chivalry so evident in Louis's life still permeated the general cultural atmosphere. Christine de Pizan wrote a much-appreciated work, The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry, in the vernacular in the early fifteenth century. Romances, likely reaching an even broader audience than ever, blossomed in such late – and very large – blooms as Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato (1495), Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532), and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). Formal dubbing to knighthood lasted throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and beyond, as could be attested by witnesses who stood on the crowded deck of the Golden Hind when a kneeling Francis Drake was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I in 1581.

Yet during its final phase – as was true in earlier phases – if important elements of chivalry persisted, significant changes affected the fit of chivalry within its changing social context. That these centuries could generate changes in chivalry can come as no surprise. The age experienced seemingly endless war funded by effective systems of taxation; these conflicts occurred during a time of economic and demographic contraction. Royal power underwent severe modulations, and even when it was doing well faced problems of public order that persisted and seemed beyond its control, if not a by-product of its actions; beyond any scale of human agency, terrifying and destructive plague ravaged Europe. On the brighter side, new intellectual currents swirled around thinkers as winds of neoclassicism swept through the quiet nooks where scholars and writers pondered issues of sovereignty, war and peace, theology, and canon and civil law, and wrote both learned and more popular treatises, often with clear messages for the chivalrous.

Steeped as we are in images of heroes as knights in shining armor, it is easy to lose sight of the essential function of the elaborate armor and even more elaborate sharp-edged and spiked weaponry that adorn the walls of museums with a wing devoted to the Middle Ages. In one of my own classes designed to make this stark function clear, one student suddenly exclaimed, “I get it! All that weaponry was not merely accessorizing!” Indeed, these armaments were not simply a statement of high fashion, though they undoubtedly fulfilled that function as well. How well such weaponry effected its purpose on the human body, even on the armored human body, could be patiently explained by archaeologists who have investigated military burials. Moreover, the museums will present no remnant of that other great tool of war, the torch, which proved so effective even where the sword could not reach. The two chapters of this part investigate knightly violence, first in actual warfare and then as a form of extreme sport that was a close relative of war. To set the stage for this investigation, we need to focus on chivalric attitudes about the use of violence, including any sense of restraint on its usefulness.

Over centuries, most discussions of chivalry tirelessly projected an ideal image of the elite lay male as a vigorous warrior, proud of his capacity to achieve his twin chief goals of honor and material gain through expert, personal violence. Seldom unqualified, the view shows complexities, for the sources will suggest a great variety of reform plans and ideal models for building a better knighthood (with greater or lesser degrees of subtlety). Even a cycle of chansons de geste or romance texts may carry reform significance through its structure, within and between texts justifying war or warning about excesses. In individual works, these warnings may come with a roll of thunder or may speak only in a stage whisper. The mother of the eponymous antihero in Raoul de Cambrai, for example, gives her son stern admonitions against despoiling the poor or looting or burning churches; his stubborn insistence that he will commit these very acts in his determined fighting – clear violations of the mesure or wise restraint much praised in this and other literary works – leads to her potent cursing of her son.

That the earliest of our set of model knights (discussed in Chapter 2) date from this second phase of chivalric history can cause little surprise. More surviving evidence does not always prove new social phenomena, yet some correlation between evidence and historical change likely exists and is, as we will see, especially likely in a second chivalric phase. We have no trouble picturing a figure such as Richard Lion-Heart and his armored contemporaries as knights, and quickly form mental images of Arthurian heroes such as Lancelot. We can even assign the knightly label with confidence to William the Conqueror or any of the Normans of his generation active across Europe more than a century earlier. Building on the undoubted changes from the ninth and tenth centuries, this second phase (c. 1050–c. 1300) brings classic chivalry fully to life. Elite social status for knights became a given and a valorizing and inclusive ideology, expanding and extending earlier developments, fused with an older military function. The results both reflected and shaped structural dimensions as chivalric ideals and practices interacted powerfully with the vibrant socioeconomic, religious, and political changes of this central period of medieval history. Crucial new strands intertwined, adding strength to an existing older core.

Of course the chronology often remains approximate, varying region by region; blurred demarcation lines persist. Some changes that will fully appear in the third phase of chivalric development (to be considered in the following chapter) began to come tellingly to the surface by the end of the thirteenth century. Each line of inquiry we follow could justly demand its own monograph (which some have truly received), but the goal here remains thematic overview rather than encyclopedic particularity. Viewing the forest can reasonably hold our attention as much as any individual stand of trees. As before, discussion is intended to set powerful and in some cases well-known phenomena within a developing chivalric function, ideology, and status, rather than to adumbrate topics as freestanding subjects. Relying on useful clusters of evidence, a first section will serve as a brief reminder that function retained its military core – never exclusive, but ever central.

CHIVALRY AND THE EMERGING STATE

During the age of chivalry, kings and great lords (and urban communal governing bodies) were busily extending their reach (Figure 9). They expanded administrative structures, increased the flow of legislation, bolstered law enforcement, and increased financial exaction within societies producing new forms and deposits of wealth. The kingdom of Sicily, where Richard Lion-Heart may have seen a draft of the Chanson d'Aspremont (quoted in the introduction to this part) while on crusade, provides a good case in point, as more famously did Richard's own territories on the continent and his kingdom of England with its central royal court, the great administrative gyroscope of the exchequer, itinerant justices on circuit throughout the realm, and emerging methods of taxation that produced appreciable results. The French kingdom under his fellow crusader and bitter rival Philip II (Augustus) provides another case in point with its territorial acquisitions and its administrative advances in justice and finance. Such processes on either side of the Channel generated what Joseph Strayer termed “the medieval origins of the modern state.” And they can be found south of the Pyrenees as well, if on a slightly later chronology. Thirteenth-century Castile witnessed a move toward centralization of political power, especially under Alfonso X (r. 1252–1284). Evidence includes not only the great law book, the Siete Partidas, but also the beginning of the appointment of corregidores – royal officials appointed at the local level to oversee the meting out of justice, some control over the use of armed force, and general oversight of administration. If conditions were more mixed and complex east of the Rhine and north of the Alps, regional governing powers still developed within growing towns and lay and ecclesiastical lordships. It is at least interesting to note that Wolfram von Eschenbach in his Parzifal pictured King Arthur prohibiting his knights from undertaking any joust without his permission.

In short, early working notions of sovereignty – especially evident in the Anglo-Norman and Capetian efforts – did not have to await formal declaration of theory by the French jurist and political philosopher Jean Bodin in the late sixteenth century.