Standing securely upon its spur of rock above the Charente River in south-central France, the castle of Verteuil seemed impregnable. A French force under the duke of Bourbon was besieging the castle in 1385 as part of a campaign to sweep away garrisons of routiers who, though formally aligned to the English crown, were simply robbing and devastating the countryside for their own profit. To attack this formidable fortress, the duke relied on two classic siege techniques: he bashed parts of the defenses with stone-throwing machines (leaving several projectiles embedded in the fabric for later discovery by archaeologists), and he cut mines under the walls to topple them (and traces of these, too, have been found). The defenders had to endure the missiles, but knew how to respond more actively to the mines: they dug counter-mines, eventually intersecting the advancing tunnels of the besiegers. Armored men fought in these cramped tunnels as torches cast fantastic shadows of their hacking and thrusting figures on the chiseled rock walls. One chronicler, Jean Cabaret d'Orville (who wrote about the duke of Bourbon under the patronage of the ducal family), tells that the duke himself, wanting a share in the danger and glory, descended into the mine with a few close followers and, gripping ax and sword, battled a defender named Regnaud de Montferrand. The duke's identity remained deliberately hidden until, in the heat of combat, one of his excited followers suddenly shouted out his lord's war cry, “Bourbon! Saint Mary!” Hearing these potent and revealing words, Regnaud, a nobleman who was an unknighted squire, dropped his sword, fell to his knees, and offered to hand over the castle if only the duke would knight him, for this would be the greatest honor that could come to him. At least this is Jean Cabaret's account. Another chronicler, the famous Jean Froissart, says simply that the garrison surrendered after their leader was fatally struck by one of the massive stone projectiles flung at the fortress.

How can modern investigators understand these conflicting narratives of the capture of Verteuil and make sense of the chivalric culture they apparently reflect? Did Regnaud cheerfully surrender a strong base (from which plundering raids had sustained his band) in return for the honor of being knighted by a great lord?

A thick European mist obscures the origins of chivalry, making close investigation difficult and hope of certainty doubtful. An analysis seeking general patterns may even prove perilous, for the landscape beneath the mist is crisscrossed by deep furrows of scholarly controversy, and contested ground, still heavily mined, is periodically swept by erudite gunfire. If this chapter attempts some generalizations, it recognizes that many questions await further investigation or at least scholarly willingness to observe truce.

Reasons for this degree of contention are not far to seek. The seedbed of chivalry must be sought in the Carolingian and immediately post-Carolingian era, a time abounding with unresolved interpretive issues. If scholars could agree on social, political, and cultural continuity from the ninth century through the eleventh century, or agree, instead, on the rise of transformative forces as the Carolingian regnum collapsed, historians of the origins of chivalry might plan extended holidays. Lacking such agreement, they find problems stubbornly clustering around such basic issues as the efficacy of centralized rule by Charlemagne and his successors. Did royal/imperial authority constitute a public governmental capacity with armies built on universal male service? Did this authority for a time effectively and closely rule this vast Carolingian land mass, only to see it fracture into privatized local rule by military strongmen, or does such a view perpetuate what R. I. Moore termed “the fantasy of a revived Roman empire with which clerical courtiers flattered their masters and themselves”? One or another approach to such issues could determine whether early knighthood arose during Carolingian rule, even at the Carolingian court, or only emerged from the rubble as this world fractured, leading to a rise of the knights.

To ask when and how chivalry emerged is thus to pose no simple question that can be settled with a precise birth date. Finding formative chivalric ideals and assessing their importance become crucial issues. So does discerning the early appearance of men who will be instantly recognizable as knights in both popular and scholarly views. Did these warriors constitute an emerging aristocracy with a distinctive style of living? Were they already features of a Carolingian world or rather a new group emerging from the mist? Did military function define them and slowly bind together fighting men at a variety of social levels?

Genuine understanding of roughly half a millennium of early European history will falter without an effort to analyze the phenomenon of chivalry, for the ideals and practices of chivalry formed an essential component of society and civilization throughout those generations. Its voice was prominent whether the inquiring listener focuses on the practice of violence and war, governance, social and cultural life, the framework of religion, the process of getting and spending, or the bonds of friendship and ideal and actual gender relations. The ideals and actions of elite arms bearers always put them in a prominent position, ever playing a crucial role. Since the close engagement of chivalry with such basic issues of life makes it an inescapably important subject, we do the topic and ourselves a disservice if we relegate chivalry to the slight category of fanciful escapism or imagine it to be some ideal system in a long-ago fairyland.

Of course the forms in which chivalry was expressed were indeed impressively colorful and could take on a superficial playfulness of speech, action, or attire; and in their bright hues and utter quaintness, chivalric displays have proved continuing attractions to modern audiences for whom the contemporary world may seem a bit drab and tirelessly pragmatic. Much publication about medieval chivalry seems intended to meet this need, which is likely felt by many a writer or picture-book compiler, as it is certainly felt by the filmmakers. In all such presentations, chivalry intrudes few questions into the minds of consumers of print, film, or video game, nor does it raise problems for analysis that could engage scholarship. If brave men in shining armor fought evil, if muscular men protected the weak and unfailingly honored all females, if they humbly practiced the piety taught to them, then surely all was well.

The medieval evidence we have examined, likely to have caused surprise by its abundance no less than its themes, presents a much more complex and vastly more interesting chivalric world – one that, however colorful, was built not simply on easy agreement but on conflicts, contradictions, and paradoxes. In studying these complexities, we learn about real people, about multiple sets of ideals in dialogue and often in contention, and about the role of governing institutions with power emerging to match their claims.

As one of the grand words spoken or written in medieval Latin and the various vernacular languages, love was wide-ranging in its implications and powerful in its use and impact (Figure 12). R. W. Southern argued eloquently that love between humanity and God came to a new level of understanding and emphasis in the long twelfth century, and even a focus on purely human relationships involving the chivalrous reveals an impressive range of meanings. As so often, the Song of Roland provides perspective. A furious Ganelon, thinking he has been betrayed by his nephew Roland, responds by saying publicly and in deadly earnest that he does not love him and will take revenge, the love that is lost here conveying crucial bonds of loyalty that have been broken and bonds of kinship now severed. William Marshal, dying slowly and almost operatically, calls his wife to his bedside, addresses her fondly as “ami,” and kisses her for the last time, his love for her embedded in amorous, conjugal friendship. Lancelot's love for Queen Guinevere, providing a central pivot around which stories of Camelot turn and finally spin out of control, readily comes to mind as a classic account of heterosexual, romantic, passionate attraction, overwhelming in its compulsion, however disastrous its consequences. Richard Lion-Heart and Philip Augustus are reported, early in their careers, to have shown openly that they feel a bond that leaves modern analysts struggling to characterize it adequately and accurately. Even if in all these instances love fails to conquer all, it seems to have captured an impressive range of emotional territory central to chivalry, through the affective life of characters both historical and fictional.

Given the almost crushing weight of scholarship on every aspect of love in the Middle Ages, with strongly held modern interpretive positions laid out like battlefield dispositions beneath banners of accomplished scholars, attempting any necessarily contained discussion of the role of the emotions of love in chivalry may resemble tap-dancing a route through minefields thickly planted within more than one academic department. Yet an overall historical perspective with a focus on the role of love within chivalric ideology and practice allows at least some contentious issues to be left to the care of specialists.

A revival of jousting has become a feature of the medieval or Renaissance fairs that now dot the summer landscape of the United States, drawing large crowds especially to watch colorful combats between fully armored knights while enjoying a roast turkey leg and quaffing mead. Usually the jousting is sadly false and scripted to ensure victory by the obvious hero, but the sheer physicality of armored men atop snorting, stamping horses remains impressive enough; and on one occasion it elicited from my watching granddaughter (at age 4) a series of questions pertinent to this chapter: “Why are they doing this? Are they having a quarrel? Are they going to do it again?” Her conclusion revealed genuine concern: “Perhaps we should talk to them.” This chapter at least talks about them, or rather their authentic medieval predecessors, drawing on the careful work of numerous scholars such as David Crouch, Juliet Barker, and Richard Barber.

We must grant, however, that they would have been surprised by these queries, for over centuries tourneying seemed natural and self-justifying to them. Early in the massive fourteenth-century romance Perceforest, Alexander the Great, improbably portrayed as the founder of an English kingdom, descends on an exploratory quest into the sea within a large glass barrel towed behind a ship. His great discovery is swordfish that “tourney and battle with one another so fiercely that it was a wonder to behold, exchanging mighty blows.” Alexander sees they are well equipped for such extreme sport, “having a head shaped like a helmet with a shield behind and a sword clutched by the pommel before.” As a natural phenomenon, this martial play can be read from the created universe and usefully implemented in human society; knighthood can engage in it enthusiastically as a defining chivalric activity. The result is that “the noble king was inspired to establish a similar sport between his knights so that in times of peace and rest they could practice fighting without killing and in times of war be the readier to inflict damage on their enemies and defend themselves if attacked.”

This sport, the text continues, could be called “the school of prowess.” There must be careful rules to exclude treachery; blunted weaponry only should be used; and no one must hit a man from behind when he has lost his helmet.

In the modern world we feel confident that we know exactly what war is. Thankfully, for most this sense derives only from awareness of conflicts remote in time or space, miniaturized on the screen of some electronic device, or splashed with brutal color on the vast cinema screen within overwhelming darkness; and both cases present technological vistas of sweeping, thunderous destruction in which grimy men and women heroically or at least stoically “get the job done” so that the rest of us can sleep peacefully in our beds and the fighters can soon return to restored civilian life and the degree of peace we take as normal.

In the medieval world, however, war edged closer to representing the normal and acceptable state of things. Whereas many modern people consider war a tragic mistake, most medieval people knew that the first war took place in heaven (God and his angels throwing out Satan and his rebels). As Honoré Bonet wrote in the late fourteenth century in his Tree of Battles (summing up much previous discussion), it would not be natural for the world to be at peace, for war came from God who awards victory and could be evil only in its use rather than its basic nature. If the innocent suffer, divine will may be allowing them to do penance for their sins even before death sends them to final judgment. Moreover, medieval warfare took a greater variety of forms and investments of personnel and resources. Two lords quarreling over possession of a village and its revenues could without hearing a contradictory voice characterize their conflict as war; precursors of the Montagues and Capulets could seize arms and rush into narrow Florentine streets shouting for war; the followers of sovereigns disputing a province or a crown made war financed by increasingly effective systems of taxation. Conducting licit violence on any manageable scale represented the exercise of a right, a sign and possession of sufficiently high status to be entitled to make war. Those who possessed such authority the French termed chevetaines de guerre, but there were many such “war chiefs” occupying upper ranges of the social pyramid and more who longed to possess and exercise the coveted right to use violence to secure goals.

Thinking about knights and kings will likely bring to mind vivid scenes in stories and especially films about King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. It is easy to picture them feasting together (inconveniently wearing full plate armor) in joyous harmony, their rich goblets lifted to toast a common sense of purpose and destiny. Thinking about chivalry and the clerical hierarchy may conjure fewer vivid scenes; it requires us to recall that governing powers rested in great ecclesiastics no less than kings whose very knightliness more readily fills the eyes and mind. Yet the popular mental picture that surfaces will likely remain rosy-hued, perhaps featuring a bishop, solemn beneath his mitre, with gloved and ringed hand uplifted in blessing while knights bow heads in obedience and reverence. Both imagined scenes are not foreign to medieval life: kings, knights, and great clerics (joined by ranks of monks and parish priests) had good reason to cooperate; all knew that their thoughts operated within a common religious worldview encompassing a special role for kings and clerics as well as knights.

Yet reality was not always so simple and amicable, especially when actual and effective governing power was at issue. If harmonious scenes are readily imagined, tensions and difficulties can swiftly be spotted. A good witness can be summoned in the person of crusty old Girart, duke of Burgundy, as imagined in the great twelfth-century epic poem Chanson d'Aspremont. An utterly unreconstructed conservative, scornful of all advancing institutions of governance, he sings out an assertion of full independence from any governing authority. Though, in company with other epics, this chanson is set in an imagined Carolingian world, the poem wrestles with issues of the time of its composition. As the duke lectures Archbishop Turpin, who has been sent to secure his assistance in Charlemagne's campaign against Muslim invaders: