The Age of Chivalry
Remembering the Glories of the Middle Ages
Series: The Ethos of Chivalry
This post continues the thread of my recent post on “Alasdair MacIntyre and the Lost Tradition of the Virtues,” so consider starting from there. But jumping in here is fine, too.
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When Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, in 1603, he seems to have wanted to ridicule into oblivion the antiquated notions of knight-errantry that pervaded the popular fiction of his day. Spain was the superpower of the age, with big responsibilities in the world, and no time for escapist fantasy. Cervantes was a brave man, who had fought in the climactic battle of Lepanto that saved the Mediterranean world from Turkish domination, and he was a devout Catholic as well. But he saw how obsolete knight-errantry was in an age of subjects and soldiers, taxes and technology and the rule of law. So he set out to make the figure of the knight into the figure of a fool.
But Don Quixote got the better of his maker. The comedy morphs into a tragedy, and its fool is transfigured into a hero. No reader of the novel can fail to be on the side of the crazy adventurer against the drab reality that he disrupts. Readers are compelled to admire the way he clings to his dignity and his dreams through all the humiliations heaped upon him by a squalid and decadent world. A medieval light transfigures his pathetic person, and makes it beautiful and noble against his commonplace surroundings, and we are left with the feeling that the past was better than the present, so much so that madness is a price worth paying to live in that past, if only in fancy. What can it mean? What was so good about the past? What had been lost?
It was the tradition of the virtues.
In Cervantes’s day, it had been lost more in practice than in theory. In the universities, Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic philosophy still reigned, even if it had lost some of its creative vigor. It was in public affairs that Christendom was going to the bad.
For one thing, on many fronts the bad guys were just winning. Turkish power was advancing in the Mediterranean and the Balkans. The archvillain King Henry VIII of England, serial seducer, had appropriated the Church in order to authorize his own divorce, closed the monasteries, and judicially murdered his top advisor Thomas More when he had the integrity to object. Most modern readers will view Martin Luther more sympathetically than a Spanish Catholic like Cervantes must have done, but Protestants and Catholics alike will regret that he left Germany, and Christendom, religiously divided. Spain was at the height of its power, having expelled the Muslims and conquered the New World with its vast supplies of gold and silver. It saw itself as the champion of an embattled Catholicism, and had spent blood and treasure on battlefields across Europe for the cause. But it kept meeting setbacks, and felt overburdened and frustrated.
But the worst wasn’t that the bad guys were winning, but that the good guys had lost sight of the meaning of goodness. What they had to offer no longer satisfied. There was a kind of freedom and heroism that shone through in old tales that made them more worth living in than the contemporary reality. Doubtless, the old tales were fanciful and fictional enough, yet they must have had some basis, some inspiration. There was a time when each tale was first written. There was a time before that when the whole genre of such tales was first invented. Some past world first gave some poet the idea for such tales, and some audience recognized in them enough that was familiar that they could understand and enjoy them. Behind the fiction of chivalry was the fact.
It began in France.
Charlemagne, the great “king of the Franks” (forerunners of the French), who, to take up European history where I left off at the end of a previous post, was crowned “Holy Roman Emperor,” by the pope, on Christmas Day, 800 AD. His dynasty had begun a kind of preeminence of France within Europe that lasted a thousand years, but Charlemagne's empire did not last a thousand years in France. After his death, though Charlemagne's grand title survived, the empire became intermittent. Successive revivals and consolidations kept moving it east, and it lost control of the lands we now call France. A new “king of the Franks” arose, based in Paris, but for generations he had little power. France came to epitomize the form of society that historians now call “feudalism,” which it is tempting to define as “government by knights.” That’s not quite true, though, because it was as much a form of anarchy as a form of government.
To understand it, one needs to know what a knight is.
Essentials of Knighthood
Most societies, if not all, have warriors. Sometimes they are admired, often hated and feared, but they are always needed, because it takes warriors to defend you against warriors. The Church accepted that necessity but somehow—many details are lost in the mists of the almost illiterate Dark Ages—turned the warrior class into the order of knighthood, a sacred vocation.
Historian Georges Duby sees the Peace of God movement, around the year 1000 AD, as the key turning point in the emergence of knighthood, as a new principle of order, amidst the chaos of the Dark Ages. That movement set rather modest limits on the lawlessness of the times, by such rules as forbidding violence against unarmed clerics or in the vicinity of churches, against agricultural property or on certain holy days. The crucial thing was that it emanated from the Church and relied on moral suasion, or whatever power the Church might derive from the confessional and a monopoly of the Eucharist. Centuries would pass before any sovereign authority could curb lawless knights by force. But the beauty of moral suasion is that when it works, it not only prevents wrongdoing, but turns the will of the potential wrongdoer towards good, and lets him fully own his good action, enjoy it, and make it part of his identity. There was a good deal of violence in the feudal centuries, to be sure, but because it was more personal and decentralized, it could be more valiant and courteous, more capable of turning into spontaneous mercy. Those who freely wielded force could yet be humble enough to seek glory instead of taking it for granted. They had more scope for friendship than do isolated sovereigns, and were less prone to be trapped in echo chambers of flattery.
A typical knight might have begun by being sent from home at the age of 7 to be a page in a lordly household. A page fetched and cleaned and did menial work, which was not considered disgraceful. At about age 14, the page became a squire, a knight’s servant on quests and campaigns, watering horses and fixing armor and the like. All this time, he would be trained for strength and speed and weapons proficiency and riding and all else needful to be, well, a mounted “knight in shining armor,” hero of his age.
At age 21 or thereabouts, the squire might be ready to get knighted. The most famous part of the ceremony was the “dubbing,” where a sword tap on each shoulder made the man a knight. But before that, he had to do a “vigil of arms,” staying up all night long praying next to his armor. It would be interesting to know how many of our Christian readers have stayed up all night praying. It’s a rigorous demand. What, one wonders, did all those knights pray about? In the morning, the knight would hear a sermon on the duties of knighthood. All this ritual helped to prepare the knight spiritually not to succumb, or perhaps not even to feel, the temptations that come from wielding the power of the sword—to prey on the weak, to use power to get sex, and so on.
Violence and the Principle of Honor
An interesting detail of the knighthood ceremony is that the knight-to-be was sometimes struck on the cheek, to signify the last blow that he could accept without retaliation. Once knighted, his honor was too important for him to accept such an insult. Now, there is a striking opposition between the knightly code of conduct and the teachings of Jesus:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist an evil person. For whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (Matthew 5:38-39)
This is symptomatic of a certain tension that existed between chivalry and Christianity, the knight and the Church, from the beginning. Nevertheless, there’s a fairly easy reconciliation here. The Roman Catholic Church has long taught, and most other Christians, apart from rare pacifist sects such as the Amish, seem in practice to agree, that the Sermon on the Mount is to be followed literally only as the vocation of a select spiritual elite. Rank-and-file Christians retain the right to normal self-defense. The knights never forgot, though they sometimes resented, that they were the spiritual inferiors of the Church’s hermits and monks. They were not an ascetic spiritual elite, but men engaged in worldly affairs, living by a lower law than that of the Sermon on the Mount. So they could repay blows with blows.
They could repay blows for blows, but why must they? Why make it an obligation? Even if one doesn’t want to turn the other cheek all the time, it might sometimes be a good idea, mightn’t it? Yet to commit beforehand to vindicate one’s honor has its benefits. If everyone knows that, if struck, you’ll fight, they’re less likely to strike you in the first place. Also, in one sense, honor levels the playing field. A merely prudent knight might avenge a blow from a peasant but accept, without complaint, a blow from a king. Let all men act thus, and the king may strike whom he pleases without fear. But an honorable knight will fight when struck, though his assailant be the king. The king, though he might prevail, will prefer not to turn his knight into a rebel. So even the king is taught restraint. Honor serves to check the pride of sovereignty. A man of honor, who will avenge insults and keep promises by the laws of his own character, regardless of the command of his sovereign, is a free man, a kind of law unto himself, no matter how eagerly he fulfills the king’s quests out of love or desire for glory.
Though the Arthurian legends were set in Britain, they were a European theme, to which the French contributed as much or more than the English. The character of Sir Lancelot, for example, first appears in the writings of the 12th-century French poet Chretien de Troyes. In some respects, the court of Arthur is an imaginative projection of France in the Age of Chivalry. At the heart of the Arthurian legends is the Round Table, where Arthur’s knights sit. The Round Table is a symbol of equality. A round table has no head. All sit at it as equals, with Arthur a kind of ‘first among equals’ as the old saying has it. France in the Age of Chivalry was a little like that. A good king like Saint Louis IX (1214-1270), renowned for his justice and piety and love of the poor, who patronized art and learning and died on crusade, could lead the knights of France by inspiration and example. But they didn’t really have to obey a bad king, if they didn’t want to.
Feudal Hierarchies and the Feudal Social Contract
That is not to say that feudalism was egalitarian, even as far as the knightly class was concerned. If vows implied a kind of initial moral equality, they could result in hierarchy. A key feudal institution was that of “homage,” from the Latin homo, man, wherein one man declared to another that he was “his man,” or his vassal. The recipient of homage was a suzerain. The vassal had definite and limited obligations to his suzerain, who in turn owed him protection and support. Each vassal might have vassals in turn, and the suzerain might have a suzerain, and the links from vassal to suzerain should, in theory, lead all the way up to the king, and all the way down to the peasantry, thus organizing the realm.
Knights in the Middle Ages were usually in the middle of this feudal pyramid, not at the top. Their rank was somewhat similar to that of college graduates today. Like a medieval man who has just been knighted, a new college graduate has attained a certain degree of rank or honor, yet enjoys no economic security, no real entitlements or property or position, by virtue of that honor. Instead, he or she enjoys a public, readily recognizable mark or sign of a trait greatly valued by the age: courage and military prowess in the knight’s case, intelligence and knowledge in the college graduate’s.
The knights were then, as college graduates are today, in one sense a ruling class: power could be wielded only with their help, and their ethos largely determined the character of society’s secular institutions. And such was their prestige that nobility and even royalty might aspire to knighthood, as celebrities today are proud to be given honorary degrees. Thus, the great knight Bayard knighted King Francis I of France on the battlefield after a victory at Marignano in 1515.
Yet most knights were then, like most college graduates are today, not independent, but attached to the service of a much narrower elite, namely the feudal nobility in medieval times, or in modern times, corporate executives, politicians, and celebrities. They may, if anything, be more dependent, more compelled to subordinate their preferences to tasks for and roles in the service of others, than those whom they feel, and who feel themselves, to be their social inferiors. But if they are more dependent, they are also entrusted with more power. Their autonomy is limited, they conform to a lot of norms and obey a lot of orders, but they have discretion, they make decisions, they allocate resources. Their larger responsibilities protect them from petty tyranny. The special skills and reputations and relationships they acquire eventually make them difficult to replace, giving them some security, some ability to negotiate and push back. They are candidates for the power elite, and even from subordinate positions they can sometimes influence events. The good knight had to please his lord or king in much more complex and difficult ways, in courtesy, counsel, and combat, than a peasant did by toiling in the fields, but he was also more valued, honored, trusted and rewarded.
The hierarchical system of feudalism is not to modern taste, yet it was a much more genuine “social contract” than the imaginary ones that supposedly undergird and legitimize modern democratic states. Vassals really did swear obedience to their suzerains, as citizens of Western democracies don’t typically swear obedience to their modern democratic states. Suzerains’ power was genuinely limited by the scope of the mutual vows between themselves and their vassals, whereas “sovereign” democratic governments recognize no real limits on what they’re allowed to do. Vassals often enjoyed much freedom of action, and in France in the Age of Chivalry, the vassalage of the highest ranks of the nobility to the king was often little more than nominal. Differences in interpretation about a vassal’s obligations to his suzerain could lead to a war by a suzerain against a vassal.
King Arthur, in the legends, hardly seems to have claimed any prerogatives. Knights flocked to his court for the sake of courtesy, glory, and adventure. He often urged them on to that, sending them on quests. He could not forbid it to them. At one point, his knights see a vision of the Holy Grail and vow to go seek it. Arthur is distressed by this, foreseeing that many of his knights will die on the quest, and their company will never regain its former strength, yet he shows no sign of thinking that he has the authority to forbid his knights to go on the adventure. There is a parallel between this episode in the Arthurian legends, and what actually happened when Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in France in 1095. Many French knights rallied to the cause. The French king’s opinion on the matter was unimportant. The Pope, speaking in France, happened to excommunicate the French king for sexual misconduct in the same speech that launched the Crusade. That wasn't particularly momentous or dangerous. In general, the French king was often a helpless spectator as his vassals went out to win lands and kingdoms for themselves outside his realm.
The weak center left France vulnerable to civil war and foreign invasion. The Vikings invaded in the 9th century, settled parts of the country, and gradually became integrated into the French nobility. Later, there were many invasions by the kings of England, culminating in the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). When the Cathar heresy in southern France needed to be suppressed, it was done, not by a decree of the French king, who mostly stayed on the sidelines even though, again, the whole affair occurred on French territory, but by a crusade, preached by the popes and promoted by the mendicant friars, fought by volunteers in search of heavenly salvation or earthly fortunes. France’s knights had so much freedom of action that they might fight for invading English kings, or for the pope, as much as for their own king.
But all this civil war and foreign invasion—counter-intuitive as this may sound—was a small price to pay for the splendid civilization of medieval France.
Achievements of the Age of Chivalry
It was in France, in the Age of Chivalry, that the tournament, a spectacular form of public entertainment cum military training, flourished. The medieval tournament should be compared, if we want to fully appreciate it, to the Roman Colosseum on the one hand, and modern football leagues, on the other. The Roman Colosseum entertains the masses by murdering men. The fighters were slaves, doomed to die. Modern football leagues, by contrast, are innocent enough, but entirely escapist, a sheer luxury. They build nothing, give nothing back. But the medieval tournament was almost as thrillingly violent as the Roman Colosseum, and at the same time, useful. Tournaments met society's need to teach men to fight, and to discern who were the best fighters. Meanwhile, it was not captives or slaves who exposed their bodies to danger to entertain the multitude. It was the knights, the leading class of society, the elite. And they did it not under compulsion but freely, voluntarily, spiritedly. What a splendid institution!
It was in France, in the Age of Chivalry, that the troubadours first sang, and initiated the tradition of romantic love. Romantic love has had an imaginative association in the Western mind with knighthood and chivalry ever since. In the courts of the high Middle Ages, the love between the sexes seems to have been transfigured into something more lofty and beautiful than it had ever been before, even, in a sense, than it ought to be. It became a kind of doctrine in those times that perfect “courtly love” had to be unfulfilled in order to retain its tragic purity, and that it was spoiled by the prosaic anticlimax of marriage. A dangerous notion! Yet it is capable of innocent expressions, as in the love of Dante for Beatrice, or the love of Don Quixote for Dulcinea.
It was in the Age of Chivalry that representative government was born, the most famous landmark being the Magna Carta, which in 1215 established the rights of the English Parliament against the English King, and threw in some general rule of law for good measure. Thus began the British constitution. The leader of the rebellion that won the Magna Carta was the French-English nobleman Simon de Montfort V, 6th Earl of Leicester, son of Simon de Montfort IV, the great crusader who crushed the Albigensian heresy in France, assisted by Archbishop Stephen Langton of Canterbury, educated in Paris, who also divided the Bible into the chapters and verses that we know. So native to a pious Age of Chivalry was the Magna Carta! It had little to do with the Anglo-Saxon populace that worked fields and served tables for the chivalrous knights and nobles, and who later grew into the English people, gradually inheriting the Magna Carta and Parliament and the rest of it. The Magna Carta was less special at the time than it became later, when many other elected parliaments and assemblies, after emerging in the Middle Ages, were suppressed by the absolutist sovereign monarchies of early modern times. England had a lucky escape, kept its Parliament, and became the bastion of modern liberalism.
Indeed, England is an interesting case, for its free constitution is not, ultimately, a native development, but a transplant that took root, like the free constitution of modern India. As independent India has democratized the British Raj, rather than reviving any pre-British tradition, so the British, before them, gradually made national the feudal and chivalrous regime brought to their shores in 1066 by William the Conqueror and his Norman knights. Their institutions begin then, and have little to do with the shifting Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Danish kingdoms of pre-Norman Britain. What mattered about the Norman knights is not that they were Norman but that they were knights. They annexed England thoroughly to the chivalrous civilization centered in and spreading out from France. That gave England an enduring advantage over other peripheral European countries like Scotland, Ireland, and Scandinavia, and even to some extent Germany, which never participated so fully in the culture of chivalry. England became then, and has ever remained, a great actor in the drama of Europe.
More generally, it was in the Age of Chivalry that Europe's historic nations were born, especially England and France, and to a lesser extent Germany, Poland, Scotland, and Portugal. (What we know as Spain was two countries then, Castile and Aragon, and Italy was many proudly independent city-states.) The knight, who is loyal yet not servile, may deserve credit for setting a pattern citizens of modern nation states follow. There had never quite been nations before. There were tribes, and city-states, and Empires, and political-religious communities like ancient Israel or the dar-al-Islam. But there were not nations as we mean the word, peoples whose solidarity depends little on blood relationships or personal service to a king, and encompasses far too large a group to have face-to-face interactions, but is tied to laws, land and history. Perhaps it took the feudal social contract to provide the political structure within which nations could emerge.
But if the Age of Chivalry has some claim to the paternity of nationalism, it was not itself nationalist. Loyalties then were more local, to a village or town or guild or monastery or suzerain, or more global, to the Pope or the emperor or the Templars or the Franciscans, and they overlapped and interpenetrated in elaborate ways. It was very complex, and yet there was a unity and even a simplicity about it as well. Everywhere the same Mass was said. Everywhere Christmas and Easter and Ascension and the rest of the feasts occurred at the same time. Latin has become a symbol of the Middle Ages, but we may forget why it was so widely used. It was no one's native language, but it was the second language of learned men who spoke a hundred different vernaculars. It was cosmopolitan. The part of Paris that was near the University is still called the Latin Quarter. The name is medieval, and comes from the custom of medieval students to speak Latin. It would be anachronistic to say that they came from many different nations; there were no nations in our sense; but they spoke many different mother tongues. Latin united them. It was a level playing field. It was like English today, only better, because English is some people's mother tongue and gives them an unfair advantage.
Many people today dislike globalization, despite its vast benefits for the world's poor, because they are unsettled by the way power seems to be diffused to entities like the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO, which have no territorial base or clear lines of accountability. No one's in charge! So it was in the Age of Chivalry, only more so. Great royal and noble dynasties had lands in many places and allies in more, Italian banks had branches all over Europe, the papacy’s authority, reaching down through an increasingly well organized and disciplined Church hierarchy, was present everywhere, and the Templars, Hospitallers, Cistercians, Franciscans and Dominicans had far-reaching networks that spread across the boundaries of any king's authority. Today, unfortunately, globalization operates at the pleasure of sovereign national governments, which can stop it if they choose, albeit at a cost. In the Age of Chivalry, it was dangerous for kings to defy the globalizing influence of the Church, though some tried. And it was just this combination of cultural unity with political fluidity and fragmentation that made the Age of Chivalry so creative. It remained Europe’s strength long afterwards.
It was in the Age of Chivalry that Roman law was revived and spread all over Europe, replacing primitive Germanic customs like trial by ordeal that had marred early medieval times. England was an exception, because William the Conqueror had established a legal code before university scholars had made Roman law available, so he based English law on Anglo-Saxon customs. The distinction between the civil law of the European continent and the common law of England and its offshoots has persisted ever since. Either way, though, better law and better justice was being established.
It was in France, in the Age of Chivalry, that the university as we know it was born, speaking Latin as we said, and launched the Western intellect on the great journey that continues today. Arguably, science was born in the Middle Ages. The ancient Greeks had natural philosophy of a sort, but they tended to think ideas were superior to matter, a disincentive to systematic empirical observation. Medieval thinkers derived from Christianity a belief that God liked matter and had made a good, law-governed world, and they set out to discover as best they could what those laws were. Of course, the scientific enterprise accelerated later on.
Nations, representative government, and science are medieval achievements but they do not typify medieval civilization. They were beginnings that became more important later. More expressive of the peculiar genius of the age are the cathedrals. It was in France, in the Age of Chivalry, that the first, and a little later the greatest, cathedrals were built. To judge from the revealed preference of the modern tourist, they are without peer in the history of architecture, magnificent yet serene, stone turned graceful, stained glass turning sunlight into stories, transcendent. But then, we can still see them, if a little faded. We are biased because stone stays. If we could hear the troubadours or see the tournaments, we might like them even better.
Perhaps we have strayed somewhat from the theme of chivalry. Cathedrals and universities have much more to do with the Church and with the towns than with the knights. But politics matters, it can help a little and hurt a lot, so the ruling class can claim some credit for the whole far-ranging genius of the age, simply because they let it happen. And strikingly, the first and finest cathedrals and universities, the songs of the troubadours, the most splendid fairs, the greatest tournaments, and in general, all the best that medieval Europe north of the Alps had to offer, took place not in England or Germany, which were better organized under strong monarchs, but in semi-kingless France, where chivalry reigned. The multi-faceted glory of France in the Age of Chivalry seems to have come about, not despite, but because of the weakness of centralized authority. To be sure, mere chaos does not favor culture, but France in the heyday of chivalry was not a chaos. There was no effective sovereign state until well into the 13th century, but a certain degree of peace, justice, and leadership was supplied by the nobility and the knights, for the sake of their personal honor or piety and to fulfill their knightly oaths. That was enough. And it helped a good deal that there was no suspicious, grasping central government to tread down and regulate away the manifold flourishing of high medieval French society.
Perhaps most important of all was the liberty of the Church, which in medieval times exceeded, in certain respects, the wildest demands for “religious freedom” that are made today. It was typical for clerics not even to be able to be tried in secular courts. There was a whole system of ecclesiastical courts to handle cases involving clerics. And this extreme liberty of the Church was the forerunner of academic freedom as we know it today, for students tended to be nominally clerics and enjoy clerical immunities, and anyway the popes granted all sorts of privileges and immunities to universities. The Church was also the ally and patron of the Italian city-states as they struggled for freedom from the German Empire, and won breathing space in which to make the Renaissance. But that's another story.
The Roots of Knightly Virtues
Knights were, of course, far from uniformly virtuous. Or to add a layer to that, some kind of knightly or chivalrous ideal pervaded the age, though there was never perfect agreement about it, and many knights did not live up to it. Still, knights are sufficiently striking for their courage and courtesy, their piety and principles, as to raise the question of where their virtues came from. What shaped the moral character of a class of people is difficult to document in the best of times, in the full blaze of recorded history, let alone in the nearly illiterate Dark Ages when knighthood emerged. Yet it’s not too fanciful to say that the knightly ethos of chivalry sprang from the tragic, heroic legacy of pagan Germanic and Norse warriors, baptized by a Christian Church steeped in the cult of relics and often superstitious, but wise with all the question of the ancients. Children tend to resemble parents, thanks in part to genetic heredity (nature), more to instruction and example (nurture). Much or most of the noble and knightly class probably traced its lineage back to Franks, Vikings, or other warlike northern peoples who raised, conquered, settled in and/or ruled large swaths of the old Roman civilization over many generations. It’s interesting that King Arthur, who was likely a sheer myth, or at least a figure whose historicity is completely obscured by later legends, was held to be a Briton from late Roman times, before the Saxon invasion, which would make him a Celt. Like the ancient Greeks, who remembered their Trojan enemy Hector far more kindly than their own Greek kings, the knightly caste of the High Middle Ages imagined into the Celts when their race has conquered the perfection of the virtues that they themselves strove to exemplify.
The knights, as a social class, were the offspring, so to speak, of two other classes, whose virtues they inherited and intermingled. Their Northern ancestry has been mentioned, and there lingers about the knights, down the centuries of their history, a wild and wandering disposition, and a bit of the sad, stoical courage of a race that had once believed death in battle was the way to Valhalla, and the gods would die and the world be drowned in Ragnarok. Thus unattainable courtly love; thus the impossible Crusader dream of a lasting kingdom of Jerusalem. On the other side, they were the offspring of the priests, especially priests of the Dark Ages, full of the cult of relics and destitute of the erudition and critical thinking that many in the high medieval clergy attained. Thus the immense feeling evoked by the Holy Grail, but also monogamy, no practice of slavery, and profound respect for the Church and devotion to the Christian cause. The process of inheritance isn’t too mysterious. A little birth and genetic endowment, and a lot of talk and intimate observation, should suffice. The knightly class was a few generations removed from pagan warrior ancestors, and much must have passed from generation to generation in the family home. Like father, like son. But knights also went to church, confessed to and got absolution from priests, or in later centuries, listened to the preaching of itinerant friars, participated in religious festivals, and believed in Christian doctrines, while some were even vassals of bishops or abbots, and all these were channels through which Christianity influenced the knightly ethos. Liberty and virtue are ever interlinked, and with the knights’ peculiar kind of virtue came a peculiar kind of freedom.
Freedom and Serfdom in the High Middle Ages
In some ways, the Age of Chivalry was freer than modern polities that see themselves as liberated from an oppressive past. There were still lots of wild forests to go hunting in, and wild game was part of the medieval diet of many who were not rich. One version of the life of Robin Hood has him turn outlaw when he hears that the king has forbidden hunting in the local greenwood, which a peasant in those less law-burdened times had the luxury of regarding as a self-evident and intolerable injustice. Certain lives, such as that of Godfrey of Bouillon, a French knight who heard a sermon, went on Crusade, and became king of Jerusalem in all but name, or Saint Francis of Assisi, who abandoned his bourgeois home to go begging his bread and singing the glory of God, and who soon found himself at the head of an order of men overspreading Europe and doing the same, have about them more adventure and spontaneity than our own tightly scheduled, over-regulated times, with their passport regimes, would seem to afford. Old tales of knights, which are full of surprises and have very little routine, have a wild and wandering character that would be hard to achieve in a modern realistic novel. They seem to express the spirit of an age with fewer rules.
And yet much of the population was still bound to the land. Serfdom was older than chivalry, and it waned during the Age of Chivalry, as service was commuted to dues, and dues eroded by inflation, and bans on leaving the land ceased to be enforced. There were probably always exit options anyway. An old saying has it that “town air makes men free,” meaning that a serf who spent a year and a day in a town could not be dragged back to his lord's manor. The Cistercians recruited “lay brothers” from among the peasantry to work their land, and the Franciscans recruited from among the common people. And serfdom was not slavery, which was momentous! Every prior age that was half as civilized as the High Middle Ages had had slaves. The society led by knights was the first complex society in history not to practice slavery.
Still, it was far more statistically typical for a medieval person to be born and die upon the land as a serf than to get to participate in the culture of chivalry as a knight, with all the glory and danger and courtesy of that vocation. By the institution of serfdom, as well as by the culture of chivalry, the age must be judged. How damaging is that? The brilliant economist Friedrich Hayek wrote a book called The Road to Serfdom, which was a polemic against socialism. It's a very apt analogy in some ways. The serf and the subject of a socialist regime both have their lives planned for them. They don't choose the pattern of their lives for themselves, but on the other hand, they are taken care of. Some would take the deal.
And anyway, which of us does choose the pattern of our lives? Doesn't far more depend on serendipity or necessity than on your own plans and free choices? Suppose you could interview your past self at a dozen points in time. Find out what each of your past self’s plans for the future were. How much would your life resemble any of the plans? And if it doesn't, is that because you freely changed your mind, or because of fortune and serendipity and accident? The truth is that none of us can plan our lives because we depend on too many other people. Society can plan our lives, or they can depend on serendipity and adventure, with our choices to some extent, but our plans very little, shaping their course. In the Age of Chivalry, the typical serf’s life was probably less serendipitous than the typical modern life, the typical knight’s life more so. Plenty of people might prefer the former, which is the main reason why socialism made so many converts, even though it was a road to serfdom, and as it turned out, to much worse things.
The job serfs had to do, farming, is one that, under modern conditions, more people want to live by than can. The Bible says that man's original purpose, in Eden, was to look after the plants and animals. Whatever be the truth of that old tale, many have felt that tilling the soil and watching things grow, and looking after sheep and goats and pigs and cattle, is the livelihood in which the human heart is most at home. A pastoral literature going back at least to Virgil remembers the rural life as innocent and merry, an echo of Eden. Why not? Why shouldn't peasants be merry? Of course, serfs, and knights too for that matter, had to bury many of their children. They thought they were with God. They were dirtier, less comfortable, and had to do more hard physical labor than most of us do today. One privation is surprising: medieval serfs probably went to church only rarely. Technology and human capital have tended, wherever the Christian churches are strong, to accumulate over time and raise living standards, so we are richer than the medievals. Did they take delight in being closer to nature, or is our feeling that they must have done so a bias inherited from Romanticism? Perhaps we can do no more than guess.
Just to be clear: serfdom is wrong. It unjustly curtails natural human liberty. That our age lacks it gives us a certain moral advantage. But it would be nice, too, if more people felt secure from being fired or evicted, as medieval serfs were secure from such things. When the Age of Chivalry gradually ended serfdom, that was a movement in the right direction. Is our age, with its mounting student debt as superfluous college requirements get tacked on to more and more jobs, as job security wanes and seniors get sent to nursing homes, as health care costs escalate and zoning laws drive urban housing prices sky high, also moving in the right direction, with respect to the degree to which economic institutions provide satisfactory lives for the common people?
The Crusades
Christendom’s great foreign policy problem in the High Middle Ages is surprisingly familiar in the 21st century. It was Islam. It had long been slowly losing a defensive war against Islam. Then, in the Age of Chivalry, it went suddenly and spectacularly on the offensive.
The Mediterranean had once been a Christian lake. Then, in the 7th and 8th centuries, the Arabs burst forth from the desert, inflamed with ambition by the advent of their new religion, and conquered Syria and Palestine, Egypt and North Africa, and Spain, gaining an empire that stretched from the Indus to the Atlantic. Constantinople, with its towering walls, resisted the first onslaught, and became, for many centuries, the Minas Tirith of the Middle Ages, the Horatius on the bridge from Europe to Asia. When Pope Urban II received a desperate plea for help from Constantinople, which was besieged by the Seljuk Turks, he summoned the Council of Clermont, and there launched a project which became the Crusades. The successor of St. Peter had no troops of his own, but had great influence. He preached in Italy, and especially in France, asking the knights to march to the aid of Constantinople—and while they were at it, for good measure, to take Jerusalem as well. They did so. Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders in 1099, and the short, violent history of the Crusader states began.
Moderns tend to be naïve about the Crusades. They blame the Crusaders for their aggression and wonder why they couldn’t leave the Muslims alone. But why should the Muslims’ right to rule be acknowledged? Muslim rulers in Palestine were a minority regime, established by conquest, and practicing slavery. Their Christian subjects often welcomed the Crusaders as fellow Christians and liberators. Also, pilgrimage to Jerusalem was genuinely important to western Europeans. They wanted to walk where Christ had once walked, and to visit his tomb and other places of sacred memory. It is unfortunate that modern ideologies don’t have more room for this motive, for the idea that the right to visit places crucial to the life of one’s spirit might be as important as the right to choose one’s profession or marry for love. Christian pilgrimage had long been allowed by Muslim rulers, but was disrupted in the 11th century, and that became a secondary motive for the Crusades.
That said, capturing Jerusalem was a bit rash. Jerusalem was far beyond what had for centuries been the furthest boundaries of Christian rule. As a newly Christian stronghold, it was exposed, isolated, and surrounded by enemies. The Crusader states never had the economy and manpower to sustain themselves in the face of such threats. Instead, they relied on constant infusions of money and volunteers from western Europe. Nine Crusades were organized in Europe over the following two centuries, often involving Europe’s greatest kings, to support the Christian position in the Holy Land, and those were the only the largest surges in a continuing traffic of volunteer fighters. The popes were continually preaching crusades, and promising forgiveness of sins in return, until they considerably debased this, so to speak, spiritual currency. In the long run, the strategic payoff for all this sacrifice was disappointing. Jerusalem fell in 1187, after less than ninety years of Crusader rule, and after another century, the Crusaders were completely and permanently expelled from the Holy Land with the fall of the castle of Acre in 1291. It does not follow that the Crusades were in vain, however. If nothing else, they took Muslim pressure off Constantinople for a couple of centuries.
Crusading seized the European imagination, and the crusader became the apotheosis of the knight. And this can be felt, I think, in the mature Arthurian legend.
The early part of the Arthurian legend is full of the magic of Merlin, the valor and justice of Arthur, and the adventures and combats of his knights, against enemies, or against each other. Later, the legends take an amorous turn, and the most famous amours in the legend are tragically illicit. Sir Lancelot, greatest of Arthur’s knights, fights for love of Arthur’s queen, Guinevere. Sir Tristram, second only to Lancelot in his prowess and distinction, loves Isolde the Fair of Ireland, who is the wife of King Mark of Cornwall. Tristram’s story is sad and even sordid, for Mark knows that Isolde loves Tristram, and hates Tristram for it, and banishes him from his court, so that Tristram is left to languish far from his love. By contrast, Lancelot’s love for Guinevere becomes a kind of institution in the court without provoking the jealousy of Arthur, who seems to be the only one who doesn’t know about it. It inspires Lancelot’s great deeds, which bring Arthur’s kingdom to the height of its power and glory. To what extent, if any, Lancelot’s love affair with Guinevere involves physical infidelity is not always clear. The fact that Guinevere is Arthur’s wife prolongs the romantic suspense, ensuring that the desperate ardor of unattained love cannot subside into the humdrum happiness of marriage. So life seems to have developed in many courts in France in the Age of Chivalry. The glamor by which the great nobles attached knights to their courts created environments too thick with romantic intrigue to be tamely partitioned into married couples. The art of courtly love was developed, with all its beauty, and its ultimate sadness and vanity.
But then, as the martial grandeur of Arthur’s court is vitiated by amorous secrets, comes the quest of the Holy Grail, the search for the cup into which Christ’s blood was spilled, and for its sake the chief knights of the court feel the call to transcend their sins, for they are told that only one purified of sins may succeed in that greatest of quests. Sir Tristram, long the illicit lover of Queen Isolde, seeks to purify himself in preparation for the quest of the Grail, by marrying a different maiden, but then falls ill until Queen Isolde is sent for, and dies by King Mark’s dagger while he is playing the harp for his former love. Sir Lancelot seeks out a holy hermit, and makes his confession, repenting of his long years spent in love for Guinevere. He does go on the Grail quest, but he only gets to see the Grail through a door, and, unworthy to enter the room where the Grail is, he is smitten with fire when he tries, and is driven back. It is younger, more sinless knights, Sirs Bohort, Parsifal, and Galahad, who win the quest, especially Sir Galahad, who has never so much as held hands with a maiden, and who is taken up to heaven by angels, with the Grail in his hand.
At the risk of taking liberties, it is hard to avoid supposing that the quest for the Holy Grail, as the climax of the Arthurian legends, expressed the impression made on the minds of knights and poets in the Age of Chivalry by the sudden intrusion of the crusading vocation into the world of chivalry. Something was lost. The sacrifices were real. Yet it was somehow necessary that chivalry be saved from itself, saved from its own labyrinthine dreams, by this high and holy quest. And Sir Galahad has his historical counterparts, for there appeared in the aftermath of the First Crusade a new class of knights too pure ever to hold a maiden’s hand.
The Templars
In 1118, Hugh de Payens, a French knight and minor nobleman, along with eight comrades, approached King Baldwin I of Jerusalem with an offer to provide security to pilgrims along the dangerous highways that led from the seaport to the holy city. They wanted to dedicate themselves to this task as a holy calling, and to live as monks while still fighting as knights. Their offer was eagerly accepted, and soon they became an official monastic order, named the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, or Templars for short, were promoted by the great orator Saint Bernard, strongly backed by the pope, and received bountiful gifts from kings and nobles all over Europe. The pope exempted them from taxation by and subjection to the secular kings of Europe, and even authorized them, once a year, to give communion to people who were excommunicated by the pope and countries under interdict. A slightly older monastic order, the Hospitallers, at first dedicated to caring for sick pilgrims at a hospital in Jerusalem, also took on a military character and came to resemble the Templars.
The immense popularity and trust that the Templars enjoyed almost from the moment of their founding-- to the point where, at times, almost every will contained a gift to the Templars and kings deposited their treasuries with the Templars, sometimes lived in and ruled from their Temples, or took shelter there in times of unrest, and used them as witnesses to wills and as ambassadors-- suggests that they met a need, satisfied a thirst, fulfilled a dream. Chivalry needed them, needed their high quest as a fitting aim for its energetic spirit of adventure. And yet the mission for which they were founded, though in practice they did much more, was a modest one, and for that reason, clearly just. Taken literally and narrowly, it was not to conquer, not even to hold onto territory, but simply to protect peaceful pilgrims from brigands, marauders, and wild beasts. In 1192, the Templars dented their popularity in Europe by successfully counseling Richard the Lionhearted not to recapture Jerusalem from Saladin, who had seized it five years before, after Saladin agreed to let Christian pilgrims visit the holy sites. That was consistent with the Templars’ founding mission. Had such moderation been more common during the Crusades, their outcome might have been happier. But the belief that any who died fighting in the Crusades would go straight to heaven gave the Templars, like other Crusaders, an incentive to rash courage that could be strategically unhelpful.
The Templars, and the Hospitallers, were a military asset very disproportionate to their numbers, for they remained in the Holy Land when the volunteer crusaders from the West went home. Famed for their prowess and intense courage, often they led the charge, but sometimes they held back and then stepped into the fray just as secular Crusaders were fleeing, preventing a rout. They came to know the land, and its strategic challenges, well. They guarded the flanks of large European armies and kept them fed. They became skillful diplomats and negotiators, and sometimes were able to hold together crusading armies consisting of kings who were enemies in Europe. Twice they advised, unfortunately without success on these occasions, against attacks on Egypt, which didn't properly fit the crusading mandate, yet which tempted crusaders and kings of Jerusalem because it was a rich country with opportunities for plunder. Ultimately, it was the strategic ineptitude of crusading kings from Europe, as much as Islamic armies’ greatly superior numbers, that doomed the Christian presence in the Holy Land. The Templars had Arab linguists and one of their Grand Masters was a Syrian. On occasion, they scandalized European visitors by their friendly relations with the Muslims, with whom they preferred peace when they could get it. That may be why, when they were later accused of worshiping Mohammad, some found the charge plausible.
All the while—and this sounds strange at first—the Templars grew very wealthy, and became a kind of international corporation, running farms and other businesses, and engaging in high finance. The Templars invented a kind of traveler’s check. Pilgrims to Jerusalem could deposit their money with Templar offices in Europe, receive papers signifying that they had done so, and then, after arriving in the Holy Land, show the papers to the Templars there to withdraw their money. The Templars’ fortunes were founded on the donations of the faithful, though bolstered thereafter by their own enterprising business sense. The feeling that chivalry and finance are strange bedfellows, and that it’s unsuitable for Sir Galahad to become a banker, is hard to fight down. Yet the truth is that it is perfectly appropriate for a good knight to husband scarce resources for the cause, and to be bold in business as well as in battle. The vows of poverty that were taken by individual Templars not only did not contradict the wealth of the order, but surely helped it to grow so rich, since the order could economize on the upkeep of its members, and save its money for the cause.
Yet there came a time when the last Templar castle in the Holy Land fell, and the Crusades seemed to have been utterly defeated. And yet, though their cause was lost, they still possessed great wealth, stored in a network of Temples across Europe. What should be done with Templars when there were no Crusades left?
Strategically, the answer is clear. Jerusalem had always been a strategic luxury, a gambit, an adventure. The Crusaders had overreached. It was time to recognize that mistake, give up the dream of Jerusalem, and return to the Crusades’ original purpose. The Mediterranean, as we mentioned before, had once been a Christian lake. Now, after the fall of Acre, its southern and eastern shores were lost, Islam was on the march again, and Constantinople, outnumbered and weakening, stood exposed to the oncoming tide of Muslim conquest. Who should come to its defense, if not the Templars, with all their wealth, prestige, and valor? Had they done so, what a different course history might have taken! The Turks might never have conquered Asia Minor, and Constantinople, and Greece, Cyprus and Crete, and Bulgaria and Serbia and Romania and Hungary, and reduced them to centuries of captivity, stealing their best young boys to make them into janissary soldiers, conscripting maidens into the harems of the sultan and other Turkish grandees, slaying thousands of martyrs, and filling the Mediterranean with pirates and slavers.
As a poet once wrote, “Of all the words of tongue or pen / The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”
But long before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Templars were gone. They did not gradually decline, or go out of fashion. Like Sir Tristram in the Arthurian tales, they were stabbed in the back by a cowardly king.
Next post in this series coming soon