Lancelot battles the copper knight automata in order to enter the Doloreuse Garde castle. The humanoid knights are often depicted without clothing. (From Lancelot do lac, France, 15th century. Paris, BnF, MS Fr. 118, fol. 200v.)

c. 1220

LANCELOT’S COPPER KNIGHTS

Simple examples of AI, in the form of mechanical men and creatures, became common in European medieval times, when, as historian Elly Truitt writes, “Golden birds and beasts, musical fountains, and robotic servants astound and terrify guests. . . . Automata stood at the intersection of natural knowledge (including magic) and technology, and . . . were troubling links between art and nature.” Both actual and fictional devices in ancient literature provide a fascinating glimpse of an “interdependence of science, technology, and the imagination.”

One famous example of fictional medieval robots occurs in Lancelot du lac (Lancelot of the Lake, c. 1220), an old French prose tale that recounts the adventures of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, including the secret romance of Sir Lancelot and Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. While outside Doloreuse Garde, a frightening enchanted castle, Lancelot encounters a small army of robotic copper knights. After entering the castle, he defeats two more sword-wielding copper knights as they guard an internal chamber where a young copper woman holds the keys to the enchantment. He uses the keys to open a box that contains thirty copper tubes, from which come terrifying cries—and he quickly falls asleep. Upon awakening, he finds that the copper woman has collapsed to the ground, and the copper knights are shattered.

Historian Jessica Riskin writes: “The automaton knights and damsels of Arthurian legend were accompanied by gold, silver and copper children, satyrs, archers, musicians, oracles and giants. These fictional artificial beings had plenty of real counterparts. Actual mechanical people and animals thronged the landscape of late medieval and early modern Europe.” As one example, around the same time as the tale of Lancelot’s copper knights, French artist and engineer Villard de Honnecourt (c. 1225–c. 1250) created a mechanical eagle that was designed to turn its head towards the deacon when he read from the Gospel. Riskin notes that these lifelike automata provide a context for scientific and philosophical models of living beings as machines that emerged in the seventeenth century.