COMING UNEXPECTEDLY UPON the splendid manuscript painting in British Library Harley 3244 (folios 27b, 28) provided one of those moments that richly reward scholarly work in archives. This striking mid-thirteenth-century illumination vividly portrays knighthood in a righteous struggle against sin and vice.1 It could easily have been missed, for the obviously visual part of this volume features an engaging bestiary (an illustrated, moralized “book of beasts” at folios 36–71b); this menagerie of animals so suddenly and colorfully intruded among somber treatises on sin, confession, and penance that I half feared an outburst of trumpeting, howling, and braying that would disturb other readers in that wonderfully quiet Manuscript Room. The serene calm and serious religious tenor of the book was only reasserted when I leafed back to a partial copy of a thirteenth-century encyclopedic work on virtues and vices by a French Dominican named William of Peraldus (Guillaume Peyraut).2 This is the book for which our stunning illustration now provides a frontispiece.
The painting can likewise serve to introduce the present book on the religion of knights. Carefully planned and beautifully drawn, the bifoliate illumination brings chivalry and religion into the same conceptual frame-work. Yet the right-hand page irresistibly draws the reader's eye first, for with much boldness and confidence it presents a mounted knight fully encased in mid-thirteenth-century armor, ready for rough action with lance and drawn sword. At the top of this page a Latin inscription (emphasized by being outlined and written in red ink) serves as caption for the full painting; it quotes a passage from the Book of Job (7:1): “Militia est vita hominis super terram (human life on earth is militia).”3 This small Latin noun, militia, bears large meanings: it can denote hard struggle, or fighting, or knighthood. All these meanings seem to merge in the illustration. The knight drawn so prominently symbolizes the heroic struggle asserted in the biblical quotation; we could even say he symbolizes the medieval Christian ideal for the profession of knighthood. And we cannot doubt that religious validity is asserted for his struggle, for each part of his equipment has been given a pious meaning. The terms do not simply reproduce those well known from St. Paul (in Ephesians 6), who exhorts the believer to put on the whole armor of God, specifying parts and meanings. Nor could they reproduce the symbols used by the most popular writer of a manual on chivalry, the former knight Ramon Llull. Though Llull provided religious meanings for all parts of a knight's armor and even that of his horse, he likely wrote his influential Book of the Order of Chivalry decades later.4 The influential Prose Lancelot appeared decades before this illumination, but presents an entirely different set of symbolic meanings for the knight's equipment.5 Evidently the religious labels in our illumination have been chosen by the writer or illustrator, if not selected by the patron. The knight is, for example, firmly seated in the Christian religion (Christiana religio), his saddle resting on a blanket of humility (humilitas). The sword he bears in one hand is the word of God (verbum dei) as in St. Paul, but his lance is labeled steadfastness or perseverance (perseverantia). On each corner of his shield the name of a member of the Christian Trinity appears, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the lines converging in the center of the shield as Deus (the Godhead).6 Even the parts of the horse are assigned religious meanings, the horse's rump unfortunately being termed good will. Overhead, an angel descends from stylized heaven bearing a crown. It is not a royal crown, but rather the crown of victory won by the knight in his determined struggle. Inscribed on the band held in the angel's left hand is a maxim which seems taken from St. Paul (2 Timothy 2:5) declaring that only he who fights the good fight wins a crown.7 Equally interesting, the angel holds in its right hand a set of seven scrolls that bear equally potent language; in short form they convey the Beatitudes, those transforming sayings of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount. Their presentation here is intriguing. In each case the heavenly blessing for the recipient is noted, though the requisite human activity or state, even if assumed, is omitted. Thus the banderoles simply promise the holy warriors that
Theirs is the kingdom of heaven (ipsorum est regnum celorum)
They shall inherit the kingdom (ipsi possedebunt regnum)
They shall be comforted (ipsi consolabuntur)
They shall be filled (ipsi saturabuntur)
They shall have mercy (ipsi misericordiam consequentur)
They shall see God (ipsi deum videbunt)
They shall be called sons of God (ipsi filii dei vocabuntur).
As if the symbolic knight's fight against evil is merit enough to earn such divine favor, the requirements for receiving each of these blessings are not specified. In other words, there is no stated injunction that the recipients are to be poor in spirit, meek, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, no stipulation that it is those who mourn who shall be comforted.8 We might already sense tension between the martial words from Job and the spirit of the Beatitudes, between the determined knight, weapons at the ready, and these forgiving, pacific sentiments from the Sermon on the Mount, possibly even between the full import of the Beatitudes and their shortened form, reduced to benefits received, as they are quoted here. A battle-ready knight is about to be festooned with streamers at least recalling the virtues of mercy, peace, and forbearance, though they are not specified. The conjuncture of ideas seems jarring.
The martial theme in the illumination cannot be doubted. A desperate combat is about to erupt from the vellum pages, more desperate and noisy than the briefly threatened intrusion of the bestiary. The eye of the knight, clearly visible through the narrow slot in his great helm, is sternly set on what will soon assault him from the left page, for as noted, this composite illumination spreads impressively across two folio pages. From the left folio advance serried ranks of grotesque demons representing the seven deadly sins, each sin backed by a cluster of smaller figures of supporting vices in a wonderfully medieval hierarchical pattern. Avarice, a chief sin, is for example backed by a smaller demon labeled usury. The knight has allies too, the seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit pictured as doves ranked before him on his side of the illustration, facing the enemy. But these pale and pacific birds hardly inspire confidence as stout or effective coadjutors in the fight to come. Moreover, the forces of right are desperately outnumbered; the sides stand sixty-nine to eight. Yet the viewer need not fear the outcome, for the knight is surely an ideally stalwart fighter for the right, however rampant and numerous the menacing forces of evil marshaled against him. Exactly how this warrior fits into the world of Beatitudes remains an issue, perhaps even a paradox.
As a first step toward understanding this tension and how it was resolved, we need to recognize that our illustration, however splendid, is a piece of collusive propaganda. Its visual and verbal program portrays the ideal knight as both pious and fiercely martial, a combination more easily shown in ideal form (as a fight against evil) than could be achieved within the messy details of daily life. Clerics advanced this ideal for knighthood and knights might have been happy to accept it as a flattering and valorizing representation of their profession. Yet it is most emphatically not a realistic picture, not a description of what knights actually were or what they actually did in a world much troubled by the consequences of sin if not by visible demons. This illustration, in other words, is prescriptive rather than descriptive. Powerfully presented, it shows us what clerics ardently wanted knights to be, even how knights might have liked to see themselves portrayed. Yet it would be a great error to accept this idealized and wishful view as displaying the essence of chivalry; it belongs rather to an effort that flattered warrior sensibilities as it tried to engage warrior piety and direct warrior energies.
These considerable energies in the knights had to be fitted within a society working to create order in a great many dimensions of life: not only governmental, legal, and religious, but also socioeconomic, and intellectual. Broadly governmental or political frameworks were being established by lay authority just as guidelines of doctrine and governing ecclesiastical structure were being elaborated by clerics. Textbook accounts too often bring chivalry into this broad picture of governance and social order without ambiguity, as a unidirectional force for peace and order. Chivalry is so easily sketched as a straightforward internalization of restraint among the warriors, knocking off the rough edges and making them proto-gentlemen. Violence and war, in this view, would be less likely, or at least (to borrow the phrase of an American president) “kinder and gentler.” In Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe, I argued a case for the uneasy fit of chivalry within the governmental frame-work produced by kings and royal and ecclesiastical administrations busily lengthening their effective reach. That book emerged from a decade of reading the literature knights regularly patronized and read, or heard (thousands of pages of chanson de geste, romance, chivalric biography, and vernacular manuals). The evidence of this chivalric literature convinced me to attempt to complicate the common view. I argued that chivalry, centered as it was in prowess as the key to honor—that inestimable good—actually contributed as much to the problem of violence as it provided a solution. Knighthood surely did some of both, and both sides of the equation are important: the knights were in many ways loyal sons of Holy Mother Church and stood by kings and great lords whose patronage they enjoyed, whose courts they attended, whose armies they joined. Yet chivalry was deeply, essentially complicit in problems of securing public order. If royal governments undoubtedly needed the armed force and administrative services of the knights, they worried over their unlicensed tournaments and fortifications, their private wars, and their love of hot-blooded vengeance; they likewise feared their disregard for, or overawing of, royal law-courts that were coming to be thicker on the ground. While kings were personally proud to be knights, the knights were troublesomely inclined to think themselves kinglets. Chivalry did not constitute a direct and unblemished force for order in the political sphere, not, at least, from the standpoint of kings actively engaged in building early forms of the European state or churchmen striving for order. The knights were a paradoxical force: necessary, but dangerous, rather like fire. If, as I have argued, leading agents and agencies in Medieval Europe struggled to come to terms with violence, the problem was intensified because knightly violence was considered noble and heroic and could be carried out by private right in quest of the unsurpassed goal of honor. The issue of order involved not simply crime in a modern sense, not even war in a modern sense, but rather privatized violence infused into the upper ranges of the social hierarchy by the collapse of effective large-scale political authority from the late Carolingian era. The medieval states that slowly emerged—it needs to be acknowledged—took on an ambivalent role themselves. If they moved slowly toward an interest in the control of violence within the realm (a goal Max Weber saw as characteristic of all states), sadly they and their descendants into modern times have taken fighting with their neighbors as another goal. Striving for internal peace and fomenting external war seem to form the broad pattern. It was bound to involve the knights in complex relationships with the governance of kings and the ideals of clerics.
Tension and Paradox in Ideas
Constructing an ideology that would fit chivalry within a religious frame-work—the subject of the present book—moved matters well beyond governing authority to an engagement of basic ideas old and new, lay and clerical. Analyses of clerical ideas have filled our library shelves with hefty tomes that naturally continue to attract scholarly study (underscoring their importance). And scholars readily agree that these ideas were so fundamental in all dimensions of medieval society that any lay pattern of life necessarily drew on undoubted piety and religious language; at minimum such a lay pattern had to make its peace with clerical claims and ideals, or find ways of rejecting or skirting around them short of anti-sacerdotal heresy. Yet, as R. W. Southern has cautioned, clerical patterns were neither absolutely dominant nor static, and “the theories and mechanisms of secular society also developed. The world did not stand still while the clerical ideal was realized.”9 The age in which chivalry emerged and matured saw burgeoning religious piety among the laity no less than the creation of new religious institutions and clarification of major doctrines. It was an age in which the laity asserted new independence, indeed an age not only of anticlericalism but of outbursts of heresy.10 If the knights, in company with so many lay people, showed a tendency to form independent religious ideas in matters of great concern to them, even while they stood as stalwarts against heresy, how would they respond when insistent clerical claims of leadership and direction touched their own profession? Did knightly piety move in concert with the waves of new religious ideas and with the tidal surges of widespread and creative lay piety throughout the period?
The problem arose when religious ideas threatened to invert or negate chivalry as a fierce warrior code. For the medieval European elite—both lay and clerical—the central question such inversion raised was stark: What had the religion of Christ to do with the worship of the demigod prowess in chivalric ideology? What result obtains when prowess confronts Christian caritas? Could broadswords—even if directed by clerical voices—carve a rough world into the shape prescribed by the Beatitudes? If active force mirrored divine judgment, did not mercy reflect divine grace? Chivalric texts urged mercy for helpless, defeated opponents, yet vengeance, a particularly prickly sense of honor, and unrestrained joy in the skilled and vigorous use of edged weaponry animated chivalric ideology.11 Prowess meant less an ethereal moral courage supporting abstract right than the very physical triumph of armored men wielding honed weapons—or blazing torches—as they fought for all the reasons for which men have always fought. In the twelfth century Bertran de Born's many poems enthusing over the joys of warfare, with its clash of arms and wounded men, seem the polar opposite of the Gospel of Matthew.12 Girart de Vienne, hero of his own chanson, similarly praises the sights and sounds of war, declaring that he would surely contract some dread illness if deprived of its joys for a month.13 As the war against the Romans looms in the late fourteenth-century Alliterative Morte Arthure, Duke Cador cries out, “Now war is upon us again, all praise to Christ! (Now wakenes the war! Worshipped be Crist!)”14 Tension could not be avoided. In colors still bright, our manuscript illumination embodies that tension through symbols and powerfully sacred words.15
How did lay and clerical ideas meet and negotiate an ideology acceptable to the warrior class of medieval Europe? Confronting this large and important question calls for close investigation and fresh analysis. We must ask by what intellectual pathways, even by what specific language, those who were especially concerned about religion and about chivalry in this developing society could find their way through the hazardous borderlands where religion and warrior life met and overlapped. The subject is usually considered within a framework of developing crusading ideas and practices, and is often viewed from the perspective of clerical or specifically papal initiatives.16 As a well-nurtured subfield of medieval history, crusade studies have generated a vast and informative body of scholarship that I will draw on with gratitude; but I will extend the scope of investigation to the ideology of chivalry in general and will look closely at ideas propagated for or even by the knights themselves as they sought to shape—and certainly to justify—their hard profession.17 This book seeks to explain the process by analysis of the close, if highly selective, fitting of chivalry within developing and conflicting strands of thought on significant theological issues.18 The set of issues is basic: precisely how Christ achieved human salvation, the nature of penance and confession, and ideas about ideal social organization and the value of human labor—all emerging within the context of an unusually ascetic culture animated by an intensified lay piety significantly blended with lay independence. This study seeks to understand the power of paradox in the formation of chivalric ideology; it insists on the knightly embrace of asceticism, and emphasizes the degree of independence seen in a highly selective borrowing of the theological ideas utilized in forming knightly ideology. These thematic lines differentiate the approach of this book from classic studies by such scholars as Carl Erdmann, Maurice Keen, and Jean Flori—though I will draw on their works with no less gratitude than I owe to historians of crusade.19 My aim throughout is to document the paradoxes necessarily built into a religious ideology of chivalry and to explain how and why they worked so well.20
Finding evidence that will reveal the ideals of a group that long emphasized virtues other than literacy, and wrote much less than the clerics even when they became literate, is a daunting challenge. As in previous work, I will turn to a mix of sources, emphasizing works of imaginative literature along with narrative sources, chivalric biographies, and manuals. My case for the usefulness of this mix of sources has appeared already and will be amplified here.21 In this work I have also found invaluable another source that has received less attention for knighthood than it deserves: the copious body of exempla (moral tales told in sermons and read in collections by the elite). Many of these tales portray and instruct the knighthood. What I have found impressive is the congruity of all this evidence. A remarkably consistent body of ideas for consideration and debate about chivalry appears in the entire corpus of evidence across the centuries and regions in which chivalry was forming.
Evidence could (and occasionally will) be found on the general themes of religion and warrior life well before the High Middle Ages (roughly the later eleventh century through the thirteenth century). Yet a new critical stage emerged then and continued through the later Middle Ages (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). I will limit my study to Western Europe and can only hope that other scholars will broaden the picture by moving east from the lands along the Channel. The forces under investigation began to take more defined form in these regions and during the High Middle Ages: chivalry came to life and the medieval church took on its most characteristic forms and elaborated many of its most characteristic ideas, especially on such matters of concern here as crusade, a strongly centralized papal governance, a developed canon law, and especially a newly elaborated theology for the laity. In a society animated by such changes, the complex links between violence and religion inevitably took on new or newly clarified form.
Paradox spreads like a spider web over the formation of chivalric ideology. Yet the issue of perception and the danger of presentism cannot be ignored. Were the tensions and uncertainties troublesome to medieval people or are they merely the imposition of modern sensibilities? Framing the question clearly is essential: what is at issue is not whether medieval people accepted and valorized violence. We know that they did, laity and clergy alike—as most people in other times and places have done. Rather, the issue is whether they recognized the paradoxes involved—such as pacific forgiveness along-side hot-blooded vengeance—and took any steps toward resolution of issues in troubled minds. These are difficult but essential questions. Our investigation requires us to confront the paradox that so often remains the elephant in the room, willfully ignored; we must ask if paradox registered and was addressed by thoughtful folk in the High and Late Middle Ages. The search can inform historical inquiry if we explore genuinely medieval views about knighthood, violence, suffering, and vengeance in relationship to historically contemporary ideas about piety, penance, atonement, and the will of God. Debate on these issues obviously produced disagreements within the groups of clerics and knights and not just between these two groups. Not all knights or clerics shared the views of others within their groups. Yet dominant values of medieval Christianity stood at odds with dominant values of the warriors. Looking broadly at each group should thus be useful.
Paradox in Clerical Thought?
It would be possible to think no paradox existed at all in medieval views on chivalry. Had not sensible clerics pragmatically come to terms with any troublesome issues? Did they not simply view God as the bellicose Lord of Hosts, emphasizing those biblical passages and patristic writings that came to that sharp conclusion? And if there was, indeed, any problem at all, was not crusade ideology the encompassing answer?
Most clerics had indeed found it necessary to accept war and violence from early days in a Roman empire wrapped around the Mediterranean Sea. In the succeeding Carolingian Empire and again in High Medieval Europe, learned clerical opinion and directive so significantly sanctified violence that some historians speak convincingly of a Christianization of warfare.22 Since the Carolingian period most major armies setting off on campaign under some king or great lord were accompanied by a smaller host of supportive clerics to commune, confess, and bless the warriors.23 What army and its leaders did not loudly proclaim that their cause was just? Few failed to muster at least some clerical backing for the claim, their opponents busily doing the same.
Among the clerics themselves, moreover, many betrayed a bellicose stance, praying for the success of campaigns they had encouraged, when not leading them. Vigorous church reformers, trembling with the desire to produce “right order in the world,” were notoriously willing to use armed force to attain ecclesiastical goals. From the end of the eleventh century, crusades preached by stern popes and soon by wild-eyed hermits sent mailed men of undoubted martial piety to the Holy Land, Spanish and Slavic lands, and eventually into heretical or troublesome regions of Western Europe itself. The seemingly inexorable expansion of Europe proceeded on three cardinal points of the compass by use of the sword as well as the plough—both under the aegis of the cross. The blessing of religion descended on all these uses of violence.
Clerical writers could justify their blessing of the work of knighthood in frankly pragmatic terms. Were not knightly swords needed to defend the homeland, preserve clerical property, hang robbers, and repress or burn heretics? The Ordene de Chevalerie (an early thirteenth-century continental text) makes the point explicitly. Speaking for clerics, it declares:
knights,…whom everybody should honour…have us all to guard; and if it were not for knighthood, our lordship would be of little worth, for they defend Holy Church, and they uphold justice for us against those who would do us harm.…Our chalices would be stolen from before us at the table of God, and nothing would ever stop it.…The good would never be able to endure if the wicked did not fear knights, and if there were only Saracens, Albigensians, and barbarians, and people of evil faith who would do us wrong.…it is given to the knight…that if he has acted according to his order, he can go straight to Paradise.24
Such pragmatic justifications eased the clerical path to sanctified violence. Moreover, as great lords themselves, clerics were inextricably involved in the world of armies and knighthood. They held estates owing knight service to some superior lord or to the lord king. They knew knightly force was needed in a violent and dangerous world and willingly held lands that supported it. Even those without landed endowment necessarily drew on warrior force. That enthusiastic clerical writer Gerald of Wales at one point found his household entangled in a family feud and had to seek military help from a Welsh lord who was his relative.25 Thomas Becket, while still chancellor to Henry II, had knighted Baldwin, Count of Guines, with his own hand.26 Language of vassalage came naturally to the famous archbishop, even in his moment of mortal crisis. Minutes away from martyrdom in Canterbury Cathedral, Thomas caught one of his knightly assailants by the mail shirt and as he powerfully sent the man reeling shouted, “Unhand me, Reginald. You are my sworn vassal.”27 In theory prevented from personal violence by canon law, clerics can readily be found leading forces and sometimes even wielding weapons themselves. The late medieval English crown even attempted to array the clergy in arms as a form of home guard.28
At times the ecclesiastical atmosphere seems suffused with martial chant. Warlike psalms inspired knights or their clerical backers. How remarkably must God's instructions to the Hebrews to smite the Amalekites hip and thigh have resounded in clerics' ears, let alone in knightly ears. This tonality was scarcely softened in monasteries whose monks considered themselves fellow warriors maintaining martial bastions against the active hosts of invisible evil in the world. Some religious houses, of course, had been founded as memorials to victory in thoroughly worldly fighting, such as those established by William the Conqueror and Philip Augustus, who “stamped the imagery of secular authority and bellicose concerns upon institutions which represented the reforming church at its most withdrawn from lay preoccupations.”29 The church found no difficulty in recognizing a need for violence in proper causes, properly directed, in an imperfect world. As Karl Leyser has eloquently exclaimed,
It is worthwhile to pause and gasp at the extent to which Christianity from St Augustine onwards and indeed much earlier had been able not only to live with the phenomenon of war which profoundly contradicted its imperatives of peace but even to endorse it, both for the punishment of the wicked and the coercion of heretics and in the secular spheres of kingdoms and peoples fighting to avenge wrongs. Aristotle's Politics here spoke with a louder voice than the passivity of the Gospels.30
Yet while recognizing the truth of this concise statement, we can also see that potential elements of tension, even of paradox, were built into medieval Christianity; they may have given it supple strength in a world ever resistant to rigidly straightforward or systematic explanation.31 Leyser aptly characterized the medieval discussion on war as a moral debate. There was more than one opinion. Inconveniently, clerics did not speak with one voice on so complex and troubling a set of topics as war and violence. Canonists, scholastic theologians, crusade preachers, priests hearing confessions—all could sustain their own arguments based on deep principles or informed by pragmatism. What we so readily term “the church” scarcely represented a monolithic body of thought. Swirling eddies of clerical dissent flowed against mainstream ideas that carried forward much justification of violence. However far below the surface, clerical memory stored so many dissenting textual injunctions from biblical, liturgical, and patristic sources documenting the religion of the Prince of Peace. Worry over their clear duty to correct the sins of the laity could hinder endorsement of all war. And not every pragmatic line of thought led to justifications of fighting. Local wars, after all, generated thoroughly pragmatic fears about social order and the safety of clerical personnel and property.32 The fear might, of course, become quite immediate. William of Malmesbury says that a group of bishops meeting under the direction of a papal legate (to discuss the crisis caused by King Stephen's arrest of the bishops of Salisbury and Lincoln) decided not to excommunicate the king. Their reasons were twofold: they needed the advice of the pope, and they heard and saw swords being drawn!33 In short, the undoubted Christianization of violence and war loaded one side of a balance; yet the other side carried a weight of continuing Christian doubt about war and surprisingly brisk denunciation of specific knights or even the knighthood in general. This duality of view was undoubtedly tilted in favor of sanctified violence, but even if the doubtful view was less emphasized, it persisted throughout the Middle Ages.34 Tension and paradox were not ended by reform popes, learned canonists, peace movements, or the preaching of crusade. The evident lack of crusading success after the first great effort may have led to fairly widespread doubts about divine favor for the enterprise; some portion of the faithful seemed to believe only in defensive war against the Saracens.35 Searching critiques of knightly violence continued alongside much sanctification of warfare. The clerical view was usually modulated according to the perpetrator of violence, the victim of the violence, and, above all, the authority justifying it.
Yet incompatible ideas stood side by side, century after century, and were selectively emphasized as occasion demanded. If violence in the abstract was not an issue for most of the clergy, the practice of some particular violence was often very much at issue. And in cases where clerical rights, bodies, and property were at risk, or some larger sense of the internal peace and well-being of the commonwealth of Christianity loomed, the all but buried pacific ideas readily came out of cold storage into what might become the hot rhetoric needed in that hour.
In mid-eleventh century, Leo IX (1048–53), traditionally the first of a series of “Gregorian” reform popes, denounced the Norman knights so trouble-some in Italy as acting “with an ungodliness worse than that of the pagans.”36 In desperation, he raised an army against them and led it in person. Leo was defeated and captured at Civitate in 1053. Some clerics condemned his undertaking such military leadership; others defended his action by claiming that his slain knights “rejoiced forever in heaven…united in glory with the holy martyrs.”37 Gregory VII (1073–85), the towering figure who gave his name to the reform era, at first proclaimed that knighthood was a profession that “can scarcely be performed without sin” and declared that a knight doing penance would normally have to set aside his arms while he atoned (though he might fight in specified good causes after consulting bishops).38 His view implies that true penance was impossible while acting as a self-directed warrior who would be engaged, as H. E. J. Cowdrey explains, in “the sins inherent in his everyday manner of life.”39 This view came to be widely cited and it lived on in the influential manual of canon law, the Decretum of Gratian, and the standard textbook of Peter Lombard.40 Though Gregory later modified this theoretical position (drawn from his intense concern for true penitence), his shifting views finally owed much to stark necessity, especially in his great quarrel with Emperor Henry IV. Cowdrey, the pope's modern biographer, carefully notes “the tentativeness and even inner contradiction of his thought and legislation about the bearing of arms by Christian laymen,” and concludes that “Gregory the man of action outran Gregory the man of ideas.”41 Gregory's willingness to use force on a local or grand scale, his idea for a militia sancti Petri (armed force of St. Peter) drawn from the loyal knighthood of Europe, made him “the most warlike pope who had ever sat in St Peter's chair.” 42 Clerical opponents (from the imperial camp) denounced him as a man of blood. His support for William of Normandy's invasion of England likewise brought an outcry. Gregory later wrote to William that he had received criticism “for the pains I took over such a bloodletting.”43
The mass of issues remained unsettled and debated even after the beginnings of crusade. Clerical authors could rake the entire body of ordinary knights over rhetorical coals, excepting only a chosen few. St. Bernard set a high standard for such denunciation of the sins of ordinary knighthood doing its usual work. In his early twelfth-century treatise for the new order of the Knights Templar he was as vigorous in excoriating the generality of worldly knights as he was lavish in praising and assuring the select subset of monk-knights who fought under the new order. To the majority of knights he pointedly asked,
What then, O knights, is this monstrous error and what this unbearable urge which bids you fight with such pomp and labor, and all to no purpose except death and sin. You cover your horses with silk, and plume your armor with I know not what sort of rags; you paint your shields and your saddles; you adorn your bits and spurs with gold and silver and precious stones, and then in all this glory you rush to your ruin with fearful wrath and fearless folly.44
The rhetoric of other monastics might not achieve the vitriolic level of St. Bernard's prose, but the sentiment came from many pens.
Moreover, denunciations did not resound solely from cloisters. Robert of Flamborough, one of the circle of influential theologians clustered around Peter Cantor in Paris in the early thirteenth century, wrote a penitential, a book to guide priests in examining their flock during confession and assigning them proper penance. His treatise instructed these confessors to raise significant questions about warfare. The confessor is to ask if the warrior extorted any money or collected illicit exactions (talliam injustam), whether he killed anyone and under what circumstances or with what motives. The warriors must know that they cannot avoid confessing and doing penance for sins committed by arguing that they were just following the orders of their leader. Those who kill for avarice are as bad as idolaters. Warriors must not follow their worldly lord and contemn their heavenly lord.45
Another famous scholar, Alan of Lille, repeatedly thundered at later twelfth-century knighthood for its violence and greed. On one occasion his classroom was suddenly entered by knights who demanded that he settle for them the issue as to what formed the highest degree of courtesy. Alan not only answered their question (asserting that generous giving is the highest courtesy), he continued, archly, by saying that the highest degree of villainy was living by looting the poor, as they did. This sharp retort was still getting wide currency generations later through its inclusion in collections of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century sermon exempla.46 Moreover, Alan had broadcast his message of warning against knightly theft and violence in his own book on the Ars predicandi (Art of Preaching), which told any aspiring preacher who read it how to address the knights:
Let him urge them to be content with their own wages [this from Luke 3:14] and not to threaten strangers; let them exact nothing by force, terrify no-one with violence; let them be defenders of their homeland, guardians of widows and orphans. So let them bear the outward arms of the world that they may be armed inwardly with the hauberk of faith.47
These thoughts, conjuring up so censorious a picture of the actual daily work of the knights, become much more explicit in his model sermon Ad Milites, directed specifically to the elite warriors. Alan included it in his preaching manual. He softens the bite of his critique somewhat by initially assuring knights that they have a high calling: “For this especially were soldiers ordained that they should defend their native land and that they should repel the attacks of the violent upon the church.”48 Undoubtedly this praise is sincere and emerges from genuine belief in their role. He soon shifts gears, however, and excoriates the knighthood in general, as he had verbally slashed at those who intruded on the sanctity of his classroom:
but now soldiers have been made the leaders of pillaging bands; they have become cattle-thieves. Now they engage not in soldiering, but in plundering, and under the guise of soldiers, they take on the cruel nature of marauders. Nor do they fight against their enemies so much as victimize the poor, and those whom they should guard with the shield of knightly protection, they hound with the sword of savagery. Nowadays they prostitute their knighthood, they fight for gain, they take up arms to plunder. Nowadays they are not soldiers but thieves and robbers; not defenders, but invaders. Into the bosom of Mother Church they plunge their swords, and the force which they should expend against the enemy, they expend against their own people. They cease to attack their enemies—either out of idleness or out of cowardice—and against the peaceful household of Christ they wreak havoc with their swords.49
Even beloved chivalric honor might be merely a cause for destruction, he wrote:
Where is vanity if not in worldly honors? They show their favor to a man only so that they may destroy him. They lift him up only to cast him down. They raise him up only to throw him the more heavily to the ground. In these is the vanity of vanities, for there is in honor an unbearable burden, and in the burden a valueless honor.50
Another sermon authority writing somewhat later, Humbert of Romans, reminded preachers that all lay nobility in the world—carnal as opposed to spiritual nobility—was founded on great evils as well as good. “For they often commit thefts, murders, sacrileges, and all manner of vicious evils (Nam raptores, homicidae, sacrilegi, et omni genere vitiorum scelerati, hanc habent frequenter).”51
Sermon stories delivered from pulpits across Christendom occasionally questioned even the fundamental chivalric urge for vengeance (so often effected through homicide). Vengeful attacks and killing—or at least killing fellow Christians—was not always countenanced with ease. One cluster of remarkable moral tales or exempla, told repeatedly, praises the ideal of the merciful knight who spares even his most vile opponent; instead of taking vengeance by attacking or inflicting a death richly deserved by common chivalric standards, he pardons the enemy in honor of Christ (in an action that often takes place symbolically on Good Friday). The former mortal foes proceed to church together, where the figure on the cross miraculously bows in stunning honor of his knight who chose charitable forgiveness over prowess-driven vengeance. Variants of this miracle story appear in numerous collections from the late thirteenth century through the early fifteenth century.52 How they balanced charity and mild forbearance with hot-blooded vengeance and worldly victory remains a question. Clerical authors sometimes praised knights swinging their swords, even against fellow Christians, as agents of divine wrath; at other times they urged caritas. Bloody vengeance stands opposed to mild forbearance.
Our evidence (barely sampled here) shows that clerics held divided views on basic aspects of a warrior code and that it troubled the more thoughtful among them. Alongside valorization, a serious clerical critique of knighthood as a violent profession extended from the twelfth century into the later Middle Ages. We come almost full circle in the work of Richard Rolle, the most influential fourteenth-century English mystic, who denounced the violence of knighthood in search of vain, worldly honor with rhetorical exuberance almost the equal of St. Bernard's withering blast two centuries earlier. Rolle's attack targeted both the battlefield and the tourney ground. Here are his stern words from Against the Lovers of the World (Contra Amatores Mundi):
Do not call such persons bold who when they tear the garments of others are rewarded with a bad death. With shining armor and gaily-decked horses they rush to battle; and before they strike a blow, they die inwardly. While they pierce the hearts of men, they themselves are struck to the quick by the devils' spears. Let us say to them, “Where is your God?”…Surely it is not our God, for they have made a god of whatever they love most. Some make proud vanity or empty honor their god, for the sake of which they exalt themselves, endure hardships, undergo need, give and take wounds, kill and are killed.53
This hard-hitting critique charges that fundamental chivalric ideals lead to idolatry, to the virtual worship of another god.54
The contested views of churchmen pinned them ineluctably to paradox. They could scarcely show consistency on troubling issues of such deep concern to the chivalry no less than to themselves. What confronted them was not merely the issue of homicide in licit wars between kings and great lords, but the challenge of defining the very role of an ordo of laymen who were as necessary as they could be dangerous, both morally and socially. If clerics willingly accepted the claim of knighthood to an inherent right to practice violence, they also funneled intense critiques at the warriors along with claims to a directive moral superiority. In a world of much petty warfare and punitive raiding as well as major campaigns, and in a time of powerful and frightening Muslim advances, determined heretics, and plentiful bandits, the clerics could not doubt they needed a source of righteous force. Yet they could not forget that their safety lay in dangerous and acquisitive hands and that they must try to control and direct this force, prescribing its role and denouncing its dangerous sins. They could likewise never forget that they were followers of the Prince of Peace no less than the Lord of Hosts; they were bound to question much of the violence that marked knightly life, to thunder against vengeance, feud, pride, looting of the poor and the churches, and the host of sins inherent in tournament. They knew there was a peace that passed human understanding and they ardently wanted a more peaceful society, at least within Europe. If they were to do God's work a certain level of peace was an obvious requirement. The problem was how to direct the sacred ordo of knighthood while chipping away at a range of ideas and practices knights cherished as foundation stones of their profession, true building blocks of prowess yielding honor.
Paradox in Knightly Ideas?
Did the knights themselves worry about their own profession and actions? Did they sense the potential gap separating foundational principles of their religion from their fearsome and much-honored work with edged weaponry and all-consuming fire? And if they perceived disparity did they suffer any fear of divine displeasure and wrath? Exploring such questions for the knights is obviously harder than for the literate and loquacious clerics who made the full range of their views abundantly known. Knights in significant numbers acquired literacy late in our period; we must generally wait for at least the thirteenth or even fourteenth century to be certain that we hear their thoughts in relatively unmediated form. We must initially employ a combination of approaches, considering statements by the literate clergy who directed reforming words at the knights and who also wrote on behalf of the knights, celebrating the warriors' own thoughts and values in charters, chronicles, and, above all, imaginative literature.55
Clerics certainly made truly vigorous efforts to induce a healthy fear for sin and its consequences in the knights. As a reasonable baseline for our effort we might say that virtually all lay Christians in the Middle Ages trembled at the thought of death and what followed. They busied themselves in finding ways of obtaining what Eamon Duffy (no foe of the medieval church) frankly termed “postmortem fire insurance.”56 Duffy believes the late medieval parishioners he studies were overwhelmingly preoccupied with “the safe transition of their souls from this world to the next, above all with the shortening and easing of their stay in Purgatory.”57 Some clerics liked to insist that prospects were bleak. A set of religious tales written in the mid-fifteenth century specifies that of 30,000 who died on one day in the twelfth century, only St. Bernard of Clairvaux and the Dean of Langres went directly to heaven, three others were sent to be cleansed in the sulfurous fires of purgatory, and the remaining 29,995 went straight to hell.58 Equally sobering, all medieval folk knew that the punishment awaiting them on the far side of the grave was worse than anything endured on earth—the least pain of purgatory was commonly said to be more severe than the greatest earthly suffering59—and the unspeakable torments awaiting many in the fires of hell would, they knew, never end: “For sawle may neuer for pyne deye (for the soul may never die from pain)” is the grim and thought-provoking warning of a Middle English manual.60 In the thirteenth century Étienne de Bourbon recalled a Dominican who tried repeatedly to convert the son of a count to “contempt of the world and entry into a religious order (ad contemptum mundi et introitus ordinis).” Finally this cleric managed the conversion by telling the man he thought it a great shame that his beautiful body would become fuel for eternal flames (pabulum incendi eterni).61 “Medieval theology was not a jocund art,” Eileen Power dryly observed, “and the thought of that perpetual damnation, which all but the few had merited, was forever before its eyes.”62
Uncertainty and fear within knightly minds could be generated even when theologians, canonists, and confessors played the role of analytical scholar and helpful guide rather than sternly warning preacher. Simply trying to find a way through the dark maze of licit killing and plundering produced disagreements among clerics; such debates could easily sow un-certainties among any attentive warriors. Was all plundering licit? What if it involved despoiling the poor and churches—and what if the “defenseless” had fought back vigorously? Must a vassal follow his lord into a fight he thought illicit? How could one with certainty judge a licit war and the need for restitution? Were crossbows sinful weapons? Could Christians justly kill erring Christians? Some clerical solutions to such issues were so tortured in their reasoning that they could scarcely serve as practical guides, and must only have deepened any uncertainty lying heavily in the hearts of lay hearers or readers. Not much assurance could have come from the idea, for example, that a knight must follow his lord into any campaign, even one he considered unjust, but with the caveat that he not shed blood or take loot if the war were illicit. Manuals to be used by priests in confession sometimes specify criteria that would leave arms-bearers with glazed eyes and puzzled countenances. Many of the issues would, of course, resurface as soon as focus shifted to those sporting wars, the tournament.63 Perhaps more than clerical warning stands behind the miracle story of the knight who became a monk, but remained spiritually troubled by his prior life. He found reassurance, finally, only by a dream in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to remind him that he had her help, having always bowed at the mention of her name.64
Even lists of basic virtues and vices that may have been more familiar to them could generate tension. Wrath provides a fine case in point. As one of the seven deadly sins—the very evils our ideal knight confronted in the Harley manuscript—wrath is regularly associated in Old French and Middle English sermons with lust for vengeance. Yet vengeance is a cornerstone of the chivalric ethos, the harsh repayment justly given for any diminution of precious honor. In the Story of Merlin, Bors's sword, the agency of the prowess earning his honor, is tellingly named Wrathful.65 Contrary to ecclesiastical teaching, human wrath in this Arthurian text is the highly valued motive force behind a great and pious knight's characteristic weapon; his vengeance is a sacred duty and a self-evident good. Did the knightly recognize, to take another example, that pride was one of the seven deadly sins, but that this same quality appears as virtuous in great knights praised in chivalric literature?66
How such thoughts resonated in the minds of most knights is not easily estimated. In one sense, knights were simply lay Christians for whom all the expectations applied and all the set paths to piety lay open. In another sense they formed a highly particular and powerful subset of the laity.67 There can be no thought that as a group they suffered a level of fear that utterly corroded belief in their own status and sanctified ordo; the macro evidence of centuries of knighthood vigorously practiced and joyously celebrated stands as witness.68 It would be no more accurate to conceive of piety emanating solely from clerics who struggled to overwhelm determined knightly secularism. The knighthood in general, we may safely assume, was pious on its own terms.69 Yet knightly piety asserted that securing honor in the world through vigorous prowess could not be hateful in the sight of God. In fact, their literature shows how often they simply assumed the merit of their actions and clothed them with religious terminology, even if it may seem to us ill-fitting.70 What remained at issue were the precise forms that won divine approval and, when pressed, the directive authority claimed by the clergy.
We might thus doubt if knights trembled as demonstrably as others at the thought of the afterlife, despite clerical warnings of the morally risky nature of their activities. Undoubtedly the high status of the knights and their sense of personal service to the Lord of Hosts insulated them somewhat from even the most searching questions or assaults. Already in the twelfth century, their status was beginning the rise that would take them into the nobility and offered useful armor against intrusive moral pangs. Whatever religious professionals say by way of warning, the powerful in any age attempt to coopt religion as justification for their lives, their characteristic work, and their social dominance. They find a degree of comforting reassurance in the belief that divine will has elevated them above others. Surely the God who gave them capacity and dominance in this world cannot desire their damnation in the next. Medieval barons, captains, and knights may share this comforting line of thought with more modern robber barons and captains of industry. Religion is the ultimate valorizing force in the world—or at least it was in the old world, before virtual deification of the market. What the divine has ordained must be right; and the powerful can so often convince themselves and others that the blessing of heaven has descended upon their status and all that supports it.71 There was much to bolster this sort of confidence among the medieval knighthood. Did not the clerics sing their praises regularly and see a divine mission for them? As “those who fought” they constituted a particular ordo, one of the ordines, the “orders,” prescribed for society by God.72 With quite tolerable effort the knightly could block out much of the carping clerical criticism and listen contentedly to the glowing celebration of their necessary role in an ideal world.
Yet the critiques came insistently and it is hard to escape the sense that knightly bravado was sometimes a covering for fear, in effect whistling past the graveyard. Perhaps those whose hands carry out the killing and destroying in any society suffer late night thoughts about widespread destruction and the shedding of human blood, about retribution and final justice. Indeed, even proud, self-assured knights sometimes reveal that they harbored doubts and fears about their role. Men who proudly and self-consciously proclaimed that they lived by the sword might well have experienced some mental caution and agitation—if they were at all thoughtful—upon reading or hearing a sermon on the sixth commandment, a homily on the Sermon on the Mount, or on Christ's stern words to Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane about the fate of those who live by the sword.73 We would like to know how Sir Thomas Malory reacted if he heard or read the characterization of pride in a late fourteenth-century manual on penance as “of owne hyness overgrete love (excessive love of one's own greatness),” especially if he heard these words soon after writing one of his passages of fulsome praise for the “worshyppe” owed great men whose hands carried out stunning acts of prowess.74 We do know that the prominent mid-fourteenth-century knight Geoffroi de Charny wrote clearly, if briefly, about the “dark side of the force.” In his treatise on chivalry (analyzed in the following chapter) he denounces vile arms-bearers who use their might without control, who break truces, attack without formal warnings, and the like. We can almost sense his shudder as he disposes of them as quickly as possible and hurries back to praise the good knights, those who use their great prowess in a broad range of recognized causes. He is hastily papering over a deep crevice in knighthood that few warriors wished to recognize: the prowess they liked to consider a chief virtue might simply reduce to morally neutral force.75
Consider so basic an issue as their understanding the meaning of the potent symbol of the crucifix at the core of their religion. The solemn drama on Calvary could only create a vortex of tension and paradox within the warrior elite. On the cross the incarnate Son of God placated the just wrath of an angry God the Father who would take fearsome vengeance—the word is regularly used—for human sin.76 Through his grievous sufferings and his violent death, the Son paid the vast debt for sin that lost humanity owed the Father. With a focus on the Son the message is one of surpassing and self-sacrificing love; even from the cruel cross he asked forgiveness for his enemies. But the paradoxical insinuates itself by the clear inference that the vengeance of God the Father is averted and his wrath mollified only by terrible suffering.77 In the divine view, meritorious suffering by the supremely righteous God/man is good; it atones for sin through the violence of whip, nails, thorns, cross, and spear thrust. Yet this shameful and violent treatment, causing the death of the Son of God, is also wrong beyond telling. Should not God's enemies then and now become the objects of suitable vengeance as God himself took vengeance for sin? A warrior society based on honor and prowess struggled with these troubling, surging ideas of meritorious suffering, vengeance, and forgiveness—a theme on which Alan Frantzen has written perceptively.78 They were willing to suffer. Intoned tirelessly, the maxim among the warriors becomes, “Christ died for his men; we knights must die for our men.”79 Yet since vengeance no less than suffering had divine precedents, the warriors were also eager to take vengeance on enemies who wronged them. They knew that divine wrath was bought off by sacrifice and suffering, by that of his Son above all (on Calvary and repeatedly on the altar in the mass), and by the constant, mimetic suffering of all sinners in this world and in the afterworld. Thus any pacific meaning to the Passion of Christ is significantly and dramatically inverted. The message is shifted away from humble self-sacrifice by the divine in human form, away from a view of Calvary as the climax to a fully heroic but nonviolent life. The act of Christ ceases to be considered an end to cycles of vengeance and is twisted into a powerful stimulus for more vengeful violence. The late twelfth-century Chanson d'Aspremont mentions in passing the story of Christ on the cross forgiving Longinus, the centurian whose spear thrust he received. Yet the message drawn out is that if knights want to share in such divine forgiveness for sin they must show their faith by slaughtering the enemies of their faith.80 With similarly breath-taking inversion of forgiveness, the Anglo-Norman poem narrating the late twelfth-century invasion of Ireland at one point pictures the invaders charging their foes stirred by their leader's cry, “Strike in the name of the cross! (Ferez al nun de la croiz!)”81 In the Chanson Aymeri de Narbonne, Charlemagne intones a wish that God who forgave Longinus will grant victory to the hero Aymeri over his enemies.82 God himself, in the early thirteenth-century History of the Holy Grail, uses the crucifixion lance as a tool of his inscrutable vengeance; through this holy lance that drips Christ's blood and is associated with the Grail, God promises vengeance to come.83 Mingled ideas of righteous suffering and just vengeance echoed across medieval centuries and informed much thought about how to conduct a pious heroic life.
Charters recording donations of land may explain the motives clerics only hoped were at work; yet lay donors were at least unlikely to have objected strongly to what was said formally in their names on the eternal record of parchment. Their motives as set down in such records may frankly be fear. Early in the eleventh century when Duke Richard II of Normandy provided a landed gift to the Benedictines of Mont St. Michel, he avowed—in the straightforward words attributed to him in the charter—that he was “seeking to escape the pains of hell and obtain the joys of paradise, after the death of his body.”84 William of Newburg was certain that William the Conqueror founded Battle Abbey as atonement for all the Christian blood he spilled in his conquest of England.85 Words given to Henry, Count of Namur and Luxemburg, in a late twelfth-century ratification of a vassal's gift, meditated on power and the need for its careful and pious use. “Because all power is from the all-powerful God, who, although he is powerful, does not throw down the powerful,” the count begins in hopeful tones (as one of the powerful), “it is necessary that whoever desires to use in a healthy way, the power granted by God should strive both to serve the Lord of lords in fear and conserve faithfully those serving him.” The result is his ratification of a grant to the church of St. Mary in Floreffe made by a man setting off on crusade; two types of service are prominent here: service in arms against enemies of the faith, and service with the purse by giving certain rights over to God's other servants.86 In the early thirteenth century, Guy d'Arblincourt “wished to correct [his] excesses,” and so, before setting forth on crusade, confirmed rights in a particular estate to the church of Chauny “for my soul and the souls of my ancestors.”87 Deathbed speeches of great lords were often penned by monastic chroniclers. A classic case of the genre comes from the twelfth-century chronicler Orderic Vitalis, who imagined William the Conqueror trembling at the end of his vigorous life, weighed down by sins and dreading the awful divine judgment to come. Concern for killing is prominent: “I was brought up in arms from childhood, and am deeply stained with all the blood I have shed (In armis enim ab infantia nutritus sum et multi sanguinia effusione admodum pollutus sum).”88 While no scholar believes that these are William's actual last words, the idea of fears and doubts on his deathbed may not be pure invention; at minimum such accounts show the fears that clerics tirelessly tried to inculcate in knights. The modern dictum “no atheist in a foxhole” may find its medieval predecessor in “no obdurate knight on the deathbed.” Indeed, the medieval dictum might well be extended to the eve or even the moment before battle when all warriors craved spiritual assurance.89
Did knights worry whether all their deeds of prowess throughout a long life in arms registered in the mind of God as righteous? Such doubts were sown by clerical declarations that prowess was, after all, a morally neutral quality.90
Recorded behavior of knights supports such interpretation. In his chronicle, Richard of Hexham noted that some English knights refused to continue a campaign against the Scots in the reign of Stephen. The reason was partly that the king of Scots was refusing to give battle, but also that Lent was beginning and they were evidently reluctant to use their arms in that sacred season.91 A northern Italian saint named Obizio (d. 1204) began life as a knight but was so badly wounded in a fight at a bridge over the river Oglio that he was left for dead. Though he was carried to safety by a friend, while lying near death he experienced a terrifying vision of hell that led him to give up military life and become a helper of the poor and, eventually, a lay brother in the monastery of Santa Giula in Brescia; symbolically, at his own expense he rebuilt the bridge at which he had been so grievously wounded while a knight.92 Simon de Montfort, who would become the ardent crusader against the Albigensians, would not join with most of the army on the Fourth Crusade in sacking the Christian city of Zara, but left the main host and went on to fulfill his vow in the Holy Land. He was not alone.93 Contemporaries at least debated whether Edward III and his army worried about divine displeasure over their campaigning after a terrifying storm with lightning and huge hailstones struck the host near Chartres on “Black Monday” (April 14, 1360).94 At the end of their lives many thought it prudent to exchange armor for a monastic habit. In mid-twelfth century a knight appropriately called Peter the Aged (Petrus cognomento Vetula) fearing death during a grave illness entered the cloister at Homblières, bringing appropriate landed gifts with him.95 Caesarius of Heisterbach tells approvingly of the knight Waleran who even rode fully armed on his great charger down the aisle of the monastic church to the altar and there gave up his armor for the modest Cistercian robe.96 Better-known figures underscore the point. The great knight William Marshal died under a Templar's robe;97 King John of England was buried in a Benedictine monk's cowl.98 Not all late converts could feel perfect confidence, however. Moral tales in medieval collections sometimes show former knights worried about their military lives even after committing to the cloister.99 Of course, knights were warned that counting on a salvific eleventh-hour conversion might backfire, as one great lord in another of Caesarius of Heisterbach's exemplary moral stories learned. This noble end-of-life gambler planned to be safely wrapped in the monastic habit just after his death, but Caesarius assured his readers a demon had already taken possession of his hopelessly sinful body a year before his physical death, and he was most assuredly damned.100 It was a well-known trick of wily devils, in fact, to convince knights to postpone—until death overtook them—even a final confession; suddenly it was too late.101
We can move a step closer to a secure sense of knightly views with the imaginative chivalric literature we know they read or heard and patronized. It is again helpful to remember that this is a literature of debate and reform. There is much confident assertion in these works, of course, but fears hover and sometimes dominate. A few cases must again stand for a massive body of evidence. Among the eponymous heroes of chansons, Raoul de Cambrai comes quickly to mind as, in fact, a complex mixture of what is admired and even more feared. The leitmotif of his story is that a man out of measure cannot come to a good end. Raoul does not. Having, against his pious mother's specific admonition, waged war with ravaging of the poor and burning of churches—even a nunnery, with its nuns—he may well be considered an antihero. Yet the text shows enough ineradicable admiration for pure heroic prowess to satisfy a sense that it is not simply a clerical screed hostile to chivalric ideas, but is opening them to debate in an awareness of incompatibility.102 Galehaut, one of the dominant and most admired figures in the early thirteenth-century romance Lancelot, tries to convince a wise man to reveal to him the moment of his death. He wants to be prepared, he says, “since I have committed many wrongs in my life, destroying cities, killing people, dispossessing and banishing people (car molt ai fet mals en ma vie, que de viles destruire, que de gens occire et deseriter et essilier).” Master Elias, the wise man, agrees that this must be true, “for any man who has conquered as much as you have must have a heavy burden of sins, and it's no wonder (kar nus hom qui tant ai conquis com vos avés ne porroit estre sans trop grant charge de pechiés: et ce n'est pas merveille).”103
Bernier, a major figure in the long Chanson Raoul de Cambrai (the second part of which was written at roughly the same time as the Lancelot), expresses similar worries about sin, killing, and atonement. He, too, seeks wise advice—in this case from a select group of his courtiers:
Advise me, barons…for God's sake. I am frightened at the thought of the sins I have committed, and alarmed at the number of people I have killed. Raoul [his lord] was among them, and that weighs on me indeed. I intend to go to Saint-Gilles at once and pray to the saint to intercede on my behalf with God our lord and king.104
In the Middle English Awntyrs off Arthur, Gawain and Guenevere, straying from their hunting party, confront a terrifying apparition (Guenevere's deceased mother, we learn) that suddenly rises from the nether world to warn the queen of sins at court. Gawain, the model knight, takes the opportunity to ask this spirit a question troubling his mind:
“What will happen to us,” asked the knight, “who strive to fight, / and so trample down folk in many king's lands, / And ride over realms without any right. / To win worship in war through prowess of hands?”
The chilling answer from the otherworldly messenger combines a warning against greed, with a prediction of the fall of the Round Table as Fortune's wheel turns.105
Tension and paradox are central to romance literature, most of it written, as general scholarly agreement holds, by clerics of one stripe or another. As a literature not merely of affirmation and valorization, but of insistent debate and reform, romance amply documents the uncertainties we are seeking to establish. Clearly some clerical critics found truly hateful in the sight of God what many of their fellows, authors of romance, considered legitimate elements of the warrior code of chivalry. The tension and paradox appear within individual works no less than between works. A case of the former is evident in the sad puzzlement of Queen Guenevere, speaking to the hero Galahaut in the great prose romance, Lancelot: the queen laments that “it is too bad Our Lord pays no heed to our courtly ways, and a person whom the world sees as good is wicked to God.”106 At work behind her puzzlement were arguments such as the warning given by Alan of Lille (quoting Luke 16:15) that “What is valued highly among men is an abomination in the sight of God.”107 Did the chivalric life build upon laudable prowess and licit loot or was it a practice of grievous sin?
We might consider portrayals of the ideal last day for a knight as imagined by two sets of clerics. In sermon stories told from pulpits and repeated in one manuscript collection after another a pious crusader dies willingly on the Mount of Olives, or in a final, pious, suicidal rush into battle against pagans, thinking he could leave this earth in no better way.108 By contrast, in the great Vulgate Cycle of prose Arthurian romance knights sometimes say after a particularly successful day of vigorously cutting down their enemies—fellow Christians, not Muslims—that they would be satisfied if God would give them death: for they will never again have such a grand day.109
Or we could turn to the radically differing moral evaluations of the results of chivalric prowess on the human body. Robert Mannyng of Brunne‘s Handlyng Synne warns that a tourneyer may wound an opponent or be him-self wounded so badly that he never can thrive afterward.110 Authors of chivalric texts turn the sentiment upside down. The capacity to kill an opponent, or at least to leave him seriously crippled, proves a knight's prowess and earns him imperishable honor. Sir Tryamour in his Middle English romance hits an enemy so hard that “He was nevyr aftur sownde (He was never healthy thereafter).”111 Another hero, Lybeaus Desconus, breaks an opponent's thigh so badly he is ever after lame.112 These authors accept what is clearly the point of view of the knights. One of the accolades Malory bestows on Lancelot is that many of the men he strikes “never throoff aftir (never thrive afterward).”113 Another knightly author, the standard bearer to the great Spanish knight Don Pero Niño, similarly assures readers that his hero wounded an opponent so badly that he remained crippled for many days after their contest.114 What is feared by some clerics is praised by others (and aligns their views with those of knightly authors). Centuries earlier Pope Gregory VII had worried over such tensions, saying that “although such men say with their lips ‘Mea culpa' for the killing of many, in their hearts they nevertheless rejoice for the increase of their supposed honour, and they do not wish that they had not done what they have done; nor do they grieve that they have driven their brothers to hell.”115 This is, of course, why they wore the best armor available. If, on the spiritual side, their corporal suffering was meritorious, on the more worldly side, survival to enjoy victory was so very enjoyable. Enemies would assure a full measure of meritorious suffering; there was no need to boost such vigorous efforts by shedding defensive armor in order to maximize the result.
Chronicle evidence supports that from literature. Matthew Paris reports in mid-thirteenth century that Christ himself taught a prominent English lord a lesson about knightly wrongdoing on campaign. Christ appeared in a dream to Hubert de Burgh, a leading royal minister of the late reign of John and minority of Henry III. Burgh was conducting a campaign of devastation against the king's enemies and in the process was despoiling churches. In his vision, Christ from the cross instructed Hubert that when next he saw a crucifix he must spare the crucified and worship his image. As the devastation proceeded in the cold light of the next day, a priest approached Hubert, thrusting into his field of vision a large crucifix, remarkably like that in his dream. In obedience to the divine command, Hubert dismounted, fell to the ground in order to worship the crucifix, and restored the plundered ecclesiastical goods to the priest. He was later convinced that this faithfulness to Christ's command had won him a much-needed restoration to royal favor. Whether the incident moved him to a general lessening of his pillaging campaign is another matter, though the dramatic scene retains its value as evidence.116
A crusade chronicle from a century earlier may bring us equally close to knightly sentiments. At a crucial point during the crusading expedition that captured Lisbon in 1147 “a portent appeared among the Flemings.”117 It was the practice for a priest, after the completion of mass, to distribute blessed bread to the warriors. But on this Sunday
the blessed bread was bloody, and when [the priest] directed that it be purged with a knife, it was found to be as permeated with blood as flesh which can never be cut without bleeding (sacerdos panem benedictum vidit sanguineum, quem dum cultello purgare iuberet, inventus est adeo cum sanguine permixtus, ut caro que numquam sine sanguine potest incidi).118
To a modern historian what is more remarkable is the moral drawn from the incident by the writer of this chronicle, a cleric who appears to have been quite close to the men at arms he served and, in fact, a spokesman for their views:
And some, interpreting it, said that this fierce and indomitable people, covetous of the goods of others, although at the moment under the guise of a pilgrimage and religion, had not yet put away the thirst for human blood.119
Issues involving looting are significant throughout this chronicle. Sensitivity to the issue may have been heightened by Muslim taunts hurled at the crusaders in debate. “Labeling your ambition zeal for righteousness,” they charge, “you misrepresent vices as virtues (ambitionem vestram rectitudinis zelum dicentes, pro virtutibus vitia mentimini).”120 Are the Muslims here being allowed to speak some of the inner fears that troubled the crusaders themselves? Even the priest's own sermon to the crusaders probed similar issues: he reminded the warriors that since they have followed Christ and accepted poverty, they must not trust in oppression or become vain in robbery.121
Other chronicles supply evidence to suggest tensions between warrior vocation and religious ideals. The chronicle of Ralph of Caen—the author was himself a Norman knight—records the vocational uncertainties of Tancred, one of the famous Norman adventurers active in southern Italy. The issue troubling Tancred in the late eleventh century was clearly war, vengeance, and killing, especially as set against Christ's precept of turning the other cheek. His uncertainties were disabling in a warrior: “the contradiction lessened the daring of the wise man whenever he had opportunity to reflect quietly.” Tancred's mind was torn, Ralph says, between ideas of the gospel and those of the world. But all his fears ceased once he had heard the message of the crusade sermon of Urban II which “granted a remission of all sins (peccatorum omnium remissionem ascripsit)” to those setting out on the great expedition. With his natural vigor freed of spiritual doubts, Tancred went forth a vigorous crusader.122 The doubts he left behind provide splendid evidence.
Even the early Templars felt troubling doubts. Such uncertainties would not be expected from the Templars who joined to the venerable and idealized vocation of monk that of ideal Christian warrior. To some Christians, however, the compound seemed false and unworkable; outside voices had raised serious objections to the very idea of such a combined vocation. Even more interesting, fears had surfaced in members within the group. A remarkable letter on the subject written c. 1128 by a man calling himself Hugh the Sinner (Hugh Peccator) has survived in a French municipal archive; Hugh may have been one of the founders of the order, Hugh de Payns.123 He writes to his fellow Templars:
we have heard that certain of your number have been troubled by people of no wisdom, as though your profession, by which you have dedicated your life to carrying arms against the enemies of the faith and peace in defense of Christians, as though, I say, that profession were illicit or harmful, that is, either a sin or an obstacle to greater advancement.124
Hugh finds the origin of such disparagement in the devil, who is tempting the knights of the order “with anger and hatred when you kill, with greed when you strip your victim (suggerit odium et furorem dum occiditis et suggerit cupiditatem dum spoliatis).” His letter assures the brothers that they do not hate sinfully in killing nor covet dishonestly in their just looting, and he caps the case with the rhetorical question “should not payment be made to the man who lays down his life for the protection of his neighbours' lives (homini pro seruanda vita proximorum animam suam ponenti merces non debetur?)” In case his own words do not convince, he imagines Christ speaking to them: “You want to sit and to rest with Christ ruling but you do not want to work and be exhausted with Christ fighting (sedere uultis et quiescere cum regnante, sed laborare non uultis et fatigari cum pugnante).” In words that recall our Harley manuscript illumination, Christ is made to say “he who wishes to reign should not shirk work; he who seeks the crown should not avoid the fight (qui querit coronam non subterfugiat pugnam).” Christ himself toiled, Hugh reminds his brethren; it is the unavoidable price of peace and quiet. “Take note, brothers: if peace and quiet were to be sought in the manner you say, there would be no order left in the church of God (Videte, fraters: si hoc modo, ut uos dicitis, requies et pax querenda esset, nullus in Esslesia Dei ordo subsisteret).” Echoes of an ancient debate over the active and contemplative life rumble like distant thunder. But Hugh hammers his main point home again:
the devil…now tells the knights of Christ to lay down their arms, not to wage war, to flee tumults, to seek out the wilderness, so that when he shows the appearance of humility he takes away true humility. What is pride if not to disobey what God has imposed on one? (diabolus…nunc militibus Christi dicit ut arma deponent, bella non gerant, tumultam fugiant, secretum petant, ut dum humilitatis pretendit speciem, ueram tollat humilitatem. Quid est enim superbum esse, nisi in eo quod a Deo iniunctum est non obedire?)
He enjoins the knight of Christ to “offer the sacrifice of your labour to God (vestri laboris sacrificium Deo offerte).” From the intensity of the case made we can only conclude that the doubts and fears that provoked so much rebuttal must have been serious, indeed.125
The impact of such evidence is redoubled by Jean Leclercq's argument that doubts of the sort Hugh was combating stand behind the more elaborate treatise St. Bernard wrote for the Templars six or seven years later, In Praise of the New Knighthood (De Laude Novae Militiae).126 In that treatise Bernard, too, carefully assures the Templars that their fighting is licit and even praise-worthy in the eyes of God, that they kill evil, rather than men, and can, themselves, die in full confidence of paradise. If Leclercq is right, we can be sure that doubts persisted for years and that doubters may have needed to hear from a more authoritative and eloquent voice than Hugh's.127
Occasionally we can hear knights speak their fears directly. David Crouch has used early twelfth-century letters from the circle of Henry I of England to show that “these men who lived and worked in Henry's service were very conscious of the moral compromises they had made.”128 Other knights spoke directly to a particular unease over killing their fellow Christians. Joinville (the chronicler of the mid-thirteenth-century crusade of St. Louis) tells that Josserand de Brancion came away with the prize for valor in each of thirty-six battles and skirmishes in which he had taken part. Yet after one Franco-German fight that took place on a Good Friday, he entered a church he had saved from destruction, fell dramatically upon his knees before the altar and prayed aloud in Joinville's presence:
Lord…I pray Thee to have mercy on me, and take me out of these wars among Christians in which I have spent a great part of my life; and grant that I may die in Thy service, and so come to enjoy Thy kingdom in paradise.129
The scene is real and immediate. We can almost hear the armor clank as the worried knight falls to his knees in anguished prayer; we certainly hear his own words.
A fourteenth-century miracle story praising St. Martial gives similarly valuable evidence. In the campaigning of the Hundred Years War, an English squire went out plundering (pro depredando per patriam) with his men in the region of Limoges, but was unexpectedly thrown into the raging Dordogne River when his horse harness suddenly snapped. Sinking to certain death beneath the rushing water, he made two quick promises: first, he would offer a certain weight of wax for himself and his horse when St. Martial's head was displayed in its sanctuary (ad ejus capitis ostentionem); second, he would never take up arms again against any Christian (nunquam adversum christianum aliquem de cetero sumeret arma). At once, he sensed that a man led him, followed by his fortunate horse, safely out of the water.130 Man and beast were saved by the squire's pious votive vow and by the promise to circumscribe his participation in warfare that had not pleased God.
If more restrained, at least a similar sentiment appears in a remarkable account of deeds done by the great Spanish knight Don Pero Niño, written by his standard bearer in the early decades of the fifteenth century. The author admits what a pity it was that the great hero had to burn Christian dwellings during a raid on the isle of Jersey in the English Channel. The account even records a moving plea from these folk, asking that he spare their lives and homes: they argued that he should not have the killing of noncombatants, including children, on his conscience.131 The moving scene and the arguments of the noncombatants made an impression on the writer: they are not suppressed, as the biographer could easily have done in his triumphal account of his hero's life.
Our evidence is diverse and only gradually escapes the taint of clerical mediation; but it is collectively impressive and moves in a direction suggesting that thoughtful knights sensed paradoxical elements in their relationship with their religion. Other knights, perhaps even a majority, might have been only vaguely aware of such tensions which, like old wounds, were so familiar and habitually suppressed that they seldom came to the level of consciousness, causing pain only when probed. Yet our sample of evidence suggests that many knights suffered troubling thoughts at some time in their lives, sensing incompatible elements of piety and prowess. Clerics worked hard to induce such awareness, but it seems likely that knightly piety in itself generated tensions. Bridging the gap was especially important to thoughtful knights and may well have had some importance to all. How the gap was bridged is the subject of this book.
A Roadmap
Each of the following chapters will examine evidence on these vexed issues. We begin in Chapter 2 with a pair of treatises written late in the development we are studying—in mid-fourteenth century—by highly thoughtful practicing knights from opposite sides of the Channel, Henry of Lancaster and Geoffroi de Charny. These works present developed ideas of heroic, meritorious atonement for sin through the hardships of knightly life. They show the tough knightly profession selectively incorporating religious ideas within a warrior framework, demonstrating significant lay independence.
Chapter 3 elaborates two broad topics that form the essential environment within which ideas of chivalry took shape. It first briefly considers the importance of clerical reform coming in two great surges: the famous Gregorian effort to establish clerical leadership and independence and the later movement gathering force from the later twelfth century. This later phase of reform sought to create a working theology to guide the laity. Emphasizing a penitential system with a focus on priestly counseling and individual confession, it recognized the variety of occupations of the laity and the need for spiritual guidance within the practice of each. One such occupational group, of course, was the knighthood. To establish a second essential element of context (much less generally investigated), the chapter emphasizes the atmosphere of asceticism that so powerfully marked High and Late Medieval culture. Chivalry grew within a remarkably ascetic environment that emphasized corporal suffering as an important source of spiritual merits.
A third crucial contextual element requires separate treatment. Chapter 4 analyzes the combination of piety and religious independence that characterized chivalric thought. This fusion informs all aspects of the knightly approach to a religious undergirding of their profession. Tournament and crusade, foundational elements of the knightly life, provide especially informative cases in point. How did knights respond to clerical strictures on tournament? How did they hear and incorporate elements from crusade preaching into their own undoubted piety? Their combination of piety and independence was crucially important: it allowed for a highly selective borrowing of ideas from both sides of current theological discussion. Ideas that benefited chivalry could be absorbed; those considered troublesome could be confidently ignored. Chivalry cannot be labeled either clerical or secular in inspiration, for it drew on each to produce the mighty alloy that gave it such strength.
Chapter 5 emphasizes the role of imaginative chivalric literature in the creation and dissemination of chivalric ideology. Evidence for three basic themes is outlined (though these elements sinuously intertwined in practice). The first established the sheer suffering inherent in the knightly life; the second asserted that spiritual merit, a counterweight to the heavy burden of sin, was earned in that hard life; and the third extended the valorization that was forged for crusaders to all knights—their entire vocation generated spiritual merit, not merely crusading against enemies of the faith. The religion of knights was not simply produced by clerics for crusaders. Knights had ideas of their own and they determinedly proclaimed the validity and penitential value of their demanding professional life in arms, even though some of its principles and ineradicable practices sorely troubled ecclesiastics.
The next set of chapters (6, 7, and 8) show how in three major instances religious ideas were selectively drawn from clerical discussions and infused into a tough warrior ethos. High medieval clerics loved order and rationality and they were attempting to fashion a distinct pastoral theology for the laity. Basic questions readily arose in their discussion. Exactly how had Christ achieved salvation for lost humanity? How might mere humans imitate his model in their own lives? What was the divine social and professional template for Christian society? That is, what social groups and labor were divinely planned? Did human labor incorporate spiritual value or was it merely a form of punishment for sin? What means provided the best hope for cleansing the general populace of sin? Thoughtful writers who spoke about chivalry (clerics and knights alike) borrowed skillfully from conflicting opinions in these debates, incorporating some lines of thought and confidently neglecting others. Theirs was a tightrope performance. They had to justify and sanctify knight-hood by claiming it merited the blessing of God; yet they also had to avoid contrary ideas of the sort that filled the Sermon on the Mount. If the process seems logically contradictory or paradoxical, it was socially and culturally powerful.
Chapter 6 examines the fundamental case of differing ideas on exactly how Christ achieved the redemption of sinful humanity. The issue was central to medieval religion and raised the significant question of how sinful mortals should follow or imitate their Savior. One view emphasized that Christ enacted the classic warrior virtue of heroic victory over the devil and evil; the other stressed his meritorious suffering in expiation of human sin. Knight-hood enthusiastically claimed both roles. Victory bravely won and victim-hood willingly suffered were both built solidly into knightly religion. We will find Christ described as a victorious knight no less than a suffering servant and will witness the milites proclaiming that they exactly and devotedly follow his divine example.
Chapter 7 takes up the division of society into “orders” (ordines) with an appropriate labor envisaged for each. Since each ordo represented a particular social and professional group (required in the divine plan for an ideal society), each contributed its characteristic labor. Such work had to be related to individual salvation no less than to social utility. Again, two theological positions appeared side by side: work in any ordo could be considered merely penitential, or it could be seen more positively as approved by God, a path-way toward salvation. Knighthood, one of the ordines, had its ideal labor to perform. Was this labor of fighting merely a sad and usually sinful—though necessary—species of work, or might it be considered sanctified? Knightly ideology secured benefits from both theological points of view, combining the penitential with the meritorious. How forcefully such ideas of hard and meritorious labor (and suffering) were at work in society appears in the competition among ordines on the basis of their ascetic merit. Who suffered more and earned more of God's forgiving love?
Chapter 8 considers the clerical elaboration of ideas on sin, confession, and penance, asking how knights participated in an economy of salvation. Was physical suffering necessary for penance to be genuine? Should confession and penance take place once—heroically—for some great sin, or often, for quotidian sins?132 Or was inner contrition the key? Once again knightly ideology drew characteristically on all sources of strength. A sense of the heroic stature of acts of penance was favored, but so, in effect, was the concept of repeatable penance. The hard knightly life of campaign and meritorious combat came to be viewed as a form of penance in itself. It remains doubtful how fully the knights cooperated with the ecclesiastical ideal of individual confession to their parish priest. They showed resistance; and they could claim that their own sanctified vocation, replete with righteous suffering, provided at least an attractive additional option—if not an alternative—for performing effective penance.
Knights were pious members of their society. Their ideology based itself on powerful religious as well as warrior ideas; in fact the veritable fusion helps to explain how long the ideals dominated and animated the lay elite. What ended its centuries-long innings? The final chapter (9) considers why this ethos of chivalry began to die out as the traditional medieval era was transformed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and beyond. Monolithic explanations—gunpowder or military revolution eliminating the knights (and their supporting ideals), the transformative force of humanistic ideals, or of radical religious reform—are discounted in favor of a more modulated mix of forces. What seems especially crucial was rapidly growing state power, supported by changing ideas about noble formation, the kingdom as respublica, the duties of citizenship and—as ever—religious blessing on the process.
This book makes no claim that knights practiced a specific chivalric piety that excluded all other ideas and practices of lay piety. Knights surely followed standard forms of religious practice common to lay folk in general. That they believed strongly in founding religious institutions is manifest. The case is rather that knights could at will practice the pious forms of their fellow lay-men (alms, pilgrimage, fasting, and religious foundation); but to the degree that it was useful, they could follow their own exclusive and carefully crafted channel of piety, one highly compatible with their violent ideal of prowess winning honor. A specifically knightly ideology blended major and some-times competing strands of changing theology with the chivalric worship of the demigod prowess. They squared the circle and incorporated in their ordo the most ascetic tenets of their religion and the most bloodthirsty and vengeful standards of their professional code. Watching this process unfold is useful, even if it leads to sobering reflections. Its relevance to understanding religiously valorized violence that daily stains our newspaper accounts with blood scarcely requires comment.