IF KNIGHTHOOD RECEIVED essential support from an interlinked body of ideas, how did this ideology emerge and how was it diffused? The state of our evidence leaves such questions fraught with difficulties. We cannot know who talked with whom at each tournament or what was said about honor and atonement as the wine flowed and the candles burned low late at night in castle halls. Many voices were heard and many pens scratched on parchment and specific authors cannot be assigned for each idea. Our evidence has, however, strongly indicated that, however pious, ideals for chivalry were not simply generated by clerics and dutifully absorbed by knights. Not only did the warriors insist on certain lines of professional virtue, they selectively chose theological views and adapted them to fit within their framework of heroic and courtly norms. If this creative process involved paradox and generated sparks, it produced powerful valorizing results evident in the treatises of Henry of Lancaster and Geoffroi de Charny, in the appropriation and generalization of crusading propaganda.
This chapter emphasizes the role of chivalric literature as the great agency of creation and diffusion. In all its forms, this literature selectively absorbed heroic, religious, and courtly influences from elite society and channeled them, suitably trimmed, reinforced, or amplified, into the cultural sphere of knighthood. Like a transformer receiving electric current, this massive body of writing sent along the fusion of ideas at higher voltage to animate numerous receptors. Chivalric literature provided a feature of courtly society with its communal readings and numbers of private readers rising with increasing literacy. Authors remembered (or imagined) stirring words attributed to innovative popes of the stature of Urban II and harangues of monks with the charismatic force of Bernard of Clairvaux. They drew upon deeds and sayings of historical figures such as Godfrey of Bouillon, William Marshal, Geoffroi de Charny, and “le roi-chevalier” Richard Lion-Heart.1 Above all, they created chivalric heroes by the dozen for readers and hearers whose appetite could scarcely be sated. In the process, they shaped ideals and contended with other writers taking on the same task. The result was a fascinating and complex dialogue between the exigencies of vigorous knightly life and the ideals embedded in a vast body of memories and literary invention. Tensions and paradox were not flattened or eliminated, but a mere chaos of clashing views was surmounted. Whatever the continuing debates, knighthood achieved an acceptable valorizing framework.2
Linked Ideas
Three broad concepts found throughout chivalric literature (chansons de geste, chronicles, romances, biographies, and vernacular manuals) convey the core of this framework. We have encountered these ideas in focused lines of inquiry and with specific evidence; it is important to bring them together here and to take account of the abundant literary evidence in support of their broad role. Unsurprisingly, these overarching chivalric ideas overlap with specific elements of crusading propaganda already analyzed: chivalric ideology no less than crusade propaganda emphasized knightly suffering and its spiritual merit; but, as we will see, a broad chivalric ideology stands sharply opposed to crusade thinking on strict clerical authority to legitimize fighting and on the extension of spiritual benefits to non crusaders engaged in licit warfare.
(1) A first emphasis falls on the sheer corporal suffering knights undergo in the exercise of arms throughout a lifetime in their tough profession. (2) A second clearly establishes the spiritually meritorious nature of that labor and suffering. Hard knightly labor is the licit work of their ordo, blessed by God who endows knightly prowess. As closely as earthly labor can, these tough and virtuous labors actually parallel the meritorious suffering and heroic labor of Christ. (3) Finally, this hard work and religious merit sanctifies all virtuous warriors, not solely crusaders. Even hard combat of Christian against (misguided) Christian brings merit. The labor of crusaders is not a contrast and a rebuke to ordinary knighthood, but simply ranks as its most obviously pious form. The principles, in short, announce that the hard campaigning and fighting of knights is their licit work assigned to them by the Lord of Hosts; doing it well necessitates suffering that brings religious merit to those engaged in any good fighting for right causes, whether on crusade or not.
Though these thematic elements interlock in heroic knightly atonement, seldom will any single text lay out the entire set of ideas, neatly assembled. We must cast a wider net for the components, rather like recognizing the existence and grandeur of the entire Lancelot-Grail cycle, which seldom appears in single manuscripts, but must be pieced together from many overlapping sources. It seems characteristic of the way social or cultural ideologies grow and spread that they are likely to advance piecemeal, one set of links being established at a time: a single text may connect the first and second themes; another, the second and third; yet another, the first and third. Only in over-view can we see the complete pattern.
(1) Knighthood Means Suffering
Suffering as atonement is not the topos one immediately associates with the proud and dominant chivalric layer in society. Yet, knighthood took form and did its work—as we have seen—in an intensely ascetic culture which paid great spiritual dividends to those who suffered. An emphasis on knightly suffering appears throughout the life span of chivalry and in all the types of evidence that present it to us. Abundant evidence shows that suffering and hardship, pain, toil, and endurance formed fundamental elements in the self-perception of knightly life.3
Twelfth-century chansons provide the locus classicus. Old Duke Girart cries out in the midst of fierce battle in the Song of Aspremont that his men must be prepared for suffering and can confidently expect all heavenly re-wards offered to martyrs if they die.4 Seven hundred doomed warriors ride across the battlefield of the Archamp in The Song of William, with bodies so grievously wounded their bowels drag between their feet and their brains spill out of their mouths.5 “Saint Stephen and the other martyrs,” as this chanson pointedly insists, “were no better than all of those who died for God in the Archamp.”6 The model warrior Vivien in this epic has not taken food for three days, is bleeding profusely from mouth and side wounds, and in his great thirst can find only the salt water of the Mediterranean or muddy water running across the battlefield, now mixed with blood and brains. The sea water he prefers to force down comes up involuntarily through his mouth and nose as the Saracens surround him and so severely increase his wounds with spears and javelins that his entrails fall to the ground.7 He calls on Christ who suffered to preserve his courage and faith during his own suffering.8 Later in this text William's nephew Guy, only fifteen years old, is thought too young to be able to endure the rigors of campaign and battle. William's wife Guibourg cautions Guy: “You could not undergo the hardships, watching by night and fasting by day, nor endure and suffer the fierce fighting.”9 Raoul de Cambrai, a text with no quasi-crusading theme at all, stresses how knights must endure great hardships, the death of kin and friends. They “suffer and endure (sosfrir et endurer)” the seemingly endless hacking and thrusting of combat that fills one laisse after another.10
Does this emphasis on knightly suffering in epic continue in later works? Thirteenth-century romance may depict the rigors of campaign and battle less graphically, yet the basic theme of chivalric suffering undoubtedly prospers. In the Perlesvaus (a romance written probably fairly early in the thirteenth century) the opening lines refer to “painne e travaill (suffering and hard work).” Thomas Kelly suggests that this theme “constitutes a main thread in the fabric of the narrative.”11 The hero, says the author near the end of his romance, “was never free of toil and hardship all his days as a knight (ne fu sanz travaile sanz paine en tant com il vesqui chevaliers)” and soon repeats that “his life was never free of hardship and toil (ne puet vivre sanz paine e sanz travaill).”12 Likewise, the romances composing the great Vulgate or Lancelot-Grail cycle are insistent on suffering as a condition of knighthood, though one or two instances must stand for many in the vast expanse of that cycle. The hermit to whom Lancelot confesses in the Quest of the Holy Grail commends him for soffrance, suggesting fortitude or patience in suffering.13 When the veteran Gawain instructs the young knight Melias about the rigors of chivalry early in this same text, the new knight replies that “God willing, he would endure any amount of suffering to preserve the honor of knighthood; nothing could keep him from it.”14 Praising another young hero, Claudin, Gawain describes him as “one of the best knights in the world whom I have seen endure most labor at arms and most pain and suffering in mortal battles.”15 Sir Gawain, of course, knew the suffering of knighthood first hand; after a single combat in The Story of Merlin, he “had already been so badly battered that he suffered from it forever thereafter.”16 In the Post-Vulgate Merlin Continuation, King Lot's brave suffering is extolled as exemplary:
The battle was cruel and pitiless; it began at tierce and lasted until vespers. If King Lot had not been such a good knight, his men would have been defeated sooner. But all alone he bore the burden of the battle, so that all those who watched him crossed themselves in wonder that he could endure half of what he suffered. He did great deeds and struck great blows.17
The History of the Holy Grail that begins the cycle had predicted just such pain and toil for knights. Anticipating the Grail quest, it announced that “the good…will undertake to suffer the difficult burden of earthly exploits of chivalry in order to learn about the marvels of the Holy Grail and the lance.”18 In the Post-Vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail, Gawain again praises the young Claudin, here in even more significant terms: “I know that he was a good knight by what I see he has suffered.”19
The biography of the great knight William Marshal, written at about the same time, regularly calls to mind the suffering of knighthood. John Marshal, the hero's father, had endured severe hardships while fighting to support Queen Matilda,20 and William himself later declared to Richard I that “all men of good birth / should suffer hardship and great pain / for their rightful lord,”21 a principle recalling (perhaps even drawing on) the oft-quoted maxim from the Song of Roland:
We know our duty: to stand here for our King.
One must suffer hardships for one's lord,
And endure great heat and great cold,
One must lose hide and hair.
Now let each see to it that he employ great blows,
So that no taunting song be sung about us!22
Marshal's biographer frequently points out how William and other knights suffered in battle,23 in tournament,24 and during captivity.25
Fourteenth-century authors busily inscribed similar sentiments. As Andrea Hopkins suggests in her study of a particular group of Middle English works, “the object of the quest is not necessarily ‘love' and in a sense is not relevant, so long as it is not ignoble. It is the period of exile, of suffering and isolation which the hero must undergo in striving to attain his goal, to embody the ideal, which strikes the crucial note and expresses the essence of the romance spirit.”26
Scenes described in the fourteenth-century Middle English romance Alliterative Morte Arthure closely recall much older chansons de geste, with fighters graphically plying weapons and suffering in gruesome detail. In one relatively minor fight,
There at the front of the forest, where the road went forth,
Fifty thousand fierce men were unhorsed at once.
When those two armies came crashing together, knights
Were wounded sore enough on either side;
…
They cut down in that company shielded knights,
Pierced those princes despite all the pride of their mail,
Through chain-linked byrnies stabbed to the white of their chests,
Burst asunder the brilliantly burnished braces;
They chopped through bloody shields and bloody horses
With their swords of gleaming steel.27
There can be little cause for wonder that, as in earlier epic, men are cut so severely that the filth from their bowels splashes on the ground beneath their horses' hooves or that Arthur reports from a significant dream a frightful vision in which “great, loathsome lions licked their teeth / As they lapped up the glowing blood of my loyal knights.”28
The Middle English Prose Merlin (written in the mid-fifteenth century) may be less sanguine, but it uses pain as both a noun and as a reflexive verb. Knights “pain themselves” to accomplish their feats; they suffer great pain as they fight. The language used to describe the rescue of two kings during the barons' revolt against young King Arthur shows the cast of mind:
The knyghts that were with Kynge Ventres peyned hem sore [painfully worked] to socoure their lorde, and so did the knyghts of King Loth. And Arthur's knyghts peyned hem sore to helpe Arthur, and to take and holde these other two kynges.…But with grete payn were these two kynges rescowed and horsed agein.29
Later King Leodogan hopes to find “a worthi man of armes that myght wele endure peyne and travayle to meyntene my were.” To such a man he would willingly give his daughter, Guenevere.30 Another late medieval English author, John Lydgate, similarly uses the word pain to represent the hard labor of fighting. In his Troy Book (written in the early fifteenth century) when Achilles “ne wolde lenger don his peyne (will no longer undergo his pain)” we know that he is, for the time being, withdrawing from the fighting.31 Clearly the modern phrase to “take pains” represents only a pale survival of a once more vigorous meaning.
Our texts from different eras and regions, written in several languages, all agree. Grievous bodily suffering is the inevitable fate of stalwart men who campaign and engage in close personal combat with edged weapons. This emphasis is important. Acknowledging such pain and suffering could have been suppressed; insistent voices could sing solely of power and victory. Instead, far from being ignored or downplayed, the pain and suffering are emphasized by graphic depiction and tireless repetition. The knightly mentality is so often do or die, and the requirement so often is to suffer horribly and then to die. This ideological stance remains significant; whatever the body counts on historical battlefields, knights thought of themselves as truly suffering in their hard profession.
(2) Knightly Suffering Is Meritorious
The second theme helps, of course, to explain the first. Many texts picture knights suffering in defense of Christianity and so draw upon that potent line of valorization. To establish spiritual merit, authors of chansons repeatedly invoke crusade-like settings, projecting aspects of their own age back into the Carolingian era of their poems' settings. Blood-stained virtue cloaks the warriors as they heroically triumph over heathen foes or manfully and willingly die in the valiant effort. Whether these heathen “Saracens” are imagined as invaders of Italy (in epics such as in the Crowning of Louis or in epics such as the Song of Aspremont) or as Saxons invading England (as in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae or later in the Alliterative Morte Arthure), the vigorous knightly practice of arms and the dire knightly suffering easily acquire religious virtue. In effect, the authors of chronicle and epic anachronistically make the knights crusaders before there were crusades; as if dispensing a sacrament to the sound of martial chant, they provide glowing crusading justification for hard fighting.
Perhaps to state the case more accurately, they provide the blessing knights truly wanted, one that often is even broader and richer than that offered by bishops, popes, and canon lawyers known to historical knights. In the works of literature they patronized, the ahistorical chronology and the suprahistorical crusade benefits mix powerfully in a blessing descending on the grateful chivalric ordo, rather like the crown descending from heaven in angelic hands in the manuscript illumination with which this book began. The message is delivered repeatedly, as in the classic speech by the pope him-self in the Song of Aspremont:
I am a man who does not deal in lies;
He who goes now against this foe to fight
And for God's sake should lose his mortal life,
God waits already for him in Paradise
With crowns and laurels for the soldier of Christ;
He shall sit us at his own right-hand side;
Without confession, all the sins of your lives
On God's behalf I now collect and shrive;
Your penance is to fight with all your might!32
The knights in the audience must especially have appreciated the pope's dispensing with any troublesome need for confession as he announced that fierce fighting counted as complete penance. They would likewise have listened approvingly to the speech by the archbishop near the end of The Song of Girart of Vienne. He tells Christian forces, locked in conflict,
Barons, my lords, give ear to me and listen:
I stand for God, Who made the world we live in,
And for St. Peter, His regent in Rome city,
To whom He gave the power of forgiveness
To any sinners for any sins committed;
I tell you now that any man who's willing
To go with Charles, keeper of the French kingdom,
Shall be forgiven for a lifetime of sinning
In Lord God's name, Who made the world we live in.”
The French all say: “How high a pardon this is!”33
In fact the plan has come direct from highest heaven, carried by an angel who pointedly tells feuding Christians to stop internecine conflict and go to “Spain” where their “fierce prowess” is needed “in service of God's love.”34 However reluctant they might be to give up the joys and opportunities of fighting and feud—an obvious clerical goal for them—knights in chansons know the basic exchange: their suffering brings merit. In the Song of Aspremont none will go as messenger to seek aid from Charlemagne early in the great fight against the pagans, for to leave the fighting would seem cowardly in the worldly frame and a loss of penitential opportunity in the spiritual frame. As the knight Godfroi explains tersely, swearing by his faith, “Why should I not strike mighty blows for Jesus / and pay to God the debt of all believers?”35 Later the pope has the same problem in finding a knight to carry even the standard that contains a piece of the true cross. Though the knights revere this potent relic from Calvary, they know they win God's grace by fighting weapons in hand and if necessary by dying in the fight.36 Hope of gaining the reward of faithful battlefield service unto death is intoned by one knight after another who refuses to leave the active fighting. They cherish the quality of their hard-won reward. Amauri, one of the determined knights, imagines the reward: “On flowers in Paradise tonight I'll sleep / with all God's saints to keep me company.”37
Some passages comfortingly assert that a warrior need not make the supreme sacrifice to gain desired spiritual benefits, though dying in battle remained the surest route to a honored place in paradise. Pope Milon in the Song of Aspremont tells knights that they are lucky to have the opportunity of winning salvation through their fighting. Though born in sin and deserving damnation, they can be absolved by striking great blows against the enemies of their religion.38 Meritorious fighting and suffering short of death here seem sufficient. Other passages clearly state that crusading, with all its deprivation and dangers, is a form of martyrdom for all who suffer, not merely for those who die. This is the stance taken, for example, in The Crusade of Richard Lion-Heart.39
The romances so popular from the late twelfth century carry forward the theme we have found in chansons and point toward our third theme, the valorization of all licit fighting (to be considered shortly). Virtually all romances present fighting and suffering as meritorious and often locate the action in a world beyond that of crusading.40 Romance settings represent the violence of the courtly world through lonely knightly quest rather than the warfare of panoramic crusade-like battlefields.
Their role in establishing knightly ideology thus stands out prominently. Without the quests so prominent in romance, a valorizing mythology ex-tended to all licit knightly fighting seems much less likely. Romances like-wise manage to be pious, or at least what the Victorians would have termed “improving,” without living under complete intellectual control by clerics; they scarcely come unaltered from the pages of ecclesiastical doctrine. In short, questing in romance and the knightly mythology created by romance writers remind us again that knightly lay piety viewed its ideas through a powerful lens of lay independence.
Repeatedly in these stories a knight sets out from a courtly center on some quest that will significantly test his valor and endurance, a process that ideally forges him into a better man. So often the task set the questing knight is righting a particular wrong that troubles some member of elite society—classically a wounded knight or a threatened lady—who has sought help at a renowned court. Knightly prowess must be brought to bear against a local tyrant, or against the inhabitants of a castle who practice an odious custom in place of the straightforward hospitality endlessly recounted and praised. The hero's stunning deeds of prowess exalt knightly bodies performing hard and meritorious labor, suffering, and achievement. Undertaking lonely wanderings in wild and fearsome settings, knights encounter fierce foes and endure a succession of grueling all-day battles which leave the ground brightly littered with shattered mail rings and darkly stained with pools of chivalric blood. Yet they steadfastly persevere to conclude these worthy enterprises.
At minimum, the quests in even the most pedestrian romances show knights gaining honor through suffering and tough physical exertions. Such suffering can only entail merit with spiritual underpinning, given their cultural milieu. This tendency to assume the religious behind the lay is not surprising in a world that knew few other registers for the supremely important. Those who turned treason and cowardice into sins and paralleled the immortal soul with imperishable honor would see hard-won knightly merit as redemptive.
If even third-rate romances show knighthood proved at high personal cost, the most thoughtful and ambitious romances show knighthood truly transformed by hard, noble service. Carl Schmidt and Nicholas Jacobs argue—in significant language—that any romance hero must “go through a purgatory of ‘loneliness and pain.' ”41 The most sophisticated stories, such as those of Chrétien de Troyes (even before his final romance, Perceval), show the young hero radically transformed by his quest. Jean Frappier sees the hero in Chrétien's Yvain so thoroughly reformed that he has become “a true chivalric saint (une veritable saint de chevalerie).”42
If only briefly, we should note, finally, that the considerable import of this second theme is boosted by a special intensifier: the knights think they are following or imitating Christ through meritorious, even redemptive suffering in licit fighting, as we will see in Chapter 6. This mimetic idea takes on powerful meaning for them, forming a potent bond with Christ seen as a divine warrior who suffered as they must suffer and who triumphs as they hope to triumph.
(3) All Good Fighting Counts
Chivalric texts readily blur or even eliminate the distinction between crusade and non-crusade.43 Warriors did not consider crusade to be the sole licit form of military enterprise. If crusade (as most agreed) was the most pious form of fighting, it did not generally stand as the polar opposite to their quotidian combats at home, but merely graced one end of a continuum of their hard, pious, and meritorious labor in good causes. Writers resolutely grasp the mantle of divine blessing provided crusaders and stretch it to cover all knights fighting in good causes. Evidence appears in the several forms of imaginative chivalric literature, as well as in papal pronouncements, chronicles, and political propaganda.
Their fighting was readily sacrilized. Demonized “enemies of God” and foes denounced as “worse than Saracens”—even though Christian—have a way of turning up to play their ideological role, even on battlefields where we might not readily expect them. The goal is clear: if the enemy a knight faces is worse than a pagan, he will find it much easier to consider his warfare as meritorious as that of a crusader. He can destroy or kill with moral certainty; he can suffer with a sense of spiritual merit earned. The tradition was as venerable as the reform papacy of mid-eleventh century, half a century before the famous sermon that launched the First Crusade. Faced with the dire threat of Norman warriors in Italy, Pope Leo IX (d. 1054) tried to neutralize them with military force of his own; in the process he declared that his enemies “had shown an ungodliness worse than that of the pagans.” His contemporary biographer provided the other side of this ideological coin by announcing that those who died in combat against the Normans were known to be “united in heavenly glory with the holy martyrs.”44
By the early twelfth century, royal warfare targeted excommunicated Christians in France and was blessed by clerical authority. Guibert of Nogent writes that bishops and archbishops preached in support of the campaign of the French king Louis VI (Louis the Fat) against the notorious Thomas of Marle. Although Thomas had served valiantly on the first crusade, he now was under excommunication by a papal legate. The case made against Thomas by Abbot Suger (Louis's admiring biographer) combines the charge of tyranny with an accusation that at home Thomas is “a plague to God and men alike.”45 The king's fight was to overcome—even to kill—misguided nominal Christians. In describing royal military vigor against Thomas and other minions of evil, Suger twice states that Louis “piously slaughtered the impious.” The slain were, of course, Christian.46 Before going into battle, the king's forces were absolved of their sins and assured of the salvation of their souls. A miraculous change from inclement to fine weather—needed for an assault on Thomas's stronghold—is taken as sign of divine favor for their martial work. In fact, a bishop's prayer had sought this particular blessing.47 Abbot Suger had earlier in his account of Louis's deeds written that when responding to a threatened German invasion, the French host was convinced to set an ambush; the plan proposed against the invaders would “overthrow and slaughter them without mercy as if they were Saracens. The unburied bodies of the barbarians would then be abandoned to wolves and ravens.”48
Across the Channel, Richard of Hexham, in his chronicle (written before 1164) describes the Scots invading the north of England as “more odious than the whole race of pagans” and quotes Psalm 79: “O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance.” He assures readers that the vengeance of God overtook the Scots. What makes them worse than pagans, it is worth noting in this case as in others, is not belief but behavior. They “spread desolation over the whole province, and murdered everywhere persons of both sexes, of every age and rank, and devastated towns, churches, and houses.” This is a criterion for paganism that many Christians could readily find in their enemies, though not, of course, in themselves.49
Crusade propaganda and further papal directives could be cited in the same vein by the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.50 A frustrated Pope Celestine III had in 1196 excommunicated the Spanish king Alfonso IX of León; in effect he even pronounced a crusade against him, though the step achieved little result.51 With more effect, Innocent III in 1199 promised benefits the equivalent of those given crusaders to men willing to fight against his Hohenstaufen opponent in southern Italy, Markward of Anweiler, “in effect,” as John C. Moore writes, “proclaiming a crusade against a Christian prince as Celestine III had done against the king of León.”52 Innocent branded Mark-ward “another Saladin (alius Saladinus)” who was leading Muslim allies among his troops (quibusdam Saracenis confoederatus).53 This same train of thought is likewise attributed to Richard Lion-Heart in Ambroise's Estoire de la guerre sainte, written in the closing years of the twelfth century. In telling the story of the warrior-king's crusade, Ambroise asserts that in the fighting on Cyprus against Greek Christians—those “perfidious Greeks”—the king “had no desire to hunt out Saracens worse than these.”54 That Christians could fight Christians without loss of sanctity became obvious. Boniface VIII (acting simply as Benedict Gaëtani to spare royalist sensitivities among the French) blessed both sides of the Anglo-French war conducted by Edward I and Philip IV. To borrow uncompromising words from Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural, “both [parties] read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes his aid against the other.” Earlier, in the well-known “political crusades” of the thirteenth century, clerics blessed warfare against Christians. During the troubled Fourth Crusade, the Christian city of Zara was infamously sacked and the Christian capital of Constantinople seized by a crusading army, despite, for a time, their excommunication by Innocent III. The pope could scarcely disavow all the work of a crusading army, raised by such great efforts and on which so many hopes were focused. Control of spiritually valorized warfare was patently slipping from the directing hands of clerics.55
Papal authority famously blessed the crusade against the Cathars (and their orthodox supporters) in the French Midi. The elder Simon de Montfort, who had left the Fourth Crusade as it attacked Christians, led the armed struggle for orthodoxy in southern France. Yet, as in the fighting in England during the early minority of Henry III, both sides in this conflict asserted religious valorization for their work. Opposing forces never simply aligned themselves on strictly religious lines. Northern orthodox Christian knights often fought southerners who, though Catholic, stoutly defended their region against invasion. If the invading forces were wrapped in the official blessing of the Roman church, those resisting the crusade might respond in kind. The Song of the Cathar Wars describes the scene as Provençal forces build a protective wall during their siege of Beaucaire Castle, held by crusaders called and blessed by the papacy. Despite this high clerical valorization of their opponents, the besiegers are sure that their fighting will bring spiritual benefits, even against papal-sponsored crusaders. As their chaplain advised, “‘My lords, in the name of God and the count [Raymond VI of Toulouse] I tell you that everyone who helps to build this dry-stone wall will be richly rewarded by God and by Count Raymond. Upon my holy orders, I promise each one of you salvation.' All together they shouted, ‘To the pardon of all of us!'”56 The Barons' Crusade was preached by Gregory IX in 1234 as a classic expedition to the Holy Land and a step toward active Christian unity: but the call was redirected, without great success, to the Latin empire of Constantinople late in 1235, and complex local political interests rather than unity prevailed among the crusaders.57
Demonizing enemies as Saracens took various forms. Even cowardly allies might be treated as Saracens: in one chanson the French threaten Lombard knights placed in their front ranks against Saracen foes that if they flinch they will be decapitated as if they were themselves Saracens.58 A knight in Chrétien de Troyes's Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart describes the inhabit-ants of the Land of Gore as “worse than Saracens”;59 the Romance of the Rose condemns Hohenstaufen leaders (Manfred, Henry, and Conradin) as having acted worse than Saracens when they started a war against their Holy Mother Church.60 We cannot be surprised to find that early thirteenth-century crusaders are told to attack Cathars “more fearlessly even than the Saracens,” that a French crusading knight who turned over a captured castrum to pro-Cathar forces was “worse than any infidel,” that the citizens of Toulouse, resisting the crusaders and violating promises to men they had captured, were “worse than infidels,” or that a massacre at Beziers is considered worse than anything since the time of the Saracens.61 Eustache Deschamps used this same phrase against those misguided folk who sacked St. Germain in Paris in 1381;62 Philippe de Mezières used the terms in denouncing pillaging arms-bearers who in his day were “worse in the eyes of God than Saracens.”63
Spiritual valorization of pious warriors might take broader, more subtle and indirect forms. We have already encountered twelfth-century chansons picturing faithful knights playing the crusader in historical settings from Carolingian times. Yet not all epics mimic crusade; some portray the fighting of Christian against Christian in conflicts over land tenure and lord/vassal relationships with no loss of spiritual blessings descending on the warriors: some heroes of chanson move easily from fighting enemies of the Lord as proto-crusaders to fighting Christian enemies of the lord king as faithful vassals. The idea that all good fighting wins spiritual merit is reinforced in each case.
Loyal martial service to a legitimate lord could fuse with fighting against enemies of the faith. The author of the Chanson d'Aspremont describes a great proto-crusading battle of Christians against Muslims, but significantly adds the element of spiritual blessings earned by loyal service to the French crown. Early in the chanson, Duke Girart's wife, Emmeline,64 admonishes her recalcitrant husband not only to do his duty and serve his overlord, Charlemagne, but to fight for him against the enemies of the faith as an act of penance:
Now you indeed with such black sins are blemished.
Who have burned churches and murdered men so many,
Such awful sins, Girart, you've steeped yourself in,
So now to Charles and with your sword do penance.65
Significant ideas cross boundaries as if by cultural osmosis. The venerable belief that holy fighting helps repay the debt for sins is leaching into spiritual merit for those who support royal action. Was not good kingship in its own way holy? As Marsent, mother of the much aggrieved vassal Bernier, tells him in the great chanson Raoul de Cambrai, “Serve your lord and God will be your reward.”66 Crusade valorization blends into thoughts about other modes of fighting, even into fighting against Christian opponents of a monarch who is doing the work of God as the crowned and anointed head of a Christian kingdom. The next step in this movement of ideas is to consider hard fighting and suffering in any licit cause a means of knightly penance.
Some chansons drop the ideological framework of holy war against pagans in whole sections of text and treat all virtuous fighting as spiritually meritorious, even in episodes without a single non-Christian enemy in sight. The Crowning of Louis, one of the cycle of popular epics centering on William of Orange, is a classic case.67 This chanson begins at the French court but quickly shifts the scene of action to Italy threatened by Saracen invasion; it thus creates the standard proto-crusade story frame for the early portion of the chanson. William victoriously combats the invading Muslims who threaten Rome, to which he has gone on a pilgrimage. He of course defeats Corsolt, the fearsome pagan champion, in heroic single combat, closely described. With this victory achieved, however, the scene shifts again and the action returns to France and to William's fight to defend the inept but legitimate monarch against his enemies, Christians though they be. William is following the advice given him by the pope, himself. “I should like to advise you,” the pope has told him, “to go to the rescue of your lord, Louis as a penance” or even “in act of penance (En peneance vos vueil ge comander / Que Loiïs vo seignor secorez).”68 William's penitential sufferings and self-denial are real. There may even be an unspoken intensifier to this proposed act of penance. For when William took this advice, he walked away from his own wedding. Beside him at the altar stood a beautiful and rich lady, whom he never saw again once he left to do his duty to his lord. In any case, the central message is redoubled in this text, for near the end of the epic, we learn just how severe William's service has been, how much a penance he has actually suffered on behalf of his lord the king:
for three whole years there was not a single day, however high and holy, that William did not have his burnished helm laced on and his sword girt at his side, riding fully armed on his charger. There was not a feastday when men should go to worship, not even Christmas Day which should be set above all others, that he was not dressed in his hauberk and armed. The knight suffered a great penance to support and aid his lord (Grant peneance sufri li chevaliers / Por son seignor maintenir et aidier).69
William even endures a spiritual penance added to his physical suffering. No easy option is open to him. He must fight unceasingly for Louis, even on prohibited holy days. This fighting is at once wrong and will be remembered to his cost at the final judgment; yet he must not cease to act vigorously. The message is hard, even paradoxical, and it is underscored by being repeated in the next laisse:
For three whole years William the warrior was in Poitou, conquering that province. There was not a single day, however great an occasion, not even Easter Day or Christmas or the feast of All Saints that should be kept most solemnly, that he had not his burnished helm in place and his sword girt at his side, riding fully armed on his horse. The young knight suffered a great penance to protect and defend his lord (Grant peneance sofri li bachelers / Por son seignor guarantir et tenser).70
William's fighting, his self-denial, counts as a penance.71 The message is clear and important: it is not only crusading that earns knights divine forgiveness; fighting the good fight for the monarch likewise reduces the debt owed for sin, even if this means crossing swords with rebels who are fellow Christians, even if it means a technical violation of holy days when one should ideally not fight at all. This valorization avoids any pretense of crusade against actual enemies of the faith. On the great balance beam that weighs good and evil to determine the fate of a knight's soul, William's stalwart fighting in the licit cause of his king counts heavily and positively.72
The phenomenal literary output of romance gives further reason to think such ideas were active in knightly minds and speech. Nowhere is this more evident than in the core story of the rise of Arthur and his kingdom. These works, so evidently popular among the elite, powerfully reinforced the trend to broaden the reach of ideas of redemptive warrior suffering. In romance all good chivalric fighting eases the knight's progress toward salvation; it is not limited to combat on vast proto-crusading battlefields strewn with pagan and Christian corpses.
In his great campaign against the Christian Roman Emperor Lucius, Arthur can defeat and kill his enemies with moral confidence because they have brought in hordes of outright pagans from “the East” to stand against him. This sleight of hand appears somewhat obliquely in the founder of this chronicle-like Arthurian story, Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1138), and quite explicitly in his successors Wace, perhaps two decades later, and Lawman (c. 1200).73 In the crisis of Arthur's reign, when he must return to fight for his throne and wife in Britain, his archenemy Mordred has not only broken Christian law by taking the queen as his wife, he has likewise called in the pagans to fill the ranks of his army, as the texts sharply point out.74 Such a man, by implication, is as bad as his allies.
In the Perceval attributed to Robert de Boron (the third romance in this late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century cycle), Arthur's Roman campaign pits him against not only the inconveniently Christian Romans, but against the conveniently pagan allies the emperor has called to his side—the king of Muslim Spain and the sultan (this king's brother), followed by their hordes of vigorous unbelievers.75 And the end of this romance repeats the pattern we saw in Geoffrey of Monmouth's history. When Arthur returns to fight traitorous enemies at home, he learns that the archtraitor Mordred has not only recalled pagan Saxons, he has forbidden the singing of masses or matins within Britain. Each sword blow of Arthur and his men is justified as if on crusade.76
In the fourteenth-century Alliterative Morte Arthure, Arthur's warfare has pious intentions that must be forced upon impious enemies.77 Christ is repeatedly praised for the outbreak of war in the council Arthur convenes to answer Roman ambassadors demanding tribute. As in the cycle of romances attributed to Robert de Boron, the Romans draw not only on Christian forces, but call in exotic—and pagan—eastern and African allies. Some witches and warlocks are even enrolled among enemy forces, for good measure.78 That the poet has in mind his own age, and likely the contemporary fighting of the Hundred Years' War, appears in the references to Parliaments, English archers, Spanish foes, and even some named prominent families from the fourteenth century (such as the Montagues) who appear as supporters of Arthur. Yet through the intrusion of mythical “Saracens” the author plays his best ideological card for valorizing vigorous knightly war. The arch-traitor Mordred, like the Romans, has again enlisted pagan allies, so that as Arthur's forces effect a landing on the shores of England, Gawain can call out that they are surrounded by Saracens:
We'll work like loyal men for the court of Christ,
And for yonder Saracens, I swear on my oath,
We'll sup with our Savior in ceremony, in heaven,
In the presence of the King of Kings and Prince of all the others.79
After all in this force have bravely fought and died, Arthur swoons as he comes upon Gawain's dead body. He kisses the bloody corpse, and intones:
“O righteous, almighty God, look down at this sorrow!
This royal blood running out over the earth!
Such blood would be worthy to take and enshrine in gold,
For it's guiltless of any sin, as my Lord may save me!”
And he caught it up reverently with his two clean hands,
And he stored it in his helmet, and covered it fairly.80
Arthur's battle helmet becomes a chivalric reliquary, almost a chalice. Continuing the fight, the king again links good work with potent spiritual merit gained by fighting God's enemies:
They are Saracens in that army; may we see them dead!
Set on them with fury, for the sake of our Lord.
If it is our destiny to die today,
We'll be raised to the gates of heaven before we're half cold.81
Over a late Roman era campaign, studded with realistic late fourteenth-century details of secular warfare, the poet has drawn the richly opaque veil of crusading justification. If Malory, taking up the story again at the end of his vast book, eliminates the Saracens and witches, he does write Mordred into excommunicated state and shows him defying and threatening to decapitate the “Bysshop of Caunturbyry” who had cursed him with bell, book, and candle.82 Enemies such as these make the fight against them a spiritual exercise no less than a heroic pleasure.
Once again, the valorization may be more subtle. In the complex early thirteenth-century romance Perlesvaus (Haut livre du graal: Perlesvaus), Thomas Kelly finds that “Perlesvaus and the knights of the Round Table must be brought through adversity to the grace of salvation.”83 He notes that “expiatory action is not limited to deeds performed in direct service of advancing the New Law [Christianity].”84 Stalwart fighting in licit courtly causes in this romance helps lead the knights to salvation. As we have seen, a century and a half later, Geoffroi de Charny fully agreed.85
At times, however, romance can become self-conscious about its message. At one point in the Quest of the Holy Grail, the heroes Galahad, Perceval, and Bors face attack by hostile knights at the Castle Carcelois. They swiftly kill their attackers and massacre even those fleeing “like so many dumb beasts.” As fighting ardor cools, the heroes fall to debating whether they have enacted God's will with their swords. Galahad resists easy assumptions that they have done the right thing. At that very moment a white-robed priest suddenly appears—he even bears the Eucharistic host in a chalice. Fearful at first, looking at the bloody detritus of the slaughter, he soon assures the Grail heroes that they have in fact carried out sacred work: “never did knights labor to better purpose; if you lived until the end of time I do not think you could perform a work of mercy to compare with this.” The dead lying in bloody heaps before them, “in their treachery…had made the inhabitants of the castle behave worse than Saracens. All their actions went against God and the Holy Church…the Saracens themselves would not have behaved worse.”86 The killing is thus as meritorious as any accomplished on crusade, for the enemies were even “worse than Saracens.” Galahad is assured by the cleric that he has “done the finest deed a knight has ever done.”87
Such valorized fighting in courtly causes appears even more explicitly in both the Lancelot do Lac and the even larger Lancelot within the Vulgate Cycle. Returning to the theme we saw plainly inserted in the Crowning of Louis, the heroic knight Pharian explains to his fellow warriors the spiritual virtue of hard service to a legitimate lord. They must fight to the death for their liege lords, the young Bors and Lionel, for
if we die for them it will be to our honor in the world and to our renown as warriors, because for the sake of rescuing his liege lord from death a man is duty-bound to put his own life ungrudgingly at risk. If anyone then dies, he dies as sure of salvation as if he were slain fighting the Saracens, the enemies of our Lord Jesus Christ!88
Moreover, the point is restated in even broader terms later in these two Lancelot texts. A former knight who has entered monastic life explains to Gawain why he must abandon his monk's habit, leave the cloister, and return to warfare in the world. His higher duty is to aid his son:
is he who destroys life without justification not worse than a Saracen? If I went overseas to fight against the destroyers of Christendom, it would be judged praiseworthy, for I must do all in my power to avenge the death of Jesus Christ, since I am a Christian. Therefore I'll go to avenge my son, who is a Christian, and help him against those who are in the place of the unbelievers.89
For spiritual blessing, not even the vow to live as a monk trumps use of arms in a good cause. Knightly ideology thus bonded meritorious suffering to all licit, loyal service to kin and lord, even when the enemy was Christian. How many knights would not have viewed all their hard fighting in European quarrels as sanctified? It was all, in fact, being sanctified by such arguments, whatever the abstract merits. Were not the enemies troubling their own lives and realms worse than infidels?
Such speculation about knightly attitudes is not idle. Medieval armies often claimed religious justification for their fighting. The English barons opposed to King John in the struggle for Magna Carta, for example, called themselves the Army of God, even though at the time they were under condemnation by Innocent III.90 When the pope excommunicated by name some of these baronial opponents of his ideal for right order in England, he of course charged that these very men were “worse than Saracens.”91
The most telling insight into chivalric thought processes may come from accounts of three speeches to royalist troops in England in this period. Each was made in 1217 by the great knight William Marshal: he addressed his men twice in the campaign that led to their decisive victory over the French invasion force (and their English allies) at Lincoln, and he spoke to them again before the naval battle off Sandwich. Marshal first addressed his followers at Northampton, calling them “you who keep faith with the king (qui al rei estes en fei).”92 The message that followed fused lay political and chivalric justifications for the coming battle with an unhesitating assertion that God's will is in their work and that God's blessing would descend on those who achieve it. Honor gained through standing by the king and acting in defense of wives, children, and possessions, that is, fuses with redemption of their souls. They are fighting, he assures his troops in a classic assertion of meritorious and heroic atonement, to safeguard peace and Holy Church and “to gain redemption and pardon for all our sins” through “the burden of armed combat.”93 “God wills it (Dex le velt)” the Marshal cries, quoting—consciously or not—the famous response of warriors who heard the sermon that launched the First Crusade in 1095.94 He wants his men to “give thanks to God, who has given us the opportunity to take our revenge.”95 The words put cheer into his men's hearts.96 When the army reached Newark, the papal legate, “as was his duty,”
absolved them with full remission
of all the sins committed by them
since the hour of their birth
so that they might be free to receive
salvation on Judgment Day.97
Completing the moral template, he then excommunicated the French invaders.98
Just before the battle, Marshal addressed his army a second time, using stirring words that again associated shame and cowardice with God's curse, while linking victory and honor with the gaining of paradise. Those who will die need have no fear:
God who knows who are his loyal servants
will place us today in paradise,
of that I am completely certain.
And, if we beat them, it is no lie to say
that we will have won eternal glory
for the rest of our lives,
both for ourselves and for our kin.99
Their enemies, fighting a war against God and Holy Church, are excommunicated, and are on their swift way to hell. God has given them into the hands of the just royalists. The Marshal, his biography assures, spoke as a worthy, loyal, and wise knight.100 He kept up this encouragement even as his force moved into battle against these enemies, assuring his men of God's guidance and support.101 Riding behind him in the charge, the bishop of Winchester called out Marshal's war cry: “This way! God is with the Marshal! (Ça! Dex aïe al Mareschal!)”102
Marshal gave his final rallying speech on the seashore at Sandwich, where his warriors had hurried to reinforce a fleet setting out to block the new and dangerous French thrust coming from the Channel.103 Though briefer than the previous speeches we have noted, major themes are repeated: God has al-ready given them victory by land and now will do so by sea. Their opponents act against God's will, but the royalists are fighting with the aid of divine guidance and will conquer “the enemies of God (les enemi Deu).”104 The great victory of the king's forces was just what God intended (fu fet comme Dex volt).”105
Innocent's outrage, whole shelves of epic and romance literature, Simon de Montfort's moral scruples, the contesting valorizations of opponents in the Albigensian Crusade, the Marshal's speeches—all show how actively men engaged in the process of justifying even war between Christians. They proclaimed the spiritual legitimacy of their fighting and repeatedly branded opponents “worse than Saracens.” A knight who fought and suffered for his rights or for his lord (or lady) earned heavenly merit. Crusade justification is generalized to cover lay warfare in good causes.106 All meritorious suffering and fighting brought knights the spiritual reward they needed and craved.