Holy Warriors

The Religious Ideology of Chivalry

Richard W. Kaeuper

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780812207927
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The medieval code of chivalry demanded that warrior elites demonstrate fierce courage in battle, display prowess with weaponry, and avenge any strike against their honor. They were also required to be devout Christians. How, then, could knights pledge fealty to the Prince of Peace, who enjoined the faithful to turn the other cheek rather than seek vengeance and who taught that the meek, rather than glorious fighters in tournaments, shall inherit the earth? By what logic and language was knighthood valorized?In Holy Warriors, Richard Kaeuper argues that while some clerics sanctified violence in defense of the Holy Church, others were sorely troubled by chivalric practices in everyday life. As elite laity, knights had theological ideas of their own. Soundly pious yet independent, knights proclaimed the validity of their bloody profession by selectively appropriating religious ideals. Their ideology emphasized meritorious suffering on campaign and in battle even as their violence enriched them and established their dominance. In a world of divinely ordained social orders, theirs was blessed, though many sensitive souls worried about the ultimate price of rapine and destruction.Kaeuper examines how these paradoxical chivalric ideals were spread in a vast corpus of literature from exempla and chansons de geste to romance. Through these works, both clerics and lay military elites claimed God's blessing for knighthood while avoiding the contradictions inherent in their fusion of chivalry with a religion that looked back to the Sermon on the Mount for its ethical foundation.

CHAPTER 1

Violent Knights, Holy Knights

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 M...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Chapter 1 - Violent Knights, Holy Knights
• Chapter 2 - Two Model Knight/Authors as Guides
• Chapter 3 - The Religious Context for Chivalric Ideology
• Chapter 4 - Independence in Knightly Piety
• Chapter 5 - Knightly Ideology Developed and Disseminated
• Chapter 6 - The Hero and the Suffering Servant
• Chapter 7 - Knighthood and the New Lay Theology: Ordines and Labor
• Chapter 8 - Knighthood and the New Lay Theology: Confession and Penance
• Chapter 9 - Writing the Death Certificate for Chivalric Ideology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments