Kaeuper R.W. - Chivalry and violence in medieval europe (1999)(en)
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knighthood, from the uninterrupted quiet of his study, in his sermon ÔAd MilitesÕ.
John of Salisbury is generally more accepting. Since he clothes knights in the classical drapery of his self-conscious learning, his view allows for more talk of the loyal service owed by milites to Ôthe princeÕ and to Ôthe commonwealthÕ. He wants his readers to know he is not hostile to military men or the military life.51 He tries to think of contemporary knights as the Roman soldiers he so admires in his books on antiquity, Þtted into a world properly directed by clergie. The armed soldier, in fact, Ôno less than the spiritual one is limited by the requirements of ofÞce to religion and the worship of God, since he must faithfully and according to God obey the prince and vigilantly serve the republicÕ. Given such a military force, he announces his willingness to Ôundertake its defence against whoever attacks it and will fully justify it on the authority of GodÕ.52
He knows, though, that the world in which he lives is not the world of his books. He would that the knights of his own day were a stalwart, ideal soldiery selected by careful examination, disciplined in constant drill, and enlisted for true public service. He is thus disappointed and critical on two levels. First, he confronts the knights on their own ground, on the level of sheer professionalism: the knights of his day are simply not good enough at their tasks as warriors, not bold enough, not truly committed to their high and necessary vocation. The Roman discipline is gone, he laments, largely because of effeminacy and luxury.53
But his second criticism is more pointed, even if John, ever cautious, gives it less space. The wrong people hold the swords and use them in wrongful pursuits. Many of those who call themselves milites Ôare in reality no more soldiers than men are priests and clerics whom the Church has never called into ordersÕ. He knows, from his books, what to call these men, Ôfor in old writings those who use arms outside the decree of law are called murderers and bandits.Õ These untrue milites,
believe that the glory of their military service grows if the priesthood is humiliated, if the authority of the Church becomes worthless, if they would so expand the kingdom of man that the empire of God contracts, if they declare their own praises and ßatter and extol themselves by false eulogy. . . . Their courage manifests itself mainly if either their weapons or their words pierce the clergy or the unarmed soldiers [i.e. the other servants of the republic].
51What follows draws on his Policraticus: see Webb, ed., Ioannis Saresberiensis and Nederman, tr., Policraticus. The insistence that he appreciates the military appears at the opening of Book VI, chapter v.
52Policraticus, VI, chs viii and v.
53Ibid., Book VI, ch. vi.
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Such men serve Ôrage or vanity or avarice or their own private willÕ rather than defending the Church and the poor, pacifying the land, and even giving their lives, if needed.54 Though milites ideally offer their service to the republic and Church,
the number is legion of those who when they offer their belt upon the altar for the purpose of consecrating themselves to military service, their evil works seem to cry aloud and proclaim that they have approached the altar with the intention of declaring war against it and its ministers and even against God Himself who is worshipped there.
They are more like practitioners of malitia than members of the true militia.55 In such passages, John seems to step away from the classical backdrop that so often formed the stage-set for his writing and to speak plainly about his own age.
Gerald of Wales, a bridge Þgure connecting this world of scholarship with the busy world of clerical administrators, often adopts the mores of the world he describes in his historical writing. Yet even he can slip in telling critiques. If he praises the knights from England and the Welsh Marches who invaded Ireland in the reign of Henry II, he can note archly that their work were better done if they
had paid due reverence to the church of Christ, not only by preserving its ancient rights and privileges inviolate, but also by hallowing their new and sanguinary conquest, in which so much blood had been shed, and which was stained by the slaughter of a christian people, by liberally contributing some portion of their spoils for religious use. But
. . . this has been the common failing of all our countrymen engaged in these wars from their Þrst coming over to the present day.56
GeraldÕs contemporary, Etienne de Foug•res, chaplain to Henry II and bishop of Rennes (1168Ð78), was even more outspoken and pointed in the criticisms. His Livre des mani•res, which excoriates all the divisions of society, states that knights should provide justice, extinguish violence and plundering:
But most knights are usually lax about their duties,
So I hear complaints all day long (from those the knights should protect) That little remains to them
That they can own or obtain (with surety).
The great eat and drink up the hard-won fruits of peasant labour, turning chivalry into faithless debauchery. Though loyal knights can be saved in their own order of society, the evil knights who will not cooperate with Holy
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Ibid., VI, ch. viii. |
55 Ibid., chs ix and xiii; quotation from the close of chapter xiii. |
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Wright, tr., Historical Works, 266. |
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Church, who joust and tourney and misuse the power of the sword given them by God, should be stripped of sword and spurs and expelled.57
How did clerics respond to the important phenomenon of tournament? At Þrst, clerical writers universally took a censorious view of this most characteristic and popular sport of chivalry, fulminating against what St Bernard of Clairvaux termed Ôthose accursed tournamentsÕ.58 Chronicle, chivalric biography, and imaginative chivalric literature all show that participation in tournament was for knights the very afÞrmation of chevalerie. But in clerical eyes these mock wars imperilled soul as well as body, encouraged pride, occasioned the risk of homicide, and, in a more general sense, deßected martial energies better spent on crusade. After the initial interdiction issued at the council of Clermont in 1130, this condemnation would scarcely slacken in principle for the better part of two centuries.
At the highest level churchmen gave ground slowly and only yielded to the inevitable, Þnally, in 1316, when Pope John XXII revoked the ban on tournaments. Local ecclesiastical authorities had probably compromised much sooner: in 1281 Pope Martin IV had commented with resignation that sometimes custom is stronger than law.59 He was thinking of tournaments, of knightly custom, and papal law.
One eminent scholar has emphasized the general shift in clerical position symbolized by the acceptance of tournament. Georges Duby has, in fact, suggested that the clerical critique of chivalry emerged from an essentially monastic Church and so became muted, or rather transmuted, after the crisis in Western monasticism so evident by roughly the mid-twelfth century. The more worldly clerks and canons who dominated the Church from the later twelfth century were men more attuned to military activity and were even more personally involved in it; they thus turned away from monastic hostility to chivalry and created for knights Ôla nouvelle morale des guerriersÕ.60
The present chapter argues that both impulses, the hostile and the valorizing, were actually present in a clerical ideology of reform throughout the lifespan of chivalry, and that they both appeared not only in the cloister, but in the papal circle, in episcopal courts, and in the schools. Both impulses continued through the undoubted twelfth-century transformations which took place in monasticism and its role within the Church at large. The crucial valorizing role
57Lodge, ed., Etienne de Foug•res, ll. 537Ð676. Translation from Switten, ÔChevalierÕ. Cf. Flori,
LÕEssor de chevalerie, 315Ð19.
58For what follows see Barker, Tournament, 139Ð51; Barber and Barker, Tournaments, 139Ð46; Keen, Chivalry, 83Ð102. For St BernardÕs comment, see Bruno Scott James, tr., Bernard of Clairvaux, letter 405.
59Quoted in Langlois, Philippe III, 199.
60Duby, ÔGuerre et sociŽtŽÕ. For overviews of this monastic change, see John van Engen, ÔCrisis of CenobitismÕ, and Leclercq, ÔMonastic CrisisÕ.
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of the Gregorians, who represent the ecclesiastical world moving beyond the cloister, after all, stands on the early side of a mid-twelfth-century line, and the continuing inßuence of stringent Cistercian critics, the most powerful and effective monastic force of their day, was written into such powerful works as The Quest for the Holy Grail in the early thirteenth century, on the later side of that line. Criticism was never simply monastic, as we have seen in looking at the ideas of schoolmen such as Alain de Lille and John of Salisbury. Clerics and intellectuals of the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries did not simply create a new morale for knights; most of them also continued to condemn the chief and characteristic knightly sport of tournament, and many of them set standards for ideal chivalry so high as to be almost unreachable by the generality of knights.
But DubyÕs argument serves as a highly useful reminder of an important fact. If both valorization and criticism were structural elements of the clerical stance on chivalry, over time both the tenor of the discussion and the relative weights on the balance beam of clerical opinion shifted signiÞcantly. Stated in its simplest form, knighthood became a given in high medieval society, an accepted building block in the structure of civilization, imagined by ChrŽtien de Troyes, for example, to be as old as civilization itself. As chivalry came to signify the identifying set of values of the nobility in society, it became an ordo in clerical thought. The rhetorical vitriol attributed to Urban II and that of a certainty written by St Bernard and Alain de Lille thus gave way to a more balanced, steady stream of didactic, reformist exhortation. Not the rightful existence of chivalry, but its rightful practice came to be the issue. More in knightly life and practice was understood or tactfully overlooked; moreÑ Þnally, by the fourteenth century, even tournamentÑwas overlooked or forgiven.
The Church and Governing Power
ÔEnforcement of the lawÕ, as Richard M. Fraher notes, Ôstands with diplomacy, defense, and taxation as one of the functions which modern observers associate with the state.Õ61 In a famous passage, F. W. Maitland pointed to clear similarities between the medieval Church and our contemporary idea of a state:
The medieval church was a state. Convenience may forbid us to call it a state very often, but we ought to do so from time to time, for we can frame no acceptable deÞnition of a state which would not comprehend the church. What has it not that a state should have? It has laws, lawgivers, law courts, lawyers. It uses physical force to compel men
61 Fraher, ÔTheoretical JustiÞcationÕ, 579.
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to obey its laws. It keeps prisons. In the thirteenth century, though with squeamish phrases, it pronounces sentence of death.62
In fact, as it dealt with the chivalrous, the institutional Church lacked one characteristic feature of a state which is crucial for our analysis. Although clerics had articulated an ideology concerning chivalry and order, although (as Maitland states so elegantly) they possessed an elaborate system of courts, codes, and practitioners of law, they lacked direct means of enforcing these ideas or even these laws.63
The clerical hierarchy was not in any position, in other words, to use physical force to compel knights to obey its laws or to follow its more general guidelines about licit and illicit violence. The paradoxical constitution of the medieval Church comes sharply into focus on just such a point.64 In the broadest conception, of course, Christian society and the Church were coterminous; the knights were the armed force of the church, the armed force within the Church. In the more hierarchical and strictly clerical conception of the Church, so inßuential following the Gregorian reform, however, the knights represented a somewhat more alien force, one with ideas and standards of an independent nature; they constituted a force, moreover, with weapons which were thoroughly physicalÑthe only such force after the disarming of the clergy, which had been another great goal of church reformers.
For peace, for right order in the world, churchmen turned from long-accus- tomed habit to the upper reaches of the hierarchy of lay powers, to kings above all, and to great lords. A colourful case in point appears in the early twelfthcentury efforts of Louis VI against the castle of CrŽcy belonging to Thomas of Marle, the warlord who was so disliked, as we have seen, by Abbot Suger and characterized by Guibert of Nogent as Ôthe proudest and most wicked of menÕ. Having called upon the king to destroy the power of this man, the prelates gave the kingÕs forces their most enthusiastic blessing. Guibert tells us that
the archbishop and the bishops, going up on high platforms, united the crowd, gave them their instructions for the affair, absolved them from their sins, and ordered them as an act of penitence in full assurance of the salvation of their souls to attack that castle.65
The blessing is important; but the point to note is that the armed force relied upon was royal.
In England the reality and continuity of royal power made a peace move-
62Maitland, Roman Canon Law, 100.
63Useful discussions in Rodes, Ecclesiastical Administration, 99, and Helmholz, ÔCrimeÕ.
64See discussions in Strayer, ÔState and ReligionÕ, and Southern, Western Society, 19, and Smalley ÔCapetian FranceÕ, 63.
65Quoted and discussed in Benton, Self and Society, 204Ð5.
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ment virtually unnecessary; and, in what was becoming France, such a convergence of the concern for public order and a belief in holy war directed by the Church faded gradually but signiÞcantly before the advance of Capetian royal power.
In the south, Norman Housley notes, the fusion of clerical activism with the peace movement went from strength to strength, Ôbecause of the absence of such [lay] authority, coupled with the alarming spread of mercenary violence and, later, heresyÕ. But Ô[i]n northern France, the incorporation of crusading ideas into peace-enforcement had no long term future because of the rapidity with which Capetian authority was growingÕ.66
Thus no coercive ecclesiastical role regarding violence developed in northwestern Europe. By the thirteenth century ecclesiastical authorities so generally relied on Ôthe secular armÕ that in England a speciÞc royal writ offered a regular means by which clerics secured the coercion of those offenders who ignored even sentences of excommunication; the spiritual sentence was enforced, in effect, by the kingÕs ofÞcer, the sheriff, when the chancery sent him the writ de excommunicato capiendo ordering him to arrest the resisting excommunicate.67 Relying on this writ is not the act of a competing form of state, whatever the sophistication of its laws, however signiÞcant its treasurestore of ideas.
The same point appears in the famous thirteenth-century French legal treatise, The Customs of the Beauvaisis, by Philippe de Beaumanoir. He insists that lay ofÞcials must use the secular arm to protect Holy Church, and he says why: ÔFor the spiritual sword would not be much feared by wrong doers if they did not believe that the temporal sword would get involved; this in spite of the fact that the spiritual sword is incomparably more to be fearedÕ.68 Evidently, ecclesiastics recognized that the coercive force exercised by lay government was, in fact, much more effective than spiritual censures in France, as it was in England.
Of course this recognition on the part of ecclesiastical authorities was not some lamentable or reprehensible failure on their part. The Church had for many centuries placed hope and conÞdence in Christian Roman emperors and, later, pious kings or at least great Christian lords. If Gregorian radicals had brießy considered taking the task in hand personally, even they, and certainly their successorsÑwhile they continued to assert their leadership of Christian societyÑknew that for tasks involving coercion, physical force, and blood, they had to work through the power of kingship (sometimes in the
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Housley, ÔCrusades Against ChristiansÕ, 25. |
67 Logan, Excommunication. |
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Akehurst, tr., Coutumes de Beauvaisis, 29Ð30; Salmon, ed., Philippe de Beaumanoir, I, 39. The |
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Þnal statement is wonderfully theoretical in view of the plain words with which he begins.
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hands of great lords), and Þnally the power of knights themselves. These lay powers were at once necessary and dangerous, worthy of sacralization and in need of constant correction.
The Force of Ideas
Was the clerical ideology of reform absorbed by the knights themselves; in other words, was this external ideology to any signiÞcant degree internalized by knights, who (as we have already noted) displayed a high degree of independence of thought? Academics inclined to believe in the force of ideasÑ especially scholars who rely primarily on the evidence of idealizing textsÑare likely to utter statements of hope in approaching this difÞcult issue. The medieval world knew much violence, to be sure, but at least clerical ideas set the terms of the discourse and began to make a difference, to civilize the brutal warriors, and help them make their world a better place. Along with John of Salisbury, some scholars tend to link advancing civilization and restraint with the admixture of classical and clerical ideas in chivalric culture.
Scholars who have spent years among court records and chronicles, on the other hand, are less likely to think the knights stepped, transformed, out of the soft hues of pre-Raphaelite paintings; the most hard-boiled are more likely to argue that clerical efforts in factÑhowever unintentionallyÑpulled the thinnest veil of decency over knightly behaviour that often went on largely as before. In such a view, knights simply absorbed and laicized the clerical valorization of all the violence they carried on with such enthusiasm, while Þltering out most of the criticism.
The difÞculty, of course, lies not only in Þnding sufÞcient evidence but in calibrating a standard for judging the effectiveness of reform ideas in the world. How could we know in how many instances knights refrained from burning a church or pillaging an opponentÕs peasantry out of a fear and love of God inculcated by clerical instruction on ideal chivalry?
Some evidence is suggestive. We might recall that Orderic Vitalis thought it highly commendable and worthy of mention that Richer of Laigle hesitated to attack peasants whom he had already plundered and who had prostrated themselves before a roadside cruciÞx in terror. Such unusual restraint, praised so highly (Ôsomething that deserves to be remembered foreverÕ) at least indirectly suggests what was a common view of early twelfth-century Norman knights.69 A passage in the contemporary Crowning of Louis pointedly reminded its audience that Jesus liked knights who spared churches from the torch, a theme that
69 Chibnall, ed., tr., Ecclesiastical History, VI, 250Ð1.
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might have special meaning for John Marshal (father of the more famous William), whose face had been disÞgured by molten lead dripping from the roof of an abbey church burned by one of his enemies during the twelfth-cen- tury period of civil war in England.70
Major characters in chivalric literature occasionally speak out in a surprisingly self-critical vein. In the prose romances of the early thirteenth century Queen Guinevere, Lancelot, and Galehaut confess fascinating and revealing doubts about the moral solidity of chivalric life as they live it. The queen, in conversation with Lancelot, says that it is Ôtoo bad Our Lord pays no heed to our courtly ways, and a person whom the world sees as good is wicked to GodÕ. A little earlier, Galehaut, learning from a dream that his death may be close, decides to amend his life. He admits: ÔI have committed many wrongs in my life, destroying cities, killing people, dispossessing and banishing people.Õ71 This confession comes from a man continually praised as an exemplar of all excellent chivalric qualities.
If such evidence is problematic and at best suggestive, other evidence is indisputable. Wars without clerical sanction continued throughout the Middle Ages and subjected Ônon-combatantsÕ to the entire scale of violence available, especially to the indiscriminate force of Þre.
It seems equally important that clerics themselves were not satisÞed with the reception and internalization of their ideas by knights; even crusaders suffered bitter criticisms from disappointed ecclesiastical enthusiasts. Certainly, the knights showed no great inclination to listen to clerical condemnations of their characteristic sport of tournament. In a letter to Abbot Suger, St Bernard complained in bitter tones:
The men who have returned from the Crusade have arranged to hold again those accursed tournaments after Easter, and the lord Henry, son of the count, and the lord Robert, brother of the king, have agreed regardless of all law to attack and slay each other. Notice with what sort of dispositions they must have taken the road to Jerusalem when they return in this frame of mind!72
Nor did knights accept clerical claims regarding the dubbing ceremony. To control these ceremonies would obviously win the clerics an excellent opportunity for inculcating their ideas of true chivalry at one of the more signiÞcant moments in a knightÕs life. An ecclesiastical strand is undeniably present in the historical and literary accounts of dubbing ceremonies. Yet, as Maurice Keen has argued convincingly, the Church, which managed to establish its role in
70Hoggan, tr., ÔCrowning of LouisÕ, 43; Langlois, ed., Couronnement de Louis, 64. The John Marshal incident is discussed by Crouch, William Marshal, 13; John lost one of his eyes.
71Rosenberg, tr., Lancelot Part III, 275, 254, Micha, ed., Lancelot, I, 152, 61.
72Bruno Scott James, tr., Bernard of Clairvaux, letter 405.
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the coronation ceremony, achieved much less success when it came to the dubbing of knights.73 In fact, dubbing to knighthood looks very much like a classic example of independent lay piety, an appropriation or laicizing of the clerical entry into knightly practice; once again, knights more readily took on religious legitimation than the element of sacerdotal control intended from the sphere of clergie.
None of these estimates needs to be read judgementally, of course. If medieval churchmen did not cut through the Gordian knot binding violence and religion, neither have thoughtful people before or sinceÑat least not to general satisfaction. Nor must we take up the ecclesiastical scales of judgement on knighthood in this matter. Knights surely did not passively absorb restraining and improving clerical ideas and then fail deplorably to reach the high standards. They had ideas of their own, as we have seen, even ideas along religious lines. They considered themselves competent judges as to which clerical ideas about chivalry they would accept and may not even have wished to accord their lives with many others. Our task is not to award or withhold good behaviour points for knights, but to recognize how selectively they absorbed clerical ideology.
Their particular form of lay piety probably gave knights the conÞdence that God understood them and appreciated their hard service, even if further transactions were necessary to secure formal approval via his touchy worldly representativesÑlikely to be their brothers, sisters, and cousins who had entered the clergy. Valorization of holy war, of course, spread easily at a time when any war could, with minimal effort or sophistry, be considered holy.74 But the simpler truth could be that knights needed very little valorization of their warfare by clerics at all, though undoubtedly they would prefer to have it.
Their hard lives and their good service covered most of the tab for their morally risky violence. If their hands were bloody, was it not becauseÑas even the clerics recognizedÑsome blood had to be spilled in a world spoiled by sin? Whether loyally smiting the kingÕs enemies or merely troubling their neighbours, whether they fought before or after a crusade, they were doing what they had to do in the conÞdence that they could settle any accounts with the fussy clerics through donations or deathbed contrition, even deathbed conversion to the religious life. ÔIn crude termsÕ, Emma Mason writes, Ôthey tried to buy off the consequences of their aggression by offering a share of the loot to those whose prayers would hopefully resolve their dilemma.Õ75 Christopher Holdsworth makes a similar observation: ÔStandards were held up, but at the
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See the discussion in Keen, Chivalry, 64Ð82. |
74 See Russell, Just War. |
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Mason, ÔTimeo BaronesÕ, 67. Mason continues, ÔSuch a naive attitude cannot, however, be |
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contrasted with any superior spirituality of the cloister, for religious houses were all too ready to cooperate in this cycle.Õ
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last one lot of soldiers would take the others in, provided they received an adequate payment.Õ76 This certainly was the view of the Anglo-Norman knight Rodolf Pinellus, when his violent way of life was criticized by Abbot Herluin of Westminster; only after he had had his Þll of worldly pleasure and was tired of Þghting, he coolly told the abbot, would he give it up to become a monk.77 Likewise, Gerald of Wales tells us that the Anglo-Norman invaders of Ireland were great men; but they had failed to give enough in payments to the Church to offset their slaughters.78
William Marshal in the early thirteenth century and Geoffroi de Charny in the mid-fourteenth century took what probably seems to us a less crude view, but they both showed the same spirit of lay independence when the matter in question was the knightly right to Þght, to take pleasure in the display of prowess and the winning of honour and proÞt. WilliamÕs ßattering biography, primarily a study of war and, secondarily, of the quasi-war of tournament, shows no evident qualms about warfare; instead, one comment after another reveals an easy assumption of the knightly right to violence in causes any knight would consider right.79 His unceasing piety hardly keeps Charny, similarly, from paeans of praise for prowess and assertions of the religious character of the knightly life per se. Charny is especially sure that the sheer suffering endured by knights in their demanding calling wins them favour with God.80
In fact, we must remember that ideological inßuence ßowed both ways between clergie and chevalerie, or at least that churchmen found it necessary and sometimes even congenial to accept more of the self-estimate of the knightly role than strict clerical ideology would suggest. In his sermon delivered at William MarshalÕs funeral, for example, the Archbishop of Canterbury waxed eloquent about the ÔÞnest knight in the worldÕ in language not very different from that used to praise the Marshal at the French royal court. The Templar sent shortly before WilliamÕs death to receive him into the order had announced unambiguously that, as the greatest knight in the world, possessed of the most prowess, ÔsensÕ, and loyalty, Marshal could be sure that God would receive him.81
76Holdsworth, ÔIdeas and RealityÕ, 78. See his further comment on pp. 76Ð7: ÔThe work of a knight, the work of Christ, the work of a monk, were all inextricably linked because they seemed varieties of battle.Õ
77Vita Herluini, in J. A. Robinson, Gilbert Crispin, 94Ð5.
78Wright, ed., tr., Historical Works, 266. Orderic would undoubtedly not have appreciated this stark formulation, yet in praising the benefactors of his own house he tells us that a former knight, Arnold (now one of the monks), travelled as far as Apulia and Calabria Ôto ask for support for his church from the loot acquired by his kinsmen in ItalyÕ: Chibnall, ed., Ecclesiastical History, IV, bk. VIII, 142Ð3.
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Gillingham, ÔWar and ChivalryÕ. |
80 Kaeuper and Kennedy, Book of Chivalry, 176Ð7. |
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Meyer, ed., Histoire, II, ll. 18387Ð406, 19072Ð165. |
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