Kaeuper R.W. - Chivalry and violence in medieval europe (1999)(en)

Orderic Vitalis draws upon the world of war to write of monks using Ôthe weapon of prayer (arma orationis)Õ. He can use the term martyr for knights who suffer death on their crusade. When he pens the phrase Ôsoldiers of Christ (milites Christi)Õ he sometimes means monks, sometimes crusading knights.16 Writing in praise of a man named Gerold, a pious clerk in the household of

the Earl of Chester, Orderic says:

[He] did his best to convert the men of the court to a better way of life by showing them the examples of their forebears. He rightly condemned the worldly wantonness that he saw in many and deplored the great negligence that most of them showed for the worship of God. To great lords, simple knights, and noble boys alike he gave salutary counsel; and he made a great collection of tales of the combats of holy knights, drawn from the Old Testament and more recent records of Christian achievements, for them to imitate. He told them vivid stories of the conßicts of Demetrius and George, of Theodore and Sebastian, of the Theban legion and Maurice its leader, and of Eustace, supreme commander of the army and his companions, who won the crown of martyrdom in heaven. He also told them of the holy champion, William [of Orange], who after long service in war renounced the world and fought gloriously for the Lord under the monastic rule. And many proÞted from his exhortations, for he brought them from the wide ocean of the world to the safe harbour of life under the Rule.17

Orderic presents a fascinating compromise here, suggesting, indirectly, the validity of a knightly life in the world, so long as religion is not neglected and the battles are fought for good causes, but ending conventionally with the ultimate monastic solution: it would be better for the knights to become monks, at least at the end of an active life in the world. Of course many knights in fact heard this call, William Marshal only the most famous of them.18

In the writings of St Bernard, himself the son of a knight, these military metaphors appear regularly. An Augustinian canon, who had given up his religious vocation and returned to the world, was admonished in a letter from Bernard: ÔShow yourself in the Þght. If Christ recognizes you in battle he will recognize you . . . on the Last Day.Õ He wrote to Robert de Ch‰tillon to return to his Ôfellow-soldiersÕ in the monastery at Clairvaux: ÔArise, soldier of Christ, I say arise! Shake off the dust and return to the battle.Õ Bernard tells Robert he is sleeping, while his house is invaded by armed men scaling the walls, pouring in at every entrance.19

16Chibnall, ed., Ecclesiastical History, III, bk. VI 260Ð1, 292Ð3, 298Ð9; V, bk. IX, 6Ð7, 52Ð7, bk. X, 340Ð1.

17Chibnall, Ecclesiastical History, III, bk. VI, 216Ð17.

18Even Bertran de Born, famous warrior/poet, retired to a religious house he had patronized: Paden et al., eds, Poems of the Troubadour, 24Ð6.

19Quoted in Evans, Bernard of Clairvaux, 24.

Crusade was clearly another conduit for transmitting clerical valorization of knightly violence.20 In the era of crusade, as Christian society was being divided by clerical intellectuals into three distinct ÔordersÕÑthose who pray, those who Þght, and those who workÑknighthood became, in clerical minds, an ordo. Knights became, that is, one of these divisions of society approved by God, one of the orders within which one might achieve salvation.21

At a time when much cultural attention was likewise focused on penance and the means of achieving salvation,22 when salvation may have appeared to many almost as a treasure securely kept behind monastic walls, contemporaries sensed the novelty of creating this new order not simply for laymen, but speciÞcally for knights, with all their enthusiasm for killing. In the early twelfth century Guibert of Nogent, a monk and supporter of Gregorian ideals, wrote that knights who wore the crusaderÕs cross could now Þnd salvation without taking the traditional path of giving up their way of life and entering a monastery:

God in our time has introduced the holy war so that the knighthood and the unstable people, who shed each otherÕs blood in the way of pagans, might have a new way to win salvation. They need not choose the life of a monk and abandon the world in accordance with the vows of a rule, but can obtain GodÕs grace through their own profession, in their accustomed freedom and secular dress.23

Otto of Freising, writing towards the middle of the twelfth century, thought of crusaders in similar terms. At a time of senseless war at home,

some, for ChristÕs sake, despising their own interests and considering that it was not for naught that they were wearing the girdle of knighthood, set out for Jerusalem and there, undertaking a new kind of warfare, so conducted themselves against the enemies of the Cross of Christ that, continually bearing about in their bodies the death of the cross, they appeared by their life and conversation to be not soldiers but monks.24

The special service of crusade thus covered the sins of the knights and could pry open the doors of paradise itself. The troubadour Aimeric de PŽgulhan exults that knights Ôcan obtain honour down here and joy in ParadiseÕ and manage all this Ôwithout renouncing our rich garments, our station in life, courtesy and all that pleases and charmsÕ. He is wonderfully relieved that Ô[n]o more is there need to be tonsured or shaved and lead a hard life in the most

20Convincing views in Keen, Chivalry, 44Ð63.

21See Duby, Les Trois Ordres; Flori, LÕIdeologie du glaive.

22Cowdrey, ÔGenesis of the CrusadesÕ, 21Ð4.

23Quoted in Erdmann, Crusade, 336Ð7.

24Otto of Freising, Chronica, in Hofmeister, ed., Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, 320, Mierow, tr., Two Cities, 414Ð15.

strict order if we can revenge the shame which the Turks have done usÕ.25 The exchange is explicit and explicitly stated in some chansons: Christ died for the knights, they must be willing to die for him.26

The most inßuential monastic voice speaking to knighthood as crusade ideas gathered force was that of Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps the most inßuential churchman of the Þrst half of the twelfth century. Bernard was willing to recognize a role for the hermaphroditic fusion of monk and knight in a special body of crusaders, the Order of the Knights Templar, for whom he wrote ÔPraise of the New KnighthoodÕ.27 His approval of this new knighthood, Ôunknown to ages gone byÕ, is fulsome, but speciÞc: the order Ôceaselessly wages a twofold war both against ßesh and blood and against a spiritual army of evil in the heavensÕ. The Templars can, he assures them, Þght secure in their moral stature as GodÕs warriors:

The knight of Christ, I say, may strike with conÞdence and die yet more conÞdently, for he serves Christ when he strikes, and serves himself when he falls. Neither does he bear the sword in vain, for he is GodÕs minister, for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of the good. If he kills an evildoer, he is not a mankiller, but, if I may so put it, a killer of evil [non homicidia, sed ut ita dixerim, malicidia].28

BernardÕs last phrase recalls the wordplay with militia and malitia of which he and other clerics made such telling use; but here the game elevates his ideal knights at the expense of their brothers among merely Ôworldly chivalryÕ.

Some years later he granted his blessing to an even larger subset of the knightly (admittedly somewhat slowly at Þrst) in his preaching of the Second Crusade. At Vezelay in 1146, Bernard issued an eloquent call for crusaders, using the Ôheavenly instrumentÕ of his voice to praise the work they would do, even modifying on behalf of these knights his usual preference for the Þght of the monk, whose warfare for the good was spiritual and interior, not physical and exterior. Contemporaries noted that his eloquence on behalf of crusading warfare won the approval of God, as the many miracles that took place at Vezeley witnessed. In the preaching campaign that followed, Bernard travelled many miles through the Kingdom of France and the Empire.29

25Quoted in Painter, French Chivalry, 87, and linked to GuibertÕs statement, quoted above, by Keen, Nobles, Knights, 3.

26See, for example, ll. 9380Ð1 in Newth, ed., tr., Song of Aspremont and Brandin, ed., Chanson dÕAspremont. For an example from romance, see Bryant, tr., Perlesvaus, 236; Nitze and Jenkins, eds,

Perlesvaus, I, 370.

27In Greenia, tr., Bernard of Clairvaux, 127Ð67. For the Latin version, see Leclercq and Rochais, eds, Bernard of Clairvaux, III, 213Ð39.

28Greenia, Bernard of Clairvaux, 129, 134; Leclercq and Rochais, Bernard of Clairvaux, III, 214,

217.

29 Berry, ed, tr., Odo of Deuil, 9Ð10, describes the scene at Vezeley. Riley-Smith provides a map of St BernardÕs preaching tour: Atlas of the Crusades, 48. For the rather slow development of his

Finally we should note that clerics gradually became willing to transfer the blessings they had long reserved for kingship to the ordo of knights, shifting the heavy mantle of praise and high responsibility from one set of shoulders to another. Jean FloriÕs detailed studies of knighting ceremonies, of church ritual and liturgy, of the legislation of church councils, and the ideas of clerical intellectuals and popularizers, have skilfully illuminated this revealing change.30 The clerical tradition which had praised and legitimized the necessary societal role of Christian Roman emperors, sub-Roman Germanic kings, Carolingian emperors and their successors, came in the course of the High Middle Ages to bless and praise the ideal role of knights. The knights were needed in hard times. Like kings, and even in place of kings who were failing to fulÞl their function, they could defend the Church, keep the peace, protect the weak.

Idealistic reformers assigned knights particular responsibility for defending widows and orphans.31 If originally and ultimately such responsibility rested with God, it had devolved in turn upon the Jewish people, the Christian Church, and then, more speciÞcally and exclusively, Christian kingship. When the power of post-Carolingian kings slipped over much of Europe, the knights came to share this aspect of royal responsibility.

Over time this more generous view of knighthood not only predominated but generalized to cover the entire order of the chivalrous. A form of sacralizationÑeven though it always carried signiÞcant qualiÞcationsÑcame to rest on the knighthood which clerics so decidedly needed for all of the business of life sadly requiring force. Descendants of the knights whose excesses were condemned by the leaders of the peace movement (discussed below) heard their praises sung as at least potentially blessed warriors. They could become the Ôknights of St PeterÕ at the time of Gregory VII, or the Ôknights of ChristÕ when Þghting under later crusade banners, whether the foe consisted of Muslims in the Holy Land or heretics or declared papal enemies within Christendom.

Finally, the blessing spread from the select few to the generality of knights, as knighthood began to be more or less equated with nobility over much of Europe, as clerics attributed major aspects of royal power and responsibility to the ordo of knights. Not just crusaders, but all knights could be saved within this order if only they carried out their mission faithfully, listened to each sermonette from their clerical betters, and heeded the warnings. The formula of

enthusiasm for the crusade, and his efforts to explain its complete failure, see Evans, Bernard of Clairvaux, 24Ð36.

30Flori, LÕIdŽologie du glaive and LÕEssor de chevalerie. FloriÕs numerous articles appear in the bibliographies to these books.

31As Flori notes, however, ÔLe service de la Dame prime peu ˆ peu sur celui de lÕEglise et la ÒprotectionÓ plus ßatteuse, de la pucelle lÕemporte sur celle de la veuve et de lÕorphelin. A lÕidŽologie clŽrical se m•le lÕidŽologie profaneÕ: LÕEssor de chevalerie, 302.

willingness to die for Christ, who was willing to die for humanity, shifts easilyÑchivalric literature shows usÑto a willingness to die for the lord or king who puts his body at risk for his men.32 This laicization and generalization of crusade valorization is sometimes quite explicit. In the Lancelot do Lac and in the Lancelot, the knight Pharian explains to his fellow vassals why they must Þght for their liege lords, the young Bors and Lionel:

if we die for them it will be to our honour 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 Þghting the Saracens, the enemies of Our Lord Jesus Christ!33

Fighting for oneÕs lord has taken on the aura of Þghting for the Lord. The point is made even more broadly and strikingly later in the Lancelot. A former knight, who leaves the religious life he has adopted to return to the world to Þght against an enemy troubling his son, argues this case in discussion with Gawain:

is he who destroys life without justiÞcation not worse than a Saracen? If I went overseas to Þght 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 IÕll go to avenge my son, who is a Christian, and help him against those who are in the place of the unbelievers.34

Such views had a long future.35

Clerics must have had their doubts about the logic as well as the behaviour of the knights; but they had few alternatives. They crossed their Þngers and kept preaching their ideals, excepting from the blessings they bestowed on the High Order of Chivalry only those (in theory a minority) who burned churches, looted and raped the poor, and caused general mayhem through unjust warfare.

The Order of Knighthood (Ordene de chevalerie, c. 1220) seems to sum up clerical valorization. Evidently written by a cleric and possibly a priest, this manual provides what its editor, Keith Busby, terms a mystico-religious meaning for the ceremony by which a knight is made. Each step, each piece of equip-

32See, for example, Pickens, tr., Story of Merlin, 291; Sommer, ed., Vulgate Version, II, 226Ð7.

33Rosenberg, tr., Lancelot Part I, 32; Sommer, Vulgate Version, III, 60; Elspeth Kennedy, ed.,

Lancelot do Lac, I, 73.

34Carroll, tr., Lancelot Part II, 199; Sommer, Vulgate Version, III, 359; Kennedy, Lancelot do Lac, I, 476.

35They also had a recent past. The account of the crusade of Richard the Lion-Heart, written around the turn of the thirteenth century, says that Richard, Þghting hostile Cypriots en route to the Holy Land, Ôforbore to seek worse SaracensÕ than these enemies: (ÔPeors Sarazins ne volt guerreÕ): Paris, ed., LÕHistoire de la guerre sainte.

ment is given a moral or religious meaning. The bath shows the knight cleansed from sin; the bed on which he rests Þgures the bed he will earn in paradise, etc. The intent to praise knighthood and Þt it into medieval Christian society is obvious. The audience whom the author seems to be addressing is clerical, as the following statement near the end of the manual indicates:

knights, whom everybody should honour . . . have us all to guard; and if it were not for knighthood, our lordship would be of little worth, for they defend Holy Church, and they uphold justice for us against those who would do us harm. . . . Our chalices would be stolen from before us at the table of God, and nothing would ever stop it. But their justice which defends us in their persons is decisive. The good would never be able to endure if the wicked did not fear knights, and if there were only Saracens, Albigensians, and Barbarians, and people of evil faith.

The clerical case for the necessity of knighthood and the justiÞcation of their swords could scarcely be made more clearly.36

Clerical Strictures on Knightly Malitia

Clerics balanced approval of chivalry, as an ideal type with the most blistering criticism of the ideals and practices of chivalry actually encountered in the world.

The peace movement, at work between the late tenth and twelfth centuries, overlapped the gestational age of chivalry.37 Despite much debate, most historians think that the warriors of middling and lesser rank, the castellans (masters of fortiÞcations), and their subordinate milites were the targets of much of the legislation. Clerics wanted licit war to be limited to the higher authorities, which meant that the bishops and abbots pinned their hopes for social order on the great lords, at least in the absence of effective royal control (which to them would have been preferable still).

In the speciÞc form known as the Truce of God (which sought, from the second quarter of the eleventh century, to outlaw Þghting during times of religious signiÞcance), the prohibition against Þghting was often relaxed in favour of the lay authority considered licit by the churchmen. A count or duke could thus licitly Þght against those engaged in acts of illicit violence. Not surprisingly, at least in Normandy, Flanders, and Catalonia, the Peace of God had, before the end of the eleventh century, become the Peace of the Count

36Busby, ed., Ordene de chevalerie, tr., 174Ð5; French text, 117.

37The debates over interpretations of the Peace of God are surveyed and sampled in Head and Landes, eds, Peace of God. See also Duby, Chivalrous Society, 123Ð33; Cowdrey, ÔPeace and TruceÕ; Jean Flori, IdŽologie du glaive, 135Ð57.

or Duke; by the mid-twelfth century it had become the KingÕs Peace in France.38

Some scholarship takes us beyond major peace councils to informal efforts, which are no less signiÞcant for our themes. With the approval of the count, the monks of the monastery of Lobbes in Flanders, for example, left their house, ruined by war, to take the relics of their patron saint, Ursmer, on a tour in 1060. Among the many miracles recorded by the monks on this tour, the greatest was that the saint brought peace to the region in which interlocking feuds were everywhere. At Strazeele, the writer noted, Ôsome knights were so hostile to each other that no mortal man could bring them to peaceÕ. At Lissewege, the problem centred on a young man named Robert who had a large following of knights; he would not reconcile with his enemy. Pressed by the monks and locals (including older knights, we should note), he and this enemy lay prostrate before the saint for three hours. Robert gnashed his teeth, groaned, turned alternately pale and red, clawed the ground and ate dirt in sheer frustration with those who would rob him of revenge. Finally, the saintÕs reliquary dramatically spewed smoke and levitated: Robert pardoned his enemy and peace was made.39

The solemn rigours of the canon lawÑsome distance from smoking, levitating reliquaries in a Flemish villageÑcan likewise show us clerical doubts and fears about the milites. Although, as we have seen, GratianÕs inßuential Decretum created safe canonical space for just warfare, he seems to have sensed how hard it would be to make Christian charity the motivating force for Þghting, how unlikely it would be for the knightly ranks of his day to give up such sinful motives as private revenge or plentiful booty. Frederick Russell argues, for example, that the prolix and pompous exhortations that Gratian and so many later canonists addressed to the knights (against their Ôlust for doing harm, cruelty of punishment, implacable and unsatisÞed vehemence, savagery, and lust for dominationÕ) show deep fears on just these points. As Russell writes, ÔAgainst the well-known greed, rapacity, and ferocity of the knightly class of his time Gratian opposed the patristic portraits of the Christian soldier, thereby striking at the core of knightly practice.Õ40 The canonists, with hope in their hearts, praised the military virtues, in other words, but they recognized and feared the military vices so evident in their world; and they spoke to that fear.

38Flori, Ideologie du glaive, 154; Head and Landes eds, Peace of God, 8. The capacity of royal government in England eliminated the need for this infusion of support.

39Koziol, ÔThe Making of PeaceÕ, 250Ð1. Koziol notes that the castellans must have welcomed the monks into their regions, hoping for some increment to their own prestige.

40Russell, Just War, 61.

the praises of the select company of Knights Templar, and of the larger body of those who went on the Second Crusade, for ordinary knightsÑwhich of course means the overwhelming majority of the knights of his dayÑSt Bernard could scarcely restrain his contempt.44 To these men, ÔÞghting for the devilÕ, go plain words of warning:

If you happen to be killed while you are seeking only to kill another, you die a murderer. If you succeed, and by your will to overcome and to conquer you perchance kill a man, you live a murderer. . . . What an unhappy victoryÑto have conquered a man while yielding to vice, and to indulge in an empty glory at his fall when wrath and pride have gotten the better of you!

Warming to his subject, Bernard heaps scorn on the combination of vanity and violence in chivalry as it was practised all around him:

What then, O knights, is this monstrous error and what this unbearable urge which bids you Þght with such pomp and labor, and all to no purpose except death and sin. You cover your horses with silk, and plume your armor with I know not what sort of rags; you paint your shields and your saddles; you adorn your bits and spurs with gold and silver and precious stones, and then in all this glory you rush to your ruin with fearful wrath and fearless folly.

Since most knights, he is convinced, are Þghting for the devil rather than for God, he does not hesitate to call them Ôimpious rogues, sacrilegious thieves, murderers, perjurers and adulterersÕ. When they are converted to the new knighthood of the Temple, there will be twofold joy: ÔA twofold joy and a twofold beneÞt, since their countrymen are as glad to be rid of them as their new comrades are to receive them. Both sides have proÞted from this exchange, since the latter are strengthened and the former are now left in peace.Õ45 On one occasion Bernard backed up his ideas with dramatic effects on some knights who visited Clairvaux, but refused his entreaties to put down their arms and give up tourneying for the Lenten season. After Bernard gave them beer which he had blessed, they soon left the secular militia and became monks.46

The voice from the schools could be no less critical, or at least no less demanding than that from the cloister. In writings such as his sermon ÔAd MilitesÕ the noted scholar Alain de Lille (d. 1203) wields a pen as effective and almost as

44Grabois, ÔMilitia and MalitiaÕ. Cf. Buist-Thiele, ÔBernard of ClairvauxÕ, 57Ð65. Leclercq notes that BernardÕs purpose in his treatise was not simply to promote the Knights Templar, but Ôto Þnd expression for his own ideal of knighthoodÕ: Monks and Love, 21.

45Greenia, tr., Bernard of Clairvaux, 138, 131, 132, 143; Leclercq and Rochais, eds, Bernard of Clairvaux, 219, 215, 216, 213.

46Leclercq tells the story in Monks and Love, 89.

sharply pointed as that of St Bernard.47 In one important sense his position is more comprehensively tolerant than that of Bernard; he sees a valid knightly role extending well beyond that of knight-monks as a special subset of crusaders. In an unusual reinterpretation of the famous image of two swords (often used to refer to the powers of Church and State) he even suggests that knights possess them both. They belt on the physical sword to secure temporal peace; the second sword, he says, is spiritual, an interior weapon by which they can secure the peace of their own hearts.48

But he charges knighthood in general with terrible sins of omission and commission. They should be devoted followers of the military saints; they should defend their homeland and the Church their mother; they should Þght her enemies boldly; they should protect widows and orphans. But how do they act in fact? They show only the outward appearance of knighthood, not realizing that these exterior signs are but Þgures of the true knighthood within, that which is nourished by the word of God in their breasts. Their knighthood becomes utterly empty, only a shell. Thus, what they practise is not true knightly service, but plundering; not militia, but rapina. In short, they become thieves, devastating the poor. They avoid Þghting the enemies of Christ (out of sloth or fear), but make fellow Christians the victims of their swords. In his most telling phrase Alain denounces knights for sharpening their swords in the viscera of their mother, the Church.49

His criticism of knightly pillaging and looting appears vividly in a story told of knights from the region bursting into AlainÕs theology classroom at Montpellier. The knights (obviously motivated by intellectual curiosity and some respect for the learning of clergie) demanded that he tell them what constituted the highest degree of courtesy. An unrufßed Alain pronounced the opinion that it lay in giving liberally and beneÞcently. Though the knights all liked this answer, they could only have been less pleased as Alain turned the tables with much didactic coolness and asked them what, correspondingly, was the deepest degree of villainy (rusticitas). When the knights failed to agree on an answer, he explained archly that it lay in living by looting the poor as they did.50 Of course, no professor easily tolerates a rude invasion of his classroom, but, as we have already seen, Alain gave similar views on the evils of

47 Patrologia Latina, 210, cols 185Ð7. Cf his ÔSermo de cruce dominiÕÑin dÕAlverny, Alain de Lille, 279Ð82Ñin which he insists that crusaders must perform their service in a spirit of penitence, not anger, and must wear this penitence as an inward cross, parallelling in a more meaningful form their exterior crusading cross. They must imitate the thief to ChristÕs right on Calvary, not the angry thief to his left. Was this thief imagery chosen purely by chance? For a general discussion of AlainÕs views on knighthood see Flori, LÕEssor de chevalerie, 291Ð4.

48 ÔAd milites,Õ Patrologia Latina 210, col. 186. 49 Ibid. 50 Two versions of the story are quoted in dÕAlverny, Alain de Lille, 16Ð17, n. 30.