PART ONE—
MATERIAL CONDITIONS AND SOCIAL BACKGROUND

Chapter One—
Noblemen at Court

Nobility and Knighthood

Courtliness and knightly mentality originated in the courts—busy centers where several strata of society interacted in multiple functions. Ministeriales carried out basic administrative duties, the clergy provided not only religious guidance but administrative support and political advice, certain ladies performed as political and administrative agents, and members of the high nobility served as chief ministers. A special group of social and economic dependents variedly integrated with the others and living in and around the feudal lord's castle was that of the knights or milites (soldiers), useful in warfare and as police agents.^[1] The court was also the favorite and more or less permanent habitat of those first professional men and women of letters we know as minstrels, though many of them were vagrants, showing up especially at events like dubbings, weddings, crownings, and popular festivals and carnivals.^[2] At a time when, writing and reading being rare, most cultural and literary communication was oral, minstrels were the principal carriers of the literature with which we are concerned, and often its authors.

Knighthood was a rather late development of the feudal system, which, although its immediate origins can be traced to the eighth century, reached its peak in the twelfth—the time of the flowering of “chivalry” or knightly ethos. The milites were recognized since A.D . 980 as a separate secular “class” or ordo, distinct from the rustici and imme-

diately below the nobiles, until they eventually became part of the nobility.

Feudal power and privilege were the prerogatives of a class of noblemen whose rights and status soon became hereditary. So was the status of knight once this too became a recognized order. Nobility and knighthood must nevertheless be kept distinct even after they started to undergo a broad though partial process of merging around 1150. Since, as Frederick II's chancellor, Peter de Vineis, summarily stated, nobility was basically hereditary, it was a matter of blood, lineage, or birth—what the Germans call Geburtstand. In contrast, knighthood or chivalry was a Berufstand, a professional estate tied to actual exercise of the military arts and to official recognition by ritual dubbing.^[3] True enough, in the thirteenth century descendants of knights generally started to inherit the title, yet they were not considered full knights unless formally dubbed. The ceremonial dubbing of knights, widely practiced from early in the twelfth century, was more than a ritual: it picturesquely symbolized a set of mental attitudes which related to the practical functions of knighthood, and it also marked the official recognition of a special status for these mounted soldiers.^[4]

Such symbolic acts were an extension of the ritual sequence constituting the investiture or enfeofment of the feudal lord, which usually began with a man declaring himself liege or vassal of the lord by kneeling in front of him and placing his hands in the lord's hands.^[5] This expressed feudal homage, subjection, and request for protection. After receiving the oath of fidelity the lord gave his liege some token of what was to be the fief, a grant of land in exchange for a formal promise of military and other aid. In later times grants could take the alternative form of moneys (tenure, indenture), so that the lord would not divest himself of land ownership and the vassal would not be tied to a territory.^[6]

The specific ceremony of the granting of knighthood culminated in the girding or belting with the sword and tapping with the lord's sword on the shoulder or “dubbing.” The custom of an all-night vigil before the investiture confirmed the sacramental nature of the procedure, which appears to have become ritualized around 1160–1180.^[7] Since the tenth and eleventh centuries the terminology relating to the ceremony of girding included such common phrases as cingulo decoratus, “distinguished with a belt,” miles factus, “made into a knight,” gladio, ense, cingulo accinctus, “girded with a sword, a belt,” consecratio ensis, “dedication of the sword,” and benedictio novi militis, “benediction of

the new knight.” In its heyday, the ritual was predicated upon so much training and such steep expenses that many a prospective knight had to forego investiture. They thus forfeited the title they had inherited and settled for that of “esquire” or “squire” (Fr. damoiseau, Prov. donzel, G. Edelknecht, Sp. hidalgo ).^[8] Indeed, the young nobleman's economic predicament was not without stress: whereas he was barred from working for a living, he nevertheless needed to keep up with the standards of the rich princes who replaced the petty local lords. Prodigal display was a distinguishing trait of the chivalric class all along, but financial irresponsibility took its toll and many an indebted knight had to sell his land to the hated parvenu villains or give it back to the prince, perhaps in return for a place at court.^[9]

As with the granting of nobility, a fief could also be granted to a knight on condition of performing service to the lord, usually for a set period of, say, forty days per year, and in the form of warfare, expeditions of a routine police nature (Fr. chevauchée ), and garrison duty at the castle. The second was the literal background of adventure-seeking errantry, the third of court service as “courtiers.” Starting in the twelfth century, unfit sons of knights could retain their rights by substituting direct service with payment in money (Eng. scutage) when fighting could be performed by mercenaries. Normally, landed knights had received both the nobleman's investiture and the chivalric girding in distinct rituals, although the two ceremonies could occasionally be conflated into one.

Medieval society lacked a planned, generalized configuration of the kind we are accustomed to in modern times. Largely local and personal, social relationships were governed by custom rather than by clear and precise laws, and only minimally regulated by impersonal state-directed institutions. France was less uniform than Germany and more fragmented into multilayered feudal vassalage. It was not uncommon in France to owe homage to several lords, while in Germany it tended to be reserved to one lord only, since it involved dependence and carried the stigma of servitude. Accordingly, the German higher nobility recognized only, if at all, the emperor, while counts and margraves could rely on all their subjects to remain collectively loyal to them.

Léopold Génicot's exemplary 1960 study of noble families in the county of Namur reminds us of the difficulty of generalizing about the noble estate.^[10] It contains valuable data on the complex social situation and genealogical history of the class, though the cases are not typical, since the free state (ingenuitas ) seemed to be particularly infrequent in

that region. Around 1150 the county had twenty noble families (nobiles ), some with familiae or courts, which included milites or knights. The latter increased in number and power within the next one hundred years, even while the number of nobiles decreased by more than half, partly through lack of surviving offspring. By the end of the thirteenth century the knights were free and equal in rank to the older nobility; by 1420 the two types of nobility had become indistinguishable.^[11] As in Germany and elsewhere, the considerable rights and privileges of noble status were hereditary around Namur, too, but knights could retain them only if their titles were sanctioned by ceremonial dubbing after the actual exercise of arms. For failure to exercise this right and duty, many sons of knights had to give up their status, although enforcement had so many exceptions that a majority among later nobles descended from knights retained their status even without any military practice.

Like the title of nobility, the dignity of knighthood was incompatible with the practice of mechanical arts, especially farming. A nobleman must not be confused with a peasant. The thirteenth-century statutes of Fréjus issued by the count of Provence threatened the loss of the ban, or fiscal exemption, for knights' sons who were guilty of humble pursuits or who had not been dubbed by the age of thirty.^[12] True enough, this French prejudice against commercial involvement was not generally shared along the Mediterranean. Italian noblemen eagerly joined the merchants within the free communes both practically and formally by becoming members of the guilds—a juridical requirement in Florence for any nobleman aspiring to a political career after Giano della Bella's 1282 Ordinances of Justice. In Siena the largest bank of the time, the Gran Tavola, was founded and run by the prominent landed gentry of the Bonsignori family, reaching a peak of prosperity around 1260. In Catalonia even the fiscal officialdom of the count-kings included members of the knightly class.^[13]

While much of medieval literature was produced at court, it also flowered in the cities, which, as centers of merchants, manufacturers, hired labor, and craftsmen, were often outside the basic feudal structures. The type of free commune that became typical of northern and central Italy and of the regions of the Hanseatic League in northeastern Germany and western Norway was, however, uncommon in the rest of Europe. Most cities were under the protection of monarchs or feudal lords, who could ensure for them the same kind of safety the guilds sought for themselves in the independent communes, and often with greater effectiveness and coordination over large territories. The rise of

mercantile cities demanded safety in the countryside, and merchants depended on local protection in moving their wares by land, sea, or waterways.

The rise of the merchants also had an impact on life at court when merchants began to compete with noble courtiers for administrative positions. The intrusion of this alien social element into the ministerial ranks introduced new ethical factors which were at variance with the mental attitudes of clergy and warriors (oratores and bellatores ). This bourgeois invasion was to have a significant impact on the relationship between the sexes. In the mid-twelfth century, at the same time that matrimony became a sacrament, the mercantile view of marriage as a contract freely entered upon by mutual consent, like a mercantile contract, started to infiltrate and eventually, though slowly, to overrun the heroic view of marriage as possession of the woman by right of conquest, even by force.^[14] We shall see how this encounter of competing ideologies may also have affected the literary representation of the knight.

Germany

The story of courtliness begins with Otto I the Great (king of Germany from 936, emperor 962–973) and his brother Brun (summoned to court around 939, bishop of Cologne from 953), when they started placing in important episcopal seats those former royal chaplains who had proven aptitudes for courtly and public service.^[15] It was a first step in what would become the long-drawn-out investiture struggle, and it lay the foundation for the modern ethic of the high public servant. A number of cathedral schools became centers for a new type of education that shifted the emphasis from turning out teachers of the Bible to producing religious leaders and public administrators. More than a dozen major cathedral schools arose in Germany alone within a mere sixty years, starting in 952 at Würzburg and including Magdeburg, Cologne, Hildesheim, Trier, Bremen, Mainz, Worms, Liège, Speyer, Bamberg, Regensburg, and Paderborn. These schools remained the most important educational centers until the rise of the universities in the early thirteenth century. They must be placed alongside their counterparts in Italy (e.g., the well-endowed cathedral schools of Milan and Verona), England (York, eighth century), and France, where after Orléans, Auxerre (ninth century), and Paris (tenth century), the Aquitanian Gerbert of Aurillac's famous school at Reims (972–982) emerged to produce

such luminaries as Richer of Saint-Rémi, Atto of Fleury, Adalbero of Laon, and especially Chartres's celebrated teacher Fulbert (bishop 1006–1028), not to mention the future King Robert, son of Hugh Capet.^[16]

The idea of curialitas or courtliness appears to have originated among the curiales (from curia, “court”), the secular clergy trained in the royal chapels, which supplied the bulk of high civil servants and royal counselors. Josef Fleckenstein (1956) mapped out the flowering of the newly revived cathedral schools of the tenth century under the aegis of a new policy of imperial patronage, and argued that the direction of these new schools changed purposely from the Carolingian emphasis on the training of preachers and teachers of Scripture to the formation of statesmen and administrators.^[17] Jaeger agrees:

The goal was not knowledge for its own sake or knowledge for the glory and worship of God, but rather knowledge to be applied in the practical duties of running the empire. Brun of Cologne as imperial chancellor is known for transforming the royal chapel into a sort of academy of philosophy and school for imperial bishops. The instruction that turned gifted young men into trained administrators and loyal supporters of the emperor originated at court, in the chapel. But it was so valuable that it spilled over the borders of that tiny, elite institution, and sought accommodation elsewhere. This gave cathedral schools their new role . . . . Cathedral school education becomes identical with preparation for service at court, be it secular or episcopal.^[18]

Thus, following Roman models, Otto I and Brun created an institutional basis for the teaching of courtly manners while trying to take care of the actual needs of effective and orderly government. The courtier bishops and the cathedral schools they controlled became the centers for the education of clerics in courtly manners.

This vigorous educational program went hand in hand with the Saxon emperors' will to restore the empire and revive the ancient cultural splendor. A telling episode illustrates the new enthusiasm. The Saxon emperor Otto II's interest in things Greek had been aided by his wedding to the Byzantine princess Theophanes. Otto was so impressed by Gerbert of Aurillac's knowledge that he made him abbot of Bobbio (983) and invited him to join his court as tutor to his son, the future Otto III (983–1002). “Remove from us our Saxon uncouthness and allow the Greek refinement to grow in us . . . . A spark of the Greek spirit will then be found in us . . . . Arouse in us the lively genius of the Greeks.” In his enthusiasm for his exalted protectors Gerbert would

later assert that “something divine manifests itself when a man of Greek origin and with Roman power in his person requests almost by hereditary right the treasures of Greek and Roman wisdom.”^[19] Otto III made Gerbert archbishop of Reims (991), archbishop of Ravenna (998), and finally pope with the name of Sylvester II (999). Like a later “civic humanist,” Gerbert would take pride in being deeply involved in political affairs, “rei publicae permixtus.”^[20]

This marriage between ruler and cleric naturally led to a struggle between state and Church for control of investiture. The Concordat of Worms (1122) attempted to settle the dispute by favoring papal appointment of bishops. Nevertheless, the succeeding Hohenstaufens continued the broader struggle for imperial supremacy. In the spirit of rebuilding the glory and honor of the ancient Roman emperors, as his Ottonian predecessors had done, Frederick I Barbarossa (crowned emperor in 1155) vigorously attempted the enforcement of lawful “regalian rights” by cajoling and coaxing the Italian communes. The Lombard League managed to frustrate his efforts even after he had destroyed Milan in 1162. The battle of Legnano (1176) ended in his defeat, and in 1183 the Peace of Constance sealed the communes' triumph, sanctioning their de facto independence despite formal assurances of allegiance to the sovereign.^[21] Still the struggle went on, especially under the unyielding Frederic II (d. 1250).

Indeed, in and outside German territories the Concordat of Worms did not close the matter, and high ecclesiastics retained an important role within the political order and in their relationship with secular authorities.^[22] The closeness of the Church hierarchy to the centers of power remained an open issue, just as Gallicanism remained permanently operative in the French Church. When Luther started his revolt against Rome, his case was still resting in part on the popular desire for independence from Rome. His reliance on the princes to decide even the religious affiliation of their subjects carried on, in its way, the joining of temporal and spiritual authority that dated from the early Ottos. German Protestantism became an instrument of princely, and later monarchic, absolutism until the kaiser and the regional princes were dethroned in 1918. The precedent set by Otto the Great in appointing his brother Brun as bishop was followed by later monarchs and princes who formally acted as bishops of the Protestant churches within their lands. The Hohenzollern kings remained the titular heads of the Prussian Church.

This dependence of Church authority on state authority has been

likened to the situation prevailing within Orthodox Slavic states, especially czarist Russia.

Bishops and pastors, with few exceptions, stood solidly behind the sovereign, the Junkers and the army, and during the nineteenth century they opposed the rising liberal and democratic movements. Even the Weimar republic  . . . was anathema to most Protestant pastors, as it had been to Niemöller, not only because it had deposed the kings and princes, to which they owed allegiance, but because it drew its main support from the Catholics, the Socialists, and the Trade Unions.^[23]

This also explains, in part, the ease with which in modern times Adolf Hitler crushed the organized Protestant resistance by citing the right of the state to appoint and direct high Church authorities. Hitler was following a tradition that preceded the Concordat of Worms.^[24]

In the course of the twelfth century, courtly culture completed its shift from cathedral schools and episcopal courts to secular courts. In comparing twelfth-century Germany with France, as I shall do shortly, we must be aware that the social makeup of the German courts, where knights were markedly more dependent on their lords, differed from the French. The German lower nobility was divided into a hereditary nobility of lineage and a new nobility made up of active or former ministeriales (G. Ministerialen ), that is, administrators and functionaries of bourgeois origin, bureaucrats avant-la-lettre in both secular and episcopal courts.^[25] From the end of the eleventh century, legal documents formally refer to both hereditary and ministerial noblemen as milites, “knights” (G. Ritter ). The studies of J. Bumke (1964), J. Johrendt (1971), and H. J. Reuter (1971) have shown that between 1050 and 1250 the Latin term miles or the German term Ritter applied in Germany to any horse-mounted soldier of whatever class and origin, without designating a special social group (ritterlich meant “knightly”). Closely associated with the category of ministeriales from which it often derived, the profession of knighthood was not restricted to a specific social layer and even included individuals who did not enjoy a free state, hence it did not by itself grant the legal status of nobleman. In turn, a ministerialis, himself in a servile status, could have a large number of knights at his service, as was the case of Frederic Barbarossa's ministerialis Werner von Bolanden who, according to the chronicler Gislebert of Mons (Chronicon Hanoniense ), at the end of the twelfth century had eleven hundred milites as his vassals.^[26]

Great princes could behave with considerable independence toward their only superior, the emperor. They could even openly oppose him,

as happened in the struggle over investiture and the consequent civil war. Directly below the princes came the free lesser nobility, the Edelfreie, flanked by the servant-knights (Edelknecht ) or ministeriales, who, owing to their lords both their personal power and inalienable feudal estates, could not leave their service. Together, these aristocratic ranks made up the hierarchy of the military nobility (Heerschild ). Being a soldier, however, even on horseback, did not automatically mean being a knight, since this implied, beyond the formal dubbing and the special status this conferred, the adoption of a mentality which was largely based on literary-ideological sources of French origin (after 1150). Hence “knighthood did not originate from cavalry soldiers,”^[27] since, once again, far from being a homogeneous social class, the motley category of mounted soldiers (all milites ) included considerable numbers of peasants selected and hired for their soldierly dispositions as well as professional mercenaries who never, either in the Middle Ages or in the Renaissance, acquired noble status through the mere exercise of their profession. Both armed peasants and mercenaries comprised de facto the bulk of the princes' armies. They were kept around the court for prompter and more reliable employment than the armies that could be raised by calling on vassals' feudal services.^[28]

Technological advances in military equipment reduced the knights' value in warfare after 1200. The foot soldier armed with an arbalète threatened the strongest horse-mounted and sword-armed fighter, and any peasant with a good knife could kill a knight who, having fallen off his horse, lay immobilized by his heavy armor.^[29] Shortly before 1206 Guiot de Provins complained that an arbalétrier was becoming more valuable, hence more expensive, than a knight.^[30] Cervantes would later note that a coward with a gun could kill the bravest knight. Within the ministerial ranks the high administrators, now glorified bureaucrats (with an enhanced sense of their worth and value, as possibly illustrated, according to some interpreters, in Hartmann's epics), started turning to law as educational background for their business.

France

Courtesy was born at court, first perhaps among clerical chaplains, then among the lesser nobility. The fact that courtly literature was born in southern France is related to the crucial function of princely courts in that area. The weakened central authority in the wake of the dissolution of monarchic power in France after Charlemagne's immediate succes-

sors made the feudal lords effective centers of regional power, but the weakness of central government was also reflected in the heightened independence of the lower vassals. Even such great counts as those of Poitiers and Toulouse had great difficulties in restraining their vassals. Hence the comital courts had to be turned into attractive centers of noble living so that the counts could cultivate the loyalty of their vassals by keeping them at close quarters.^[31]

The vacancy of a legitimate central temporal power prompted the Church to fill the vacuum and arrogate to itself some basic duties of government. The Church started preaching the Peace of God (Pax Dei ) in the hope of preserving peace and justice from the anarchic, bellicose counts emboldened by the lack of effective checks from above. The Church was thus taking a stand as protector of the weak and poor—a role attributed to the monarchy by the Carolingian capitularies and edicts. This movement started in southern France, where it remained particularly operative; it was less defensible in Germany as long as the bishops were controlled by the emperor and loyal to him. Dominated by the bishops and the great abbots, the councils assembled for the first stage of the Peace of God (roughly 990–1040) opposed the armed nobiles and milites, as aggressors, to the potential victims of their rapacious violence, namely unarmed rustici/villani, clerics (with all Church property in its various forms), and women of the nobility. For some historians the Peace of God movement was responsible for triggering powerful forces among the populace.^[32]

Amounting to both a Christianization of militarism and a militarization of Christianity, the Pax Dei bears the seeds of chivalry, since the knightly class responded to the complex situation created by the Peace of God.^[33] The original intent was to restrain the destructively barbarous forms of military activity prevailing among feudal bands. In a second stage, during the second quarter of the eleventh century, the Church went farther by proclaiming the “Truce of God” (Treuga Dei ), which declared private warfare a sinful pleasure to be restrained. During specified periods of “abstinence” the penitent knights were urged to put down their armor and swords and join the inermes, the unarmed under the spiritual protection of the Church. It was a further progression toward chivalric deeds.

As early as the 930s, Odo of Cluny, founder of the Cluniac order, had recognized the ethical utility of military life.^[34] This idea finally came to fruition in the alliance between militia saecularis and militia spiritualis brought about by the Cluniac reform, which, in particular, exer-

cised a strong influence on the Norman nobility. Military knightly orders, like the Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Teutonic Knights (“Deutscher Orden”), arose in the wake of the preaching of the Crusades, which marked the third phase of the Peace of God, and the new spirituality erupted in the enthusiasm for crusading in Europe and in the Orient. The knight's ethic thus became ambivalent, entailing a denial or limitation of his right and duty to do battle except for Christ. The principle was clearly stated at the Council of Narbonne in 1054 and made universal at the Council of Clermont in 1095.

The militia was given a chance to become what Pope Gregory VII and St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090/91–1153) would then call a nova militia, the militia Dei or Christi, if it abided by its purported divine calling to be a providential arm for justice, peace, and social order.^[35] Such a role was far less urgent in Germany, as the bishop of Cambrai had affirmed as early as 1025, since there the sovereign had sufficient power to keep the peace.^[36] Knightly status generally rose in prestige as a result of the ecclesiastical reform movements which moralized and spiritualized the social function of knighthood, and this rise in prestige fostered the assimilation of the two orders of nobiles and milites, which, for the same reason of lesser urgency, did not take place in Germany.

The active alliance between religious and secular knighthood exhausted itself when the crusading spirit failed. Hence, the Church's rejection of warlike attitudes forced a new justification of chivalry, with a displacement of values that could take one of two directions: (1) a willful acceptance of military action (even outright brigandage) for economic and political reasons of a purely secular nature, or (2) a shift in emphasis from the military aspect of chivalry to the nonmilitary, that is, to a noble code of loving (the ideology of courtly love) and behaving at court (the ideology of manners).

Georges Duby has proposed to view the poor nobility as both creator and direct audience of the literature of courtoisie. The curiales or curial clerics and the knights, most commonly poor nobles, shared economic interests and social background, both often being noble cadets who could neither inherit their fathers' domains nor aspire to independent sources of livelihood. They could enter a monastery or seek ecclesiastical careers as court clerics, or they could turn to the knightly profession. Starting in the tenth or eleventh century the members of the landless lower nobility who turned to knightly status gravitated around the seigniorial courts as their natural habitat, since, deprived of permanent residences and personal holdings in the form of fiefs, they depended on

the liberal hospitality of a lord and mistress. In return for hospitality these “marginal men” served according to a regular contract that specified the duty to perform chevauchées through the countryside. The purpose of such errands, which became the practical model of the knight errant's idealized adventure trips, was not to find portentous encounters with ogres, dragons, or magic villains, but to ensure the orderly collection of levies and taxes and strike terror in the hearts of the peasants. The knights were the lord's militia, police, and law enforcers.^[37]

In southern France more than elsewhere, the knights came to constitute a sort of state within the state, taking right and justice into their own hands for largely uncensurable and uncontrollable purposes.^[38] Their livelihood could be supplemented from acts of violence at the expense of various property owners. “Le milieu économique que représente, dans la société de ce temps, le groupe des chevaliers est, par vocation professionnelle, celui de la rapine.”^[39] Indeed, it was not always easy to distinguish between knights and bandits, since even the most fearsome bandits might display the same chivalrous and courtly conduct toward ladies and the downtrodden. When his superiors decided a knight's behavior was no longer acceptable or manageable, he would be declared an outlaw, which occasionally turned him into a popular hero (vide the various Robin Hoods of British and continental history).^[40]

Duby's picture of the social predicament confirms Erich Köhler's interpretations of troubadour lyrics. Yet we must be careful to give each factor its due.^[41] Typically for most historians, Duby tends to explain all sociohistorical phenomena, including the rise of chivalry, on the basis of political, social, and economic forces. Even while he vigorously advocates the joining of material causes to the study of mental attitudes, he only occasionally refers to purely cultural factors as expressed and, in part, created by literature.^[42] Yet a balanced reconstruction of behavioral patterns requires a full realization of the enduring impact of purely mental attitudes, often induced by literary models even when the material conditions have made them obsolete. The prestige of chivalry long continued to produce among the leading classes a “reproduction fidèle du discours romanesque et courtois,” a general mimesis of Arthurian and Carolingian heroes through a need to see life as a work of art.^[43] Chivalry remained a live cultural model even when, after Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415), it was out of tune not only with the new military techniques but with the moral perception of the practical irrelevance and visible “frivolity” of the knight in shining armor. Typically, like paladins from the old epics, Louis of Orléans, Philip the Good of Bur-

gundy, and even the emperor Charles V could still respectively call to personal combat Henry IV of England (challenged by Louis), Duke Humphrey of Gloucester (challenged by Philip in 1425), and Francis I (twice engaged in challenges with Charles V, in 1528 and 1536), ostensibly “to avoid shedding the blood of their Christian subjects.”^[44] True enough, these carefully staged and widely advertised challenges never came to execution, thus looking rather like self-seeking rhetorical displays for purposes of propaganda, but it is remarkable that they would be taken seriously by the public, starting with the chroniclers.

The public of courtly lyrics and chivalric romances appears to have comprised mainly milites and ministeriales—ministeriales being the majority of court denizens in Germany, the milites in southern France.^[45] The composite group making up the court was often referred to as maisnada in southern France (Fr. maisnie or compagnie, It. masnada ). The equivalent Latin term was, significantly, familia, commonly used throughout Europe, including Germany: the court was defined as the prince's “family” well into the Renaissance. In addition to poor knights (Prov. paubres chavaliers ) and court functionaries, the maisnada comprised lower domestics (sirvens, doncels ), soudadiers, troubadours, and joglars or minstrels. Though low on the social scale, the ministeriales could be the most influential. The soudadiers (Fr. soudoiers ) were the mercenary soldiers (Bertran de Born, e.g., addresses them by that name). The members of all these diverse groups of the lord's “family” referred to one another as companhos, “comrades,” as does, for instance, Marcabru (1129–1150), a troubadour of lowly origin, when he speaks of his peers and, in the same breath, the soudadiers.^[46] The death of Henry the Young (el rei joven of Bertran de Born's and Dante's memory), son of Henry II of England, was said to have saddened, left doloros, all the “brave and young,” pretz e joven, especially “li cortes soudadiers / e'l trobador e.lh joglar avinen.”^[47]

The terminology was similar in the French chansons de geste. In the Chanson d'Aspremont Charlemagne distributes presents to his maisnie according to rank, distinguishing the riches hommes de riche lin from the pauvres chevaliers; a third group is made up of bacheliers légers, damoiseaux (pages), and vaillans soldoiers. A similar phraseology is in other epic songs, like Girart de Roussillon.^[48] All these terms, together with écuyers (squires), collectively comprise the bacheliers, that is, “the young.” This term, indicating not years of age but social state, can be defined as “between the knighting and having become a father.”^[49] Provençal damoisial, damizel, donzel, and the French damoiseau or écuyer,

corresponding to Latin domicellus, used in the south of France, and armiger, used in the north, before 1100 generally referred to men-atarms educated and trained at court as future knights, and after 1200 to noblemen's sons not yet knighted. The German terminology was equally rich: gesellen “companions,” reitgesellen “mounted fellows,” knechte “servants,” swertgenôze “fellows of the sword,” swertdegen “swordwarriors,” schiltgesellen “fellows of the shield,” knappen “squires,” kint “Young men.”^[50]

Duby's picturesque description of the psychological climate of the maisnada points to some of the constant motifs of troubadour poetry: “La joie règne dans ces bandes. Le chef dépense sans compter, aime Ie luxe, le jeu, les mimes, les chevaux, les chiens. Les moeurs y sont fort libres. La grande affaire est cependant de combattre, ‘en tournoiements et en guerre.’”^[51] The poets transformed this theme of constant gaiety and joi into a sublime criterion of self-satisfaction, along with the cult of feasts, games, tourneys, and hunting parties, all in lavish display of “liberality” and wealth. The very common term jove (Fr. jeune ) applied to all the members of the group and was used constantly with a positive connotation, referring to all that is good and excluding all that is undesirable and harmful.^[52] The remarkable educational value of courtesy can be easily grasped when we realize that these were the same sort of people who made up the notorious mercenary armies of Italian and other condottieri through the Renaissance and then served as the lords' private armies in the baroque age (remember Manzoni's bravi ), spreading terror wherever they went through their reckless plundering, raping, and, often, through the sheer glee they derived from destruction.^[53] The literature made some of them see themselves as romantic heroes and, at least occasionally, behave as noble characters.

Sections of “companies” often lived away from court as knights errant. Unlike the adventure seekers of the romances, knights seldom traveled alone. At the very least they traveled with a squire, like Don Quixote, but more often they went out as a troop led by a more experienced “young” knight assigned by the lord as mentor to his own errant sons, and were followed by a train of domestics and harlots. Their approach could not have been welcomed by the poor “villeins,” the merchants, and other lords with the enthusiastic, hospitable favor that the romances usually portray. Despite the element of turbulence and violence and despite the danger (violent death prevented many from returning), such sallies suited both the ideal of knighthood and the interests of the lords, since the latter welcomed the opportunity of ridding themselves

of cadet sons who might rival the firstborn for the patrimony. It was true, however, that the eldest son also was expected to undergo the experience of militant knighthood.

A noble father hoped as well that the game of errantry would produce happy and profitable encounters with widows of high social standing to be carried off to the altar. For his own benefit, the father tended to postpone his children's marriages as long as possible, since weddings entailed some division of patrimony and the new offspring might be in competition with older heirs. This reluctance to caser (“marry off”) the children, male and female, held even for the firstborn male, since he could then claim his patrimonial rights immediately.^[54]

In an anthropological sense, one could also read into knightly behavior some patterns of what Mikhail Bakhtin has called popular comic culture, grotesque realism, and the carnival spirit. The Russian critic reminded us of the terracotta figurine in the Hermitage, the laughing pregnant old woman of Kertch allegedly expressing the joyous coupling of imminent death with the birth of new life, a symbol of fertility in the readiness for death. Bakhtin saw in this spirit of cosmic renewal the enactment of the perpetual youth of the world of nature. The apparently irrational joie de vivre of a Guillaume of Poitier, the first troubadour; the laetitia spiritualis of St. Francis praising God through communion with all the creatures of the world; the chaotic, irrepressible, even destructive “joy” of the companies of roaming knights constantly exalting in their boastful “youth”; and the contradictory thrusts of the knights of the Round Table—all these disparate yet related manifestations contain in a Bakhtinian sense elements of the need for survival in a renovatio, a rebirth that had deep biological and cultural roots. In the sense of Bakhtin's “lowering” (snizenie ), the disorderly impetuosity of the youthful knights was a folkloric counterpart of the medieval and Renaissance crusading spirit.^[55]

The prestige of the knightly state was such that as early as the middle of the twelfth century, French juridical documents used the title to cover all layers of the nobility, the great aristocrats taking pride in being associated with what in other parts of the empire continued to be a lower status.^[56] A significant document of the nobility of blood deciding to join the knights by adopting their title is Lambert of Ardres's Historia comitum Ghisnensium (ca. 1195), which records how the powerful counts of Guines had themselves formally knighted.^[57] An eloquent example of this phenomenon concerns the early career of Henry of Anjou, who in 1149, when only sixteen, persuaded David I, King of the Scots, to

knight him. Having become king as Henry II of England, he returned the favor in 1159 by knighting David's grandson, the seventeen-year-old Malcolm King of Scots, who had been eager to receive the honor. In France, between 1180 and 1230 a juridical quasi-fusion took place between the domini castellani, feudal lords possessing castles and subject only to the sovereign, hence the true, hereditary nobility of blood (nobiles in the official documents), and the knights (milites ) who were their dependents, living in their castles as part of their familia and originally subjected to them, hence juridically not free.^[58]

Gradually, the knights began to appropriate the title and authority of domini —French sires, messires. It is typical of more bourgeois Italy that there the title ser, of analogous etymology, indicated not nobility but the notarial status, although, as in France starting in the last third of the twelfth century, it could also indicate the status of ordained priest.^[59] The knights' ascendancy through the eleventh century accompanied the weakening of the domini's power because of the strengthening of the central authority of the knights' natural allies, namely the sovereign, dukes, and princes. The greater lords had an interest in favoring the fragmentation of the castellani's power into more local administrative units around the houses of simple knights. The Peace of God and the Crusades also contributed to the respective weakening and strengthening of the two ordines of domini and milites. Knights who owned large farms began to rebuild them in imitation of castles, with moats, strong outer walls, and towers—the domus fortes, French maisons fortes.^[60] Around 1200 they started to acquire true freedom and noble status by arrogating to themselves the noble rights previously reserved for the domini, which consisted of exemption from taxation (ban ) and the authority to judge and punish the “villeins.” They also started to marry women from the higher rank and to adopt primogeniture for their succession, in order to preserve the inviolability and indivisibility of their fiefs. The contemporaneous use of heraldic shields symbolically sealed their entrance into the higher order.^[61]

If on the one hand the knights could be seen as a means to reduce the power of the lords, the closeness between nobility and knights could on the other hand unite them in the king's distrust when he was trying to restrain the lords' and their knights' anarchic, destructive, and criminal rampages against neighbors and subjects. Suger of St. Denis showed this side of the coin when, in his Life of Louis VI (before 1145), he exposed feudatories and knights as unruly outlaws to be restrained and punished by the good king.^[62]

After A.D. 1000 the growth of cities as centers of manufacturing, trade, and crafts was a negative development for the nobility. Wresting their civic freedoms from the lords, the burghers escaped the constraints of the feudal system. As the cities became important centers of productivity and culture, regional lords and knights remained more and more tied to the agricultural world of the countryside, outside the new monetary and mercantile economy. The burghers could increase their independence from the lesser feudatories by keeping ties with the greater lords, especially the sovereign. Bourgeois bankers helped in the raising of mercenary armies to be paid with currency: this bypassed the more cumbersome feudal fealties and rendered the knightly order dispensable.

In southern France courts and town merchants lived in much better harmony than in the north. Both there and in Italy the towns gave themselves republican statutes reflecting the new monetary economy that had freed them from feudal controls. The lords in control of the countryside tolerated the heretical sects of Albigensians and Valdensians that flourished within the towns, at times even sympathizing with them. Hence in the south the ideological opposition between cortesia and vilania did not involve the merchants, as it did in the north, but only the lowly peasants.^[63] We shall see this clearly reflected in the literature.

Italy

In Italy, too, through the tenth and eleventh centuries the German emperors pursued a steady policy of transferring authority from local secular feudatories to the bishops, so that by 1050 most leading bishops in northern Italy enjoyed the judicial powers of the former counts.^[64] The emperors' attempts to control the bishops, however, met with particularly fierce resistance from the rising Italian townships. When Conrad II (1024–1039) tried to depose the proud and powerful archbishop of Milan, Ariberto d'Intimiano, Ariberto, supported by the local nobility and the burghers, refused to give up. The imprisonment of the bishops of Cremona, Vercelli, and Piacenza by order of the same emperor provoked enmity in those cities, too. On the other hand, most Tuscan, Emilian, and Lombard bishops remained loyal to Henry IV even during his struggle against the pope, whereas the populace grew increasingly sympathetic to papal authority, which appeared as the natural champion of territorial independence.^[65]

Italy's social makeup was unique in that it had a comparatively weak

feudal nobility facing a predominant merchant class who operated from extraordinarily vibrant bases of teeming communes. We must not, however, underestimate the ideological power of the nobility. Not only did the burghers of the communes adopt many of the cultural ideals of the knightly caste, as would be the case throughout European society for centuries to come, but even in practical terms the nobility dominated the communes through the end of the twelfth century. Although cities were not enfeoffed and had no lords within the feudal order, it was not until the end of the thirteenth century that the popolo, to wit, the organized class of wealthy merchants and entrepreneurs, managed to take control of most communes. Even so, the popolo' s almost complete triumph in such city-states as Florence and Bologna was exceptional. In most of the towns, the popolo could not wrest from the hands of the nobility and the knights more than one third or at best one half of the voting rights and public offices, and in one of the largest communes, Milan, the popular faction succumbed to a strong counterattack from its traditional enemy. This occurred in 1277, when Archbishop Ottone Visconti reentered the city at the head of a victorious army of noblemen and quickly proceeded to turn back to the knighted class all the most prized dignities, including cathedral canonries.^[66]

Even in Florence, though less so than in most communes, the presence of noblemen was real and conspicuous, with the difference that they were highly urbanized, hence closely tied to business activities.^[67] They did keep their landed bases, but joined the merchants within the cities. As for Venice, recent research has underlined how the patriciate of that hardy republic consistently behaved according to patterns of both feudal and mercantile self-interest, despite the rhetoric of the official “myth of unanimity.”^[68] One of the most authoritative politicohistorical analyses of Venetian society in the Cinquecento, Donato Giannotti's Libro della Repubblica de Vinitiani (1526–1530), objected to the established view that Venetians were divided into two classes only, popolari and gentil'huomini, and insisted on a threefold articulation entailing a further distinction of popolari into popolari proper, engaged in servile or “mechanical” tasks, and cittadini, wealthy tradesmen and merchants dedicated to “arti più honorate.”^[69] The established view was represented, for instance, by the equally respectable analyst of the Venetian constitution, Gasparo Contarini, who in his De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum (1523–1531 or later)^[70] praised the wisdom of the city fathers for having ordered the citizenry along a rigidly dual system. All “mercenari e artigiani” had to be considered servile

populace, servants of the commonwealth, deprived of the dignity of true citizens. Power in the republic had to remain in the hands of free men, the only true citizens: “il cittadinoè huomo libero.” Reflecting the spirit of the time, even a Sienese observer of the quality of Alessandro Piccolomini, Professor of Philosophy at Padua, praised the Venetian constitution for recognizing that long noble heritage was a prerequisite to good and stable city governance (Della institution di tutta la vita dell'huomo nato nobile e in città libera, 1542).^[71] No matter how one looked at the social structure of the Serenissima, a unique brand of aristocratic ideology played a crucial role in its government.

Starting in Germany in the tenth century, the clerical circles at court developed an ideology that contrasted with that of the warrior class. The opposition between the mores of warriors and those of court clerics is somewhat similar to the opposition between the consorterie of nobles or magnati that controlled the Italian communes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the new merchant guilds that emerged at the end of the twelfth century.^[72] Merchants were naturally more disposed than nobles to adopt the literati's ideology of gentilezza (i.e., courtesy and good manners) as a sign of true superiority and inner nobility. The theme had enjoyed great popularity among the troubadours, and in its abstract form as rhetorical topos it had an ancient history going back to Juvenal. Even though the burghers' guilds first asserted themselves by imitating the aggressiveness and bellicosity of the armed magnati, they soon recognized that their interests were best served through the peaceful means of influence and control. Where money is power, the merchant prevails over the soldier. In fact, peaceloving merchants often did prevail, sometimes to the extent that they compelled the nobles to give up their warlike ways and accept the powerfully symbolic razing of their forbidding high towers within city walls. Just the same, the established methods of governance remained for the most part unruly, grasping, and violent: to ensure the safety of their own money, the burghers had little choice but to imitate their opponents and do their best to grab power for themselves. Daily life in the communes thus remained one of constant dissent and strife, always verging on civil war and war with neighbors. Within the walls of the Italian communes the more civilized side of courtliness and courtesy could be felt more as an idea (the literati's protests in favor of the nobility of heart, mind, and manners) than in fact. All in all, the grabbing of lucrative positions as well as the exercise of political and fiscal rights remained more a matter of organized power than of merit- and law-based apportionment.

When knights were ousted from their positions of control, they could find a substitute form of employment in the mercenary armies which spread throughout Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It was an occupation and social function somewhat similar to that of the impoverished knights who attached themselves to the twelfth-century courts. We must remember that Castiglione's court of Urbino belonged to a lordly dynasty of captains commanding richly rewarding mercenary armies generation after generation, beginning with Guido da Montefeltro of Dantesque memory. Yet even the Montefeltro's power was originally based on landed wealth. Their ability to draw authority from feudal land ownership and power from the armed men at their disposal was typical. As early as 1216 the Montefeltro could put three hundred men into the field. Similarly, Salinguerra Torelli took control of Ferrara before 1220 through the help of a force of eight hundred horsemen, holding it until the Estensi ejected his family in 1240. Manfredi Lancia attempted to establish tyranny in Milan by making use of his thousandman mercenary cavalry in 1252.^[73] Even the popular communes had to use noblemen on the battlefield. The Genoese chronicler Caffaro (ca. 1080–1166) reports that in 1163 the consuls created more than a hundred knights from within Genoa and outside. The same commune of Genoa dubbed two hundred knights to serve against the Malaspina in 1211. Giovanni Villani tells us that in 1285 there were three hundred dubbed knights in Florence, and that when Florence moved against Arezzo in 1288, the Guelf force of allies that took the field included 250 cavalrymen assembled by “the Guelf Counts Guidi, Mainardo da Susignana, Jacopo da Fano, Filippuccio di Iesi, the Marquis Malaspina, the Judge of Gallura, the Counts Alberti, and other minor Tuscan barons.”^[74] In 1294, at a great court of peers he held in Ferrara, Azzo VIII of Este was dubbed a knight by the lord of Treviso, Gherardo da Camino, and then proceeded to dub fifty-two new knights with his own hand.

War had been and remained the business of noblemen, and the popular communes often entrusted themselves to noble leaders to ensure their defense, as they did with the Della Torre in Milan and the Della Scala in Verona. The middle class preferred to tend to business and leave warfare to others, thus becoming the best clients for the mercenary army leaders, often men of noble origin. Dino Compagni (Cronica 1.20: 27) gives a picturesque differential portrait of the Cerchi and the Donati, the two leading families of the Florentine White and Black Guelfs, the former being very rich members of the mercantile estate, the

latter less rich but of more ancient blood: “Those who knew said: ‘They [the Cerchi and other Whites] are only merchants, hence they are naturally cowardly, while their enemies [the Donati and other Blacks] are proud, valorous men, expert in warfare.’”

As far as the rural population was concerned, it is hard to tell whether in medieval and Renaissance Italy the peasants fared better under the burghers than under feudal lords: bourgeois landowners had the same contempt and condescension for their tenants as the lords had in France, even though rustics were “free” in Italy.

Some historians describe Italian city-states of the thirteenth century as often made up of two contiguous and competing communes.^[75] The comune del podestà, clustered within the walls of the old town, like the Florence of Dante's Cacciaguida, represented the interests of noblemen and prelates; the comune del popolo, under the leadership of the capitano del popolo, represented the interests of the high burghers. This second commune had its own courts, notarial agencies, armed citizen companies, trade guilds, and even electoral structures.

The institution of podestà became common shortly before 1200, replacing the consuls whose appearance around 1100 must be taken as a sign of a commune coming into being.^[76] Interestingly enough, the troubadour Folquet de Romans saw in the north-Italian institution of the podestà a triumph of personal merit over the stasis of feudal order. In Provence privilege no longer followed valor: “I wish we had a lord with enough power and authority to take away riches and lands from the ignoble who do not deserve them, and give them to those who are deemed brave” (“a tal que fos pros et presatz”—which, he thought, was the way nobility began in the world); “and he should not regard lineage but change the status of the ignobly rich, as the Lombards do with their podestà ”—“e no.i gardes linhatge, / e mudes hom los rics malvatz, / cum fan Lombart las poestatz.”^[77] Folquet seems to call for revolution from above, asserting that the “popular” structures of northern and central Italy were a triumph of meritocracy, which, the troubadours hoped, could give the troubadours their due within the feudal system.

The transition through each stage of the commune, from the consular and then the podestarial form, both dominated by the noblemen, to the popular form, dominated by the merchant guilds, and finally to the signorie, which around the end of the thirteenth century usually returned the power to an aristocratic family of ancient or recent blood, varies from region to region but shows common patterns, with occasional alliances between aristocratic and high ecclesiastical interests.^[78]

In Milan the Della Torre were followed by the Visconti bishops; in Verona and Mantua the new signori got their power riding on the shoulders of the local guilds and the popolo, but soon, as was usual everywhere, they proceeded to divest the popular institutions of their influence and to ground the new government on the support of the signori's natural allies, the local aristocracy. In Ferrara the new lord Obizzo d'Este suppressed the guilds outright in 1287. There, as in Mantua, large scale patronage sealed the victory of despotism by turning over to the new lord's allies and acolytes all sorts of confiscated rural properties. In November 1283 Treviso witnessed a tense coup-d'état whereby Gherardo, head of the White (Guelf) party and of the influential noble family Da Camino, was popularly elected captain of the city and district and given absolute power to interpret the communal statutes according to his will. He immediately banned the rival Castelli feudal clan, leaders of the Red (Ghibelline) party, and confiscated their property. In Orvieto the long struggle between the popolo and the nobility ended in 1334, when the council of the popolo voted to suspend many constitutional clauses and handed full power over to Ormanno Monaldeschi, leader of the principal noble family, as “Gonfalonier of the Popolo and of Justice” for life.^[79]

Starting early in the thirteenth century, the education of the ruling classes, which had passed from the hands of chaplains on to the cathedral schools and then to the courts, was shared, especially in Italy, by rhetoricians and masters of ars dictandi. The later humanists would inherit this role, since humanists were often lawyers and notaries who pursued their philological interests alongside their bureaucratic and administrative careers.^[80] An early example of a militant notary is the famous Bologna professor of ars notaria Rolandino dei Passeggeri of Padua, who in 1274 captained the armed companies that drove the Ghibelline nobility from the city of Bologna. Rolandino had his counterparts in Brunetto in Florence, Ptolemy of Lucca in Lucca, and later Marsilius of Padua at the imperial court.^[81]

In Italy, too, the cult of knighthood survived the loss of the military functionality of court knights, and chivalric models remained operative for centuries in everyday life. Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages (1927) described the impassioned ritualization of chivalry at the court of Burgundy in the fifteenth century, but that court was only extreme, not unique: similar patterns of thinking and behaving were widespread, and Renaissance Italy was no exception. For anecdotal but typical examples, Martín de Riquer tells the stories of several of the

Aragonese knights who found the Italian courts a logical setting for bloody duels fought under extremely elaborate rules of chivalry. In 1432 the Marquis Niccolò d'Este summoned to Ferrara the Valencian knights Joan Tolsà and Joan Marrades for the armed encounter for which they had been desperately trying to find a worthy setting, with noble judges and witnesses. In 1457 Sigismondo Malatesta, signor of Rimini, agreed to convoke Pere Sarriera and Genís Miquel of Gerona to Rimini for a duel to the death, but realizing that the demanded conditions amounted to cruel suicide, he managed to arrange a solemn diplomatic reconciliation on the field of battle, resulting in great rejoicing of the whole court, and ending in the public dubbing of Miquel and of Sarriera's son. Splendid festivities followed, with dancing attended by Sigismondo's famous mistress, Isotta degli Atti. In 1465 the Duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza, agreed to sit as judge at the duel between the Portuguese Joâo de Almada, Count of Abranches, and the prominent Navarrese knight Juan de Beaumont, to be held in Mantua.^[82] We shall see that even in the sixteenth century and later, Italy remained a fertile ground for private challenges and spectacular duels of this sort.

The generation of Castiglione, Machiavelli, Ariosto, Guicciardini, and Bembo experienced what Guicciardini termed “the horrendous calamities” of the Italian wars, which brought out all the weaknesses of Italian social and political structures. It was difficult enough for regional powers to resist the onslaught of national foreign neighbors, but perhaps more decisive were the inner tensions of nobility versus high bourgeoisie, with the lower popolo being unwilling to display loyalty to systems that kept it outside any decision-making mechanism and oppressed it economically and fiscally. Spain and France could count on armies of citizens that felt much more united under their kings than was the case for any Italian populace. In the meantime, the disoriented and stunned ruling castes emulated the court aristocracy (made up of old nobility, high clergy, and ennobled high bourgeoisie) with a feeling of idealized cultural self-satisfaction that made them cling ever more tightly to their egotistical privileges, while their economic productivity had become disrupted and depressed by political and military vicissitudes.

The world of the courtiers was also the world of Italian diplomacy, which has been recognized as influential in shaping the typology of this varied profession for centuries.^[83] To offset the Italian states' political, social, and military disadvantages, their diplomats had been hoping to “make the foxes masters of the lions”: cunning should have had the

best of sheer military force by using those behavioral principles of dissimulation, calculation of interests and passions, oratorical persuasiveness, and compromise which they had inherited from their “curial” medieval predecessors. The cleric and the courtier hoped to dominate knight and soldier and bend them to their interests. In vain, we now know.

In any event, in Italy and elsewhere court life changed and yet continued to show certain similarities of patterns between A.D. 950 and the French Revolution. European courts gradually evolved from the feudal and then chivalric type to the monarchic centralism of Louis XIV, where both noblemen and high bourgeois administrators became dependent subjects of the king to a degree that had not yet been seen. Francis I marked the point of transition, when France saw the birth of aristocratic society. Some large fiefs still remained, but the king's law courts, staffed by the bourgeois personnel of the parlements,

increasingly displaced the feudal administration and jurisdiction . . . . At the same time Francis I built up, beside the landowning nobility with its hierarchy of fiefs, a new titular nobility extending from the simple noblemen to the princes and peers of France . . . . As early as the second half of the sixteenth century almost all the names of the aristocracy are new names.

What the king rewarded in this manner was military service. “As before, therefore, the nobility was a military estate.”^[84] Hence one thing remained constant in the midst of these social upheavals: the homines novi, like the old feudal lords, were warriors, and their mentality continued to hinge on certain moral principles that we see reflected, with the necessary adaptations, in the literary genres that concern us.

It seems fair to assimilate the changes in Italian society to this grand pattern of evolution. The secular courts of Castiglione or the ecclesiastical ones of Paolo Cortesi were, in their mixture of new aristocrats of the sword, bourgeois mercantile tycoons, and high bureaucrats, analogous to the French court and different from the displaced medieval feudal nobility. At the same time they harbored cultural and moral images which were an adapted inheritance from medieval chivalry.^[85]

Should we choose to look further, we would find French society growing stronger from the sixteenth century on, just as Italian society declined with the waning strength of its independent entrepreneurial merchant class after 1500. The French bourgeoisie continued to play a vital role through the nobility of the robe centered in the parlements, for which there was no equivalent in Italy after 1500. The relative cul-

tural lag of Italy versus France after 1600 had its superficial manifestations in the literature of the two countries, but our subject here is the themes and forms of chivalry and courtliness, which is one part of that broader story.

Further Suggestions

Despite its extended ideological impact, the feudal regime enjoyed a relatively short life in western Europe, achieving its full maturity in the twelfth century. But besides the vertical ramifications that, as we shall see, extend feudalism up and down a long chronological span even to our own time, our theme can also have horizontal ramifications that overlap its European geographic boundaries. Indeed, the study of the triangular relationship among feudal structures, chivalric ideology, and literature should gain by being extended beyond Europe. To illustrate the avenues that would open up to a comparative exploration of feudalism's cultural dimensions it should suffice to extract some elements that parallel the ones I am about to retrace in western Europe.

Knights and clerics were cosmopolitan classes in the Middle Ages, and good travelers, too. The Norman horsemen about whom we shall hear a good deal were active from Norway to northern France, Sicily, and Anatolia in the tenth and eleventh centuries. They operated by the thousands as mercenary soldiers in the Byzantine empire.^[86] Like the West, only with more dire consequences, the Byzantine empire witnessed in those centuries a fierce struggle between the military party and the court bureaucrats, vying with each other for supremacy even while the Turks were waiting at the borders, ready to invade Anatolia under propitious circumstances. The generals were large provincial landowners with long military experience through many generations. Not unlike the western ministerials, the bureaucrats, mostly around the court of Constantinople, were clerics, intellectuals (like Psellos, intimate of Michael VII Ducas, emperor since 1071), and functionaries, some with landed property to back up their influence and power. The dissension between the two parties prompted both to seek support outside the regular army, in mercenary armies of foreigners like Normans, Slavs, and even Turks, with the result that foreign armed groups managed, as they had once done within the Roman empire, to take advantage of their entry into the state system until they could openly go to the attack and eventually overrun the whole region.^[87] A consequence of these changes was the decline of the free peasantry, forced to give up their

land to the generals and high clergy. Since these latter acquired progressive exemptions from the taxes that the free peasants had been paying, the state was deprived of precious tax moneys. The peasants, now disenchanted and less productive, became serfs (paroicoi ) of the secular and church magnates. It was the conclusion of a process that, “for want of a better word, must be described as ‘feudalization.’”^[88]

The most extensive experiments in feudal organization probably took place in eastern Asia, and I shall summarize them in a way that demonstrates some of the analogies with European phenomena treated in the forthcoming analysis. In its centuries-long variations, the Confucian doctrine which dominated Chinese life generally emphasized loyalty (chu in Japan), moral reform, reason as distinct from (alternatively opposed to or cooperating with) instinct or desire (the basis of violence and warfare), subordination of private to public good, and the cult of family (ko in Japan) and ancestors. These were some of the more elementary teachings of Confucius (551-479 B.C. ), a scholar of court ritual and music who later turned to moral philosophy and the teaching of government and social ethics. It is easy to see the analogy of such principles with those of western curiality and courtliness which shall be described presently. The Confucian cult of ancestors displaced the Chinese aristocratic tradition of regarding ancestors as the divine source of power and privilege. Believing that the individual is responsible for his own actions, that only the virtuous and capable are entitled to govern, and that ability and character are developed by education through formal schooling, Confucius taught that those in power must be able to choose capable ministers (like the western courtiers and ministerials) to whom to delegate all administrative authority.

His most influential successor, Mencius (late fourth century B.C. ), was an itinerant philosopher going from court to court to teach compassion and virtue as a more successful way of governing than selfseeking guile or force. Belief in the inherent goodness of human nature was the humanistic foundation of this moral philosophy. The Orthodox Neo-Confucianism of Chu Hsi (1130–1200) became the official state doctrine in China from his time to the end of the empire in 1911, with a relative revival after the conservative victory of Chang Kai-shek in 1926.

Confucianism had a powerful influence in Japan, where a characteristic form of feudalism embodied in the class of daimyo (“great names”) ruled from the late twelfth century until 1869, when the new Meiji regime forced the daimyo to turn their lands over to the emperor. Not

unlike the high courtiers and great knights we are about to meet, these feudal barons were dedicated warriors as well as educated practitioners of the arts, which they also patronized at their courts. Above them sat the shoguns, who derived their authority directly from the emperor at Kyoto. The samurai or professional warriors, developing into a class since the tenth century, ranked immediately below the daimyo. Like the emperor and the shoguns, the daimyo held court at their towns of residence, at the center of the territory they owned hereditarily and governed as military leaders, provincial magistrates, legislators, and judges. Their court culture included the aptitude to administer according to the learned ways of the imperial court, and consisted of a combination, developed under Chinese influence, of the arts of war (bu ) with the arts of peace (bun ), the latter serving as a way to legitimize the former. This is in close parallel with the combination of knightly militarism and the civilizing arts of courtesy and humaneness that we shall observe in the West.

The regime of the daimyo, which superseded the previous system of public domain, fragmented the country into a set of personal power centers subjected to the nominal authority of the shoguns. The fourteenth-and fifteenth-century shugo daimyo were appointed by the Ashikaga shoguns, a dynasty of hereditary military warlords, and in turn they appointed their own vassals to rule over minor fiefs. After 1467 a period of chronic civil war set in, with sengoku daimyo ruling independently together with their vassals and waging war against their neighboring rivals. In 1603 Tokugawa Ieyasu (d. 1616) was recognized as leader of the daimyo and started the long, peaceful period of the Tokugawa shogunate that lasted until 1867. By administrative and juridical measures Ieyasu managed to constrain the daimyo as well as the imperial court nobles, the clerics, and his own vassals. To ensure his succession, in 1605 he made his son Hidetada supreme shogun or generalissimo. Hidetada managed to force the daimyo to build a huge new palace at Edo (present-day Tokyo) at their expense and with their labor; by 1614 Edo had become the Versailles of Japan, with the daimyo living in nearby mansions as court nobles and practically as hostages. The analogy with Versailles is striking. The daimyo, who toward the end of the period became a parasitic aristocratic class, were classified by their relationship to the ruling shogun, that is, as kinsmen, hereditary vassals (fudai ), or allies. Their spiritual and martial education took place mainly in the temples and focused on writing, reading, philosophy, religion, literature, and the fine arts. Neo-Confucianism, originally

propagated by Zen Buddhist masters, was the guiding principle of the Tokugawa regime all along, and was characterized by mind-to-mind instruction from master to disciple rather than reliance on scripture and set doctrine—similar to the method of the imperial and episcopal chapels to be described in my next chapter.^[89]

It would be rewarding to interpret the courtly and knightly elements in the literatures of China and Japan by comparing them systematically to their analogous manifestations in the West. Court novels and diaries reached an unparalleled degree of sophistication in Japan around the year 1000, the period of such masterpieces as Lady Murasaki Shikibu's (ca. 978 to ca. 1031) Genji monogatari (“The Tale of Genji,” ca. 1001–1008) and Sei Shonagon's (ca. 966 to after 1013) Makura-nososhi (“The Pillow Book,” ca. 1000–1015). One wonders about the analogies that might result from an investigation of the cultural and literary constants emerging from the literature of such disparate yet inherently similar feudal societies.