Chapter Three—
Courtliness and Chivalry in France
Courtly Knights and Chivalrous Princes:
From Reality to Ideation (and Vice Versa)
The nonfictional genres of chronicles and biographies will now assist us in establishing the connection between the evolution of curialitas and the standards of chivalry. To the German texts adduced by Jaeger I shall add a number that appear to show how the standards were developing, at the same time or even earlier than in Germany, in the Flanders, northern France, Normandy, and Anjou, thus perhaps invalidating this part of his thesis and confirming the more traditional view of the historical genesis of courtesy. Jaeger suggests that German imperial/episcopal standards might have spread to other areas from the tenth to the eleventh century, but, since he has not managed to supply what appear as missing links, we must assume that the developments we are surveying took place independently.[1]
A pithy portrait of the first Norman Duke Richard I by Dudo of St. Quentin (De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum, ca. 1017–1020) provides an example of the summary presentation of an already established code of ethical personal qualities expected of a successful leader. This code was both logical and specific in terms of a tradition that harks back to the classics but with significant application to current needs: “He shone for his noble ancestry, . . . well behaved, . . . endowed with a sparkling appearance, second to none in piety. Of fine complexion and more distinguished than anyone in all his
gestures, he stood out for his pleasant speech, even sweeter to all for his gait and dress. He was attractive in his clean speaking and always serene and happy at heart.”[2] The text belongs in the epideictic genre, a specific antecedent being Claudian's panegyric of the Roman general Stilicho in the De consulatu Stilichonis, but what interests us is the way such topoi did not simply carry on a stale schema, but were obviously used because they fitted the occasion.[3]
Dudo's chronicle was continued after 1070 (hence, after Hastings) by Guillaume de Jumiéges (Gesta Normannorum ducum )[4] and, again, in 1073/1074 by Guillaume de Poitier (Gesta Guillelmi II ducis Normannorum et regis Anglorum ).[5] This last author concentrated on a panegyrical biography of William the Conqueror, presented as the perfect ideal of the valorous and pious knight. In all these portraits, the chivalric or knightly ethos, still in its inchoate stage, is vested in the high nobility, the milites being presented as an unruly crowd in need of restraint from above. It was only in the next century that the lower nobility, turned “courtois,” would assume a leading role to be emulated by its superiors.
Interestingly enough, the portraits keep shifting the emphasis from the subjects' warlike virtues to their being handsome knights dedicated to the protection of the poor and the weak, the clergy and the Church, and to the prevention of injustice, plunder, and the violation of equity and measure. In more religious contexts the miles Christi was reminded that he had to serve with humilitas and misericordia, Christian humility and readiness to help the needy. All three chroniclers, Dudo and the two Guillaumes, agree on attributing to the fierce dukes the pious qualities that the preachers of the Peace of God, in the wake of an ancient tradition based on the Bible, had wanted to see in a ruler and a noble soldier.
In a passage that reminds us of John of Limoges's story of Joseph and the Pharaoh, Dudo tells of the abbot Martin of Jumièges's dissuading Duke William Long-Sword (Guillaume Longue-Epée, ca. 930–942), son of Rollo, from abandoning his life as a warrior and secular leader in order to join the “superior,” holier rank of the monks. “Who will protect us monks from the pagans and the plunderers if you leave your calling and your duty? Everyone must stay and serve in his God-assigned social role.”[6] Consistent with this view of the divinelyordained social order, Guillaume de Jumièges, who confirms the story of the abbot Martin,[7] praises Richard II for mercilessly and efficiently crushing a peasant revolt by cutting off the leaders' hands and feet.
Thus, says Guillaume, did Richard teach the peasants a lesson: those whom God appoints to work (the agricolae ) must work, while others fight or pray.[8]
In this interesting episode of the centuries-long debate on vita contemplativa versus vita activa, the solution is based not on the search for the perfect state but on everyone doing his assigned job. The clerics perform their self-appointed task as court educators by assigning to the rulers a mission that is both a prefiguration of chivalric ethic and a confirmation of what Jean Flori calls “the royal ethic,” which, in the climate of the Peace of God, gradually percolated down from the king to the princes and, finally, to the new knightly class.
The texts abound. Two other examples are Helgaud's life of King Robert the Pious (ca. 1033), where the king's main concern is given as the protection of monks, widows, orphans, and the poor,[9] and Odo of St. Maur's (Eudes de Saint-Maur-des-Fossés) life of Count Burchard of Vendôme, Corbeil, Melun, and Paris (Vita domni Burcardi, 1058), where this high vassal, counselor, and intimate friend of Hugh Capet and Robert the Pious, is said to have been marked by piety and eagerness to defend the Church.[10] This “royal ethic” could not play the same role in Germany as in France, given the different relationships between Church and state in the two regions and the more limited role of the Peace of God in Germany.
A different vantage point conditions Guelf speculation on the role of milites within a divine scheme, which divided humankind into three broad estates or “orders” (ordines ), usually identified as: pugnatores or bellatores (the warriors), oratores (those who pray), and laboratores; namely, the nobility, the priests, and the workers. In a poem of the late 1020s on Robert the Pious by Bishop Adalbero of Laon we read: “Triplex ergo Dei domus est, quae creditur una . . . . Alii orant, alii pugnant, alii laborant.” The eleventh-century Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium (Deeds of the Bishops of Cambrai) attributes to Bishop Gerard of Cambrai a division of mankind into oratores, pugnatores, and agricultores —a division which can be dated to 1024.[11] These are the first documents of the doctrine: both Adalbero, a man of royal blood of Carolingian descent, nephew of the already mentioned archbishop of Reims by the same name and cousin-german to the dukes of Lorraine, and Gerard, also a Carolingian by blood, were interested in asserting their authority as magistri over Robert, king of France; they clearly placed themselves in such a position as oratores above the class of pugnatores or bellatores, which included the king as first soldier.
Writing between 1090 and 1095 within the framework of the controversy on investiture, the brilliant curialist Bonizo, bishop of Sutri (ca. 1045—ca. 1096), defined the role of the milites, part of the ordo laicalis of the pugnatores, as military/political service to the lord to whom they are sworn (above all, to the governing prince) and to the Church (including the rooting out of heretics and schismatics), as well as maintenance of moral justice and social order, including the defense of the poor, widows, and orphans. They must refrain from plunder and private violence: “praedae non iniare, . . . pauperes quoque et viduas et orphanos defensare.”[12] St. Bernard of Clairvaux would give his most authoritative endorsement to such a perspective (De laude novae militiae ). In the early years of the twelfth century the influential theologian and moralist Honorius Augustodunensis (perhaps of Augsburg or Ratisbon/Regensburg) reiterated the injunction to knights to be ready to defend widows and orphans and help the poor (“viduas, pupillos defendentes, . . . pauperes pascentes”), sternly warning them to avoid plunder and fornication: “a rapina et fornicatione vosmetipsos custodire.” Fornication here may refer to rape or to the sort of adulterous living and thinking that would become a standard feature of courtly love.[13]
In the broader context of what Georges Dumézil has called the “trifunctional” doctrine of social order, it is symptomatic that the idea of the tripartite division of society into Clergy, Nobility (the soldiers), and Laborers reappeared in the authoritative Traité des ordres et simples dignitez of 1610 by the Parisian Charles Loyseau, who also designated these “orders” as “estates” (estats ).[14]
An outstanding example of the closeness of clerics to the knights at court is that of Ordericus Vitalis, who in his Historia ecclesiastica (1142) tells of Gerald of Avranches, chaplain to the lively familia or maisnie of Hugh of Chester, spinning out chivalric tales for both the entertainment and instruction of the assembled court (ad emendationem vitae virorum curialium ). Rather surprisingly, the tales studding Gerald's sermons were exemplary lives of ancient saintly warriors (sancti milites ): Demetrius, George, Eustache, Sebastian, Theodore, Maurice, and the monk/Count Guillaume of Aquitaine (the Guillaume d'Orange of the chansons de geste )—all models of the Christian knight, fighter for God, Church, and society.[15]
Ordericus is an important witness because, even in the seclusion of his Norman monastery, he was among the first to define a code of ethical conduct that can be considered clearly chivalric by the principles of
“knightly honor” which we encounter in the romances. When we read how nonchalantly Chrétien's Lancelot releases his once dangerous enemies, simply on their promise to do exactly what he commands, we can think back to Ordericus's story of William Rufus (Guillaume le Roux, William the Conqueror's son and successor). The king had just freed his prisoners on their own word, after treating them as honored guests. When his courtiers objected to this trusting gesture, he lost his temper: “A knight does not violate his word, or he would lose his honor forever, as an outlaw!”[16] Another point dramatically presented by Ordericus is respect for our adversaries. Ordericus cites the nearly bloodless 1119 battle between Henry I Beauclerc and King Louis VI of France, in which nine hundred knights fought but only three were killed, as a result, the author says, of the combatants' sense of “brotherhood of arms” (Flori [1986]: 272). The noble warrior wants to defeat his knightly opponents, not slay them. Here again we are reminded of the knight's reluctance to kill even the most abominable characters in the romances, once they have been duly defeated. This brotherhood extends into a strong sense of class solidarity when we realize how the defense of the weak that we have seen illustrated above was largely limited in practice to members of the higher classes. Lambert of Ardres, for example, commends Baldwin II of Guines for being a strong defender of orphans and widows, but we can assume that only noble ones were meant.[17] Orphans spoiled of their heritage would have it restored to them and would then be married off to noble and rich young ladies.
John of Salisbury (1115/20–1180) provides an important analysis of the role of milites in the political and social order.[18] His Policraticus, dedicated to Thomas Becket, was written in 1159 while John was secretary to Becket, then Chancellor of England, and when Henry of Anjou, once the idol of the French knights and now king of England as Henry II, was trying to restore royal authority after an interlude of triumphant feudality.[19] In line with his patron's firm Gregorian views on the relationship between the spiritual and the secular, John declares the prince to be the priests' minister, inferior to them in absolute status. John advises the prince to be learned in letters in order to be able to read the law; if he is illiterate he should be guided by the counsel of literate men—presumably the learned clerics at court.[20] Against this background it is easier to understand why and how John represents the ecclesiastical perspective of knights as justified and good, even “saintly” if they serve the prince loyally according to the Christian faith.[21] When, however, they behave, as so many do, as plunderers and pursuers of
their own or their lords' violent private quarrels, they are no better than criminals, to be restrained and punished by the king. Both positive and negative statements amount to an important theoretical recognition of the knightly status and of its inherent unacceptability to the Church, at least in its de facto form. In particular, John's statements severely criticize the practice of knight errantry and the knights' ethos of luxury and splendor—let alone the inherent sinfulness of courtly love.[22] Just as later “books of chivalry” would turn out to be derivations of Flavius Vegetius's ancient Roman treatise on military art,[23] so do John's concepts have a basis in the ancient literature on military life and duties. Yet it is clear that he has chivalry in mind, as when he specifically criticizes the method of recruitment, which is not based on merit, as he thinks it should be, but on individual patronage. It is even clearer when, in book 6, chapters 10 and 13, he refers to the ceremony of dubbing as symbolic of the knight's solemnly sworn profession (consecratio by ordinata militia ) to serve the altar and God with the very sword he has laid on the altar. Unfortunately, he sadly interjects, some knights, by a purely secular interpretation which makes of militia a true malitia, come to their consecration in order to swear war on the same altar, its ministers, and God.[24]
John's austerely qualified recognition of the role of knights in the feudal state was carried forward by Alan of Lille, the outstanding heir of the Chartres masters William of Conches, John of Salisbury, and Peter of Blois. Jean Flori sees in Alan's work the coming of age of the chivalric ideology in the last third of the twelfth century, when it achieved its triumph in Flanders and the Plantagenet domains, perhaps not without Alienor (Eleanor) of Aquitaine and her daughters having played a decisive role.[25] Alan's Summa de arte praedicatoria reiterates the main principles of chivalric behavior: knights must take up defence of country, widows, and orphans, they must be armed with the faith as well as the sword, and they must neither oppress the people nor resort to violence (presumably a reference to private wars). Like John, Alan also regrets that knightly practice does not correspond to its assigned function. Instead of protecting against plunderers, knights themselves do the plundering; they serve for personal profit and, in the end, prostitute the military calling.[26]
In the Livre des manières (ca. 1175), written in the form of a poetic sermon, Étienne de Fougères, bishop of Rennes and Lisieux and former chaplain of King Henry II of England, addresses the knightly class, which in his mind includes the aristocracy as a whole.[27] The tasks God
has assigned to this class are to govern the people, uphold the noblest causes and moral principles toward God, the king, and the Church, maintain peace and justice, and defend the poor. The treatise goes on to review all other classes: peasants, burghers and merchants, and women of all states, and makes the then commonplace critique of each state or “order” (ordo ) for its failure to keep their divinely-willed mutual harmony. In line with Plantagenet policy, Fougères implicitly places ruling princes above the clergy, at variance with the intent of Adalbero of Laon and Gerard of Cambrai, the first theorists of the ordines. Furthermore, he clearly addresses the court and upholds its interests when he commiserates with the toiling peasants only in order to inculcate the principle that they must meekly accept their misery and their exploitation by the lords as God-willed and healthy for them: they are thus cleansed of original sin and will be rewarded in the other world. The long planctus on the sad state of peasants urges the courtiers to assert their mission as leaders and teachers of submissiveness to the lower class, since “knight and clerk must live by the peasant's toil.”[28]
The courtois paradigm which came out of the romances of about 1155–1180 had a direct impact on the French nobility's self-image. In 1160 Henry II Plantagenet commissioned Wace to write his family chronicle, the Roman de Rou (Rou being Rollo or Hròlfr, the Danish Viking who founded the Norman dukedom in France ca. 911). Wace started it in 1160 and interrupted it in 1174. Also by royal commission a “Benoît,” arguably Benoît de Sainte-Maure, the author of the Roman de Troie, carried the chronicle further in his own Chronique des Ducs de Normandie, written between 1173–1175. Both authors were also romanciers, and both carried on the recognition of a positive knightly function.[29] Wace stressed the leader's duty to ensure the triumph of justice in his realm and picked up the story of the abbot Martin dissuading William Long-Sword from entering a monastery, urging him instead to do his work as leader of his people.[30] Of Richard I, Wace says he loved both the clergy and chivalry: “Richard aima clers e clergie, / chevaliers et chevalerie” (3: vv. 273 f.). He was a paragon of courtoisie, governing with fairness all his subjects, peasants as well as burghers, distributing lands and valuables to his nobles, and surpassing all his ancestors in liberality and good manners.[31] The list of courtly virtues is rather full.
It is even fuller in Benoît's Chronique, where William Long-Sword is said to have been hardi, corajos, franc, douz, large, gentis, sage, proz, and prodomme, and Duke Richard I to have been a noble prince, “chevaler merveillos,” “Plein de bonté e de valor / E plein de grand pris e
d'onnor,” a great raconteur, expert at hunting and playing social games, harsh with the wicked, sweet with the good, of good company, and a lover of good music (vv. 19,547–551; 19,560–616). High nobility, knighthood, and courtliness, we can see, had become close allies. Carrying on the Norman/Angevin propaganda line which all these chroniclers share, Benoît made an unfavorable comparison between Louis VII, who downgraded the nobility by surrounding himself with parvenu bourgeois ministers, and Richard II Plantagenet, who would not tolerate anyone of low birth in his entourage.[32] Clearly, this attribution of chivalrous qualities to Norman ancestors was an anachronistic and retroactive reflection of standards then coming into fashion. Even the marauder Rollo was called buen chevalier by Benoît de Sainte-Maure (Chronique: vv. 2388–2398).
In straight historical writing, the minstrel author of the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal gives a vivid portrait of William the Marshal, fourth son of an English baron. After serving under Henry II, Henry the Young, Richard Lion-Heart, and John Lackland, William managed through his brilliant and persistent exercise of the knightly and courtly arts to rise to the status of virtual regent (rector regis et regni ) for the young Henry III. His knightly prowess had first attracted the attention of Alienor of Aquitaine, who appointed him tutor to her son Henry the Young. He had fought in a well-advertised tournament sponsored by Alienor's daughter and Chrétien de Troyes's patroness, Marie de Champagne, and her husband, Henri de Champagne. As a result, he had enjoyed his share of successful and profitable love affairs. He was a good illustration of Charny's “he who achieves more is the more worthy” as the criterion for the model knight (see below).[33]
Feudal society was a man's world, but especially in the twelfth century, the high period of creative feudalism, the role of women was more prominent in the political and economic spheres than in the cultural one, since in the latter women were essentially relegated to a symbolic role of emotional inspiration when not charged with instigation of base lustfulness. Alienor's and her daughters' widely-spread spheres of influence were particularly impressive but not unique cases: women were often in control as regents during a man's absence or minority, and at times as legal heirs. Occasionally they could even lead armies.[34]
Further documenting the close relationship between cleric and nobleman, Breton d'Amboise stressed the joining of chivalry and literacy—the virtues of the warrior/knight and those of the cleric—in the model ruler. Writing his Gesta Ambaziensium Dominorum around 1155 (Hal-
phen and Poupardin opined between 1155–1173), he promoted the literate and chivalric Henry, count of Anjou and duke of Normandy and Aquitaine (who had just become Henry II of England) over King Louis VII of France, whom Alienor had left to marry Henry. Like his predecessor, Louis VI, who had battled to reduce the barons' power, Louis VII was not as inclined as Henry II to appreciate chivalric and literary concerns.[35] His successor Philip II Augustus (1180–1223) carried on a victorious struggle against the Plantagenets, especially Henry II's fiercely independent son and heir Richard I Lion-Heart, also count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine—a chivalric hero in the eyes of all Europe.[36] As legend has it, Richard lost his horse in a battle against Saladin during the crusade of 1191. In admiration for his valor Saladin sent him two Arabian stallions, which enabled Richard to resume the fight and force Saladin to retreat.[37] He was a shining example of the ideology's contradictory power: the pursuit of his feudal interests by chivalrous means made him a bad ruler but a great knight. The famous family rivalry among Richard, his parents, and his three brothers Henry the Young, Geoffrey of Brittany, and John Lackland, shows how the much proclaimed chivalric standards of “loyalty” and “frankness” were impure rhetorical motives, inherently subjective and ambiguous—an aspect of the duality and tension of feudal realities. Richard was admired as the perfect knight and so extolled in the songs of the troubadours (above all, Bertran de Born's), but he was in fact supremely treacherous and perfidious where it counted most, that is, against those who should have been his best lord and his allies: his king and father and his brothers.
Jean de Marmoutier continued Breton's chronicle in his own Historia Gaufredi Ducis Normannorum et Comitis Andegavorum written around 1180 (Halphen and Poupardin dated it 1173), where he portrayed the Plantagenet Count of Anjou, Geoffrey the Handsome (Gaufredus), as a model chivalrous prince, again, like Breton before him, stressing the image of the cultured prince who is fond of vernacular poetry and draws on Vegetius to improve his military strategy.[38] In a remarkably “democratic” episode the “liberal” Geoffrey encounters a peasant, typically described as dirty, hairy, and black. Instead of scorning him, Geoffrey offers the fellow a lift on his horse, and as they ride along he asks him what the people think of their lord. Without recognizing Geoffrey, the peasant says the people think him a great lover of justice, a good warrior devoted to peace and to the defense of the oppressed. The trouble in the land, the peasant avers, comes not from the
good count, but from his ministers, the true oppressors of the people.[39] This does not mean that Geoffrey did not share a sense of class solidarity: what the episode expresses is distrust for the ministeriales, often parvenu commoners, considered greedy and dishonest. Another episode shows him approving the release of imprisoned knights out of sympathy for his peers.[40]
If we wonder about the meaning of this phase in the development of the chivalric ideology and the reasons for its geographical location, we might turn to Paul Zumthor's observation that the literary genre of the romance, arising between 1150 and 1175, appears more closely related to the historiographic genre than to the epic.[41] In those politically better structured regions a new seigniorial class began to discover the harmfulness of warfare. The implicit ethos of the epic was perceived as artificial, if not intolerable. At the same time, clerics and educated knights developed a taste for the book, which began to find a commercial market. While the epic was an oral phenomenon, structurally based on formulaic juxtaposition on the textual level, the romance was completely written out and was to be read in private or heard from reading, not from public recitation. The cultural proximity between historiography and the roman bears a formal marker in that, in the twelfth century, practically all works in both genres are in rhyming octosyllables without caesura. This proximity extends further to the first French literary prose, which, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, also emerged simultaneously and, at first, exclusively in these same two genres.
Lambert of Ardres's (1154–1206) exemplary set of biographies is an advanced case in point, showing the chivalric overlay on a rather different social reality (Historia comitum Ghisnensium, 1194 or more likely 1201–1206).[42] Lambert made his patron Arnold, Arnoud, or Arnulf the Young of Guines a courtly knight with all the trappings inherent to the early biographies of German imperial bishops. Arnold was born in the 1160s as Arnold IV of Ardres before he succeeded his father, Count Baldwin II of Guines, as Arnold I of Guines in northwest Flanders, now Pas de Calais. Arnold's quest for tests of prowess had carried his fame to Countess Ida of Boulogne, who, having been left mistress of a large lordly estate, planned a splendid future for her hero. They exchanged secret messages, in which he used courtship as a means to a political end, since his expressions of love toward the lady were highly suspicious: the author states outright that, “whether his love was true or simulated, its goal and his aspiration were the acquisition of the countess's land and the dignity of count of Boulogne, once he would have
won the favor of the same countess.”[43] Since competition was fierce, Arnold missed out to a rival on that opportunity, but he went bravely on to woo the daughter of the count of Saint-Pol, whom in the end, true Machiavellian knight errant that he was, he jilted for a better match still, the heiress of Bourbourg. Upon the qualities of knight as warrior, Arnold clearly overlaid the refinements of courtly lover, which included the witty and kindly affability of the courtois courtier and largesse almost to the point of prodigality: “in omni curiali facetia praeclarus, servitio promptus”; “largitate ausim dicere fere prodigus.” Note the terms curialis, facetia, servitium, and largitas.[ 44] Lambert's lovingly elaborate portrait ends with an emphatic brush stroke: “per omnia et in omnibus ab omnibus dicebatur et erat gratiosus,” “he was, as everybody agreed, gracious in everything to everybody.”[45] Once again, such courtly qualities are also retrospectively attributed to ancestors: Baudouin II of Guines is portrayed as ready to “serve” and protect widows and orphans[46] and, most remarkably, as having joined, at such an early date as 1060, arms and letters, like a knight/clerk. Being only a layman (laicus ) he did not master Latin, but having had parts of the Scriptures and even secular scientific texts translated for him into the Romance vernacular he knew (“maximam quoque fisice artis de Latino in sibi notam linguam Romanam translatam accepit”), he retained the clerics' expositions and amazed them with his understanding of the deep, hidden meanings: “Non solum superficiem, sed et mysticam virtutem . . . . Non solum ad litteram sed ad mysticam spiritualis interpretationis intelligentiam.”[47]
Chivalry Comes of Age
Joachim Bumke (1964) uses Lambert's famous text to support the following conclusion, a neat summary of his authoritative interpretation:
The aristocratic knighthood of courtly literature is not explainable in terms of shifts in the class structure. It is an educational and cultural idea of farreaching significance, and a phenomenon that belongs far more to intellectual than to social history. The reality of the nobility around 1200 clearly looked quite different . . . . Poets set the ideal of chivalric virtue against this harsh reality, the dream of the gentleman who has tempered his nobility with humility, and who strives to fulfill his worldly duties and to serve God at the same time.[48]
This agrees with Edmond Faral's (1913: 195) observation that “le chevalier amoureux est une invention littéraire du clerc.” Even in 1200
the reality of baronial living did not accommodate the image of the polished, loving knight, but we must now add an important genetic factor: this ideal was created not “out of thin air,” but as part of the civilizing process contained in the clerical education of curial and courtly candidates. The process, we have seen, started in imperial Germany and continued independently throughout the West.[49]
Our three basic concepts are about to come together at this point and a brief pause is needed to keep these distinctions in mind. Chivalry is a historic phenomenon based on both hard social realities and lofty literary ideals, separate yet somehow convergent. It contains in itself, as essential ingredients, the civilizing factors of both courtliness and courtesy, the former being more social in origin, the latter, at this time, more ideological (including, in particular, an exquisitely literary idea which we shall see emerge in the poetry, namely courtly love as the spring of heroic action, its motive and goal).
Because of the model introduced by French romances, the vulgate view of chivalry and courtesy (courtoisie ) has tended to confuse the two categories as originally and naturally coextensive, further combining or confusing the proper elements of courtliness with courtly love. Courtesy became an operative principle in literature only when education of the noble/warrior class by clerics became an accomplished fact. At that point the “courtly,” later “courtois” knight began to draw inspiration from the life of the court, which had become his psychological locus. It was not so before, when the feudal lord lived on his domain without a court of educated clerics and intellectuals. The first point of pressure was at the royal courts, where the need for social polish and regulated behavior was first felt, with the high lords soon starting to emulate the royalty. In due course the progress of royal centralization carried the process further. The literature of romances, first written by clerical curiales for a noble audience, completed this “educative” task. That, especially in Germany, we find so little evidence of direct seigniorial patronage of medieval epics and romances would seem to argue that clerical authors usually took the initiative in their composition, ostensibly to “educate” their audiences rather than in response to any aesthetic desire on the part of their public.[50]
A number of documents can be adduced to illustrate more explicitly this process of education through instruction in moral behavioral rules and correction of beastly and rustic instincts, to use the terminology of the time (e.g., Peter of Blois's and others' instructio and correctio of bestiales and rusticales attitudes). Around 1168 the abbot of Bonne-
Espérance, Philip of Harvengt (near Mons), wrote two revealing letters to important noblemen. First, addressing the new Count Philip of Flanders, he eloquently argued for the principle that a noble knight's militia is enhanced, not hindered, by learning, and that, conversely, letters and the arts are given purpose by the virtues of the good ruler:
Neither is manly chivalry of prejudice to learning, nor is a fitting knowledge of letters of prejudice to the knightly exercises. Indeed, the union of the two is so useful and so becoming in a prince, that the prince who is not made truly noble by knowledge of letters betrays his status by stooping to the condition of a rustic or even a beast.[51]
Philip of Harvengt's other letter conveyed the same advice to Count Henry the Liberal of Champagne, the husband of Chrétien de Troyes's patroness, Marie de Champagne, explicitly urging court patronage of learned clerics. Such arguments were not uncommon: see, for example, Gerald of Wales's reminders that great warriors of the past were all the more valiant in combat as their knowledge of letters threw light on their moral purposes.[52] We have just encountered this same theme in Breton d'Amboise and Jean de Marmoutier.
In a tract aiming to instruct knights in the art of love, Der heimliche Bote (first dated 1180–1190, though more recently 1170–1180 has been proposed),[53] a German cleric argued against the warrior ways of loving in favor of the newfangled style of love based on service through humility. Discriminating ladies now favor the “well-loving man who serves with humility” (“der wol minnende man” who “denet mit demute”), virtue, elegant discourse, wisdom, and sweetness, over the man who only relies on his strong body, physical beauty, prowess, and boldness. The author appears to use the Facetus as one of his sources.
The closeness of the cleric to the knight that we have seen so clearly implied in Ordericus Vitalis is stated outright as an established principle in a remarkably perspicuous allegorical poem of the late thirteenth century contained in Bodleian MS. Douce 210 (ff. 1ra—12vb), where the identification of nobility and knighthood is also sanctioned in straightforward terms:
Et quant prince oiez nomer,
Entendez-i le chevaler;
Sanz chevaler ne poet rais estre
Rien plus ke eveske (poet) sanz prestre,
Dount ces dous, clerc et chevaler,
Ount tot le mounde a governer;
Li clerc ki touz dait bien aprendre,
Li chevaler pur touz defendre.[54]
(And when you hear the name of prince, / understand it for knight; / a king cannot be without the knight, / no more than a bishop without the priest, / hence these two, the cleric and the knight, / have all the world to govern; / the cleric to teach us all, / and the knight to defend us all.)
Let me now anticipate some of the forthcoming analysis by summarily setting the nascent chivalric code alongside the courtly one: equivalences and similarities may point to the way the two will combine into the new code of courtesy. The courtier's “elegance (or beauty) of manners” had meant self-control, entailing humanity and consideration toward others. Similarly, the victorious knight of the romances often surprises us by resisting the instinct to pursue his victory and exercise his right to kill. He humanely releases his prisoner without conditions, or simply on his word that he will publicize his defeat. Elegance is also personal style, etiquette, and social manners, and the knight always puts on a dignified, even splendid show if circumstances permit, with liberality and a sense of theatrical display. Love for the woman adds the decisive dimension of gentility, refinement, and devotion.
Technical Treatments of Chivalry
Looking for reliable historical sources on chivalry, Maurice Keen has called attention to a type of document that has not been taken into account by either literary or political historians, namely the treatises on chivalry written by technical secular writers—writers, that is, who were reforming neither clerics nor poets. Keen picked three texts that continued to be widely read, translated, and adapted well into the Renaissance, namely: the anonymous poem Ordene de chevalerie (probably before 1250); the Libre del ordre de cavayleria (between 1263 and 1276) by the Majorcan mystic Ramón Llull, a dedicated knight before his conversion; and the Livre de chevalerie by the French knight Geoffroi de Charny (d. 1356).[55] It is interesting to check the parallels in the ethical framework between the literary texts and these documents which, thanks to, rather than in spite of, their relatively late date, can be taken as conclusive statements. There is also an early document of this kind that Keen has not taken up, namely the Ensenhamen del cavalher (ca. 1160–1170) by a nobleman from the Landes in Gascony, Arnaut Guilhem de Marsan, especially remarkable because it offers as models of behavior not only such ancient heroes as Paris, Aeneas, and Apollonius of Tyre but, alongside them, the Arthurian knights. Since
Chrétien de Troyes had just begun composing his romances, this is also one of the many indices of the Arthurian lore's widespread popularity even before Chrétien.[56]
The Ordene is the poetic story of a Count Hugh of Tiberias who, having been captured by Saladin, obtains his release by agreeing to dub the latter as a Christian knight according to all the proper forms. The elaborate ceremony is described in detail, and Saladin frees his admired preudhomme with a display of chivalrous largesse that makes Saladin the equal of the most enviable Christian knights. There is evidence that the Ordene was well known in Italy.[57]
In the body of the work and in the final summary, Llull's treatise sketches the knight's character as loyal, truthful, hardy, courageous, liberal, moderate, and humble. He must also be eloquent, of noble bearing, and an elegant dresser. The art of knighthood deserves formal cultivation, hence specialized books are needed as spiritual, intellectual, and technical nourishment, and schools should be set up for the proper training of aspirants to this honorable status. Llull was well ahead of his time, since such institutions only came into being in the sixteenth century in the form of Academies for Knights and Riding Schools, starting with the celebrated school established by Federico Grisone in 1532 in Naples. It was later imitated by the Jesuits in their colleges and universities, where such elective subjects (riding, fencing, etc.) were offered as “exercises and sciences of chivalry” and reserved for the nobility. Other countries followed suit: Richelieu established and endowed the exemplary Académie Royale in 1636, one year after his Académie Francaise; even the small dukedom of Savoy had a famous military academy for the nobles attached to the Royal Palace in Torino, and in addition to the Royal College for the Nobles (1679), run by the Jesuits. The Jesuits had a number of colleges exclusively for nobles, like the important Collège de la Flèche in Anjou established by order of Henry IV (1603), and several in Italy, the most illustrious of these being the one at Parma, founded by Duke Ranuccio I Farnese (1601, entrusted to the Jesuits from 1604 to 1770).[58]
An active man at arms all his life until he fell at the battle of Poitiers in 1356, Charny found enough free time to write three treatises on the fine points of chivalry, the last and longest one probably in the early 1350s. He was talking about real knights, who hurt when they fall and who know how to enjoy the moments of success and conviviality, keeping lofty ideals before them but quite capable of managing their interests on a day-to-day basis. Love service is an uplifting motive for bravery,
since to serve par amours increases valor (483–485), but it appears without the hyperbolic and unrealistic garb it was wont to take on in imaginative literature.[59]
Johannes Rothe (Ritterspiegel, ca. 1410) reviewed the whole aristocratic hierarchy open to the knighthood (Heerschild ). Ghillebert de Lannoy (Instruction d'un jeune prince, first half of fifteenth century,[60] like the anonymous Enseignement de la vraye noblesse) made extensive use of Llull and, like his contemporary, the Castilian knight Diego de Valera (Espejo de verdadera nobleza, more widely known in the French version by Hugues de Salves, the Traicté de noblesse ), showed a typical mixture of medieval anachronistic interpolation and incipient humanistic moods by adducing the ancient Romans as models of true chivalry.[61]
These didactic treatises for the instruction of knights demonstrate the inseparability of social and economic factors from the mental structures produced by the literature of imagination. They share a common ethos with the “mirror of princes” for the education of royal scions—both ranks being called upon to “govern.”
Giles of Rome, or the Merging of the three Codes
One of the most influential of these mirrors of princes calls for our special attention: the De regimine principum, dedicated about 1280 to the young prince, the future Philip IV of France, by the Augustinian scholar, high administrator, and pupil of Thomas Aquinas, Aegidius Columna Romanus (Egidio Colonna or Giles of Rome, ca. 1247–1316).[62] An outstanding specimen of political speculation for its moral and doctrinal setting, this treatise was immediately popular, as attested by the numerous vernacular versions including English and Tuscan (the earliest of the five Tuscan versions dates from 1288).
Aegidius is a good example of the importance and complexity of episcopal appointments even in the France of Philip the Fair (1285–1314). Despite the Concordat of Worms, most of the bishops were still chosen from among the king's close collaborators (about twenty-eight of Philip's officials, mostly high-ranking administrators and trusted advisers, became bishops during his reign). Yet even a high-handed king like Philip could not always have his way: at least twice his own hand-picked Pope Clement V appointed other than the royal candidate.[63] Aegidius had been Philip's high tutor, though too busy on his own to be personally
very close to his pupil or to act as a royal courtier. He was also naturally opposed to Philip's policies in the quarrel with Boniface VIII since he was a prominent upholder of Guelf policies and papal rights, as laid down in his De ecclesiastica potestate (1301), where all power, ecclesiastical as well as temporal, was said to derive from the pope. Nevertheless, his appointment as archbishop of Bourges in 1295 was welcomed by the king:[64] high personal regard could still be an important part of a future bishop's effective credentials, as it had been in the imperial courts before the investiture contest. Moreover, despite the author's strong Guelf feelings, the youthful De regimine was explicit on defining royal authority in ways that a king of France could only find to his taste. “Melius est regnum et civitatem regi rege quam lege,” “the king's rule is better than rule by law,” he unequivocally stated, since the king is above the law, “supra iustitiam legalem,”[65] although kings were said to be tyrants unless they governed for the common good, “propter bonum communem.”[66] This healthy principle notwithstanding, he sounded a strong Augustinian note of caution where he said it was better to obey than to revolt against tyrants if revolt risked the evils of anarchy.[67]
The broad scope of the notion of courtliness is confirmed by the definition of curialitas we find in the De regimine principum: “curialitas est quodammodo omnis virtus, quia nobilitatem morum quasi omnis virtus concomitari debet,” “curiality is in a sense the whole ensemble of virtues, since almost every virtue must accompany the nobility of mores,” hence it is to be expected of all royal and princely ministers (2.3.18).[68] In that chapter Aegidius expanded on the traditional list of such curial virtues, lingering on magnificentia, temperantia, fortitudo, affabilitas, hilaritas, and liberalitas.
What throws a special light on this important text is the way it was rendered into French in a remarkable vulgarization that was more influential than the original, undoubtedly starting at Philip's court.[69] The definition of curialitas was dropped in the translation (where this chapter 18 became chapter 16 of the same part), although its meaning was clearly carried in the ensuing discussion, but it is particularly interesting that here and throughout the text, curialitas was rendered without any hesitation as “courtesy,” cortoisie (Molenaer ed.: 261). The text goes on promising to demonstrate by two arguments of “nobility” why the ministers of kings and princes must be courtly or courteous: “nos dirrons quele chose est cortoisie, et qu'il afiert as serjanz des rois et des princes que il soient cortois, por quoi nos poons primierement prover II nobleces” (p. 261 vv. 15–20). There follows a disquisition on the roots
and characteristics of true nobility, stating that the serjanz need “noblece de mours et de vertuz” (p. 261 v. 20), as distinct from the “noblece de lignie” (vv. 21 f.)—“nobility of manners and virtue rather than by birth.” Then the exposition presents a twist: the courtier must be courtly (cortois, curialis in the original), not simply in order to do what is pleasant or to obey the law, but in order to be like the noblemen of the court: “ne mie por le delit qu'il a ne por la loi acomplir, mes por ensuivre les mours et les manieres des nobles hommes” (p. 263 vv. 12–14). This because courtesy is nothing but a nobility of good mores: “cortoisie n'est fors une noblece de bones mours” (p. 262 v. 29), and a courtier is one who does good deeds in order to imitate and preserve the mores and manners of a noble court: “quant il fet aucunes bones euvres por retenir les mours et les manieres de la cort as nobles hommes” (p. 263 vv. 15–17). He is truly noble who behaves like a nobleman at court. We can thus conclude in our turn: courtiers are imitators rather than originators of noble manners—which can be assumed to be a reversal of what happened in historical reality.
Nor is this all. The last section of the work (part 3 of book 3) contains an art of war, dealing with government in wartime: it starts with seven chapters on militia rendered outright with chevalerie, boldly and frankly comparing it with other soldiers, bellatores, in governing and defending both castles and towns (chastiaus, citez ). Knights are called upon to defend the people from external enemies or from internal dissensions and injustices (esp. pp. 372 f.). Proper knights are arbiters of battle, above common soldiers. On Vegetius's authority, Giles says peasants are better fighters—“les vileins sont meillors bataillors”—because they are tougher, more used to physical effort and all sorts of hardships, and, not expecting much from life, they are less fearful of death, whereas the nobles are accustomed to many comforts (pp. 376–379). Vegetius, of course, was speaking of Roman legions, where the generals knew all too well that the bulk of their strength lay with the peasants, not the equites. Yet the nobles have a powerful factor in their favor: they are motivated by honor, which can make them better fighters. Besides, knowledge and skill count too, especially on horseback (p. 380).
This exemplary text offers palpable proof that, at the time of their full ripening, the three notions of courtliness, chivalry, and courtesy (in the broadest possible sense, including good social conduct) could be seen as logically coexistent and convergent in their natural habitat at court. They coexisted as the centrifugally active ideology, the ethical core of the power center. The interrelatedness of these three codes being
the main theme of the present study, of all the material at hand this text of Giles of Rome may be one that ideally and neatly clinches the argument.
To summarize the complex situation I have been surveying: around the year 1100, once the gains obtained by force of arms became consolidated, the high nobility began to taste the advantages of a more refined way of life which was being defined by the educated clerics for a lay society with a secular culture. A more sophisticated ethical code began to set in, with the help of a literary corpus of tales and precepts. The old military virtues became joined with the new courtly ones, specifying liberality in the use of worldly goods, affability and articulateness in conversation, and elegance of manners: the whole cemented in a sublimated experience of love, proclaimed as the secret of all human value. Nobles and knights were getting ready to advance their full claim to rule.