The Knight in History (2 page)

In the twelfth century, some of the same social and economic forces that lay behind Crusading led knights into an unexpected and even anomalous pursuit. Certain of them became “troubadours,” lyric poets who flourished in the sophisticated climate of southern France and who produced a body of verse that, in addition to its influence on European literature, had a high intrinsic value, now unfortunately obscured by the lapse of Provençal from an international literary language to a local dialect. The troubadours’ poetic successors, knights of northern France and of Germany, carried on the tradition as trouvères and minnesingers. Narrative poetry and prose, influenced by the troubadours, also swelled the twelfth-century literary Renaissance, reaching a climax in the Arthurian romances, a multiauthored accumulation that fixed the image of the medieval knight for himself, his contemporaries, and posterity.

The knight-errant heroes of the Arthur stories had historical counterparts whose adventures, if less fabulous, were genuine enough as they roamed Europe earning a living in tournament and battle. Those of William Marshal of England, who became the trusted counselor of kings, have been preserved in a valuable chronicle. By the thirteenth century, political developments had attached the knights firmly to the nobility and modified their role from the strictly military. The rise of a money economy and subsequent inflation increased the expenses of knighthood and created a new class of men eligible to become knights who no longer wished to be knighted but opted to remain squires. Simultaneously, commoners—rich peasants and merchants—began to invade the knightly class.

The Church’s ideal of the “soldier of Christ” was best realized in the Military Orders that fought the infidel in Spain, eastern Europe, and above all the Holy Land. The Knights Templars, Hospitalers, Teutonic Knights, and Spanish Orders of Calatrava, Santiago, and Alcantara performed their military duties with a monastic discipline that contrasted with the unruly individualism of the traditional knights. The Templars, the most celebrated of the Orders, were drawn into the unknightly profession of banking, which led first to their enrichment and then to their downfall.

The Hundred Years War (1337–1453) worked the final transformation of the western European knight from landed vassal to professional soldier. The careers of two knights, the Breton hero Bertrand du Guesclin and John Fastolf, an English knight of middle-class origins who reaped a fortune from the war, illuminate aspects of fourteenth-and fifteenth-century knighthood.

In the end the knight was absorbed into the standing army of the new national state, where he quickly lost his distinctive identity. More enduring was the influence on manners and morals of “chivalry,” an ambiguous word that sometimes refers to the corps of knights themselves, sometimes to the panoply of tournament and heraldry, sometimes to the knightly code of conduct. The title of knight survived as a lower rank of nobility and as a conferred civil or military honor. The panoply long enjoyed popularity, especially in the circles of royalty, and even made a memorable farewell appearance in the age of Victoria. The code of conduct, with its invocation of generous sentiments, has never lost its appeal, and is permanently enshrined in the literature of chivalry.

2

The First Knights

IN THE BEGINNING… NO MAN WAS HIGHER IN BIRTH THAN ANY OTHER, FOR ALL MEN WERE DESCENDED FROM A SINGLE FATHER AND MOTHER. BUT WHEN ENVY AND COVETOUSNESS CAME INTO THE WORLD, AND MIGHT TRIUMPHED OVER RIGHT…CERTAIN MEN WERE APPOINTED AS GUARANTORS AND DEFENDERS OF THE WEAK AND THE HUMBLE
.

—The Book of Lancelot of the Lake

M
EDIEVAL MORALISTS believed that at an early stage knights had been chosen as the sword arm of society, to enforce justice and protect the helpless. This event had occurred in antiquity, and Old Testament heroes such as Judas Maccabeus and King David were included in the roll of knights. The real entry of the knight into history was no such dramatic phenomenon, but a gradual coalescing of social and technological elements over a long period of time.

Long though its germination took, the rise of knighthood was a medieval event, not a Roman continuation. Rome possessed its own class of “knights” (
equites
, horsemen), originally the cavalry wing of the Roman army and source of the army’s officers. This class had by the end of the Republican period abandoned its military role and become army contractors, tax farmers, and exploiters of public resources. They formed the lower segment of the upper class, just below the senators, a status memorialized in the theaters and arenas throughout the Empire, where the first rows were reserved for the senators, the next several for the knights.
¹
Contrary to the assumption of some nineteenth-century historians, however, this Roman “Equestrian Order” had no historical connection with medieval knighthood.

Scholarly controversy still clouds the emergence of the medieval knight.
²
Records for the critical period are scarce, and semantic problems—the relationship between late-Roman terms for certain kinds of soldiers and Latin terms used in the early Middle Ages—compound the difficulty. Terms used for social classes in the time of Charlemagne and those of the eleventh century are equally ambiguous. The prejudices of early modern historians also inhibited understanding. In the nineteenth century, when feudal society was regarded as backward, barbaric, and chaotic, a school of German scholars headed by Heinrich Brunner attempted to prove that feudalism had originated not in ancient German tribal custom but in eighth-century France. Brunner traced its beginnings to the adoption by Charles Martel of the Muslims’ cavalry arm and tactics. To support his new cavalry corps, Charles seized church lands and granted them as “benefices” to the mounted soldiers, thereby inventing the fief. These first knights became, according to Brunner, the ancestors of the medieval nobility.
³

Brunner’s theory was elaborated and refined by two twentieth-century historians, French medievalist Marc Bloch and American Lynn White, Jr. Bloch, writing in the 1930s, proposed that the nobility of the early Middle Ages, both the Roman senatorial class and the Germanic chiefs, had disappeared by the eighth century; what took its place was a new class distinguished not by birth but by power derived from the king’s service. Pedigrees of the medieval nobility could be traced back only to the “crucial turning-point of the year 800,” shortly before which the class had its origins in the professional warrior of the time, with his horse, armor, shield, lance, and sword. “As the logical consequence of the adoption, [in] about the tenth century, of the stirrup, the short spear of former days, brandished at arm’s length like a javelin, was abandoned and replaced by the long and heavy lance…” Added to stirrup and lance were helmet and chain mail. These improvements made the warrior’s equipment far more expensive, affordable only by a rich man or a rich man’s vassal. Therefore the Carolingian kings bestowed lands—benefices—to support and equip their fighting men, who formed a new aristocracy.
⁴

In the 1960s Lynn White embellished the theories of Brunner and Bloch, making the stirrup the “keystone” of “Brunner’s magnificent structure of hypotheses.” White moved the arrival of the stirrup in western Europe back to the first part of the eighth century and attributed its adoption to “Charles Martel’s genius.” “Feudal institutions, the knightly class, and chivalric culture” were born from “the new military technology of the eighth century.”
⁵

Recent scholarship has favored a more complex picture of the origins of knights, medieval nobility, and feudalism. Most historians now do not believe that knights originated in the eighth century, or that they were the founders of either the medieval nobility or feudalism. The consensus is rather that there was a genuine nobility of blood and birth in the time of Charlemagne and his successors, that it was indeed enriched by the king’s grants of land and office, but that its origins lay not in a class of mounted warriors recently raised from obscurity but in the old Frankish aristocracy. This Carolingian nobility, with continuing transfusions of new blood including that of knights, was the source of the nobility of the High Middle Ages.
⁶
Pedigrees are difficult to trace (and not only before the “crucial turning-point of the year 800” but in most cases before the year 1000) not because the families were parvenu, but because the concept of family in the ninth and tenth centuries differed from that of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
⁷
“The noble kins of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian world,” writes a modern authority on early medieval sociology, “…present to the historian an oddly horizontal rather than vertical aspect, very different from the later dynasties of counts, castellans, and, by the twelfth century, even knights….”
⁸
Patronymics—family names—had not yet appeared. Families were not the monolithic arrangements of the later age when feudalism was at its height. Much of the land in Europe in the tenth century was still held not by the conditional terms of feudal tenure but unconditionally as “allods,” land that could be sold or bestowed freely as the owner chose. On his death, the land was commonly divided equally among his heirs. Primogeniture, with principal family property passing from father to eldest son, or any variant form of undivided inheritance, was not yet the rule.

CAROLINGIAN WARRIORS
,
FROM A NINTH-CENTURY IVORY PLAQUE, WEAR CONICAL HELMETS AND CARRY ROUND SHIELDS.
(LOUVRE)

In this new picture, feudalism did not emerge suddenly out of the military needs of Charles Martel, but grew slowly out of the confluence of Germanic and Roman social institutions, with strong influence from a third source, the Christian Church.
⁹
The personal association of lord and vassal has been found to have roots in both Germanic and Roman society. An ancient German custom was the
comitatus
, the association of a young warrior with an older one, in which the young man pledged loyalty and service in return for maintenance by the older. A similar Roman custom provided patronage, protection, and support of a client in return for his allegiance. Still another form of mutual association was the Franks’ practice of commendation, in which a freeman voluntarily bound himself to a lord, giving up his freedom and pledging his fealty while placing himself under the lord’s protection.

The other great basic of feudalism, the conditional grant of land, had its origin in the Church. Forbidden to sell its lands, the Church invented the benefice (favor) or
precarium
(response to prayers), allowing a layman use of Church land without giving him title to it.

Feudalism was in essence the association between lord and armed followers supported by the conditional gift of land. Although its origins can be traced to the early Middle Ages, not until the thirteenth century did it reach maturity, and in some regions, notably Italy, it never became the dominant system. By the thirteenth century the most feudalized areas of Europe—northern France, the Low Countries, England, and Germany—no longer recognized the existence of allodial land, land owned outright. All lands were regarded as fiefs. In southern France and Spain, on the other hand, allodial property never completely disappeared, while in Italy the allod remained the principal form of land tenure throughout the Middle Ages.

The military revolution, too, seems to have been gradual, though in light of the long Greek-Roman standstill in weapons technology its changes were dramatic.
¹⁰
The Roman soldier fought on foot, with short sword, protected by a shield and a few pieces of light armor. The knight of the High Middle Ages fought on horseback, completely sheathed in heavy armor, carrying a long sword and heavy lance. With the lance gripped under his arm, his body secured to his horse by saddle and stirrups, he could deliver his blow with the mass and strength of the horse united to his own, creating the sometimes overrated but nonetheless effective technique of shock combat.

BRONZE
EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF CHARLEMAGNE
,
NINTH CENTURY. NOTE THE ABSENCE OF STIRRUPS.
(LOUVRE)

The technical innovations embodied by the knight, including the nailed horseshoe and the stirrup, can be traced all the way back to the central Asian nomads who invaded the Near East and Balkans at the beginning of the Middle Ages. The first documented evidence of the stirrup is from North Korea in the fifth century
A.D.
The Avars, originally from Mongolia, seem to have brought the stirrup when they established themselves in the 550s in what became Hungary. From the Avars the device passed to the Byzantines, then to the Arabs.
¹¹
The first pictorial evidence of the stirrup in western Europe dates only from the ninth century, but archeological evidence shows that it was known at least a century earlier. Whether Charles Martel’s “genius” was responsible for adopting it cannot be proved or disproved, but what emerges from the mass of literary, archeological, and pictorial evidence is first, that the stirrup was probably not widely used till long after its initial arrival in Europe, and second, that mounted shock combat was not a decisive element in the campaigns of Charles Martel and his immediate successors, or indeed for some time afterward. Even as late as the Battle of Hastings (1066), it was apparently not the rule. David C. Douglas, the authority on William the Conqueror, describes the battle as offering no evidence of “the ‘classic’ use of cavalry—that is to say a massed charge of heavily armed horsemen, riding knee-to-knee, using their mounts to overwhelm their opponents, and then attacking with lances and swords.”
¹²
The famous Bayeux Tapestry, executed in England a few years after the battle, shows the Normans equipped with stirrups but carrying light lances which, like the spears or javelins of the infantry, are thrown at the enemy rather than driven by the force of the horse. That decisive changes took place in military technology between the eighth and the twelfth centuries is beyond question, but perhaps it is more appropriate to describe them as evolutionary than as revolutionary.