The Mammoth Book of King Arthur (54 page)

This is not an idle concept because the intent behind the very first Crusade, in 1096, had been to foster links with Constantinople with a view to establishing a united Christian Empire with the
Pope as its head, rather than simply a secular empire. Nevertheless, it is pretty certain that at the time of the Third Crusade, in 1189, a secular empire was uppermost in the mind of the Holy
Roman Emperor Frederick I, known as
Barbarossa
because of his flaming (though now somewhat grizzled) red beard.

The Third Crusade is the one most people remember because it involved Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, who captured Jerusalem in 1187. The two other main European leaders at the time were the
French king, Philippe II and Frederick I. Of all the rulers in Europe, Frederick came closest to exemplifying the romantic image of the chivalric King Arthur. At the celebration of Pentecost in
Mainz in 1188, Frederick was duly inspired and took the Cross. I strongly suspect that when Frederick led his vast army of some 100,000 men (Saladin believed it totalled a million!) out from
Ratisbon in May 1189 – probably the largest and best equipped army ever to venture on a Crusade – he believed himself to be Arthur reborn. I also suspect that the latest generation of
romancers had Frederick in mind when they wrote about Arthur.

Unfortunately, Frederick’s crusade ended in disaster. The Byzantine Emperor Isaac Angelus had colluded with Saladin to hamper the overland route from Europe through Constantinople to the
Holy Land, and Frederick’s army had been forced to make a difficult crossing over the Bosporus, and through the mountains of Cilicia in southwest Turkey. Attempting to help his son, who was
battling the Armenians at a bridge over the River
Calycadnus (modern Göksu), Frederick rode his horse across the river, but was carried away in the current and drowned.
Although dispirited, Frederick’s men took his body to the Holy Land and buried it at Antioch. However, just as in the legend of Arthur, rumours abounded that Frederick had not died but been
washed away, and that he was presently sleeping and would return again to rule Germany.

Despite taking the Arthurian legend forward significantly by linking it to the legend of the Grail and Joseph of Arimathea, Robert was not a great writer, and his story is bland and
straightforward. It required someone else to rework Chrétien’s
Perceval
in a more inspired form, and that someone was Wolfram von Eschenbach. Wolfram referred to himself as a
minnesänger
, the German equivalent of a French troubadour. He joked about his own illiteracy, although that may simply mean he was not well versed in French or Latin. Wolfram probably
came from somewhere near the town of Anspach, in Bavaria in southern Germany, and from about 1203 onwards was under the patronage of Hermann, Landgrave (count) of Thuringia, at his court at
Wartburg in Eisenach. Hermann was a renowned patron of the arts, and we know that sometime around 1210 he commissioned Wolfram to translate the French
Aliscans
into the epic poem
Willehalm.
This non-Arthurian story of a young man’s rise to knighthood and eventual retirement to a monastery is set against the background of Charlemagne’s war against the
Saracens, and was powerful Crusader fiction.

We do not know who commissioned Wolfram’s
Parzival
, but Hermann probably played a part, since Wolfram was attached to his court at the time. The work appears to have been composed
in two parts, since Wolfram stopped at the end of Book VI and asked for anyone else to continue it. He may have written these first six books at the behest of a patroness with whom he then fell
out, and only continued the work when at the court of Hermann after 1203.

Like the continuators in Flanders, Wolfram was drawn to finish Chrétien’s
Conte du Graal.
However, he was no slavish imitator. He even chides Chrétien’s misuse
of his source material, saying: “If Master Christian of Troyes has done wrong by this story, Kyot, who sent us the authentic tale, has good cause to be
angry.”
Kyot, according to Wolfram, was a Provençal author and traveller who had found the manuscript – written in Arabic by an astronomer called Flegetanis – in Toledo. This may be a
fictional device, but it gives an air of authenticity to a story that has many Arabic features. Wolfram’s patrons, especially Hermann’s son Ludwig who had been to the Holy Land with
Henri of Champagne (the son of Marie, countess of Champagne), could easily have brought back any number of ancient documents. Wolfram used the idea of a more accurate source in order to explain the
differences between his story and Chrétien’s, and to allow it to develop along his own lines, whilst still contriving to relate it to the same subject. It was very effective.

There was a contemporary French writer, Guiot de Provins, but there is no reason to believe that Wolfram was suggesting Guiot as his source, despite the similarity of the name to
Kyot
, as
nothing written by Guiot (a one-time
jongleur
turned monk who wrote social satire) has any connection with the Grail or the Holy Land. Yet Guiot did have some interesting connections. He was
from Champagne (Provins is midway between Troyes and Paris), but had connections with Spain as one of his patrons was Pedro II of Aragon. Pedro’s wife Maria was the granddaughter of the
Byzantine Emperor Manuel. Guiot may well have known Chrétien, but there is no way of knowing if he knew Wolfram.

Another feature that suggests that Wolfram was following a previous script and not creating one is that his Parzival, rather than coming from Thuringia or Bavaria, is from Anjou. Chrétien
makes no specific reference to Perceval’s nationality. The implication is that he is either English or Welsh; indeed, most versions call Perceval
le Gallois
, “the
Welshman”. Making him an Angevin links him not only to the ruling house of England and Normandy, but more pertinently to the previous ruling house of Jerusalem. Fulk V, count of Anjou (whose
son Geoffrey was the father of Henry II), had become king of Jerusalem through his marriage to Melisande, when her father Baldwin II died in 1131. He was succeeded by Amalric I.

The combined forces of the west never managed to regain Jerusalem after the Third Crusade, and the so-called kingdom remained in disarray, refocusing its “capital” at Acre.
Fulk’s line continued through his granddaughter Isabella, queen of
Jerusalem, who married (amongst four husbands) Henri II of Champagne. After her death in 1205, at the
time that Wolfram was writing
Parzival
, the kingdom passed through a sequence of daughters and husbands, until merging with the parallel kingdom of Cyprus.

In making Parzival an Angevin in search of the Grail castle, Wolfram was identifying the castle very clearly, to contemporary eyes, as a form of spiritual Jerusalem. It was not the same as
Jerusalem, but was its spiritual counterpart. Parzival’s adventures, and those of a more earthly Gawain, become joint quests to achieve control of the spiritual Jerusalem. Wolfram succeeds
admirably in making the one an analogue of the other. All readers of
Parzifal
at the time would know what he was saying: that only the most devout and perfect Christian could achieve the
Grail and, by inference, win the Holy War.

Parzival
may even have become a way of excusing the creation and growth of the chivalric orders of knights in the Holy Land, the Knights Templar and the Teutonic Knights. Wolfram reveals
that the Grail Knights are the “Templars”, and that the Grail castle is a hidden fortress that governs the command of the west, sending out new lords to control tenantless lands.
Wolfram’s use of the world “Templars” or, more accurately,
Templeisen
, need not automatically mean the Knights Templar, since he is referring in general terms to those who
guarded the Grail temple. But since he also dressed them in white surcoats with red crosses, the connection is inevitable.

However, the concept of the Grail Knights that Wolfram develops goes beyond the Templars, and becomes analogous to another order. The Teutonic Order of Knights, founded in 1190 and based at
Acre, had been transformed in 1198 from a medical to a military order within the Knights Hospitaller. Their evolution into an independent order that fought on behalf of Christian rulers against
pagan nations did not fully develop until after 1211, when Andrew, king of Hungary, hired them to combat the Kumans. Thereafter, the Teutonic Knights separated from the Knights Hospitaller and
became mercenaries fighting in the name of God to protect Christians and to convert the pagans.

Wolfram makes a clever connection in the story. The symbol of the Teutonic Knights was a white surcoat charged with a black
cross, covered by a dark blue mantle. The knight
who becomes the Guardian of the Grail, Feirifiz (the illegitimate son of Parzival’s father Gahmuret and the Arab queen Belacane of Zazamanc), is described as “particoloured”,
looking rather like a zebra, being half white and half black.

The Teutonic Knights were established under the auspices of Amalric II, king of Jerusalem. He was the fourth husband of Fulk’s granddaughter Isabella, father-in-law of Gautier, Robert de
Boron’s patron and half brother of Jean d’Ibelin of the Round Table. The Master of the Teutonic Knights, at the time they developed their militaristic role in 1211, was Hermann von
Salza. His family were vassals to Hermann of Thuringia on the Eisenach estate, and Salza had accompanied the Landgrave to the Holy Land in 1197, along with Henri II de Champagne. Hermann of
Thuringia’s son Ludwig married Elizabeth, daughter of Andrew of Hungary, whilst another son, Konrad, later became Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights.

There are too many coincidences here. Wolfram had finished working on
Parzival
by about 1210, concluding with the revelation that the Grail Knights secretly assisted dispossessed rulers
against the pagans to protect the Christian faith. A year later, the new Master of the Teutonic Knights, who just happened to live on the estate where Wolfram was writing
Parzival
, set out
to do exactly that in Hungary.

It is difficult to be certain which came first, as Wolfram may have been inspired by the concept of the Teutonic Knights, and worked their principles into
Parzival.
However, if Wolfram
was also recounting his story of
Parzival
to Hermann of Thuringia, perhaps in the presence of Hermann von Salza, it suggests there must have been some interplay. I strongly suspect that
Hermann of Thuringia used
Parzival
to help prepare the way for the new role of the Teutonic Knights by showing them as serving the holiest of purposes. The Grail Knights were not simply
serving Christianity; they were protecting the Grail itself, the embodiment of Christ’s spirit on earth. Under Wolfram, the Grail castle had become, on a spiritual plane, what the Papacy was
on an earthly plane.

It is worth reminding ourselves that Wolfram did not write a further Grail poem.
Parzival
is complete in itself. Although
Arthur appears in the story, he has no
significant role, although his nephew Gawain does, as an earthly counterpart to the spiritual quest of Perceval.
Parzival
is thus only a borderline Arthurian novel. Unlike Robert de
Boron’s work, which was looking toward a reunited Roman-Byzantine Empire,
Parzival
was looking to a united Papacy, and therefore did not need the Arthurian denouement.

At the same time as
Parzival
was being created, another writer, unfortunately anonymous, was also working from Chrétien’s original and developing yet a third variant of the
Grail story, usually called
The High History of the Holy Grail
, or
Perlesvaus.
It is a wholly allegorical version, far removed from Wolfram’s secret history. Whereas the works
by Chrétien, Robert de Boron and Wolfram were commissioned by the noble heads of Europe to promote and justify their activities in the Holy Land,
Perlesvaus
has the feel of a work
produced by a member of the church to promote the spiritual and ethical aspects of the Grail. That suggests it was written by a learned monk or cleric, which is probably why it has remained
anonymous, with no court poet claiming his hand or his patron.
Perlesvaus
lacks the inventiveness of Robert de Boron’s work, the style of Wolfram’s and the charm of
Chrétien’s, but what it has which those three lack is sincerity. It was composed by an individual who believed in what he was writing, not necessarily in a physical Grail, but in a
spiritual goal.
Perlesvaus
was a book written not only to entertain, but to inspire and to provide a Christian foundation to the chivalric ideal.