The Age of Chivalry

by Hywel Williams

  ABOVE Saint Columbanus, who founded monasteries in France and Italy in the late sixth century, is portrayed in this fresco in the 12th-century cathedral at Brugnato, near Genoa.

  Christianity’s rituals, liturgies and sacraments gave structure to European culture at both an individual and social level, with seasons of penitence, Advent and Lent, preceding the joyful feasts of Christmas and Easter. Priests blessed harvests, animals and ships, and offered up prayers of intercession in the face of natural and man-made disasters. The Christian culture’s chronology gave a new dimension to the passing of time and separated it from the pagan past. Earlier chronologies had been varied. Some dated the years according to the number that had elapsed since the foundation of the city of Rome, and others were structured by the regnal years of different emperors. In the early sixth century, however, the Syrian monk Dionysius Exiguus had established a sequence of years based on what he took to be the date of Christ’s birth. After the English monk and historian Bede (673–735) used that anno domini system in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, it became the norm in Latin Christendom. The division of the year itself also changed. Although the months still had Roman names they were now divided into the seven-day week borrowed from the Jewish calendar, and that unit replaced the Romans’ tripartite division of Kalendae, Nonae and Ides.

  THE PROMINENCE OF THE LAITY

  The distinction between clergy and laity that gave structure to European society was interpreted with a new zeal by the Church reform movement of the 11th and 12th centuries. Clerical freedom from subordination to lay authority was, of course, central to the Investiture dispute, but the Church’s new sharpness of tone also enhanced lay status in many ways. The new teaching stated, for example, that lay authorities could legitimately perform certain judicial actions that were now forbidden to the clergy, such as the shedding of blood and administration of physical punishment. Clerical authorities from the 11th century onward also gave a new validity to lay activities that earlier and more monastic forms of Christianity had either ignored or scorned. Commerce, marriage and family life were now regarded in a positive light rather than being viewed as a sign of humanity’s fallen condition. And the emergence in the central Middle Ages of theories sanctioning “just war”—military action approved by the Church in specific circumstances such as a response to aggression—gave a new ideological underpinning to the battlefield excursions of Christian princes and generals.

  ABOVE Farmers in Gimpelsbrunn celebrate a kermis in this woodcut (c.1530) by Sebald Beham. Popular in the Low Countries and northern France during the later Middle Ages, the kermis celebrated the anniversary of a local church’s foundation and often honored the church’s patron saint.

  Lay vitality was also evident in the universities founded in the Middle Ages and which were granted imperial, papal and royal privileges. The first guilds of university teachers had emerged in the late 12th century, with their members insisting on the professional right to set the standards that applied in admitting and examining students. Effective teaching and transmission of knowledge presupposed readable styles of writing, and the Carolingian script had been a huge ninth-century breakthrough in standards of legibility. Standardization took another leap forward with the Gothic script which was developed in the 12th century and whose consistent style for abbreviations and literary expression provided teachers and students with texts that were as identical as possible.

  SCHOLASTICISM AND MUSICAL ADVANCES

  The dispute between the empire and the papacy was medieval European culture’s first major public debate about the basis of authority, and its polemical energy resulted from rival interpretations of certain key texts—especially in the field of law. By the 1140s documents relating to Church law and discipline had been assembled together in the Concordia discordantium canonum attributed to the Benedictine monk Gratian who taught law at Bologna. More generally known as the Decretum Gratiani, the treatise combined jurisprudence with the analytic style typical of scholasticism—the technique of classifying knowledge and structuring arguments that was now the hallmark of medieval Europe’s intellectual life. The sheer scale of scholasticism’s ambitions set it apart from the earlier monastic culture’s more contemplative and discursive approach to faith and knowledge, and the system’s dialectical method was applied to medicine and the arts in general as well as theology and law. Hugh of Saint-Victor (1096–1141), based at the Paris abbey of that name, produced in c.1127 the Didascalicon, a wide-ranging encyclopedia of current knowledge, and Peter Abelard (1079–1142) taught the dialectical method of investigation to the many students who flocked to Paris to be instructed by him. A similarly analytical emphasis is evident in the Four Books of Sentences (Sententiarum libri iv), a highly influential work of theology written by Peter Lombard (c.1100–60).

  Europe’s musical culture also acquired new styles of elaborate expression at this time. The early medieval liturgy’s most characteristic sound was that of the Gregorian plainchant whose differing styles, based on the Jewish tradition of singing psalms, were all monophonic. From the 12th century onward, polyphonic styles started to diversify both sacred and secular music. Early motets were exclusively liturgical, but by the end of the 13th century the genre was accommodating secular love poetry. The madrigal, written usually for two voices and often based on a pastoral subject, had acquired its typical form in Italy by c.1300.

  THE CULTURE OF CHIVALRY

  Religious and secular impulses co-existed within chivalry—a code of honorable conduct associated with the mounted knights (chevaliers) of French military culture and whose fashionable reputation led to its widespread diffusion among the landed classes from the 11th century onward. The chivalric ethic fashioned the norms of social behavior that applied in the courts of kings and princes, but the military dimension remained important throughout chivalry’s four centuries of influence within European high society. Heraldry, for example, acquired increasingly elaborate rules that dictated the designs of coats of arms painted on warriors’ shields. The wearing of heraldic emblems allowed individual knights and nobles to proclaim pride in their ancestry when taking part in jousts, tournaments and the formalized hunting of wild animals. But the shield and its designs never lost their primary role of identifying a combatant in the battlefield mélée, and heraldic emblems became increasingly important during the later Middle Ages, since by that stage a nobleman’s entire body was encased in armory when he went into battle.

  BELOW The Gutenberg printing press, as shown in this undated woodcut, revolutionized the production of books. After its introduction in the mid-15th century, texts no longer had to be copied by hand individually.

  Chivalry, however, also encompassed a whole set of mental attitudes quite apart from the military expertise involved in adroit horsemanship and the handling of lances and swords. Valor, honor and loyalty were supposed to be shown not just on the battlefield but also during peacetime and in domestic settings. Islamic society had its own traditions of chivalric behavior in all these dimensions of life, and European knights may well have been influenced by the conduct of the warriors they encountered during the crusades waged in Syria and Palestine. Spain’s Muslim commanders, encountered by many an adventurous Christian knight during the reconquista, produced their own influential examples of the Islamic warrior’s gallantry. Christianity’s social teachings were fundamental to European chivalry. The Peace and Truce of God was a Church-inspired movement that sought to limit the effects of both public warfare and private violence, and from the late-tenth century onward popes and senior clergy would announce, and try to enforce, regular periods of amnesty when knights were expected to display mercy toward weaker members of society. Chivalric attitudes engendered a markedly individualized way of looking at the world, as can be seen in the code’s association with the cult of love, both human and divine. Medieval Christianity’s increased devotion to the Virgin Mary involved a new emphasis on redemptive suffering, and the chivalrous knight’s duty of h
onor obliged him to play a self-denying and courageous role in warfare that was designed to defend and advance the Church’s interests as guarantor of the faith. But chivalry’s idealization of femininity was also present in the devotion shown by knights to certain aristocratic women, whose honor they defended and whose graciousness could then be extolled in the suitably decorous language of “courtly love.”

  ABOVE Richard II of England (r. 1377–99) presides over a courtly tournament in this 15th-century Flemish manuscript. Two mounted knights are jousting in the arena while, in the pavilion to the left, musicians play trumpets. Spectators view the scene from the safety of the pavilion on the right.

  THE EXPANSION OF EUROPEAN CULTURE

  Medieval Europe’s encounters with its neighbors led to a tighter definition of what counted as “European,” with previously pagan civilizations being conquered, converted and assimilated into Christian cultural norms. That process led to Scandinavian society becoming the northern frontier of medieval Europe, and by the 11th century the previously nomadic Magyars, once so ferociously pagan, were settled in the kingdom of Hungary that had become a central European bastion of Catholic Christendom. The late tenth-century conversion of the aristocratic (and mostly Swedish) leadership of the principality of Rus, centered on Kiev, was the basis for Russian Christianity’s subsequent evolution. Medieval Rus therefore provided a new eastern frontier that marked the boundary between European and Asiatic culture. Russian Christianity’s allegiance to the patriarchate of Constantinople placed it however within the Orthodox Church’s orbit of influence, and European culture’s most significant internal division during the Middle Ages was the one between Latin and Greek Christianity.

  Other cultures resisted the European tide or mounted offensives against its advance, and the climate of opinion associated with the First Crusade gave a new focus to Islamic-Christian hostility. The crusades led by Christian kings ended in failure in the Middle East, but the crusading ideal remained an important feature of European social attitudes until the 16th century, when Ottoman Turks threatened to advance through the Balkans and into central Europe. Despite its cultural and religious antipathy to Islam, Europe nonetheless imported many features of the Muslims’ material culture—especially their maritime, technological and agricultural innovations. Europeans became aware of a dimension other than the Islamic one to their eastern borders with the arrival of the Mongols, whose savagely effective campaigning in the mid-13th century, especially in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, exposed the continent’s east and center to hitherto unimagined levels of danger. The diminution of that threat allowed Christian Europe to direct some of its missionary energy toward Mongol-dominated Asia—a vast territory extending to the Chinese border—and by the 1290s Franciscan friars were running missions in China.

  From the 10th to the 15th century Europeans exported their culture to the continent’s northern and eastern borders, and the idea of a common European society extending from the Atlantic shores to the frontier zone of the Eurasian steppes had acquired both a territorial reality and an imaginative power. From the 13th century onward Europeans could also cross their local seas more rapidly, and map them more accurately, as a result of improved techniques in maritime engineering and navigation. It was that accumulated expertise and body of knowledge that enabled European mariners to embark on their subsequent explorations of the West African coasts and of the Atlantic and Pacific seas. The great age of discovery originated in the outward-looking curiosity of Europeans during the later medieval centuries, and by 1500 the continent’s culture was being transmitted across vast oceans and to continental regions in the west and south of a newly discovered world.

  ABOVE A late-15th-century Flemish illustration, from the Chroniques de France et d’Angleterre, of the duke of Burgundy landing in Africa. Such explorations led to the global expansion of Christianity and European culture.

  THOMAS AQUINAS

  The system of philosophical theology called Thomism was raised on the foundations laid by Tomasso d’Aquino (c.1224–74), the most original and influential thinker of medieval Latin Christendom. In the post-medieval centuries Thomas retained his authority as the philosopher who had reconciled the teachings of Aristotle with Christian theology.

  From the late 19th century onward a revived form of Thomism became the voice of Catholic orthodoxy in its confrontation with secularism. However, emphasis on Thomas the saint (he was canonized in 1323), the scholastic system-builder and Doctor Angelicus—whose teaching was divinely inspired—obscures the reality of a creative intellectual whose work alarmed many contemporaries.

  A scion of the southern Italian nobility, Thomas was educated as a boy at the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino and subsequently at the University of Naples, which had become a center for the study of philosophical and scientific texts translated from Arabic and ancient Greek. His decision to join the Dominican Order, whose members embraced poverty and begging as a way of life, rather than the more venerable Benedictines, upset Thomas’s family. The Dominicans however were involved in the cut-and-thrust of contemporary life as preachers and teachers who lived in the world—and most often within the fast developing townscape of 13th-century Europe—rather than existing in monastic seclusion. Thomas’s decision was a conscious rejection of the two narrow forms of life in which he had been raised: the daily regime of Benedictine spirituality—ordered, beautiful but dull—and the social milieu of the landed estate as lived by his parents in the district around the town of Aquino. The mental and spiritual life that he craved instead was one capable of responding creatively to the contemporary European scene. Mendicancy (or begging) was central to the Dominicans’ radical involvement, just as it was for Francis of Assisi and his followers.

  By the autumn of 1245 Thomas was in Paris, having been sent there to study by his Order, and the intellectual excitement he could generate as both teacher and writer was immediately apparent once he started to lecture at the University of Paris in 1256. Arabian-Aristotelian science and thought were now acquiring a widespread appeal in Europe, and the Church had responded initially with a panic-stricken condemnation. Aristotle in particular was deemed guilty of an arrogant rationalism and of naturalism—a creed equating nature with God. His reputation took a profound knock when the work of Averroes, the great Spanish-Islamic interpreter of Aristotle, became known in Paris and other university centers. The Averroist notion of a double truth, with the conclusions of reason and faith both being valid but also capable of contradicting each other, disturbed the Christian consensus. Other teachings by Averroes, and attributed by him to Aristotle, included the notion that the world is eternal (and not therefore created in time), and that the soul consists of two parts: an individual element which is not eternal and dies with the human body, and a divine element which links up all of humanity as common partakers in an eternal and universal consciousness.

  The commentaries written by Thomas sought to show that Aristotle’s thought was consistent with the Christian teaching that the individual soul is immortal and that God had intervened to create the world at a particular moment in time. Thomas’s position, expounded in a dazzling series of over 80 works that include the celebrated Summa Theologiae (1265–73), was exposed to attack from two directions. Averroism was the most exciting form of wisdom in 13th-century Europe and its elevation of “nature”—a category that included both the physical world and human society—appealed to many at a time of material advance and intellectual progress. Traditional Christianity on the other hand, harking back to St. Augustine, emphasized the “fallen nature” of mankind that was subordinate to God’s grace—a divine freedom that obeyed its own imperatives. Thomas, by contrast, chose to relate reason to faith: the theologian accepts the insights of faith as a starting point and then expounds them by following the distinctive rules of reason. His re-evaluation of nature—the sum total of the material world’s events and developments—proved particularly provocative. Matter was not distinct from spirit but its ine
vitable and appropriate setting, and human existence is defined by the thoroughgoing fusion of the two categories. “Spirit,” therefore, is not remote and supernatural. It exists in the here-and-now, and can be investigated, explained and enjoyed.

  By the time Thomas returned to teach at Naples in 1272 he enjoyed a Europe-wide reputation. Nonetheless, the Masters of Arts at Paris, the Church’s supreme body when it came to defining truths of theology, decided to condemn some of his most characteristic teachings in 1277. The Catholic Church took a long time to make up its mind about Thomas theologically, and it was only in 1567 that he was eventually named a Doctor of the Church.