CHAPTER IV
THE IDEA OF CHIVALRY
Medieval thought in general was saturated in every part with the conceptions of the Christian faith. In a similar way and in a more limited sphere the thought of all those who lived in the circles of court or castle was impregnated with the idea of chivalry. Their whole system of ideas was permeated by the fiction that chivalry ruled the world. This conception even tends to invade the transcendental domain. The primordial feat of arms of the archangel Michael is glorified by Jean Molinet as “the first deed of knighthood and chivalrous prowess that was ever achieved.” From the archangel “terrestrial knighthood and human chivalry” take their origin, and in so far are but an imitation of the host of the angels around God’s throne.
This illusion of society based on chivalry curiously clashed with the reality of things. The chroniclers themselves, in describing the history of their time, tell us far more of covetousness, of cruelty, of cool calculation, of well-understood self-interest, and of diplomatic subtlety, than of chivalry. None the less, all, as a rule, profess to write in honour of chivalry, which is the stay of the world. Froissart, Monstrelet, d'Escouchy, Chastellain, La Marche, Molinet, all, with the exception only of Philippe de Commines and Thomas Basin, open their works by high-sounding declarations of their purpose of glorifying knightly bravery and virtues, of recording “noble enterprises, conquests, feats of heroism and of arms,” “the great marvels and the fine feats of arms that have come to pass because of the great wars.” History, to them, is illumined throughout by this their ideal. Later, when writing, they forget it more or less. Froissart, himself the author of a super-romantic epic of chivalry, Méliador, narrates endless treasons and cruelties, without being aware of the contradiction between his general conceptions and the contents of his narrative. Molinet, in his chronicle, from time to time remembers his chivalrous intention, and interrupts his matter-of-fact account of events, to unbosom himself in a flood of high-flown terms.
The conception of chivalry constituted for these authors a sort of magic key, by the aid of which they explained to themselves the motives of politics and of history. The confused image of contemporaneous history being much too complicated for their comprehension, they simplified it, as it were, by the fiction of chivalry as a moving force (not consciously, of course). A very fantastic and rather shallow point of view, no doubt. How much vaster is ours, embracing all sorta of economic and social forces and causes. Still, this vision of a world ruled by chivalry, however superficial and mistaken it might be, was the best they had in the matter of general political ideas. It served them as a formula to understand, in their poor way, the appalling complexity of the world’s way. What they saw about them looked primarily mere violence and confusion. War in the fifteenth century tended to be a chronic process of isolated raids and incursions; diplomacy was mostly a very solemn and very verbose procedure, in which a multitude of questions about juridical details clashed with some very general traditions and some points of honour. All notions which might have enabled them to discern in history a social development were lacking to them. Yet they required a form for their political oonceptions, and here the idea of chivalry came in. By this traditional fiction they succeeded in explaining to themselves, as well as they could, the motives and the course of history, which thus was reduced to a spectacle of the honour of princes and the virtue of knights, to a noble game with edifying and heroic rules.
As a principle of historiography, this point of view is a very inferior one. History thus conceived becomes a summary of feats of arms and of ceremonies. The historians par excellence will be heralds and kings-at-arms—Froissart thinks so—for they are the witnesses of these sublime deeds; they are experts in matters of honour and of glory, and it is to record honour and glory that history is written. The statutes of the Golden Fleece enjoined that the feats of arms of the knights be noted down. Types of this combination of herald and historiographer are the king-at-arms of the Golden Fleece, Lefèvre de Saint Remy, and Gilles le Bouvier, dit le héraut Berry.
The conception of chivalry as a sublime form of secular life might be defined as an æsthetic ideal assuming the appearance of an ethical ideal. Heroic fancy and romantic sentiment form its basis. But medieval thought did not permit ideal forms of noble life, independent of religion. For this reason, piety and virtue have to be the essence of a knight’s life. Chivalry, however, will always fall short of this ethical function. Its earthly origin draws it down. For the source of the chivalrous idea is pride aspiring to beauty, and formalized pride gives rise to a conception of honour, which is the pole of noble life. The sentiment of honour, says Burckhardt, this strange mixture of conscience and of egotism, “is compatible with many vices and susceptible to extravagant delusions; nevertheless, all that has remained pure and noble in man may find support in it and draw new strength from it.” Is not this almost what Chastellain tried to say, when he expressed himself thus:
“Honneur semont toute noble nature
D’aimer tout ce qui noble est en son estre.
Noblesse aussi y adjoint sa droiture.”[1]
And again:
“La gloire des princes pend en orgueil et en haut peril emprendre; toutes principales puissances conviengnent en un point estroit qui se dit orgueil.”[2]
According to the celebrated Swiss historian, the quest of personal glory was the characteristic attribute of the men of the Renaissance. The Middle Ages proper, according to him, knew honour and glory only in collective forms, as the honour due to groups and orders of society, the honour of rank, of class, or of profession. It was in Italy, he thinks, under the influence of antique models, that the craving for individual glory originated. Here, as elsewhere, Burckhardt has exaggerated the distance separating Italy from the Western countries and the Renaissance from the Middle Ages.
The thirst for honour and glory proper to the men of the Renaissance is essentially the same as the chivalrous ambition of earlier times, and of French origin. Only it has shaken off the feudal form and assumed an antique garb. The passionate desire to find himself praised by contemporaries or by posterity was the source of virtue with the courtly knight of the twelfth century and the rude captain of the fourteenth, no less than with the beaux-esprits of the quattrocento. When Beaumanoir and Bamborough fix the conditions of the famous combat of the Thirty, the English captain, according to Froissart, expresses himself in these terms: “And let us right there try ourselves and do so much that people will speak of it in future times in halls, in palaces, in public places and elsewhere throughout the world.” The saying may not be authentic, but it teaches us what Froissart thought.
The quest of glory and of honour goes hand in hand with a hero-worship which also might seem to announce the Renaissance. The somewhat factitious revival of the splendour of chivalry that we find everywhere in European courts after 1300 is already connected with the Renaissance by a real link. It is a naïve prelude to it. In reviving chivalry the poets and princes imagined that they were returning to antiquity. In the minds of the fourteenth century, a vision of antiquity had hardly yet disengaged itself from the fairy-land sphere of the Round Table. Classical heroes were still tinged with the general colour of romance. On the one hand, the figure of Alexander had long ago entered the sphere of chivalry; on the other, chivalry was supposed to be of Roman origin. “And he maintained the discipline of chivalry well, as did the Romans formerly,” thus a Burgundian chronicler praised Henry V of England. The blazons of Cæsar, of Hercules, and of Troilus, are placed in a fantasy of King René, side by side with those of Arthur and of Lancelot. Certain coincidences of terminology played a part in tracing back the origin of chivalry to Roman antiquity. How could people have known that the word miles with Roman authors did not mean a miles in the sense of medieval Latin, that is to say, a knight, or that a Roman eques differed from a feudal knight? Consequently, Romulus, because he raised a band of a thousand mounted warriors, was taken to be the founder of chivalry.
The life of a knight is an imitation; that of princes is so too, sometimes. No one was so consciously inspired by models of the past, or manifested such desire to rival them, as Charles the Bold. In his youth he made his attendants read out to him the exploits of Gauvain and of Lancelot. Later he preferred the ancients. Before retiring to rest, he listens for an hour or two to the “lofty histories of Rome.” He especially admires Cæsar, Hannibal and Alexander, “whom he wished to follow and imitate.” All his contemporaries attach great importance to this eagerness to imitate the heroes of antiquity, and agree in regarding it as the mainspring of his conduct. “He desired great glory”—says Commines—“which more than anything else led him to undertake his wars; and longed to resemble those ancient princes who have been so much talked of after their death.” The anecdote is well known of the jester who, after the defeat of Granson, called out to him: “My lord, we are well Hannibaled this time!” His love of the “beau geste” in antique style was observed by Chastellain at Mechlin in 1467, when he made his first entry there as duke. He had to punish a rising. He sat down facing the scaffold erected for the leader of the insurgents. Already the hangman has drawn the sword and is preparing to strike the blow. “Stop,” said the duke then, “take the bandage from his eyes and help him up.” “And then I perceived”—says Chastellain—“that he had set his heart on high and singular purposes for the future, and on acquiring glory and renown by extraordinary works.”
Thus the aspiration to the splendour of antique life, which is the characteristic of the Renaissance, has its roots in the chivalrous ideal. Between the ponderous spirit of the Burgundian and the classical instinct of an Italian of the same period there is only a difference of nuance. The forms which Charles the Bold affected are still flamboyant Gothic, and he still read his classics in translations.
The chivalrous element and the Renaissance element are also confounded in the cult of the Nine Worthies (“les neuf preux”). The grouping of three pagans, three Jews, and three Christians in a sort of gallery of heroism is found for the first time in a work of the beginning of the fourteenth century, Les Vœux du Paon, by Jacques de Longuyon. The choice of the heroes betrays a close connection with the romances of chivalry. They are Hector, Cæsar, Alexander, Josuah, David, Judas Maccabæus, Arthur, Charlemagne, Godfrey of Bouillon. Eustache Deschamps adopted the idea of the “neuf preux” from his master, Guillaume de Machaut, and devoted many of his ballads to the subject. The craving for symmetry, so strong in the Middle Ages, demanded that the series should be completed by counterparts of the female sex. Deschamps satisfied the demand by choosing from fiction and history a group of rather bizarre heroines. Among them we find Penthesilea, Tomyris, Semiramis. His idea was successful. Literature and tapestry popularized the female as well as the male worthies. Blazons were invented for them. On the occasion of his entry into Paris, in 1431, the English king, Henry VI, is preceded by all the eighteen worthies of both sexes. How popular the idea was, is attested by the parody which Molinet composed of the “nine worthies of gluttony.” Francis I still occasionally dressed himself “in the antique style,” in order to represent one of the worthies.
Deschamps went further. He completed the series of the nine worthies by adding a tenth, Bertrand du Guesclin, the brave and prudent Breton warrior to whom France owed her recovery from Crécy and Poitiers. In this way he linked the cult of ancient heroes to the budding sentiment of national military glory. His idea was generally adopted. Louis of Orleans had the statue of Du Guesclin, as tenth of the “preux,” erected in the great hall of the castle of Coucy. His special reason for honouring the constable’s memory was the fact that the latter had held him at the baptismal font and put a sword into his little hand.
The inventories of the Burgundian dukes enumerate curious relics of ancient and modern heroes, such as “the sword of Saint George,” with his coat of arms; “another war-sword which belonged to Messire Bertran de Claiquin”; “a big boar’s fang, said to be the fang of the boar of Garin le Loherain”; “the psalter of Saint Louis, out of which he learned in his childhood.” How curiously the spheres of imagination of chivalrous romance, and of religious veneration, blend here with the coming spirit of the Renaissance!
About 1300 the sword of Sir Tristram, with an inscription in French verse, was said to have been discovered in Lombardy, in an ancient tomb.[3] Here we are only a step from Pope Leo X, who accepted solemnly, as though it were a relic, a humerus of Livy, offered him by the Venetians.
This hero-worship of the declining Middle Ages finds its literary expression in the biography of the perfect knight. In this genre the figures of recent history gradually superseded the legendary ones like that of Gillon de Trazegnies. Three of these lives of contemporary and illustrious knights are characteristic, although very different from each other: those of Marshal Boucicaut, of Jean de Bueil, and of Jacques de Lalaing.
The military career of Jean le Meingre, surnamed the Marshal Boucicaut, had led him from the defeat of Nicopolis to that of Agincourt, where he was taken prisoner, to die in captivity, six years later. As early as 1409 one of his admirers wrote his biography from reliable information, but with the intention of producing, not a book of contemporary history, but a mirror of chivalrous life. The real facts of this hard life of a captain and statesman disappear beneath the appearances of ideal heroism. The marshal is depicted as the type of a frugal and pious knight, at once courtly and well read. He is not rich. His father would neither augment nor diminish his possessions, saying: “If my children are honest and brave, they will have enough; if they are worthless, it would be a pity to leave them much.” Boucicaut's piety has a Puritan flavour. He rises early and remains in prayer for three hours. However occupied or hurried he may be, he hears, on his knees, two masses a day. On Fridays he dresses in black. On Sundays and festal days he makes pilgrimages on foot, discourses of holy matters, or has some life of a saint read out to him or some story of “the valiant dead—Roman or other.” He lives soberly, he speaks little, and when he speaks it is of 
MINIATURE FROM “LE JOUVENCEL.” BY ALEXANDER BENING.
From a MS. at Munich, Library of the University.
resigned and enigmatical, is “What you will.”
Such are the colours of piety, austerity and fidelity in which the ideal image of a knight is painted. The real Boucicaut did not altogether resemble this portrait; no one would have expected it. He was neither free from violence nor from avarice, common faults in his class.
There are, however, patterns of chivalry of another type. The biographical romance about Jean de Bueil, entitled Le Jouvencel, was written half a century after Le Livre des Faicts of Boucicaut, which partly explains the differences. Jean de Bueil had fought under the banner of Joan of Arc. He had taken part in the rising called the Praguerie and in the war “du bien public”; he died in 1477. Fallen in disgrace with the king, he dictated, or rather suggested, about 1465, an account of his life to three of his servants. In contrast with the Life of Boucicaut, of which the historical form hardly conceals the romantic purpose, Le Jouvencel contains in fictitious garb a great deal of simple realism; this is so, at least, in the first part, for further on the authors have lost themselves in very insipid romanticism.
Jean de Bueil must have given his scribes a very lively narrative of his exploits. It would hardly be possible to quote in the literature of the fifteenth century another work giving as sober a picture as Le Jouvencel of the wars of those times. We find the small miseries of military life, its privations and boredom, gay endurance of hardships and courage in danger. A castellan musters his garrison; there are but fifteen horses, lean and old beasts, most of them unshod. He puts two men on each horse, but of the men also most are blind of one eye or lame. They set out to seize the enemy’s laundry in order to patch the captain’s clothes. A captured cow is courteously returned to a hostile captain at his request. Reading the description of a nocturnal march, one feels as though surrounded by the silence and the freshness of the night. It is not saying too much that here military France is announcing herself in literature, which will give birth to the types of the “mousquetaire,” the “grognard,” and the “poilu.” The feudal knight is merging into the soldier of modern times; the universal and religious ideal is becoming national and military. The hero of the book releases his prisoners without a ransom, on condition that they shall become good Frenchmen. Having risen to great dignities, he yearns for the old life of adventure and liberty.
Le Jouvencel is an expression of true French sentiment. Literature in the Burgundian sphere, being more old-fashioned, more feudal and more solemn, would not have been able as yet to create so realistic a type of a knight. By the side of the Jouvencel, the figure of the Hainault pattern knight of the fifteenth century, Jacques de Lalaing, is an antique curiosity, more or leas modelled on the knights-errant of a preceding age. Le Livre des Faits du bon Chevalier Messire Jacques de Lalaing is far more concerned with tournaments and jousts than with real war.
In the Jouvencel we find a remarkable portrayal, hardly to be surpassed, of the psychology of warlike courage of a simple and touching kind. “It is a joyous thing, is war… You love your comrade so in war. When you see that your quarrel is just and your blood is fighting well, tears rise to your eye. A great sweet feeling of loyalty and of pity fills your heart on seeing your friend so valiantly exposing his body to execute and accomplish the command of our Creator. And then you prepare to go and die or live with him, and for love not to abandon him. And out of that there arises such a delectation, that he who has not tasted it is not fit to say what a delight it is. Do you think that a man who does that fears death? Not at all; for he feels so strengthened, he is so elated, that he does not know where he is. Truly he is afraid of nothing.”
These sentiments have nothing specifically chivalrous or medieval. The words might have been spoken by a modern soldier. They show us the very core of courage: man, in the excitement of danger, stepping out of his narrow egotism, the ineffable feeling caused by a comrade’s bravery, the rapture of fidelity and of sacrifice.—in short, the primitive and spontaneous asceticism, which is at the bottom of the chivalrous ideal.
- ↑ Honour urges every noble nature, To love all that is noble in being. Nobility also adds its uprightness to it.
- ↑ The glory of princes is in their pride and in undertaking great peril; all principal forces meet in a small point, which is called pride.
- ↑ A sword of Tristram figures also among King John's jewels lost in the Wash in 1216.