CHAPTER VII
THE POLITICAL AND MILITARY VALUE OF
CHIVALROUS IDEAS
In tracing the picture of the declining Middle Ages, the scholars of our days, generally speaking, take little account of the surviving chivalrous ideas. They are regarded by common consent as a more or less artificial revival of ideas, whose real value had long since disappeared. They would seem to be an ornament of society and no more. The men who made the history of those times, princes, nobles, prelates, or burghers, were no romantic dreamers, but dealt in solid facts. Still, nearly all paid homage to the chivalrous bias, and it remains to consider to what extent this bias modified the course of events. For the history of civilization the perennial dream of a sublime life has the value of a very important reality. And even political history itself, under penalty of neglecting actual facts, is bound to take illusions, vanities, follies, into account. There is not a more dangerous tendency in history than that of representing the past, as if it were a rational whole and dictated by clearly defined interests.
We have, therefore, to estimate the influence of chivalrous ideas on politics and on war at the close of the Middle Ages. Were the rules of chivalry taken into account in the councils of kings and in those of war? Were resolutions sometimes inspired by the chivalrous point of view? Without any doubt. If medieval politics were not governed for the better by the idea of chivalry, surely they were so sometimes for the worse. Chivalry during the Middle Ages was, on the one hand, the great source of tragic political errors, exactly as are nationalism and racial pride at the present day. On the other, it tended to disguise well-adjusted calculations under the appearance of generous aspirations. The gravest political error which France could commit was the creation of a quasi-independent Burgundy, and it had a chivalrous reason for its avowed motive: King John, that knightly muddle-head, wished to reward the courage shown by his son at Poitiers by an extraordinary liberality. The stubborn anti-French policy of the dukes of Burgundy after 1419, although dictated by the interests of their house, was justified in the eyes of contemporaries by the duty of exacting an exemplary vengeance for the murder of Montereau. Burgundian court literature exerts itself to keep up in all political matters the semblance of chivalrous inspiration. The surnames of the dukes, that of “Sans Peur” given to Jean, of “Hardi” to the first Philip, of “Qui qu’en hongne” which they did not succeed in imposing on the second Philip, usually called “the Good,” are inventions calculated to place the prince in a nimbus of chivalrous romance.
Now there was one among the political aspirations of the epoch where the chivalrous ideal was implied in the nature of the enterprise itself, namely, the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. The highest political ideal which all the kings of Europe were obliged to profess was still symbolized by Jerusalem. Here the contrast between the real interest of Christendom and the form the idea took is most striking. The Europe of 1400 was confronted by an Eastern question of supreme urgency: that of repulsing the Turks who had just taken Adrianople and wiped out the Serbian kingdom. The imminent danger ought to have concentrated all efforts on the Balkans. Yet the imperative task of European politics does not yet disengage itself from the old idea of the crusades. People only succeeded in seeing the Turkish question as a secondary part of the sacred duty in which their ancestors had failed: the conquest of Jerusalem.
The conquest of Jerusalem could not but present itself to the mind as a work of piety and of heroism—that is to say, of chivalry. In the councils on Eastern politics the heroic ideal preponderated more than in ordinary politics, and this it is which explains the very meagre success of the war against the Turks. Expeditions which, before all else, required patient preparation and minute inquiry, tended, more than once, to be romanticized, so to speak, from the very outset. The catastrophe of Nicopolis had proved the fatal folly of undertaking, against a very warlike enemy, an expedition of great importance as light-heartedly as if it were a question of going to kill a handful of heathen peasants in Prussia or in Lithuania.
In the fifteenth century each king still felt virtually bound to set out and recapture Jerusalem. When Henry V of England, dying at Paris in 1422, in the midst of his career of conquest, was listening to the reading of the seven penitential psalms, he interrupted the officiating priest at the words Benigne fac, domine, in bona voluntate tua Sion, ut aedificentur muri Jerusalem, and declared that he had intended to go and conquer Jerusalem, after having re-established peace in France, “if it had pleased God, his Creator, to let him live to old age.” After that he orders the priest to go on reading, and dies.
In the case of Philip the Good, the design of a crusade seems to have been a mixture of chivalrous caprice and political advertising; he wished to pose, by this pious and useful project, as the protector of Christendom, to the detriment of the king of France. The expedition to Turkey was, as it were, a trump-card that he did not live to play.
The chivalrous fiction was also at the back of a peculiar form of political advertisement, to which Duke Philip was much attached—to wit, the duel between two princes, always being announced, but never carried out. The idea of having political differences decided by a single combat between the two princes concerned, was a logical consequence of the conception still prevailing, as if political disputes were nothing but a “quarrel” in the juristic sense of the word. A Burgundian partisan, for instance, serves the “quarrel” of his lord. What more natural means to settle such a case can be imagined than the duel of two princes, the two parties to the “quarrel”? The solution was satisfactory to both the primitive sense of right and the chivalrous imagination. In reading the summary of the carefully arranged preparations for these princely duels, we ask ourselves, if they were not a conscious feint, either to impose upon one’s enemy, or to appease the grievances of one’s own subjects. Are we not rather to regard them as an inextricable mixture of humbug and of a chimerical, but, after all, sincere, craving to conform to the life heroic, by posing before all the world as the champion of right, who does not hesitate to sacrifice himself for his people?
How, otherwise, are we to explain the surprising persistence of these plans for princely duels? Richard II of England offers to fight, together with his uncles, the dukes of Lancaster, York, and Gloucester, against the king of France, Charles VI, and his uncles, the dukes of Anjou, Burgundy and Berry. Louis of Orléans defies the king of England, Henry IV. Henry V of England challenges the dauphin before marching upon Agincourt. Above all, the duke of Burgundy displayed an almost frenzied attachment to this mode of settling a question. In 1425 he challenges Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, in connection with the question of Holland. The motive, as always, is expressly formulated in these terms: “To prevent Christian bloodshed and destruction of the people, on whom my heart has compassion,” I wish “that by my own body, this quarrel may be settled, without proceeding by means of wars, which would entail that many noblemen and others, both of your army and of mine, would end their days pitifully.”
All was ready for the combat: the magnificent armour and the state dresses, the pavilions, the standards, the banners, the armorial tabards for the heralds, everything richly adorned with the duke’s blazons and with his emblems, the flint-and- steel and the Saint Andrew’s cross. The duke had gone in for a course of training “both by abstinence in the matter of food and by taking exercise to keep him in breath.” He practised fencing every day in his park of Hesdin with the most expert masters. The detailed expenses entailed by this affair are found in the accounts published by de La Borde, but the combat did not take place.
This did not prevent the duke, twenty years later, from again wishing to decide a question touching Luxemburg by a single combat with the duke of Saxony. Towards the close of his life he is still vowing to engage in a hand-to-hand combat with the Grand Turk.
We find this custom of challenges between sovereigns reappearing as late as the hey-day of the Renaissance. To deliver Italy from Cesare Borgia, Francesco Gonzaga offers to fight the latter with sword and dagger. Charles V himself, on two occasions, in 1526 and in 1536, formally proposes to the king of France to end their differences by a single combat.
The notion of two princes fighting a duel in order to decide a conflict between their countries had nothing impossible about it at an epoch when the judicial duel was still as firmly rooted in practice and in ideas as it was in the fifteenth century. If a political duel between two real sovereigns never actually took place, at any rate in 1397 a very great lord, accused of a political crime by a nobleman, fought him in due form and was killed. We refer to Othe de Granson, an illustrious knight and admired poet, who perished at Bourg en Bresse by the hand of Gerard d’Estavayer. The latter had made himself the champion of the towns of the Pays de Vaud, which were very hostile to Granson, as he was suspected of complicity in the murder of his lord, Amé VII, of Savoy, surnamed “the Red Count.” This judicial duel caused an immense sensation.
If princes had such a chivalrous conception of their duty, it is not astonishing that similar ideas constantly exercised a certain influence on political and military decisions: a negative influence and scarcely of a decisive nature, taking all in all, but nevertheless real. The chivalrous prejudice often caused resolutions to be retarded or precipitated, opportunities to be lost, and profit to be neglected, for the sake of a point of honour; it exposed commanders to unnecessary dangers. Strategical interests were frequently sacrificed in order to keep up the appearances of the heroic life. Sometimes a king himself would go forth to seek military adventure, like Edward III attacking a convoy of Spanish ships by night. Froissart asserts that the knights of the Star had to swear never to fly more than four acres from the battlefield, through which rule soon afterwards more than ninety of them lost their lives. The article is not found in the statutes of the order, as published by Luc d’Achéry; nevertheless, such formalism tallies well with the ideas of that epoch. Some days before the battle of Agincourt, the king of England, on his way to meet the French army, one evening passed by mistake by the village which the foragers of his army had fixed upon as night-quarters. He would have had time to return, and he would have done it, if a point of honour had not prevented him. The king, “as the chief guardian of the very laudable ceremonies of honour,” had just published an order, according to which knights, while reconnoitring, had to take off their coat-armour, because their honour would not suffer knights to retreat, when accoutred for battle. Now, the king himself had put on his coat-armour, and so, having passed it by, he could not return to the village mentioned. He therefore passed the night in the place he had reached and also made the vanguard advance accordingly, in spite of the dangers that might have been incurred.
Just as a political conflict was regarded as an action at law, so there was also but a difference of degree between a battle and a judicial duel, or the combat of knights in the lists. In his Arbre des Batailles, Honoré Bonet places them under the same head, although carefully distinguishing “great general battles” and “particular battles.” In the wars of the fifteenth century, and even later, the custom for two captains or two equal groups to appoint meetings for a fight, in sight of the two armies, was still kept up. The Combat of the Thirty has remained the celebrated type of these fights. It was fought in 1351 at Ploërmel, in Brittany, between the French of Beaumanoir and a company of thirty men, English, Germans and Bretons, under a certain Bamborough. Froissart, though full of admiration, cannot help remarking: “Some held it a prowess, and some held it a shame and a great overbearing.” The uselessness of these chivalrous spectacles was so evident that those in authority resented them. It was impossible to expose the honour of the kingdom to the hazards of a single combat. When Guy de la Trémoïlle wished to prove in 1386 the superiority of the French by a duel with an English nobleman, Peter Courtenay, the dukes of Burgundy and Berry at the last moment issued a formal prohibition. The authors of the Jouvencel disapprove of these competitions of glory. “They are forbidden things and which people should not do. In the first place, those who do it, want to take away the good of others, that is to say, their honour, to procure themselves vain glory, which is of little value; and, in doing this, he serves none, he spends his money; ... in being occupied in doing this, he neglects his part in waging war, the service of his king and the public cause; and no one should expose his body, unless in meritorious works.”
This is the military spirit, which itself has issued from the spirit of chivalry and is now gradually supplanting it. The custom of these fights outlived the Middle Ages. The French and Spanish armies, in the south of Italy, in 1503, feasted their eyes first upon the Combat of the Eleven, without any fatal result, and then upon the famous duel between Bayard and Sotomayor, which was by no means the last of its sort.
Thus, in warfare, the chivalrous point of honour continues to make itself felt, but when an important question arises for decision, strategic prudence carries the day in the majority of cases. Generals still propose to the enemy to come to an understanding as to the choice of the battlefield, but the invitation is generally declined by the party occupying the better position. In vain did the English in 1333 invite the Scotch to come down from their strong position in order to fight them in the plains; in vain did Guillaume de Hainaut propose an armistice of three days to the king of France, during which a bridge could be built permitting the armies to join battle. Reason, however, is not always victorious. Before the battle of Najera (or of Navarrete), in which Bertrand du Guesclin was taken prisoner, Don Henri de Trastamara desires, at any cost, to measure himself with the enemy in the open field. He voluntarily gives up the advantages offered by the configuration of the ground and loses the battle.
If chivalry had to yield to strategy and tactics, none the less it remained of importance in the exterior apparatus of warfare. An army of the fifteenth century, with its splendid show of rich ornament and solemn pomp, still offered the spectacle of a tournament of glory and honour. The multitude of banners and pennons, the variety of heraldic bearings, the sound of clarions, the war-cries resounding all day long, all this, with the military costume itself and the ceremonies of dubbing knights before the battle, tended to give war the appearance of a noble sport.
After the middle of the century, the drum, of Oriental origin, makes its appearance in the armies of the West, introduced by the lansquenets. With its unmusical hypnotic effect it symbolizes, as it were, the transition from the epoch of chivalry to that of the art of modern warfare; together with fire-arms it has contributed towards rendering war mechanical.
The chivalrous point of view still presides over the classification of martial exploits by the chroniclers. They take pains to distinguish, according to technical rules, between a pitched battle and an encounter, for it is imperative that every combat has its appropriate place in the records of glory. “And so, from this day forward”—says Monstrelet—“this business was called the encounter of Mons en Vimeu. And it was declared to be no battle, because the parties met by chance and there were hardly any banners unfurled.” Henry V solemnly baptizes his great victory, the battle of Agincourt, “inasmuch as all battles should bear the name of the nearest fortress where they are fought.”
In spite of the care taken on all hands to keep up the illusion of chivalry, reality perpetually gives the lie to it, and obliges it to take refuge in the domains of literature and of conversation. The ideal of the fine heroic life could only be cultivated within the limits of a close caste. The sentiments of chivalry were current only among the members of the caste and by no means extended to inferior persons. The Burgundian court which was saturated with chivalrous prejudice, and would not have tolerated the slightest infringement of rules in a “combat à outrance” between noblemen, relished the unbridled ferocity of a judicial duel between burghers, where there was no code of honour to observe. Nothing could be more remarkable in this respect than the interest excited everywhere by the combat of two burghers of Valenciennes in 1455. The old Duke Philip wanted to see the rare spectacle at any cost. One must read the vivid and realistic description given by Chastellain in order to appreciate how a chivalrous writer who never succeeded in giving more than a vaguely fanciful description of a Passage of Arms, made up for it here by giving full rein to the instincts of natural cruelty. Not one detail of the “very beautiful ceremony” escaped him. The adversaries, accompanied by their fencing masters, enter the lists, first Jacotin Plouvier, the plaintiff, next Mahuot. Their heads are cropped close and they are sewn up from head to foot in cordwain dresses of a single piece. They are very pale. After having saluted the duke, who was seated behind lattice-work, they await the signal, seated upon two chairs upholstered in black. The spectators exchange remarks in a low voice on the chances of the combat: How pale Mahuot is as he kisses the Testament! Two servants come to rub them with grease from the neck to the ankles. Both champions rub their hands with ashes and take sugar in their mouths; next they are given quartersticks and bucklers painted with images of saints, which they hold upside down, having, moreover, in their hands “a scroll of devotion.”
Mahuot, a small man, begins the combat by throwing sand into Jacotin’s face with the point of his buckler. Soon afterwards he falls to the ground under the formidable blows of Jacotin, who throws himself on him, fills his eyes and mouth with sand, and thrusts his thumb into the socket of his eye, to make him let go of a finger which Mahuot has between his teeth. Jacotin wrings the other’s arms, jumps upon his back and tries to break it. In vain does Mahuot cry for mercy, and asks to be confessed. “O my lord of Burgundy,” he calls out, “I have served you so well in your war of Ghent! O my lord, for God’s sake, I beg for mercy, save my life!” ... Here some pages of Chastellain’s chronicle are missing; we learn elsewhere that the dying man was dragged out of the lists and hanged by the executioner.
Did Chastellain end his lively narrative by a moral? It is probable; anyhow, La Marche tells that the nobility were a little ashamed at having been present at such a spectacle. “Because of which God caused a duel of knights to follow, which was irreproachable and without fatal consequences,” adds the incorrigible court poet.
As soon as it is a question of non-nobles, the old and deep- rooted contempt for the villein shows us that the ideas of chivalry had availed but little in mitigating feudal barbarism. Charles VI, after the battle of Rosebeke, wishes to see the corpse of Philip of Artevelde. The king does not show the slightest respect for the illustrious rebel. According to one chronicle, he is said to have kicked the body, “treating it as a villein.” “When it had been looked at, for some time”— says Froissart—“it was taken from that place and hanged on a tree.”
Hard realities were bound to open the eyes of the nobility and show the falseness and uselessness of their ideal. The financial side of a knight’s career was frankly avowed. Froissart never omits to enumerate the profits which a successful enterprise procured for its heroes. The ransom of a noble prisoner was the backbone of the business to the warriors of the fifteenth century. Pensions, rents, governor’s places, occupy a large place in a knight’s life. His aim is “s’avanchier par armes” (to get on in life by arms). Commines rates the courtiers according to their pay, and speaks of “a nobleman of twenty crowns,” and Deschamps makes them sigh after the day of payment, in a ballad with the refrain:
Et quant venra le trésorier?”[1]
As a military principle, chivalry was no longer sufficient. Tactics had long since given up all thought of conforming to its rules. The custom of making the knights fight on foot was borrowed by the French from the English, though the chivalrous spirit was opposed to this practice. It was also opposed to sea-fights. In the Debat des Hérauts d’Armes de France et d’Angleterre, the French herald being asked by his English colleague: Why does the king of France not maintain a great naval force, like that of England? replies very naïvely:—In the first place he does not need it, and, then, the French nobility prefer wars on dry land, for several reasons, “for (on the sea) there is danger and loss of life and God knows how awful it is when a storm rages and sea-sickness prevails which many people find hard to bear. Again, look at the hard life which has to be lived, which does not beseem nobility.”
Nevertheless, chivalrous ideas did not die out without having borne some fruit. In so far as they formed a system of rules of honour and precepts of virtue, they exercised a certain influence on the evolution of the laws of war. The law of nations originated in antiquity and in canon law, but it was chivalry which caused it to flower. The aspiration after universal peace is linked with the idea of crusades and with that of the orders of chivalry. Philippe de Mézières planned his “Order of the Passion” to insure the good of the world. The young king of France—(this was written about 1388, when such great hopes were still entertained of the unhappy Charles VI)—will be easily able to conclude peace with Richard of England, young like himself and also innocent of bloodshed in the past. Let them discuss the peace personally; let them tell each other of the marvellous revelations which have already heralded it. Let them ignore all the futile differences which might prevent peace, if negotiations were left to ecclesiastics, to lawyers, and to soldiers. The king of France may fearlessly cede a few frontier towns and castles. Directly after the conclusion of peace the crusade will be prepared. Quarrels and hostilities will cease everywhere; the tyrannical governments of countries will be reformed; a general council will summon the princes of Christendom to undertake a crusade, in case sermons do not suffice to convert the Tartars, Turks, Jews and Saracens.
The share which the ideas of chivalry have had in the development of the law of nations is not limited to these dreams. The notion of a law of nations itself was preceded and led up to by the ideal of a beautiful life of honour and of loyalty. In the fourteenth century we find the formulation of principles of international law blending with the casuistical and often puerile regulations of passages of arms and combats in the lists. In 1352 Sir Geoffroi de Charney (who died at Poitiers bearing the oriflamme) addresses to the king, who has just instituted his order of the Star, a treatise composed of a long list of “demandes,” that is to say, questions of casuistry, concerning jousts, tournaments and war. Jousts and tournaments rank first, but the importance of questions of military law is shown by their far greater number. It should be remembered that this order of the Star was the culmination of chivalrous romanticism, founded expressly “in the manner of the Round Table.”
Better known than the “demandes” of Geoffroi de Charney is a work that appeared towards the end of the fourteenth century, and which remained in vogue till the sixteenth: L’Arbre des Batailles of Honoré Bonet, prior of Selonnet, in Provence. The influence of chivalry on the development of the law of nations nowhere appears more clearly than here. Though the author is an ecclesiastic, the idea which suggests his very remarkable conceptions to. him is that of chivalry. He treats promiscuously questions of personal honour and the gravest questions of the law of nations. For example, “by what right can one wage war against the Saracens or other unbelievers,” or, “if a prince may refuse the passage through his country to another.” What is especially remarkable is the spirit of gentleness and of humanity in which Bonet solves these problems. May the king of France, waging war with England, take prisoner “the poor English, merchants, labourers of the soil and shepherds who tend their flocks in the fields”? The author answers in the negative; not only do Christian morals forbid it, but also “the honour of the age.” He even goes so far as to extend the privilege of safe conduct in the enemy’s country to the case of the father of an English student wishing to visit his sick son in Paris.
L’Arbre des Batailles was, unfortunately, only a theoretical treatise. We know full well that war in those times was very cruel. The fine rules and the generous exemptions enumerated by the good prior of Selonnet were too rarely observed. Still, if a little clemency was slowly introduced into political and military practice, this was due rather to the sentiment of honour than to convictions based on legal and moral principles. Military duty was conceived in the first place as the honour of a knight.
Taine said: “In the middle and lower classes the chief motive of conduct is self-interest. With an aristocracy the mainspring is pride. Now among the profound sentiments of man there is none more apt to be transformed into probity, patriotism and conscience, for a proud man feels the need of self-respect, and, to obtain it, he is led to deserve it.” Is not this the point of view whence we must consider the importance of chivalry in the history of civilization! Pride assuming the features of a high ethical value, knightly self-respect preparing the way for clemency and right. These transitions in the domain of thought are real. In the passage quoted above from Le Jouvencel we noticed how chivalric sentiment passes into patriotism. All the best elements of patriotism—the spirit of sacrifice, the desire for justice and protection for the oppressed—sprouted in the soil of chivalry. It is in the classic country of chivalry, in France, that are heard, for the first time, the touching accents of love of the fatherland, irradiated by the sentiment of justice. One need not be a great poet to say these simple things with dignity. No author of those times has given French patriotism such a touching and also such a varied expression as Eustache Deschamps, whom we can only rate as a mediocre poet. Addressing France, he says:
“Tu as duré et durras sanz doubtance
Tant com raisons sera de toy amée,
Autrement, non; fay donc à la balance
Justice en toy et que bien soit gardée.”[2]
Chivalry would never have been the ideal of life during several centuries if it had not contained high social values. Its strength lay in the very exaggeration of its generous and fantastic views. The soul of the Middle Ages, ferocious and passionate, could only be led by placing far too high the ideal towards which its aspirations should tend. Thus acted the Church, thus also feudal thought. We may apply here Emerson’s words: “Without this violence of direction, which men and women have, without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above the mark to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.” That reality has constantly given the lie to these high illusions of a pure and noble social life, who would deny? But where should we be, if our thoughts had never transcended the exact limits of the feasible?