Kaeuper - Holy warriors: the religious ideology of chivalry

COMING UNEXPECTEDLY UPON the splendid manuscript painting in British Library Harley 3244 (folios 27b, 28) provided one of those moments that richly reward scholarly work in archives. This striking mid-thirteenth-century illumination vividly portrays knighthood in a righteous struggle against sin and vice. This is the book for which our stunning illustration now provides a frontispiece.

The painting can likewise serve to introduce the present book on the religion of knights. Carefully planned and beautifully drawn, the bifoliate illumination brings chivalry and religion into the same conceptual frame-work. Yet the right-hand page irresistibly draws the reader's eye first, for with much boldness and confidence it presents a mounted knight fully encased in mid-thirteenth-century armor, ready for rough action with lance and drawn sword. At the top of this page a Latin inscription (emphasized by being outlined and written in red ink) serves as caption for the full painting; it quotes a passage from the Book of Job (7:1): Militia est vita hominis super terram (human life on earth is militia). Equally interesting, the angel holds in its right hand a set of seven scrolls that bear equally potent language; in short form they convey the Beatitudes, those transforming sayings of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount. Their presentation here is intriguing. In each case the heavenly blessing for the recipient is noted, though the requisite human activity or state, even if assumed, is omitted. Thus the banderoles simply promise the holy warriors that

Theirs is the kingdom of heaven (ipsorum est regnum celorum)
They shall inherit the kingdom (ipsi possedebunt regnum)
They shall be comforted (ipsi consolabuntur)
They shall be filled (ipsi saturabuntur)
They shall have mercy (ipsi misericordiam consequentur)
They shall see God (ipsi deum videbunt)
They shall be called sons of God (ipsi filii dei vocabuntur).

As if the symbolic knight's fight against evil is merit enough to earn such divine favor, the requirements for receiving each of these blessings are not specified. In other words, there is no stated injunction that the recipients are to be poor in spirit, meek, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, no stipulation that it is those who mourn who shall be comforted. We might already sense tension between the martial words from Job and the spirit of the Beatitudes, between the determined knight, weapons at the ready, and these forgiving, pacific sentiments from the Sermon on the Mount, possibly even between the full import of the Beatitudes and their shortened form, reduced to benefits received, as they are quoted here. A battle-ready knight is about to be festooned with streamers at least recalling the virtues of mercy, peace, and forbearance, though they are not specified. The conjuncture of ideas seems jarring.

The martial theme in the illumination cannot be doubted. A desperate combat is about to erupt from the vellum pages, more desperate and noisy than the briefly threatened intrusion of the bestiary. The eye of the knight, clearly visible through the narrow slot in his great helm, is sternly set on what will soon assault him from the left page, for as noted, this composite illumination spreads impressively across two folio pages. From the left folio advance serried ranks of grotesque demons representing the seven deadly sins, each sin backed by a cluster of smaller figures of supporting vices in a wonderfully medieval hierarchical pattern. Avarice, a chief sin, is for example backed by a smaller demon labeled usury. The knight has allies too, the seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit pictured as doves ranked before him on his side of the illustration, facing the enemy. But these pale and pacific birds hardly inspire confidence as stout or effective coadjutors in the fight to come. Moreover, the forces of right are desperately outnumbered; the sides stand sixty-nine to eight. Yet the viewer need not fear the outcome, for the knight is surely an ideally stalwart fighter for the right, however rampant and numerous the menacing forces of evil marshaled against him. Exactly how this warrior fits into the world of Beatitudes remains an issue, perhaps even a paradox.

As a first step toward understanding this tension and how it was resolved, we need to recognize that our illustration, however splendid, is a piece of collusive propaganda. Its visual and verbal program portrays the ideal knight as both pious and fiercely martial, a combination more easily shown in ideal form (as a fight against evil) than could be achieved within the messy details of daily life. Clerics advanced this ideal for knighthood and knights might have been happy to accept it as a flattering and valorizing representation of their profession. Yet it is most emphatically not a realistic picture, not a description of what knights actually were or what they actually did in a world much troubled by the consequences of sin if not by visible demons. This illustration, in other words, is prescriptive rather than descriptive. Powerfully presented, it shows us what clerics ardently wanted knights to be, even how knights might have liked to see themselves portrayed. Yet it would be a great error to accept this idealized and wishful view as displaying the essence of chivalry; it belongs rather to an effort that flattered warrior sensibilities as it tried to engage warrior piety and direct warrior energies.

These considerable energies in the knights had to be fitted within a society working to create order in a great many dimensions of life: not only governmental, legal, and religious, but also socioeconomic, and intellectual. Broadly governmental or political frameworks were being established by lay authority just as guidelines of doctrine and governing ecclesiastical structure were being elaborated by clerics. Textbook accounts too often bring chivalry into this broad picture of governance and social order without ambiguity, as a unidirectional force for peace and order. Chivalry is so easily sketched as a straightforward internalization of restraint among the warriors, knocking off the rough edges and making them proto-gentlemen. Violence and war, in this view, would be less likely, or at least (to borrow the phrase of an American president) kinder and gentler. In