Free The Knight in History by Frances Gies Page B

international literary language to a local dialect. The troubadours’ poetic successors, knights of northern France and of Germany, carried on the tradition as trouvères and minnesingers. Narrative poetry and prose, influenced by the troubadours, also swelled the twelfth-century literary Renaissance, reaching a climax in the Arthurian romances, a multiauthored accumulation that fixed the image of the medieval knight for himself, his contemporaries, and posterity.
    The knight-errant heroes of the Arthur stories had historical counterparts whose adventures, if less fabulous, were genuine enough as they roamed Europe earning a living in tournament and battle. Those of William Marshal of England, who became the trusted counselor of kings, have been preserved in a valuable chronicle. By the thirteenth century, political developments had attached the knights firmly to the nobility and modified their role from the strictly military. The rise of a money economy and subsequent inflation increased the expenses of knighthood and created a new class of men eligible to become knights who no longer wished to be knighted but opted to remain squires. Simultaneously, commoners—rich peasants and merchants—began to invade the knightly class.
    The Church’s ideal of the “soldier of Christ” was best realized in the Military Orders that fought the infidel in Spain, eastern Europe, and above all the Holy Land. The Knights Templars, Hospitalers, Teutonic Knights, and Spanish Orders of Calatrava, Santiago, and Alcantara performed their military duties with a monastic discipline that contrasted with the unruly individualism of the traditional knights. The Templars, the most celebrated of the Orders, were drawn into the unknightly profession of banking, which led first to their enrichment and then to their downfall.
     
    The Hundred Years War (1337–1453) worked the final transformation of the western European knight from landed vassal to professional soldier. The careers of two knights, the Breton hero Bertrand du Guesclin and John Fastolf, an English knight of middle-class origins who reaped a fortune from the war, illuminate aspects of fourteenth-and fifteenth-century knighthood.
    In the end the knight was absorbed into the standing army of the new national state, where he quickly lost his distinctive identity. More enduring was the influence on manners and morals of “chivalry,” an ambiguous word that sometimes refers to the corps of knights themselves, sometimes to the panoply of tournament and heraldry, sometimes to the knightly code of conduct. The title of knight survived as a lower rank of nobility and as a conferred civil or military honor. The panoply long enjoyed popularity, especially in the circles of royalty, and even made a memorable farewell appearance in the age of Victoria. The code of conduct, with its invocation of generous sentiments, has never lost its appeal, and is permanently enshrined in the literature of chivalry.

 
    2
    The First Knights
    IN THE BEGINNING… NO MAN WAS HIGHER IN BIRTH THAN ANY OTHER, FOR ALL MEN WERE DESCENDED FROM A SINGLE FATHER AND MOTHER. BUT WHEN ENVY AND COVETOUSNESS CAME INTO THE WORLD, AND MIGHT TRIUMPHED OVER RIGHT…CERTAIN MEN WERE APPOINTED AS GUARANTORS AND DEFENDERS OF THE WEAK AND THE HUMBLE .
    —The Book of Lancelot of the Lake

 
    3
    Knights of the First Crusade
    DO YOU KNOW WHAT GOD HAS PROMISED THOSE WHO TAKE THE CROSS ?
    BY GOD! HE HAS PROMISED TO REWARD THEM WELL! PARADISE FOR EVERMORE .
    —Early twelfth-century Crusading song
    LET NONE OF YOUR POSSESSIONS DETAIN YOU, NO SOLICITUDE FOR YOUR FAMILY AFFAIRS, SINCE THIS LAND WHICH YOU INHABIT, SHUT IN ON ALL SIDES BY THE SEAS AND SURROUNDED BY MOUNTAIN PEAKS, IS TOO NARROW FOR YOUR LARGE POPULATION; NOR DOES IT ABOUND IN WEALTH; AND IT FURNISHES SCARCELY FOOD ENOUGH FOR ITS CULTIVATORS. HENCE IT IS THAT YOU MURDER ONE ANOTHER, THAT YOU WAGE WAR, AND THAT FREQUENTLY YOU PERISH BY MUTUAL WOUNDS. LET THEREFORE HATRED DEPART