The Knight in History (18 page)

While the old knightly class was contracting and displaying a reluctance to assume the expenses and responsibilities of its rank, for the first time it experienced an infusion from below. The new affluence of the thirteenth century created rich peasants and merchants who aspired to rise in the social scale. Kings and princes encouraged their ambitions, but the knights, having climbed to the rank of nobility, now tried to shut the door to newcomers. Rules governing the inheritance of noble status were more strictly defined by the knightly class; nobility, stated the French legal text known as the
Etablissements de Saint Louis
(c. 1270), had its origins in the father’s knighthood. Whereas a man whose mother was noble and whose father was a commoner could previously claim nobility on the maternal side, now if he were knighted, the fraud must be exposed and his spurs cast in the mire. Furthermore, commoners must not assume the powers and privileges of nobles, even without the title. Georges Duby records instances in the thirteenth century in which Burgundian merchants purchased fiefs but were denied homage or feudal service. The fief of a commoner was pronounced inferior to that of a noble, and gentlemen could not be vassals of a bourgeois, “for noble fief does not belong to a bourgeois or a non-noble,” in the words of a late thirteenth-century legal document. Not only did commoners continue to hold noble fiefs, as Philippe de Beaumanoir recorded in his
Coutumes de Beauvaisis
(c. 1283), but they had the effrontery to compete for administrative office. The nobles denounced these “villeins” and the “bad princes” who surrounded themselves with them. In spite of their protests, the newcomers continued to infiltrate the nobility, through marriage, purchase of land, and royal service.
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Royal authority encouraged the infiltration. In 1306, when Edward I attempted the conquest of Scotland, he used the occasion of the knighting of his own son to issue a proclamation offering dubbing to all candidates who presented themselves at the ceremony, the king assuming the cost of the festivities and presenting the new knights with suits of clothing (not, however, armor). Two hundred and sixty-seven candidates appeared, of whom two were trampled to death in the crush at Westminster Abbey.
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The new knightly class consciousness was reflected in the now ostentatious dubbing ceremony. Raymond Lull’s late-thirteenth-century
Libre del orde de cauayleria
described a ritual very different from that of the eleventh century or even the twelfth. Lull recommended that the rite be performed on a feast day, when many people would be assembled in church. The candidate must confess his sins and fast the day before and spend the night in solitary vigil in the church. Above all, he must not listen to “troubadours and storytellers who speak of rottenness and sin.” In the morning, he must hear Mass, take an oath “to keep the honor of chivalry with all his power,” and listen to a sermon setting forth the articles of the Christian faith, the Ten Commandments, the seven sacraments of the Church, and other pertinent matters. The sponsor, himself a man with “the virtue and order of chivalry,” then stood forth. The candidate knelt before the altar and lifted his eyes and hands to heaven; his sponsor girded him with the sword, kissed him, and gave him “a palm
(colée
or
paumée)
in order that he remember that which he receives and promises, and the great charge in which he is obligated and bound, and the great honor which he receives by the order of chivalry.” Then the new knight should “ride through the town and show himself to the people,” so that everyone could see that he had been made a knight, and that night he must “make a great feast” and “give fair gifts and great dinners” and “joust and…sport and do other things which appertain to the order of chivalry.” Maximum fanfare would impress onlookers with the worth and splendor of the knightly order.

Lull’s work not only describes the formula for dubbing, but dwells at length on the religious significance of knighthood, in effect elaborating on the Vulgate
Lancelot
’s account of the Lady of the Lake’s discourse. When wickedness came into the world, God chose one man out of each thousand, “most loyal, most strong, and of most noble spirit, and better educated and mannered than all the others.” To serve this man, a beast was chosen, “most suitable, most fair, most courageous, and most strong to sustain exertion, and most able to serve man,” the horse. The chosen man derived his title from the horse (
chevalier
in French). “Thus to the most noble man was given the most noble beast.” Then “all the arms such as are most noble and suitable to battle” were chosen and given to the knight. The knight was given dominion over many men, and a squire and servant to take care of his horse. “And it behooves also that the common people labor in the lands in order to bring forth fruit and goods, whereof the knight and his beast have their living, and that the knight rest himself and stay at his abode according to his nobility, disporting himself upon his horse in order to hunt or in other manner…and that he take his ease and delight in things of which his men have pain and travail.”

A knight’s duties and responsibilities were threefold: he must “maintain and defend the holy Catholic faith,” he must be a “governor,” and he must “uphold and defend his worldly or earthly lord.”

Lull even pedantically elucidated the moral-religious significance of each piece of armor and equipment that the knight assumed: the sword (in the form of the cross) showed that its owner must combat the enemies of Christianity and maintain justice; the spear signified truth; the helmet “dread of shame” the hauberk resistance to “vices and faults” the mail stockings were meant to keep him from straying; the spurs to endow him with diligence and swiftness in pursuit of duty; and on through gorget, mace, knife, shield, gauntlets, saddle, horse, bridle, horse armor, coat, coat of arms, and banner.
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Significantly, the girding on of the sword was no longer the crowning element of the dubbing ceremony. Knights no longer monopolized the profession of arms, and war was not the sole knightly business.

Knighthood was already becoming honorific rather than substantive.

6

The Knights Templars: Soldiers, Diplomats, Bankers

WE HAVE HEARD THAT A NEW SORT OF CHIVALRY HAS APPEARED ON EARTH, AND IN THAT REGION WHICH ONCE HE WHO CAME FROM ON HIGH VISITED IN THE FLESH…A NEW SORT OF CHIVALRY THAT TIRELESSLY WAGES…WAR BOTH AGAINST FLESH AND BLOOD AND AGAINST THE SPIRITUAL FORCES OF EVIL
.

—Bernard of Clairvaux,
In Praise of the New Chivalry

BY [THE TEMPLE], THE ORDER OF KNIGHTHOOD FLOURISHES AND IS REVITALIZED [AND ENABLED TO DO WHAT IT SHOULD]: THAT IS, DEFEND THE POOR, WIDOWS, ORPHANS, AND CHURCHES
….

—La Règle du Temple

FOUL TEMPLARS, WICKED HOSPITALERS, EACH FULL OF ZEAL AND WITHOUT WEAKNESS, LIKE A NEST OF VIPERS, SERPENTS UNDER THEIR VARIEGATED SKINS, RED-HAIRED MEN WITH BLUE EYES, ON THEIR BLACK HORSES
….

—Imad-ad-Din,
Conquest of Syria and Palestine by Saladin

A
FTER THE First Crusade, the bulk of the responsibility for maintaining the Christian presence in the Holy Land was borne by members of the Military Orders.
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In the eyes of the Church, the brother knights of these institutions were par excellence “soldiers of Christ,” the epitome of chivalry.

The Orders’ original mission was the protection of pilgrims visiting the shrines of the Holy Land. To this duty was soon added what became their chief purpose: garrisoning the conquered land against a persistent and numerous enemy. The Order of the Temple was founded in about 1119 by two knights, Hugues de Payns, from Champagne, and Geoffrey de St. Omer, from Artois. The two men swore poverty, chastity, and obedience before the patriarch of Jerusalem and announced their mission of protecting and aiding pilgrims. First known as “the poor knights of the Temple of Solomon,” from its location in Jerusalem, the Order was supported by two great Crusading lords, Hugues, count of Champagne, and Fulk, count of Anjou, and it was recognized by the Church at the Council of Troyes in 1128, which commissioned Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of the Cistercian Order, to draw up a Rule for it. After the Council, a group of Templars led by the two founders toured France and England soliciting recruits and grants of land. Bernard’s Rule, adapted from that of the Cistercians, proved exceptionally appropriate for a military order. The Templars’ discipline on the march and in battle quickly marked them as the elite troops in any Crusading army.

Largely thanks to the support of Bernard of Clairvaux, the Order soon enjoyed a popularity in Europe beyond its founders’ dreams. At the request of Hugues de Payns in the early 1130s, St. Bernard wrote a tract,
In Praise of the New Chivalry
, acclaiming the concept of a fighting brotherhood dedicated to Christ. The worldly chivalry of the past was sinful—“
non dico militiae, sed malitiae,
” “I do not call it a militia but an evil.” He drew a vivid picture: worldly knights covered themselves with ornaments like women—silk cloths for their horses; tunics for their hauberks; painted lances, shields, and saddles; and reins and spurs decorated with gold, silver, and precious stones. “Clad in such pomp, in shameless fury and thoughtless stupidity you hasten to your deaths,” and all for a cause “so light and frivolous that it terrifies the conscience.” In contrast, the Templars risked no sin in killing since their enemies were enemies of Christ; their killing was “not homicide but malicide.” Their lives were governed by discipline that Bernard himself had prescribed; they owned no private possessions, avoided all excess in food and clothing, and lived “as a single community in a single house, eager to preserve unity of spirit in a bond of peace.” Besides shunning such vanities and follies as gaming, hunting, storytelling, and worldly entertainment, they scorned the care for personal appearance that other knights affected, wearing their hair cut short, leaving their beards uncombed, and riding to battle shaggy, dusty, darkened by sunburn, to “seek not glory but victory…meeker than lambs and fiercer than lions.” At once monks and knights, “they vigilantly and faithfully guard…the Holy Sepulchre.”
²

TEMPLE CHURCH, LAON, WITH CHARACTERISTIC ROTUNDA AND DOME, IN IMITATION OF THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE IN JERUSALEM
.

The Temple won a succession of exemptions and privileges, financial, spiritual, and administrative, that freed it of numerous taxes and eventually made it independent of all ecclesiastical authority except that of the pope, indeed, immune from all jurisdiction other than papal. Its increasing privilege followed and accompanied its growing wealth. Individual Templars owned nothing, but gifts and bequests of every description poured in to the Order in Europe and the Holy Land: lands, serfs, cattle, mills, winepresses, money, and goods. “Temples,” establishments in the form of fortified structures, often of masonry, were founded throughout France, England, Spain, Germany, and Italy. Major facilities were built in the cities, smaller centers in the countryside. All were organized into provinces, each with its Master and Commander. The purpose of these European establishments was to supply the Temple in the Holy Land with two things: money and soldiers.

Most of the rural establishments were headed by two or three members of the Order, who were not knights but minor officials called
frères casaliers
, and who administered the local estates and supervised the agricultural laborers. The urban centers were manned by knights, sergeants, and priests, as well as servants. The largest and most important in Europe was the commandery in Paris, a strong masonry keep with towers, located on the Right Bank. Its spacious walls enclosed a chapel built with a rotunda in imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Besides the Temple Enclosure, the Paris commandery owned entire streets in the city.
³
In London the Templars built a commandery and a church with a rotunda in Holborn, then in the middle of the twelfth century moved south to the bank of the Thames, where they constructed the New Temple in the form of a large church in Gothic style but, like other Templar churches, distinctively round in form. The establishment eventually included several small chapels and two large halls, one, a “hall of priests” used for meetings of the chapter, connected to the church by a cloister, the other a “hall of knights,” where the knights lived; across the Thames was a fifteen-acre field used by the Templars for military exercises. Most towns, in England as in Europe, had a Templar commandery, usually with a round church about which clustered the Templar community.
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