What do we want our soldiers to fight for? Peace. (Seems ironic, but that's how it appears to work.) Everybody wants peace (though you might not know it from some video games), peace to raise food and raise their families. The big thing that Old Testament prophets expected from the Messiah was an era of peace. In the 1950s, American postmarks said, "Pray for peace."
Medieval people also wanted peace. The peace they were concerned about was not so much an end to war between nations (at least until you get to the Hundred Years' War) but rather an end to local fighting and brigandage.
Right at the end of the tenth century, at exactly the same time as castles and knights first appeared in France, French bishops started what is called the Peace of God movement. The coincidence of these three (castles, knights, and Peace of God) was not accidental. Western Europe had managed to recover from the Vikings and other disasters, and now it faced new challenges to peace. Knights, fighters on horseback, could work serious damage on the countryside, then retreat behind castle walls where no one could catch them.
The bishops realized they could not physically overcome the knights. So they did what seemed like the best alternative--shaming the knights to give up hurting people. The bishops held what they called peace councils, inviting everyone from a region to attend, bringing along the relics of all the local churches. Here they persuaded the attending knights to swear great oaths not to harm the harmless--people in the church, peasants, women, merchants. Since in promising not to harm those who couldn't fight back, the knights realized they could still fight each other (more fun anyway), they agreed.
It was not of course a perfect solution. But it did decrease the overall level of violence and made the regional counts, in their capacity as judges, much more likely to be extremely stern with knights who broke their oaths. For the entire eleventh century, repeated peace councils were held. During this period of (relative) peace, castles proliferated. If you think about it, you need a peaceful period to build a castle.
Emboldened by their success, around 1050 the bishops began the Truce of God. Here councils sought to get knights to swear they wouldn't even attack each other except at certain times: not Lent, not Advent, not Sunday, not Friday (and probably not Saturday, as between Friday and Sunday). Monday through Thursday were good.
The Truce was a lot less successful, but it was a nice try. With the beginning of the Crusade movement around 1100, churchmen encouraged knights not to kill each other at all, not even a little bit, but to restrict their violence to Muslims. The twelfth century was a period in which it was clear (in theory anyway) that Christians really weren't supposed to kill Christians. By the late thirteenth century they'd pretty much abandoned this notion, but it was a nice idea.
© C. Dale Brittain 2018
For more about war, peace, knights, and so much more, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.
Is it a fair corollary of what you’ve said that the ideals of chivalry that we usually associate with knighthood rose from the Church-led Peace of God and Truce of God movements, and that this chivalry was retroactively ascribed to the Round Table? Or did chivalry arise from multiple sources and at multiple times for different reasons?
ReplyDeleteWhat we think of as the Round Table and its chivalry is mostly based on late-medieval (mostly 15th century) versions of King Arthur stories. The stories were written as a form of (artificial) nostalgia, "Back in the olden days men were men" etc. They were written in part to critique contemporary society, at a time when warfare was dominated by cannons and foot soldiers considered disposable. Real twelfth-century chivalry had many roots, including the Peace of God, battlefield virtues (like courage) which is what "chevalerie" originally meant, and Stoicism-inspired self-control.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the answer.
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