Chivalry and the First Crusade
(6 November 2016…ibids yo…ibids)
Chivalry is a code of honor and conduct that first appeared during the Middle Ages. Originally meant for the knights of the age, the tenets of chivalry evolved over time to become the gentlemanly ideals of the later aristocracy.[1] Originally derived from the old French word for horseman, chivalry came to inform a knight’s devotion to duty, religion, and courtly love. Today, it is impossible to consider the chivalric code without evoking the romantic images of King Arthur and Robin Hood. The Ten Commandments of Chivalry, a list popularized by Léon Gautier in the 1880s, represent the romantic ideals of the chivalric code.[2] This code can be seen in the First Crusade — chivalrous knights wearing their lady’s favor, fighting bravely against the mighty Saracens in the Holy Land. Gautier’s Ten Commandments split into three main categories: duty to the church and Christianity, conduct as a knight, and obligations to one’s lord and God. Additionally, the genesis of these ideals can be traced to Pope Urban II’s “Speech at the Council of Clermont.” Though taking place before the concept of chivalry officially took hold in Western Europe, the First Crusade represents the perfection of the chivalric ideal.
Pope Urban II called the Council of Clermont in 1095 after receiving a request for aid against the Seljuq Turks from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos. Five accounts of the pope’s speech were written by men who were present to hear his words.[3] Eric Cantor notes Pope Urban touched on the base motivations of a French knight taking the crusade.[4] Appealing to their piety, their reputation as warriors, and a promised place in heaven, the First Crusade is a direct result of Urban’s call.
Fulcher of Chartres records that, before extolling them to fight in the holy land, Urban first admonished the assemblage for its failings to uphold its chivalric obligations, as represented in Gautier’s first three commandments.[5] Urban declared those lords negligent in their duty to the church, requiring them to be “true shepherds” who must “guard all sides of the flock.”[6] He characterized the weakened Byzantines, beset on all sides by the infidel Muslims, as incapable of defending their lands or the holy places of Christendom. Robert the Monk, transcribing Urban’s words perhaps 25 years after his speech, writes of Muslims defiling churches with Christian blood for their own rites, torturing Christians with enforced circumcision, and dismembering the kingdom of the Greeks.[7] To defend the weak and uphold God’s will, Urban demanded the nobles put aside their earthly differences and fight for God.
The basis of Gautier’s fourth commandment, to love ones country, is found within Urban’s call for Christians to put aside their personal grudges and “reenact the truce,” in order to fight the Saracens in the east.[8] Urban notes it is impossible to love the country of your birth without first fighting to defend it. He characterizes “murder[ing] one another [and] perish[ing] by mutual wounds” as a waste and more importantly a sin against God.[9] At Clermont, Urban railed against the Christian soldiery who debased the church as “oppressors of children, plunderers of widows” who willfully shed Christian blood.[10] He makes it clear that to obtain the eternal reward of heaven, a knight must take his misplaced energy fighting his brothers and put it into “destroy[ing] that vile race.”[11] Urban appealed to the prevailing apocalyptic views of illiterate Europe while channeling that appeal away from Europe itself.[12]
Gautier’s sixth commandment to “make war against the infidel without cessation and without mercy” was by far the easiest to follow, especially in the context of Pope Urban’s call to violence.[13] Cantor paints emotional scenes of crusaders taking the cross throughout France and Italy as both rich and poor pledged themselves to fight. Unfortunately for the non-Christian populations of these areas, the impact was immediately violent, as Christians did not wait to implement Urban’s crusade. Before the Christian knights set out for the Holy Land, a “people’s crusade” of unruly mobs committed atrocities against the Jewish populations in France and the Rhineland.[14] Cantor describes “a plague of locusts” marching in the general direction of the Holy Land. This mob was eventually cut down by the Turks in Anatolia, but not before burning its way across the Balkans.[15] Atrocities against non-Christians continued once the valiant knights of Western Europe landed in the Holy Land. When Jerusalem fell to the crusading army in 1096, both Jews and Muslims were massacred.[16]
It is in the crusaders massacring non-Christians that one finds darker side of chivalry. Despite this, Gautier’s last three commandments are the embodiment of the romantic idea of the code, that one “shalt never lie…be generous…and shalt be everywhere and always the champion of the Right and the Good against injustice and evil.”[17] This inherent contradiction between the ceaseless pursuit of war against the infidel and the desire to follow God’s will is easily explained. The commandments guiding chivalrous conduct only applied to Christians. Urban is specific when he says “it is less wicked to brandish your sword against Saracens.” As Romans 8:1–2 states, “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free.”[18] The crusaders were free to lie and kill so long as they did not kill Christians.
At Clermont, Pope Urban II extolled the virtues of the crusade, appealing to the baser virtues of France’s assembled chivalry, demanding these knights follow God’s will to save the Holy Land from the rapacious Saracens. Léon Gautier’s Ten Commandments of Chivalry represent the noblest interpretations of the chivalric code. In addition to Roland’s noble sacrifice at Roncesvalles or Lancelot’s devotion to Queen Guinevere, one finds within this romantic framework the Christian pogroms against the Jews in Europe and the crusader’s massacres in the Holy Land. The Chivalric ideal was a strictly Christian code. As such, the bloody First Crusade is truly the perfection of the chivalric ideal.
[1] Norman F. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, the Life and Death of a Civilization (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 350.
[2] Léon Gautier, Chivalry, trans. Henry Frith, (New York: Crescent Books, 1898), 26.
[3] “Medieval Sourcebook: Urban II: Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095, According to Fulcher of Chartres, Robert the Monk, Gesta Francorum, Balderic of Dol, Guibert de Nogent, and Urban II,” Internet History Sourcebooks Project, accessed November 6, 2016, http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/source/urban2-5vers.html.
[4] Cantor, “The First Crusade and After,” 292.
[5] Gautier.
[6] Fulcher of Chartres, “Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095,” in Gesta Francorum Jerusalem Expugnantium, translated by Oliver J. Thatcher and Edgar H. McNeal (New York: Scribners, 1905), 513–17, http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/source/urban2-5vers.html.
[7] Robert the Monk, “Urban and the Crusaders,” in Historia Hierosolymitana, Translations and Reprints from Original Sources of European History, translated by Dana C. Munro (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1895), 5–8.
[8] Fulcher.
[9] Robert the Monk.
[10] August C. Krey, “Balderic of Dol,” in The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Participants (Princeton, 1921), 23–26.
[11] Fulcher.
[12] Cantor, “The First Crusade and After,” 293.
[13] Gautier.
[14] Cantor, “The First Crusade and After,” 293.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid., 296.
[17] Gautier.
[18] Romans, 8:1–2, (New Revised Standard Version).
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