Tag: knighthood

Quixote

Leadership of the noble classes remained viable throughout the middle ages. To a great degree, this is what accounted for the cultural stagnancy that we associate with the dark ages. Power and wealth was concentrated in the country manors rather than in the cities. North of the Alps, Europe had no proper capitals. Life was highly localized. Very little commerce took place between towns. People remained in their villages, farmed the land around them and abided by the rule of their local lord. Learning was sequestered to the monasteries. Commerce became the domain of the ostracized classes. Very gradually, over the course of 3 or 4 centuries, the supremacy and sovereignty of the nobles began to wane. Strong monarchs emerged in France, England, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden. In seafaring countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy a rich urban elite took form. The power of the rural gentry was rivaled and in many cases made subordinate to law and money. Power from prestige and tradition began to count less than that which was derived from economic utility. Auerbach’s reads Don Quixote as a demonstration of this phenomenon, which had occurred during the late middle ages almost imperceptibly. His interpretation of the Quixote character is fascinating. He analyses his social position and actually finds famously deluded sense of the world as perfectly reasonable given his rank and role in medieval society:

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“By his detailed description of the circumstances of his hero’s life, Cervantes makes it perfectly clear, at the very beginning of his book, where the root of Don Quixote’s confusion lies: he is the victim of a social order in which he belongs to a class that has no function. He belongs to this class; he cannot emancipate himself from it; but as a mere member of it, without wealth and without high connections, he has no role and no mission. He feels his life running meaninglessly out, as though he were paralyzed. Only upon such a man, whose life is hardly better than a peasant’s but who is educated and who is neither able nor permitted to labor as a peasant does, could romances of chivalry have such an unbalancing effect. His setting forth is a flight from a situation which is unbearable and which he has borne far too long.” (Mimesis, 137)

Given his position as a minor hidalgo, Quixote’s duties and office had become obsolete, supplanted by the government of the absolutist king. Three or four generations before him, his ancestors might have played a vital part in the destiny of Spain. They might have taken part in the reconquista, or they might have been charged with keeping order in the newly formed Spanish duchies while the king was away fighting in the crusades. By the start of the siglo de oro, the king’s rule was uncontested and peace reigned. The need for knights had vanished, though the people who occupied those positions lingered in their decrepit with nothing do. People today read Don Quixote and they see a man with pretentions to something greater than what he is. Quixote is a knight; he can claim that title as a birthright. The comic tension of the story, of course, is that by the 16th century, what it meant to be a knight in imperial Spain meant something far different than what it was originally intended to be. That someone would go about behaving the traditional way that a knight would behave in that time and place was cause for laughter. But Cervantes goes further than simple comedy and questions whether knighthood and nobility ever meant what it was supposed to be. Perhaps knighthood was always only performance of a role rather than a real office with duties and responsibilities. If this were true, than it brings us to the final question: is acting the part of knight equivalent on some level to being a knight, does one occupy the role simply by enacting it?

Code of Chivalry

Had the empire of Charlemagne endured; had the rules of succession been codified and dynastic power established, it might have resulted in a rebirth of civilization. Europe might have escaped its dark age and the Fall of Rome would have been viewed by history simply as a transition from Paganism to Christianity rather than the termination of an era. Europe responded to the collapse of the Frankish throne in 843 much the same way it did to the withdrawal of Roman rule 400 years earlier. Rule became localized. Lords exercised sovereignty over their individual fiefs and fought private wars with one another for additional territory. The church once again attempted to maintain order among the nobility—with mixed results—through adjudication and moral proselytizing. Knights, who had previously been regulated through their alliances to their lords and subordination to the throne, now acted independently and fought mostly to suit their own interests. They went around extorting the peasantry and robbing towns. Without a royal standard to march under the warrior class in Europe was directionless. It was around this time that knights began to adopt the chivalric code. Chivalry was devised as a remedy to the noble caste’s degeneration into a class of thieves and cutthroats. The chivalrous knight swore loyalty to all nobles of greater rank than he, not just his own lord. He vowed to protect the weak and to uphold the peace. He dedicate himself to living a virtuous life above all other pursuits. The tradition of martial discipline promulgated by an organized military system was no longer available to knights and other soldiers of this time. Instead, they submitted themselves to a strict program of self-discipline. With this cultural shift, knights were supposedly made docile. They became gentlemen.

Well, the condition holds a range of causes related to tadalafil tabs respitecaresa.org daily life and activities as well. It works on the issues by repairing the blood flow towards the male organ. discount viagra buying here Normally ergonomic assessment is for employee’s chair,desk, mouse, viagra prescription etc. Women get a better chance to enjoy pleasurable orgasms with enlarged phallus as more friction is produced levitra generic cheap on the wall of the vagina. It is an interesting trait of the European aristocracy: the entire edifice of manners, of refinement, of respectability, all of the behavioral attributes that we come to identify with “good breeding” developed out of a need to suppress antagonism between the powerful, so that they would not tear society to pieces fighting one another. And the greater their power grew the more exaggerated became their expressions of composure and self-control; while all the time, lurking beneath that veneer of restraint was the same anarchic potential, never fully resolved from the dark ages.


The Device of Nobility

Before his death in 511 AD, Clovis I divided Frankish Gaul between his four sons. Without establishing rules for the transition of hereditary title, internecine warfare arose between Clovis’s descendants. For the next 300 years Northern Europe became a place of constantly shifting alliances and fragmented authority. The legitimacy of the Merovingian kings’ rule dissipated with each generation. By the end of the 7th century, their power had almost completely withered. The regency had become more or less ceremonial and administrative power was wielded by the kings’ subordinates. So, it was at this point, in the darkest period of the dark ages when state authority had almost completely vanished from Europe, when family feuded with family and the only law that existed was the sporadically observed moral law of the church, that the Umayyad Caliphate captured the Iberian peninsula and then crossed the Pyrenees to challenge the Franks. This external threat of Muslim invasion prompted a rapid and dramatic reorganization of European society. Before this time, the Franks did not trust each other. One could not predict the behavior of his rivals or of his friends. Given a common enemy, the lords and regents of the Frankish kingdoms could align their interests around a single purpose and presume compliance from their neighbors since the consequence for noncompliance was certain annihilation. Led by Charles Martel, Majordomo of the Austrasian kingdom, a coalition system was devised based on alliance, obligation and trust. These new pacts would allow the different kingdoms to deploy a united army made up of professional soldiers. It was to be the first standing army in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. Built into these alliance agreements were plans for supporting, training, and arming an entire class of soldiers and provisioning them while in the field. Protocol was as follows: a lord would allow a soldier to collect wealth from a part of the lord’s holdings. This soldier would coerce the peasantry living on the lord’s land to grow food for his table, hay for his horse and enough surplus product to pay for armor and weaponry. In return, the soldier would swear an oath of fealty to the lord, promising to march under his banner when called upon to fight. The lord, in turn, swore allegiance to the king and was obliged to deploy his soldiers at the king’s command. This chain of alliances, roughly based on the Roman foederatus relation, formed the basis of European feudalism. Its efficacy was proven at the Battle of Tours, where Charles Martel was able to field an army of approximately 20,000 disciplined, well-armed men, nearly matching Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi’s force of 25,000 horsemen. According to accounts of the battle, Martel’s heavy infantry endured repeated charges from Saracen cavalry without breaking. A Muslim chronicle of the event reads as follows:

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“And in the shock of the battle the men of the North seemed like a sea that cannot be moved. Firmly they stood, one close to another, forming as it were a bulwark of ice; and with great blows of their swords they hewed down the Arabs. Drawn up in a band around their chief, the people of the Austrasians carried all before them. Their tireless hands drove their swords down to the breasts [of the foe].”

We could perhaps say that it was on this battlefield outside of Tours, in October of 732 AD, that the concept of European nobility was born.