• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1388 0

the. bridge. “Several lance stumps were still in his shield and it was that which hindered him most.” A bolt from a crossbow “pierced his nostrils most painfully whereat he was dazed, but his daze lasted but a little time.” He pressed forward, receiving many sword blows on head and shoulders which “sometimes hit the bolt embedded in his nose making him suffer great pain.” When weariness on both sides brought the battle to an end, Pero Nino’s shield “was tattered and all in pieces; his sword blade was toothed like a saw and dyed with blood … his armor was broken in several places by lance-heads of which some had entered the flesh and drawn blood, although the coat was of great strength.” Prowess was not easily bought.

Loyalty, meaning the pledged word, was chivalry’s fulcrum. The extreme emphasis given to it derived from the time when a pledge between lord and vassal was the only form of government. A knight who broke his oath was charged with “treason” for betraying the order of knighthood. The concept of loyalty did not preclude treachery or the most egregious trickery as long as no knightly oath was broken. When a party of armed knights gained entrance to a walled town by declaring themselves allies and then proceeded to slaughter the defenders, chivalry was evidently not violated, no oath having been made to the burghers.

Chivalry was regarded as a universal order of all Christian knights, a trans-national class moved by a single ideal, much as Marxism later regarded all workers of the world. It was a military guild in which all knights were theoretically brothers, although Froissart excepted the Germans and Spaniards, who, he said, were too uncultivated to understand chivalry.

In the performance of his function, the knight must be prepared, as John of Salisbury wrote, “to shed your blood for your brethren”—he meant brethren in the universal sense—“and, if needs must, to lay down your life.” Many were thus prepared, though perhaps more from sheer love of battle than concern for a cause. Blind King John of Bohemia met death in that way. He loved fighting for its own sake, not caring whether the conflict was important. He missed hardly a quarrel in Europe and entered tournaments in between, allegedly receiving in one of them the wound that blinded him. His subjects, on the other hand, said the cause was Divine punishment—not because he dug up the old synagogue of Prague, which he did, but because, on finding money concealed beneath the pavement, he was moved by greed and the advice of German knights to dig up the tomb of St. Adelbert in the Prague cathedral and was stricken blind by the desecrated saint.

As an ally of Philip VI, at the head of 500 knights, the sightless King fought the English through Picardy, always rash and in the avant-garde. At Crécy he asked his knights to lead him deeper into the battle so that he might strike further blows with his sword. Twelve of them tied their horses’ reins together and, with the King at their head, advanced into the thick of the fight, “so far as never to return.” His body was found next day among his knights, all slain with their horses still tied together.

Fighting filled the noble’s need of something to do, a way to exert himself. It was his substitute for work. His leisure time was spent chiefly in hunting, otherwise in games of chess, backgammon, and dice, in songs, dances, pageants, and other entertainments. Long winter evenings were occupied listening to the recital of interminable verse epics. The sword offered the workless noble an activity with a purpose, one that could bring him honor, status, and, if he was lucky, gain. If no real conflict was at hand, he sought tournaments, the most exciting, expensive, ruinous, and delightful activity of the noble class, and paradoxically the most harmful to his true military function. Fighting in tournaments concentrated his skills and absorbed his interest in an increasingly formalized clash, leaving little thought for the tactics and strategy of real battle.

Originating in France and referred to by others as “French combat