The Age of Chivalry (41 page)

Christianity's rituals, liturgies and sacraments gave structure to European culture at both an individual and social level, with seasons of penitence, Advent and Lent, preceding the joyful feasts of Christmas and Easter. Priests blessed harvests, animals and ships, and offered up prayers of intercession in the face of natural and man-made disasters. The Christian culture's chronology gave a new dimension to the passing of time and separated it from the pagan past. Earlier chronologies had been varied. Some dated the years according to the number that had elapsed since the foundation of the city of Rome, and others were structured by the regnal years of different emperors. In the early sixth century, however, the Syrian monk Dionysius Exiguus had established a sequence of years based on what he took to be the date of Christ's birth. After the English monk and historian Bede (673–735) used that
anno domini
system in his
Ecclesiastical History
of the English People
, it became the norm in Latin Christendom. The division of the year itself also changed. Although the months still had Roman names they were now divided into the seven-day week borrowed from the Jewish calendar, and that unit replaced the Romans' tripartite division of
Kalendae, Nonae
and
Ides
.

The distinction between clergy and laity that gave structure to European society was interpreted with a new zeal by the Church reform movement of the 11th and 12th centuries. Clerical freedom from subordination to lay authority was, of course, central to the Investiture dispute, but the Church's new sharpness of tone also enhanced lay status in many ways. The new teaching stated, for example, that lay authorities could legitimately perform certain judicial actions that were now forbidden to the clergy, such as the shedding of blood and administration of physical punishment. Clerical authorities from the 11th century onward also gave a new validity to lay activities that earlier and more monastic forms of Christianity had either ignored or scorned. Commerce, marriage and family life were now regarded in a positive light rather than being viewed as a sign of humanity's fallen condition. And the emergence in the central Middle Ages of theories sanctioning “just war”—military action approved by the Church in specific circumstances such as a response to aggression—gave a new ideological underpinning to the battlefield excursions of Christian princes and generals.

A
BOVE
Farmers in Gimpelsbrunn celebrate a
kermis
in this woodcut
(c.
1530) by Sebald Beham. Popular in the Low Countries and northern France during the later Middle Ages, the
kermis
celebrated the anniversary of a local church's foundation and often honored the church's patron saint
.

Lay vitality was also evident in the universities founded in the Middle Ages and which were granted imperial, papal and royal privileges. The first guilds of university teachers had emerged in the late 12th century, with their members insisting on the professional right to set the standards that applied in admitting and examining students. Effective teaching and transmission of knowledge presupposed readable styles of writing, and the Carolingian script had been a huge ninth-century breakthrough in standards of legibility. Standardization took another leap forward with the Gothic script which was developed in the 12th century and whose consistent style for abbreviations and literary expression provided teachers and students with texts that were as identical as possible.

The dispute between the empire and the papacy was medieval European culture's first major public debate about the basis of authority, and its polemical energy resulted from rival interpretations of certain key texts—especially in the field of law. By the 1140s documents relating to Church law and discipline had been assembled together in the
Concordia discordantium canonum
attributed to the Benedictine monk Gratian who taught law at Bologna. More generally known as the
Decretum Gratiani
, the treatise
combined jurisprudence with the analytic style typical of scholasticism—the technique of classifying knowledge and structuring arguments that was now the hallmark of medieval Europe's intellectual life. The sheer scale of scholasticism's ambitions set it apart from the earlier monastic culture's more contemplative and discursive approach to faith and knowledge, and the system's dialectical method was applied to medicine and the arts in general as well as theology and law. Hugh of Saint-Victor (1096–1141), based at the Paris abbey of that name, produced in
c
.1127 the
Didascalicon
, a wide-ranging encyclopedia of current knowledge, and Peter Abelard (1079–1142) taught the dialectical method of investigation to the many students who flocked to Paris to be instructed by him. A similarly analytical emphasis is evident in the
Four Books of Sentences
(
Sententiarum libri iv
), a highly influential work of theology written by Peter Lombard (
c
.1100–60).

Europe's musical culture also acquired new styles of elaborate expression at this time. The early medieval liturgy's most characteristic sound was that of the Gregorian plainchant whose differing styles, based on the Jewish tradition of singing psalms, were all monophonic. From the 12th century onward, polyphonic styles started to diversify both sacred and secular music. Early motets were exclusively liturgical, but by the end of the 13th century the genre was accommodating secular love poetry. The madrigal, written usually for two voices and often based on a pastoral subject, had acquired its typical form in Italy by
c
.1300.

Religious and secular impulses co-existed within chivalry—a code of honorable conduct associated with the mounted knights (
chevaliers
) of French military culture and whose fashionable reputation led to its widespread diffusion among the landed classes from the 11th century onward. The chivalric ethic fashioned the norms of social behavior that applied in the courts of kings and princes, but the military dimension remained important throughout chivalry's four centuries of influence within European high society. Heraldry, for example, acquired increasingly elaborate rules that dictated the designs of coats of arms painted on warriors' shields. The wearing of heraldic emblems allowed individual knights and nobles to proclaim pride in their ancestry when taking part in jousts, tournaments and the formalized hunting of wild animals. But the shield and its designs never lost their primary role of identifying a combatant in the battlefield mélée, and heraldic emblems became increasingly important during the later Middle Ages, since by that stage a nobleman's entire body was encased in armory when he went into battle.

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ELOW
The Gutenberg printing press, as shown in this undated woodcut, revolutionized the production of books. After its introduction in the mid-15th century, texts no longer had to be copied by hand individually
.

Chivalry, however, also encompassed a whole set of mental attitudes quite apart from the military expertise involved in adroit horsemanship and the handling of
lances and swords. Valor, honor and loyalty were supposed to be shown not just on the battlefield but also during peacetime and in domestic settings. Islamic society had its own traditions of chivalric behavior in all these dimensions of life, and European knights may well have been influenced by the conduct of the warriors they encountered during the crusades waged in Syria and Palestine. Spain's Muslim commanders, encountered by many an adventurous Christian knight during the
reconquista
, produced their own influential examples of the Islamic warrior's gallantry. Christianity's social teachings were fundamental to European chivalry. The Peace and Truce of God was a Church-inspired movement that sought to limit the effects of both public warfare and private violence, and from the late-tenth century onward popes and senior clergy would announce, and try to enforce, regular periods of amnesty when knights were expected to display mercy toward weaker members of society. Chivalric attitudes engendered a markedly individualized way of looking at the world, as can be seen in the code's association with the cult of love, both human and divine. Medieval Christianity's increased devotion to the Virgin Mary involved a new emphasis on redemptive suffering, and the chivalrous knight's duty of honor obliged him to play a self-denying and courageous role in warfare that was designed to defend and advance the Church's interests as guarantor of the faith. But chivalry's idealization of femininity was also present in the devotion shown by knights to certain aristocratic women, whose honor they defended and whose graciousness could then be extolled in the suitably decorous language of “courtly love.”

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Richard II of England (r. 1377–99) presides over a courtly tournament in this 15th-century Flemish manuscript. Two mounted knights are jousting in the arena while, in the pavilion to the left, musicians play trumpets. Spectators view the scene from the safety of the pavilion on the right
.

Medieval Europe's encounters with its neighbors led to a tighter definition of what counted as “European,” with previously pagan civilizations being conquered, converted
and assimilated into Christian cultural norms. That process led to Scandinavian society becoming the northern frontier of medieval Europe, and by the 11th century the previously nomadic Magyars, once so ferociously pagan, were settled in the kingdom of Hungary that had become a central European bastion of Catholic Christendom. The late tenth-century conversion of the aristocratic (and mostly Swedish) leadership of the principality of Rus, centered on Kiev, was the basis for Russian Christianity's subsequent evolution. Medieval Rus therefore provided a new eastern frontier that marked the boundary between European and Asiatic culture. Russian Christianity's allegiance to the patriarchate of Constantinople placed it however within the Orthodox Church's orbit of influence, and European culture's most significant internal division during the Middle Ages was the one between Latin and Greek Christianity.

Other cultures resisted the European tide or mounted offensives against its advance, and the climate of opinion associated with the First Crusade gave a new focus to Islamic-Christian hostility. The crusades led by Christian kings ended in failure in the Middle East, but the crusading ideal remained an important feature of European social attitudes until the 16th century, when Ottoman Turks threatened to advance through the Balkans and into central Europe. Despite its cultural and religious antipathy to Islam, Europe nonetheless imported many features of the Muslims' material culture—especially their maritime, technological and agricultural innovations. Europeans became aware of a dimension other than the Islamic one to their eastern borders with the arrival of the Mongols, whose savagely effective campaigning in the mid-13th century, especially in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, exposed the continent's east and center to hitherto unimagined levels of danger. The diminution of that threat allowed Christian Europe to direct some of its missionary energy toward Mongol-dominated Asia—a vast territory extending to the Chinese border—and by the 1290s Franciscan friars were running missions in China.