Feudalism and Chivalry (600–1200)

Feudalism and Chivalry (600–1200)

I – The Foundations of Feudalism

During the six centuries that followed the death of Justinian, the demands of the age combined in a remarkably effective way and gradually transformed the economic life of Western Europe from its very foundations.

Some of the conditions previously observed came together and prepared the ground for feudalism. When, as a result of the invasions of Germanic tribes, security departed from the cities of Italy and Gaul, the nobility moved to their country estates and gathered around themselves dependent peasants, subject families, and military retainers. Monasteries, whose monks were engaged in cultivating the land and in handicrafts, intensified this decentralizing movement and drove people toward semi-isolated economic units in the countryside. Roads, ruined by war and abandoned because of poverty, and made dangerous by bandits, could no longer serve as a suitable and secure means for communication and trade. As the prosperity of commerce and industry declined, state revenues also decreased. Impoverished governments could no longer protect the lives, property, and trade of the people. The obstacles that had arisen in the path of trade forced the noble castles to seek economic self-sufficiency. Many manufactured goods that had previously been purchased from cities were, from the third century onward, produced on large aristocratic estates. In the fifth century the letters of Apollinaris Sidonius indicate that lords, amid luxury, lived on vast lands cultivated by semi-servile tenants. By this time a feudal aristocratic class had emerged that possessed its own judicial system and military forces; and the only difference between this class and the barons of later periods was that the nobles of this era knew how to read.

The same factors that prepared the ground for the spread of feudalism in the third and sixth centuries stabilized feudalism in the sixth and ninth centuries. The kings of the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties, instead of salaries and stipends, granted land to their military commanders and administrators of government; in the ninth century, as a result of the weakness of the Carolingian kings, these fief-holders became hereditary and semi-independent. The invasions of the Saracens, Norsemen, and Magyars during the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries repeated the results of the Germanic invasions of the previous six centuries and established those effects on firmer foundations; that is, central protection and defense disappeared, and in every region a bishop or baron took upon himself the problem of restoring order and local defense and acquired his own court and army. Since the invaders were mostly mounted, defenders who could afford to buy and maintain horses had many suitors. Cavalry became more important than infantry, and just as in the early days of the Roman Empire the equestrian class had emerged between the nobility and the common people, now in France, Norman England, and Christian Spain a class of mounted knights appeared between dukes or barons and the mass of peasants. The people were not angered by these changes, for in an environment full of terror and fear where an attack might begin at any moment, they earnestly desired a military organization, built their houses as solidly as possible like a lord’s palace or a monastery, and willingly agreed to serve a lord or duke who had the power to lead them and to swear fealty to him. To understand the acceptance of subjection by such men, one must imagine the extent of their fear. Freemen, no longer able to protect their property and lives, placed their land or their strength and arms at the disposal of strong men in exchange for protection and shelter. In such cases where individuals “surrendered themselves,” the baron usually leased a piece of land temporarily to “his man” so that he could revoke it whenever he wished; this temporary lease became the standard formal arrangement for the occupation of land by serfs. Feudalism consisted of economic subjection and swearing military fealty to a superior in exchange for economic organization and military protection.

A comprehensive and exclusive definition of the word feudalism is impossible, for this system manifested itself in a hundred different forms according to the requirements of time and place. Feudalism essentially originated in Italy and Germany, but it was in France that most of the characteristics and features of this system reached their full development. Perhaps in Britain feudalism arose because the Anglo-Saxon conquerors violently reduced the Britons or the native inhabitants of Britain to serfdom, but more often it was a gift that the Gauls brought from Normandy to Britain. In northern Italy or Christian Spain feudalism never reached the stage of growth and perfection; in the Eastern Roman Empire the great landowners never acquired military or judicial independence, and the hierarchy of obligations that apparently was an essential requirement of feudalism in the West never appeared. Vast groups of European peasants remained outside the sphere of the feudal system; these included the shepherds and herdsmen of the Balkans, eastern Italy, and Spain; the owners of vineyards in western Germany and southern France; the sturdy farmers of Sweden and Norway; the Teutonic pioneers beyond the Elbe; and the mountaineers of the Carpathians, the Alps, the Apennines, and the Pyrenees. It could not be expected that a continent so diverse in natural features and climate would have a uniform economy. Even within feudalism, the conditions of contracts and the status of individuals differed from one nation to another, from one lordly house to another, and from one particular period to another. Our analysis in this book covers mainly France and England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

II – The Feudal Organization

1 – The Slave

In those times and lands, society consisted of freemen, serfs, and slaves. The class of freemen included nobles, clergy, professional soldiers, holders of offices, most merchants and artisans, and peasants who owned their land with little or no obligation to feudal lords, or who rented land from the lord in return for a cash rent. Such tenant farmers constituted four percent of all cultivators in eleventh-century England; in western Germany, northern Italy, and southern France their number was much greater and perhaps formed one-fourth of the entire peasant population of Western Europe.

As serfdom increased, slavery declined. In twelfth-century England slaves were mostly confined to domestic service. In the region of France north of the Loire, almost no trace of slavery was visible; in Germany it revived during the tenth century, that is, in a period when no one felt any qualms of conscience or discomfort in capturing pagan Slavs and assigning them to menial tasks on German estates, or selling them in Muslim lands or the Byzantine Empire. On the other hand, slave traders on the shores of the Black Sea, western Asia, or North Africa kidnapped Muslims or Greeks and sold them as agricultural laborers, domestic servants, eunuchs, concubines, or prostitutes in Islamic or Christian lands. The slave trade flourished especially in Italy, perhaps because of proximity to Muslim countries, for Christians with an easy conscience could kidnap people from that region and apparently regard such acts as a just revenge for Saracen invasions.

An institution that had persisted throughout known human history now appeared necessary and permanent even to those who sincerely believed in following moral principles. It is true that Pope Gregory the Great freed two of his slaves with a few words of praise for the natural freedom of all mankind, yet he continued to use hundreds of slaves on papal estates, and enacted laws by which slaves were forbidden to enter the ranks of the clergy or to marry free Christians. The Church condemned the sale of Christian prisoners to Muslims, but considered the enslavement of Muslims and Europeans who had not yet become Christians a permissible act. Thousands of Slavic and Saracen captives were distributed as slaves among monasteries, and until the eleventh century they continued to serve on church-endowed lands and papal estates. According to canon law, the wealth of church lands was sometimes estimated by the number of slaves rather than by cash. Canon law, like secular law, classified the slave as movable property, denied slaves in church service the right to make a will, and decreed that any savings a slave left at death should belong to the Church. The archbishop of Narbonne in his will of 1149 bequeathed his Saracen slaves to the bishop of Béziers. Saint Thomas Aquinas interpreted slavery as one of the consequences of Adam’s sin and explained that in a world where some people must endure the toil of labor so that others may be free to defend them, such an institution is economically expedient. Such views accorded with the teachings of Aristotle and the spirit of the age. According to church regulations, the possession of church property was never permitted unless the person paid the full market price for those goods. This worked to the disadvantage of slaves and serfs belonging to the Church, and sometimes the freeing of such individuals on church-endowed estates was far more difficult than the freeing of slaves and serfs employed on private or governmental estates. Nevertheless, by forbidding the enslavement of Christians at a time when Christianity was spreading rapidly, the Church gradually restricted the slave trade.

The decline of slavery resulted from economic change rather than from moral progress. It gradually became clear that individual production, driven by the motive of acquiring wealth and profit, was far more profitable and less troublesome than production under physical coercion. Servitude continued, and the word servus was used for both slave and serf, but over time this term became serf, just as the word villein (applied to serfs) gradually became villain, which today means a base, worthless, and wicked person, and the word slav became slave. The person who provided bread for the people of the Middle Ages was the serf, not the slave.

2 – The Serf

The true serf worked at agriculture on a piece of land belonging to a lord or baron. As long as the serf paid the annual rent in kind, cash, or labor, he held the land for life and his person and property were protected against invaders. Whenever the owner wished, he could evict the serf from his land, and when the serf died, the land passed to his children only with the lease and consent of the lord. In France a serf could be sold separately from the land for about 40 shillings (approximately 400 dollars today). The owner sometimes sold the serf to two persons, that is, assigned him to the service of two different people who would employ him sometimes for one and sometimes for the other. In France the serf could free himself from the feudal bond by surrendering the land and all his possessions to the lord or the holder of the fief. In England he was deprived of the right to move, and runaway serfs of the Middle Ages were recaptured with the same severity as runaway slaves of modern times.

According to feudal customs, the serf’s obligations to the owner of his land were numerous and varied, to the extent that remembering all these obligations requires a certain amount of shrewdness. 1) The serf paid three types of cash taxes every year: a small sum as a head tax to the state treasury through the baron; a small amount as rent; and a discretionary due called “tallage” that the lord demanded from the serf annually, or several times a year. 2) The serf delivered a share of his produce and livestock to the lord every year, usually a tenth. 3) During the year he was required to perform several days of compulsory labor for the lord; this compulsory labor was the legacy of ancient economies in which peasants collectively discharged their debt to society or their king by cutting trees in forests, draining marshes, building dikes, and digging water channels. Some lords demanded compulsory labor from the serf three days a week in most seasons, and four or five days during harvest or plowing. In urgent times lords could assign serfs to more work and give them only free food in return for this extra labor. This type of compulsory labor obligation in each household applied only to one male member. 4) The serf was required to pay a small sum for using the lord’s mill to grind his wheat, his oven to bake bread, his vat to brew beer, and his press to extract grape juice. 5) The serf paid a fee for the right to fish and hunt in the lord’s domain or to graze his livestock on the lord’s pasture. 6) All his legal disputes had to be brought before the lord’s court, and the serf was required to pay a sum according to the importance of the case. 7) He was obliged to enter the baron’s army for military service when war occurred. 8) If the baron was captured, the serf was expected to pay a sum for ransom. 9) Also, when the lord’s son was raised to the rank of knighthood, the serf was required to send him a handsome gift. 10) He paid a toll to the baron for all products he took to market or fair for sale. 11) He was not allowed to sell beer or wine until two weeks after the lord had sold his own beer or wine. 12) In many cases he was required to buy a certain quantity of wine from his lord every year; and if he did not do so on time, according to the customary rule (according to the collection of laws of the lord’s village), “then the lord must pour a four-gallon measure of wine on the roof of the house of peace; if the wine runs down, the tenant must pay its price, and if it flows upward, he will pay nothing.”

13) If the serf dedicated one of his children to the Church or sent him for higher education, he was liable to a fine, because in this way one worker left the domain of the lord’s village. 14) If the serf or his children married someone who did not belong to the lord’s village, he was required to pay a special tax and obtain the lord’s permission, because in that case the lord lost all or some of the serf’s children; in many lordly estates any marriage required permission and payment of a sum. 15) In a few cases there is mention of “the lord’s right,” according to which the lord could claim the “right of the first night” with the serf’s bride, but in almost all cases the serf was allowed to free his bride from this obligation by paying a sum to the lord. The custom of the “right of the first night” in this form persisted in Bavaria until the eighteenth century. In some English estates, a farmer whose daughter committed sin was required by the lord to pay a fine. In some Spanish estates, if a farmer’s wife was convicted of adultery, all or part of her property belonged to the lord of the estate. 16) If the farmer died and left no child in his place of residence at the time of death, the house and land reverted to the lord by ancient feudal right and custom. If the farmer’s heir was a daughter who had not taken a husband, she had the right to keep the land and property only if she married a man residing in the same estate. In any case, upon the death of a serf tenant, a type of inheritance tax belonged to the lord, meaning the lord had the right to take one head of livestock, a piece of household furniture, or a garment from the deceased’s estate. In some cases the local priest also had the right to take a similar “inheritance share.” In France such death taxes were collected when the serf died without leaving an heir in his place of residence. 17) In some lordly villages, especially those belonging to ecclesiastical authorities, the serf was required to deliver the annual tax and inheritance tax to the administrator of the estate’s defense affairs. A tenth of the produce the farmer obtained annually from the land belonged to the Church.

From all these various dues and taxes, which never forced one family to pay all of them, it is impossible to determine the total extent of a serf’s obligations. It has been estimated that in the later Middle Ages a serf in Germany usually surrendered two-thirds of his produce to the fief-holder under the titles mentioned. The power of custom, which was very important in agricultural regimes, worked to the serf’s advantage, meaning that over several centuries, despite increased production and the declining value of currency, the serf’s obligations in kind and cash remained fixed. Many of the bonds or obligations imposed on the serf class by assumption or law became easier or gradually disappeared over time through effective resistance or the indulgence of lords. In general, it is likely that historians have exaggerated the misery of the serf class in the Middle Ages. The taxes taken from the serf were mostly in return for the rent that had to be paid in cash to the owner, and the taxes he paid to society were for public services and public utilities. Perhaps in general comparison all these taxes, relative to the serf’s income, were far less than the amount of taxes we today pay from our income to the federal government, local government, county, and school. An ordinary farmer of the twelfth century was in much better condition than a Roman proletarian of the time of Augustus, and undoubtedly enjoyed as much comfort as some tenant farmers of modern countries. The baron did not consider himself a man who exploited the labor of others; he performed his duties with full activity in his village, and rarely possessed great wealth. Until the thirteenth century peasants looked upon their lord with respect and often with great affection. If his wife died and he had no child, a delegation was sent to him and he was encouraged to marry again so that he would not die without an heir and the lord’s village would not be ruined as a result of a dispute over succession. Feudalism, like most economic and political systems in world history, had to take the form required to meet the needs of time, place, and human nature.

The Peasant’s Cottage

The peasant’s cottage was built of perishable wood usually covered with straw and grass and sometimes with tiles. Until 1250 there was no organization for extinguishing fires. Usually when one of these cottages caught fire, it was completely destroyed. Most houses had one room or at most two rooms. It had a hearth where firewood was burned; an oven, a trough for kneading dough, a table and several benches, a cupboard, a number of plates, cooking utensils, several tripods for the fire, a drain, and a hook for hanging a jug. Near the oven, on the ground, was a large mattress stuffed with feathers or straw on which the farmer himself, his wife, children, and his guest all slept huddled together and kept somewhat warm. Pigs and poultry were free in the house. Women, as far as conditions allowed, kept the house area clean, but for busy farmers cleanliness was an inconvenience. According to popular legends, the devil did not admit serfs to hell because he could not tolerate the stench they emitted. Near the peasant’s cottage was a barn that also served as a stable for horses and cattle, and perhaps there was also a beehive and an area for keeping poultry. Next to the barn was a garbage heap to which all the animals and the two-legged members of the family contributed. Around these cottages and their appurtenances were placed the tools of agricultural work and domestic industry. A cat had the duty of keeping the area clean of mice, and a dog watched over everything.

The farmer, who usually wore an undergarment of cloth or skin, a tunic of leather or wool, and trousers, fastened a belt and wore long shoes or boots and acquired a robust figure that did not differ much from the French peasant of today. It is a mistake to imagine the medieval farmer as a wretched and depressed person; on the contrary, he should be regarded as the patient and strong hero of the plow — a man who, like everyone else, persisted thanks to a hidden pride, however unreasonable. His wife also worked hard from dawn to dusk like himself; in addition, she gave birth and, since children were considered wealth in the farm, she was prolific. Nevertheless, in the writings of Pelagius, a Franciscan monk (c. 1330), we read how some farmers “often avoided their wives so as not to have children, for because of poverty they feared they could not raise many of them.”

The farmer’s food was rich and palatable and consisted of dairy products, eggs, vegetables, and meat, but authentic historians lament that he was forced to eat black bread or, in other words, pure wheat. He participated in the social activities of the village but had no cultural interests. He could not read; the existence of a literate serf was an insult to his illiterate lord. He was ignorant of everything except agriculture, and even in that field he was not fully proficient. His movements and gestures were rough, coarse, and perhaps awkward. In this turbulent period of European history, he had to be a good animal for self-preservation, and he succeeded in this task as well. His greed came from poverty, his cruelty from fear, and his violence from repression. He was an uncivilized person because he was treated like an impolite peasant; he was the main pillar of the Church, but he believed more in superstition than in religion. Pelagius accused the farmer of this age of cheating in paying the church tithe and neglecting to observe the ceremonies of holy days and fasting. Gautier de Coincy (thirteenth century) complained that the serf “fears God as much as a sheep, and attaches no value to the commandments of the holy Church.” The serf occasionally displayed his coarse and awkward humor, but when working in the field or at home he was a man of few words; he did not curse, he was serious, and he was so occupied with toil and daily tasks that he could no longer expend his energy on chatter or vain delusions and fantasies. Despite his belief in superstition, he was a realistic person. He was familiar with the ruthless whims of heaven and aware of the inevitability of death. He knew that if a season of drought occurred, he and all his children would die of hunger. During the years 970 and 1100, sixty famines struck the people of France to the ground. In “merry England” no peasant could forget the ominous memory of the famines of 1086 and 1125. The bishop of Trier, in the twelfth century, felt disgust at seeing famine-stricken peasants killing their horses and feeding on their meat. Flood, plague, and earthquake entered the stage of life’s drama and finally turned every comedy into a tragedy.

3 – The Village Community

Around the noble castle, approximately from fifty to five hundred peasants, whether serfs, semi-free, or freemen residing there, lived close to one another within the castle enclosure rather than in distant cottages because of safety. Usually the village was part of one or several lordly estates. Most village officials were appointed by the baron himself and all were responsible only to him. But the peasants elected one person as village headman or constable to act as intermediary between them and the lord and to coordinate their agricultural work. Every now and then, at a fixed time, everyone gathered in the market square to exchange what remained of trade in this economy that consisted solely of the lord’s estate. The village family prepared most of the vegetables and some of the meat it needed itself, wove the linen or woolen cloth it required, and provided most of its own clothing. The village blacksmith made iron tools, the tanner made leather goods, the carpenter built cottages and household furniture, and the wheelwright made carts. Butchers, dyers, masons, saddlers, cobblers, soap makers, and the like either lived in the village itself or temporarily came to the village to offer their goods and trade; in the preparation of meat and bread, one whose official occupation was butchery or baking competed with the farmer and the housewife.

Nine-tenths of the feudal economy consisted of agriculture. Usually in eleventh-century England and France the arable land of the lord’s village was divided every year into three parts: one part was devoted to wheat or rye; the second part was reserved for ordinary barley or oats, and the third part was for fallow. Each section or field was divided into several one-acre or half-acre plots separated from one another by “strips” of untilled grass. The village officials assigned several plots of these cultivated lands to each farmer according to difference and obliged him to fallow each plot in turn and change the place of sowing according to a program set by the community. Plowing, leveling the land, sowing seed, cultivating, and harvesting the entire field were carried out by the joint efforts of all individuals. Usually the several plots assigned to one farmer were scattered in three or four different fields so that he could receive a fair share from lands that were not uniform in fertility. Cooperative farming was perhaps a remnant of a primitive communal system of which slight traces remain. In addition to these plots in the farmer’s possession, while performing feudal obligations he had the right to cut trees in the forests, the common land, or the lord’s “meadow,” to graze his flock, and to gather fodder. And usually, around his own cottage, he had enough land for a garden and flower cultivation.

The science of agriculture in Christian lands of the Middle Ages was by no means comparable to the principles of agriculture in the time of the Roman writer Lucius Columella, or the method of agriculture in Mesopotamia or Muslim Spain. The stubble of grain stalks and other waste was burned in the fields themselves so that it would serve as fertilizer for the soil and insects and weeds would be destroyed; soils mixed with gypsum and lime were themselves a kind of imperfect fertilizer. There was no artificial fertilizer, and the high cost of transport limited the use of animal manure. The archbishop of Reims poured the manure from his stables into the Seine instead of sending it to his fields in Deuil near the city. Peasants pooled their pennies to buy a plow or a harrow for common use. Until the eleventh century the ox was the beast of burden, for its food was much cheaper than that of the horse and when it became old, much use was made of its meat for food. But around the year 1000 harness makers invented a stronger yoke by means of which the horse could pull a load without danger of choking. With this yoke and traces, the horse was able to plow three or four times as much land in one day as the ox. In temperate humid climates, the speed of plowing was important. In this way during the eleventh century the horse increasingly replaced the ox and lost the high position it had held for travel, hunting, and war. The mill, which had long been used by Muslims in the East, became widespread in Western Europe near the end of the twelfth century.

The Church lightened the burden of the farmer’s toil on Sundays and holy days by decreeing that on such days “performing non-religious service” was among the sins. Farmers said that “our oxen know what day Sunday is and will not work on that day.” On such days, after the farmer had finished attending Mass, he engaged in singing and dancing and, amid the loud and hearty laughter, forgot the heavy burden of preaching and the farm. Beer was cheap, and the tongue was free and abusive. Ribald stories made about women were mixed with terrifying and awe-inspiring legends of the saints. People competed with one another, and the inhabitants of one village with those of another, in rough contests and football, hockey, wrestling, and weight throwing. Cockfighting and setting dogs on bulls became very popular; when in a circular area two people’s eyes were blindfolded and they were sent with clubs to kill a goose or a pig, the amusement and laughter of the spectators reached its peak. Sometimes in the evening farmers went to one another’s houses and entertained themselves with drinking and indoor games. But usually they spent the nights at home because no means illuminated the streets, and since candles were an expensive commodity, as soon as it became dark they went to bed. On the long winter nights the family members appreciated the presence of the flock inside the cottage, for thanks to the warmth of the animals they felt a little warmer.

In this way the farmers of Europe, with hard labor and silent courage, not relying on initiatives and skills arising from proper motives, provided food for themselves, their lords, soldiers, priests, and kings. These people drained marshes, built dikes, cleared forests and water channels, built roads, and constructed houses; they expanded the domain of agriculture and triumphed in the battle between forest and man. Modern Europe is the product of their hands. Now that we gaze at these orderly hedges and neat fields we cannot see behind them the centuries of exhausting and disheartening toil that crushed the raw material of this generous yet reluctant nature and built upon it the economic foundations of our life. Women also participated in that struggle. Their patient fertility made the conquest of the land certain. For some time monks, like everyone else, bravely stood firm, established their monasteries like advanced outposts in the midst of wildernesses, created economy out of chaos, and built villages in the deserts. At the beginning of the Middle Ages most of the soil of Europe was uncultivated, uninhabited forest, and useless. At the end of this period the army of civilization had taken possession of the entire continent. Perhaps if we carefully consider all the events and struggles of this era, we will conclude that this was the greatest battle, the highest victory, and the most important achievement of the Age of Faith.

4 – The Lord

In every economic system men who have the ability to manage people manage those who have only the ability to manage things. In feudal Europe the one who managed people was the lord, who in Latin was called dominus, in French seigneur (the same as senior or elder among the Romans), in German Herr (lord), and in English lord. The lord usually had three duties: first, to protect his lands and their inhabitants with his military force; second, to organize agriculture, industry, and commerce on these lands; third, to rise in service to his overlord or king when war occurred. In an economy that had been fragmented and reduced to a primitive state by centuries of migration, invasion, plunder, and war, society could survive only if it enjoyed local independence and sufficient food and soldiers. Those who could provide defense and agriculture became the natural lords of the land. Ownership and management of land became the source of wealth and power and the age of aristocratic landowners began, which was destined to continue until the appearance of the Industrial Revolution.

The basic principle of feudalism was mutual obligations: the serf or vassal was obligated economically and militarily to the lord, and likewise the lord to his overlord or higher lord, and he in turn to the king. Conversely, the king was obligated economically and militarily to his overlord, and he to the lord, and the lord to the vassal and serf. In return for the services performed by his serfs the lord leased the land to them for life, and this tenancy almost amounted to ownership. The lord leased to them for a small sum the right to use his ovens, presses, mills, waters, forests, and fields. By accepting a small sum of cash he waived many obligations that could only be discharged by labor and consigned other debts to the oblivion of time. When the serf became ill and unable to work, or old age overtook him, the lord did not abandon him but usually cared for him. On feast days he might open the doors of his house to the poor and fill the stomachs of all who sat at his table. The work of maintaining and repairing bridges, roads, canals, and trade was managed under his supervision. Finding a market for the surplus products of the estate, manpower for various tasks, and money for purchasing necessary goods was done by the lord. To improve breeds and raise livestock he usually bought purebred animals from outside his estate and allowed his serfs to use the stud animals of his own choice for breeding. The lord could, without any fear of punishment, beat a serf, and in some places or under certain circumstances kill him; but it was to his advantage to restrain his violence, for killing a serf harmed him. The lord in his domain possessed judicial power in addition to military authority, and profited greatly from the fines he unjustly collected in the village court, but although his agent often intimidated people in this court, most of the court staff and officials were themselves serfs. Since the serf was willing to pay a sum as compensation to the lord to be exempt from service in such courts, it can apparently be inferred that the imperfect judicial method of these courts was not so unjust. Any serf who wished and dared could say whatever he wanted in the lord’s village court, and some did dare. These courts gradually and unintentionally helped create freedoms that abolished serfdom.

The feudal lord could own more than one village estate or property at the same time. In that case he chose one as his “steward” who would oversee the entire “domain” or in other words all his lordly villages, and appointed one supervisor or manager for each settlement and traveled with his family from one village to another to consume the products of each settlement on the spot. The lord might have a castle in each of his estates. The feudal castle or fortress, which was the evolutionary continuation of the walled camp of the Roman legions (castrum, castellum), the fortified palace of Roman nobles, and the castle or burg of Germanic lords, was built more for safety and less for comfort. The outermost means of protection was a deep embankment or moat that surrounded the fortress; the soil excavated from this moat formed a mound around the castle in which square stakes were driven and by binding these stakes together a strong interconnected palisade was made. A chain bridge of wood, built with iron pieces, was placed over the moat. This bridge led to iron gates or a movable iron grate that protected the great gate in the castle wall. Inside this wall were stables, kitchens, storehouses, stable yards, a bakery, a laundry, a chapel, and servants’ quarters, all of which were usually built of wood. During war all the tenants of the lord’s village gathered in this area with their flocks and movable property. In the center of the fortress was the strongest building, the lord’s house. In most cases this house was a huge square tower also built of wood. By the twelfth century wood had given way to stone in the construction of such lordly houses and the shape of the tower had become round to make defense easier. The lower floor of this building consisted of a storehouse and prison; above it the lord and his family lived. It was from the construction of such towers that the strong castles and palaces of England, Germany, and France emerged during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and it was the impregnable stones of these fortresses that formed the foundation of the lord’s military power against tenants and the king.

The interior of the lord’s tower was dark and confined, and its windows were few and small and rarely had glass. Usually the windows were covered with cloth, oiled paper, shutters, and lattices that prevented excessive rain and light. The interior was illuminated with candles or torches. In most cases each of the three floors of this tower had only one room. Each floor was connected to the other floors by a ladder or doors built at floor level, or by spiral staircases. On the second floor was the main hall of the building where the lord’s court of justice was held, and it served as the dining room, sitting room, and bedroom for most members of the lord’s family. Usually in such halls at one end there was a platform or dais higher than the floor level on which the lord, his family, and his guests dined. Others dined at tables placed in front of benches on both sides of the hall when necessary. At bedtime mattresses were placed on the floor of the hall or on short wooden beds on both sides. All the household slept in this one room, but curtains were hung between the beds. The walls were painted white or in various colors and decorated with flags, weapons, and armor, and usually curtains or wall hangings were hung to prevent the wind from entering the room. The floor was paved with tiles or stone, and covered with branches of plants or rushes. In the middle of the room was a stove that provided a kind of central heating by burning firewood in it. Until the late Middle Ages there were no chimneys. Smoke escaped through a vent or “lantern” built in the ceiling. At the back of the platform or raised dais was a door that opened into a “sun room.” Here the lord, his family, and his guest rested and basked in the sun. The furniture of this room was much more comfortable. A carpet covered its floor and it had a stove and a luxurious bed.

The lord of the village estate wore a tunic usually of colored silk decorated with floral patterns or geometric designs; he threw a wide cloak over his shoulders that could be pulled over the head if necessary; he wore undergarments and short tight trousers, stockings that covered him to the thigh, and long shoes whose tips turned up like the prow of a ship; he usually had a sword and dagger at his belt and wore an ornament like a cross around his neck. During the First Crusade European nobles, in order to distinguish a fully armored knight with helmet from another, imitated the custom common among Muslims, that is, they marked personal garments, servants’ and companions’ clothing, flags, armor, and their equipment with special family emblems or aristocratic coats of arms. From then on a special secret language emerged among noble families that only knights and those whose work was supervising the granting of coats of arms and family trees understood. The colors yellow, white, blue, red, green, black, and purple were respectively called gold, silver, azure, gules, vert, sable, and purpure. Azure or niglon, as its name indicates, was taken from the East. Gules was the fur that was sewn in this color on the edges of garments and the Crusaders used it to decorate their wrists and necks (gule meaning “red” is a corruption of the Latin word gula meaning “throat”), in the thirteenth century these coats of arms of noble families and their shields were used in family decorations as well as in monasteries, cities, and as national characteristics. Usually families had brief mottos on hereditary banners or emblems representing their connection with nobles of past ages such as “Our motto is goodwill, neither little nor excessive.”

Despite all these decorations, the lord was not an idle and parasitic person. He rose at dawn and first climbed to the top of his tower to be aware of any future danger, hastily took breakfast, perhaps attended Mass; he took breakfast at nine in the morning and supervised the various operations of the lord’s village; he personally participated in some matters; he issued daily orders to his steward, butler, groom, and other servants; he entertained passing people and guests and at five in the afternoon, together with them, sat with his family to take “dinner”; and usually went to bed at nine in the evening. Some days this normal routine was disrupted because of going hunting, and rarely because of holding a tournament, and occasionally because of the occurrence of war. Most of the time he gave feasts, and many gifts were exchanged between him and his guests.

The lord’s wife was also almost as busy as her husband. She bore and raised numerous children, commanded the servants (sometimes by boxing their ears); she supervised the bakery, kitchen, and laundry; and she oversaw the preparation of butter and cheese, brewing beer, preserving meat for winter, and the major domestic industries such as weaving, sewing, spinning, textile making, and embroidery, which provided most of the family’s clothing. If her husband went to war, the management of the estate’s military and economic affairs was her responsibility, and it was expected that she could meet her husband’s financial needs during the struggle. If her husband was captured, she was forced to provide the necessary ransom from the labor of the lord’s serfs or by selling her jewelry and ornaments. If her husband died without a son, she might inherit the lordship and become the domina or lady of the estate; but in such a case it was expected that she would soon marry again so that her overlord could manage the affairs of the estate or preserve the settlement against foreign invasions. Usually the gathering of these conditions in one person limited the choice of a housekeeper in finding a husband. In the seclusion of the castle interior she could be a lioness or a little she-devil, and for every blow she received from her husband she would give one back. In hours of leisure she clothed her strong body in wide and long silk tunics with a fur border. Her feet and head were adorned with delicate shoes and veils, and she wore shining jewels as ornaments — all this was a collection that would drive every poet of this age into a frenzy of love or lyric enthusiasm.

Her children received an education that differed completely from the lessons of the scientific schools of the age. Sons of the noble class were rarely sent to public schools. In many cases no effort was made to make them literate. Literacy was usually left to scribes and secretaries who placed themselves at the disposal of interested parties for a small sum. Most feudal knights mocked intellectual knowledge. Duguesclin, one of the most respected figures of the age of chivalry, learned all the arts of war by himself and taught himself how to bravely confront the harshest weather, but he never took the trouble to learn reading and writing; only in Italy and the Byzantine Empire did the nobility maintain a literary tradition. A boy from a knightly family was usually, upon reaching the age of seven, sent instead of to school to another noble family to serve there as a page. In the new environment he learned obedience, discipline, the manner of dressing, the moral and chivalric rules, and the arts of jousting and war through imitation and practice. Perhaps the local priest also taught him arithmetic and a smattering of literacy. The daughters of the family, through observation and practice, learned all kinds of fine or useful arts. One of the duties of these maidens was to attend to guests and when a knight returned from battle or a contest to care for him. In such times they removed his armor, prepared bathing facilities for him, provided him with linen garments, fine clothes, and perfume, and with the modesty and dignity that was the result of years of training stood in his service at the table. The maidens, unlike the boys, learned reading and writing and formed the majority of the listeners and audience in the assemblies of lyric poets, epic reciters, and conjurers, and were themselves the important subject of the prose and verse romantic pieces of their age.

Often the baron’s family included some of the vassals or retainers. A vassal was someone who, in return for military service, being a retainer to the lord, or political support, received a great favor or a notable privilege from him, which usually consisted of a piece of land with all its peasant serfs; in such cases the right to enjoy the land and property belonged to the vassal, and ownership of everything belonged to the lord. A person who was too strong or too proud to serve like a serf, and at the same time too limited to be able to protect himself militarily, swore fealty to a feudal baron; that is, he knelt before him bareheaded and unarmed, placed his hands on the lord’s hands, and declared himself the “man” of that lord (while his rights as a freeman remained intact), and swore on relics of the saints or on the Holy Scriptures that he would remain faithful to the lord as long as he had life in his body. The lord raised him from the ground, kissed him, granted him a fief, and as a sign of this kind favor gave him a staff, a spear, or a glove. From that moment onward the lord was obliged to protect the vassal’s life and property, to be his faithful friend, and if necessary to provide him with financial and legal assistance. According to the theory of one medieval legislator, the baron had no right to insult his vassal or to seduce his wife or daughter; and if he did so, the vassal could “throw down his glove” and this action meant that he had freed his subject from the oath of fealty or allegiance, but he still had the right to keep his fief.

The vassal could transfer part of his land to someone who was willing to obey his command; in that case the lesser subject had the same rights and obligations toward his sub-lord as the vassal had toward the chief lord. One person could hold fiefs from several lords at the same time; in that case he had “simple fealty” with each and his services to each of them were limited, but he had full fealty with only one overlord and remained faithful to him in all circumstances and sometimes bound himself to his service in war and peace. The lord himself, even if he was very powerful and exalted, might be in fealty to another lord because of possessing certain properties or privileges, or even, by accepting a fief from the subject of another lord, be considered his vassal. All lords were vassals of the king. In these intricate relationships, the main bond between master and servant was military rather than economic. One person was obliged to perform military obligations toward another and to behave according to his commitments, or to expect similar commitments from the obligee. Property was only the reward for these commitments. From a theoretical point of view, feudalism was a magnificent system according to which morally individuals engaged in a series of mutual acts, and in a society full of danger, individuals united with one another relying on a tangled and intricate web of obligations, protection, and mutual loyalty.

5 – The Feudal Church

Sometimes the lord of the village estate was a bishop or an abbot. Although many monks worked with their own hands and many monasteries and cathedrals shared in the tithes of the bishop’s or abbot’s domain, large ecclesiastical institutions needed additional help, and this help was often provided from the generosity of kings and nobles in the form of land gifts or a share of feudal revenues. When these gifts accumulated, the Church became the largest landowner in Europe and the most esteemed lord of lords. The famous monastery of Fulda had fifteen thousand villas, and the monastery of St. Gall had two thousand serfs. Alcuin in Tours was lord over twenty thousand serfs. Archbishops, bishops, and abbots received their offices from the king, swore fealty to him like other vassals, acquired titles such as duke and count, minted coins in their own name, presided over ecclesiastical and episcopal courts, and undertook the management of agriculture and military preparations that were feudal duties. In Germany and France people often saw bishops and abbots riding with armor on and spear in hand about their business. Richard, Earl of Cornwall, king of England, complained in 1257 that England did not have such “warlike and fiery-tempered bishops.” The Church, thus entangled in the tangled web of feudal obligations and duties, saw itself not only as an ecclesiastical institution but also realized that it had become an economic, political, and military foundation as well. The worldly possessions and feudal rights and obligations of the Church caused distress to Christian believers, provided a pretext for heretics, and became the cause of severe conflicts between emperors and popes. Feudalism made the Church a collection of petty kingdoms.

6 – The King

Just as in the twelfth century the Church was a feudal organization with a hierarchy of mutual obligations of service and support approved by bishops and administered under overlords such as the pope himself, the secular feudal regime also needed for the completion of its system a superior who was above all vassals, a chief who ruled over all non-ecclesiastical lords. In other words, the existence of a king was necessary. Theoretically, the king was obedient to God, and kingship was considered a divine gift, that is, God had granted the king permission to rule, and for this reason kingship was established with divine approval. But in practice the king ascended the throne as a result of war or by hereditary right or by the choice of the people. Persons like Charlemagne, Otto I, William the Conqueror, Philip Augustus, Louis IX, Frederick II, and Philip the Fair expanded their hereditary power by the sword or by force of arms, but the feudal kings of Europe were usually more representatives of their vassals than rulers over their subjects. These kings were elected and approved by the high clergy and high nobility of the kingdom; their direct powers were limited to their feudal estates and lordly villages; in other parts of the kingdom serfs and vassals swore fealty to a lord who protected their lives and property, not to a king who because of distance and the smallness of his military forces did not have the power to protect and defend the scattered advanced positions of his kingdom. The kingdom according to the feudal system was only the personal property or estates of the king.

In Gaul this decentralization of power reached its utmost intensity, for the Carolingian lords, as a result of the division of the empire, prepared the causes of their own weakening. Other causes of this fragmentation were that bishops made the lords subject to the ecclesiastical system, and the invasion of the Norsemen completely disrupted the affairs of France. In this feudalism that had reached perfection, the king found the role of a mediator among numerous lords. His position was one or two degrees above the lords, dukes, marquises, and counts. But in practice he was exactly like the “nobles of the realm”; that is, a feudal baron whose revenues were limited to his own lands, and who was forced to move from one royal palace to another to pass his life and in war and peace to rely on the military aid or political services of wealthy fief vassals who could rarely be present armed in the king’s service for more than forty days a year, and spent the rest of the year plotting to depose him. The king of France, in order to attract help or in return for service, had granted estate after estate to powerful individuals, so that in the tenth and eleventh centuries the king’s domain had become so small that his superiority over his vassals was no longer possible. When these vassals made their estates hereditary and established security forces and courts and minted coins in their own name, the king no longer had the power to stop them. He lacked the authority to intervene in the judicial disputes of fief lands except in important cases where the litigants appealed to him personally. The king could not send his agents or tax collectors into the domain of such fief vassals; he could not deprive these individuals who independently wished to make peace or declare war of their freedom. In the feudal regime it was assumed that the king of France owned all the lands of the lords who recognized him as their sovereign; but in practice he was only a great landowner; it was not necessary that he be the greatest landowner, and his lands never equaled the ecclesiastical estates.

But just as the inability of kings to protect their kingdom had prepared the ground for the emergence of feudalism, in the same way the inability of feudal lords to maintain peace among themselves, or their inadequacy in creating a unified government for a developing commercial society, caused the weakening of the barons and the strengthening of the kings. The enthusiasm that had arisen for military campaigns and conquest had entangled the feudal nobility of Europe in private wars and public struggles. The Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, the Wars of the Roses, and finally the religious wars of the sixteenth century drained all the blood of the nobility. Some of them who had become impoverished and rebellious turned into robber barons who gladly plundered settlements and killed people. Excess in freedom required that a fixed and unified power be found to maintain order throughout the kingdom. Commerce and industry created a growing wealthy class outside the sphere of influence and subjection of the feudal baron. Merchants, who opposed the tolls and insecurity of transport in the domain of feudal lords, desired the establishment of a central government to replace private rule and laws. The king rose to support this class and to favor the newly developing cities, and the merchants provided the necessary budget to confirm the expansion of his authority, and all those who had suffered oppression and harm from the lords looked upon the king as a savior and helper. Ecclesiastical scholars were also usually fief vassals of the king and loyal to him. Nevertheless, popes often quarreled with kings and found dealing with the king far easier than with a handful of scattered and semi-rebellious nobles. The kings of England and France, enjoying the support of these diverse forces, instead of leaving the succession to the choice of nobles and magnates, made kingship hereditary by placing the crown on the head of their son or brother before death, and the people accepted the hereditary system of kingship, which was the best substitute for the chaos of petty kingdoms. The improvement of means of communication and the increasing circulation of money made regular taxation possible, and with the king’s increasing revenues larger armies could be prepared. The upper class became supporters of the royal system and, with the centralizing influence of revived Roman law, strengthened the foundation of monarchical government. By 1250, with the approval and ratification of legislators, all subjects of the kingdom had become subject to the king’s judicial jurisdiction; and at this time all Frenchmen swore fealty to the king rather than to their lord. At the end of the thirteenth century Philip the Fair had gained such power that he could subjugate not only his own nobles but the papal institution itself.

The kings of France, in return for depriving the nobles of the right to mint coins, hold courts, and declare private war, mitigated the severity and violence of this change by granting titles and privileges in the royal court. The great vassals formed the curia regis or king’s court and, instead of being rulers and commanders, became courtiers of the sovereign; the official ceremonies of the lordly palace became a precise and magnificent ritual for presence in the royal audience, at table, and in the royal bedchamber. Sons and daughters of the noble class were sent as pages and maids to serve the king and queen, and they became familiar with the details of courtly etiquette. The royal family became a school for the nobility of France. The peak of these ceremonies was the coronation of the king of France in Reims and the coronation of the German emperor in Aachen or Frankfurt; at these times all the elite of the nation gathered with dazzling ornaments and magnificent luxurious garments. The Church employed all its mysterious and splendid rites in the consecration of the king who wished to ascend the throne. In this way the power of the sovereign became a divine gift, and no one dared to deny it except one who was willing to call him a bold heretic. The feudal lords turned to the royal court that had made them obedient, and the Church considered kingship a divine right and granted it to kings who broke the power and leadership of the ecclesiastical institution in Europe.

III – Feudal Law

In the feudal regime, that is, in a system where judges and executors of civil law were usually literate people, custom and law were often the same. When law or punishment came into question, the elders of the community were asked what the usual custom had been in their youth. Therefore, the community itself was the most important source of law. The baron or king himself might issue orders, but these orders were not considered laws of the community, and if he attempted to prescribe more than custom approved in the matter of justice or punishment, his command was generally rendered ineffective by negative or open resistance. Southern France possessed written laws inherited from Roman government; northern France, which had more of a feudal character, had preserved most of the laws of the Franks; when these laws were also codified in the thirteenth century, changing them became even more difficult and various legal fictions were spread to reconcile them with realities.

In the feudal regime the law of property was a complicated and strange thing. This law recognized three types of land tenure: 1) freehold and unconditional ownership; 2) fief or enjoyment of land and property that the lord placed at the disposal of his vassal but which was not considered ownership; 3) lease, in which case the land and property, on condition of feudal dues and obligations, was granted to the serf or tenant. In the feudal regime, theoretically, only the king enjoyed absolute ownership; even the most exalted nobles were a tenant whose possession was conditional and dependent on service. The lord’s possession was not completely individual either. Every child had the hereditary right of possession in the lands of his ancestors and could prevent their sale. Usually all the lord’s property after death passed to his eldest son. This custom of primogeniture, which was completely unprecedented in Roman law or barbarian tribes, became expedient and appropriate according to feudal requirements, because it transferred military protection and economic management of the lordly estate to the person who was apparently the most mature member of the family. Younger sons were encouraged to set out and acquire new estates in other lands. Feudal law, despite the limitations it imposed on ownership rights, respected property so highly and prescribed such severe punishment for violating property rights that no law came close to it. A Germanic law code decreed that if a person peeled the bark of one of the willow trees that protected a dike, “his belly should be ripped open and his intestines pulled out and tied around the wound he had inflicted on the tree”; even until 1454, according to a decree in Westphalia, if a person knowingly and intentionally removed the boundary marker of his neighbor’s estate, he should be buried in the ground in such a way that his head remained above the soil, and then the ground should be plowed with oxen and people who had never plowed before; “the offender buried in the soil could save himself from that peril in any way possible.”

The course of justice in feudal law often followed barbarian laws, and an attempt was made to continue previous efforts regarding the execution of public punishments instead of private revenge. Churches, markets, and “cities of refuge” were granted the right of asylum and sanctuary for individuals. This ensured that until government agents arrived and the law intervened, persons had temporary security against private revenge. Lordly courts handled disputes between two tenants or between a tenant and the lord. Disputes between a lord and a vassal or two lords were referred to a jury composed of “magnates of the noble class.” These were individuals who were at least equal in rank and attached to the same fief to which the plaintiff belonged; and all attended one of the lordly halls. Episcopal or monastic courts handled the claims and disputes of those who were in the ranks of the clergy, while the highest degree of appeal was a royal court composed of the magnates of the realm and sometimes under the supervision of the king himself. Lordly courts kept both plaintiff and defendant in prison until the court announced its verdict. In all courts if the plaintiff lost the case, he was condemned to the same punishment that would have befallen the defendant if guilt or negligence had been proven. Bribery was common in all courts.

In the feudal period trial by ordeal continued. Around the year 1215 some heretics in Cambrai were forced to undergo the hot iron test [meaning that hot iron was applied to their bodies, and it was claimed that if they were not guilty, the fire would not harm them]; apparently because these people did not remain immune from the fire, they were led to the foot of a pyre to be burned. It is related that one of these individuals, upon confessing his sins, had his wound immediately healed and no trace of burning remained on his hand, and for this reason they had mercy on him and did not burn him. During the twelfth century, as a result of the progress of wisdom and renewed public interest in the study of Roman law, such “divine ordeals” gradually became abhorrent. Pope Innocent III forced the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) in 1216 to completely prohibit the performance of such “tests.” Henry III adopted this prohibition and incorporated it into English law (1219). Frederick II introduced it into the law code of the kingdom of Naples (1231). In Germany trial by ordeal persisted until the fourteenth century; in 1498 Savonarola, one of the Italian reforming clergy, was forced in Florence to walk through fire on the charge of heresy; during the witch trials of the sixteenth century these tests were revived again.

The feudal system encouraged the old custom of the Germanic tribes of trial by combat and duel. The reason was that this method was considered an almost reasonable way to prove innocence and to some extent a substitute for private revenge. In Britain, after the Anglo-Saxons abolished this custom, the Normans revived it, and trial by combat remained in English statute law until the nineteenth century. In 1127 a knight named Herman accused another knight named Guy of conspiring in the murder of Charles the Good of Flanders, nicknamed “the Beloved,” and when Guy denied such an act, Herman challenged him to combat to prove his innocence by victory. For several hours the two fought fiercely, until both fell from their horses unarmed and turned from sword fighting to wrestling. Finally Herman, in proof of his accusation, tore Guy’s testicle from his body, and Guy died instantly. Perhaps because of such shameful barbarities the custom of the feudal period created many obstacles and restrictions on the right to trial by combat. For the accuser to be entitled to such a right, his complaint had to be believable. Moreover, if the defendant could prove his innocence by evidence or witness, he had the right to refuse trial by combat. A serf could not challenge a freeman to combat, just as a leper had no right to fight a healthy person, and a bastard had no right to fight a legitimate child. In general, anyone could only challenge a person who was equal in rank and status to himself. The laws of some societies gave the court the right to prohibit any legal trial by combat if it deemed it appropriate. Women, members of the clergy, and disabled and crippled persons were excluded from participating in such combats, but they had the right to hire “champions,” that is, persons who were skilled in trial by combat and earned their living in this way, to represent them. From the tenth century onward, in historical events, we encounter champions who even fought in place of healthy men. Since people believed that God would reveal the innocence of the oppressed, it was obvious that the identity of the combatants had no bearing on the main issue; Otto I referred the matter of his daughter’s chastity and the right of succession to certain estates over which there was a dispute to the result of combat between two such champions. In the thirteenth century Alfonso X of Castile, who was hesitant about introducing Roman law into his realm, referred the decision to such trial by combat. Sometimes one or two of these champions were sent with envoys to the courts of kings of countries so that if political disputes were referred to the result of trial by combat, they would not be lacking. Until 1821 such champions were still seen in the coronation ceremonies of the kings of England. In this age the champion fighter was already a strange being who was a relic of past events. But in the Middle Ages such a person during the coronation of a king usually “threw down his glove on the ground and loudly declared that he was ready to fight anyone who denied the divine right of kingship.”

The use of champion fighters discredited trial by combat. The growing “bourgeoisie” class removed it from its social laws; in southern Europe, in the thirteenth century, Roman law replaced it; the Church repeatedly condemned it; Innocent III absolutely prohibited it (1215); Frederick II banned it throughout the kingdom of Naples; Louis IX abolished it in the regions directly under his command (1260); and Philip the Fair (1303) eliminated this custom from the entire country of France. Duels arose more from the ancient right of private revenge than from combats fought to prove right between litigants.

Feudal punishments were savagely harsh. Fines were of countless varieties. People were usually imprisoned for trial, not as punishment. But when the prison was full of vermin, rats, and snakes, imprisonment itself was a form of torture. Women and men who were found guilty were placed in the stocks, or their hands, feet, or heads were put through holes in wood, or they were paraded through the streets so that people would mock them, or food would be thrown at them or they would be stoned. In cases of minor crimes, to punish scolding women and those who spoke ill behind others’ backs, the guilty were tied in a sitting position on a special stool and the stool, which was attached to a long lever, was dipped into a river or pond. Those guilty of skin theft were condemned to serve like slaves as rowers on ships, that is, they were given meager food and chained half-naked to benches in the lower deck of the ship and forced to row until they completely collapsed. Any criminal who deviated from this was severely flogged. Flogging with a whip or iron rod was a common punishment. The flesh of the body and sometimes the face of the criminal was branded with a letter indicating the crime; in cases of heresy and false swearing, the tongues of the guilty were sometimes pierced with hot iron. Amputation of limbs was common. Hands or feet were cut off, ears or noses were sliced, and the criminal’s eyes were gouged out. William the Conqueror, to prevent the commission of crimes, ordered that “no one should be killed or hanged for any wrongdoing, but instead his eyes should be gouged out and his hands, feet, and testicles cut off so that whatever part of his body remained would be a living witness of his crime and wickedness for all.” In feudalism torture was not so common. Roman law and canon law revived it in the thirteenth century. Sometimes the punishment for theft or murder was the exile of the criminal, and more often beheading or hanging. Women who committed murder were buried alive. An animal that caused human death was also buried alive. Christianity taught people mercy, but ecclesiastical courts prescribed the same punishments as secular courts for similar crimes. The court of the monastery of Sainte-Geneviève buried seven women alive for the crime of theft. Perhaps in an age filled with abnormal acts, savage punishments were necessary to prevent rebellious people. But such barbarities continued until the eighteenth century and the most severe tortures were endured by pious heretics at the hands of Christian monks rather than by criminals at the hands of the noble class.

IV – Feudal War

Feudalism arose from the military organization of an agricultural society that had been devastated and plundered; its advantages were more military than economic; vassals and lords were obliged to train themselves for war or to be ready at any moment to put down the plow and take up the sword.

The feudal army was a hierarchical description composed of mutual bonds and fealties that were precisely classified according to noble ranks. Lords, dukes, marquises, counts, and archbishops were all military commanders; barons, lords, bishops, and abbots were all commanders; knights formed the cavalry class; peasants were retainers and servants of barons or knights; and finally the “armed men” — the military forces of communes or village communities — served as infantry. As we see in the Crusades, usually behind the feudal army a crowd of lower-ranking landowners moved on foot without a commander or discipline. These individuals helped the main forces in plundering the property of the defeated and with clubs or axes relieved the wounded enemy of their suffering, but the feudal army was essentially formed by the cavalry class; infantry, which did not have sufficient mobility, had lost its high position since the defeat of the Romans by the Goths at Adrianople (378) and no longer had importance except in the fourth century. Cavalry was the fighting arm of chivalry, and the very words cavalier, knight (chevalier), and finally caballero all derive from the word chaval (meaning horse).

The fighting man of the feudal age used spear and sword or bow and arrow. The knight of this period extended the scope of his self-love to include his sword and affectionately gave his sword a special name. Although it was undoubtedly the epic poets who named Charlemagne’s sword Joyeuse (joyful) and Roland’s sword Durandal (hard) and Arthur’s sword Excalibur (tempered in water). The bow of this period had various forms; one type was a short simple bow that the warrior usually drew against his chest; another type was a long bow that the fighter drew to his ear and aimed with his eye; or a steel bow with a tight string that was sometimes drawn with a heel, and usually threw a round stone or an iron bullet; the steel or bullet bow was older; the long bow was first popularized by Edward I (1272–1307) in his wars with the inhabitants of Wales. In England learning the arts of archery was an important element of military training and one of the major ancient sports. The development of the bow defeated the feudal method of warfare. The knight considered going to war on foot beneath his dignity, but the archers brought his horse to the ground and forced him to endure the trouble of fighting on foot. Later, in the fourteenth century, with the appearance of gunpowder and the cannon, the final blow was struck against feudal power, for with this new destructive means it became possible for the fighter from a distance, without endangering his life, to kill a fully armed knight and shatter his strong fortress.

The fighting man of the feudal age, because he was mounted, could cover himself completely with armor. In the twelfth century a fully equipped knight wore a hauberk and a helmet that covered his entire head and face except for the eyes, mouth, and nose. His legs were in greaves of armor up to the knee. In battle he also wore another steel helmet that had a protruding iron blade that protected the “nasal” of his nose. The steel helmet and coat of mail were invented for protection against the long bow or steel bow during the fourteenth century and remained in use until the seventeenth century; in the seventeenth century the fighter, for greater mobility, abandoned all helmet and armor. The knight, to protect his chest, hung a shield from his neck that had straps inside, and these straps were held firmly with the left hand. The shield was made of wood and leather and iron strips and had a gilded buckle as ornament in the middle. With these descriptions, the medieval knight was a moving fortress.

Usually the main and sufficient means of defense in feudal wars was the construction of ramparts and castles. An army defeated in the field could take refuge inside the four walls of the lord’s village and even hold out until the last moment in the tower of the lord’s residence. In the Middle Ages the art of besieging the enemy declined; the equipment and complicated formations for breaching the enemy’s walls were more exhausting and expensive than was pleasing to the taste of dignified knights; but the art of the sapper class, or the technique of digging tunnels, retained its credit in the system. In a world where the will to fight was far greater than the tools of war, naval forces also declined; warships remained in the same form as in ancient times. Every ship had decks and towers for combat, and a group of freemen or slaves were assigned to rowing. Decoration compensated for the lack of power. This was as true of the ship as of man. Medieval shipbuilders, to prevent the penetration of air and water, coated the hull of the vessel with tar, and painters mixed shining colors with wax and painted the hull white, vermilion, and transparent azure. The prow and railings were painted gold. The bow and stern were decorated with statues of human figures, animals, and pagan gods. The sails had shining and bright colors: some were purple and some were gold. The coat of arms or special family emblem of the lord to whom the vessel belonged was painted on it.

Feudal wars differed from ancient and modern wars in the frequency of their occurrence, the low cost, and the low mortality. Every baron considered himself entitled to start a war against anyone with whom he had no bond according to feudal traditions, and every king was free to plunder the lands of another ruler in an honorable manner whenever he wished. When the king or baron went to war, all his vassals and relatives up to the seventh degree of kinship were obliged to follow him and fight in his retinue for forty days. In the twelfth century there was no day when part of the region that constitutes modern France was not in war and conflict. Being a good fighter was the height of advancement and greatness for a knight. Such a person was expected to endure hard blows with willingness or patience or to inflict such blows on the opponent. The greatest desire of such a knight was to die in the “field of honor” rather than to die “like a cow.” Bertold of Regensburg complained that “only a very few famous lords reach a worthy age, or die a worthy death”; moreover, it should not be forgotten that Bertold was a monk.

Nevertheless, the combat of warriors was not so dangerous. Orderic Vitalis in describing the battle of Brémule (1119) says that “of the nine hundred knights engaged in the battle only three were killed.” In the battle of Tinchebray (1106), in which Henry I of England conquered all of Normandy, four hundred knights were captured, but not even one of Henry’s knights was killed. At Bouvines (1214), the site of one of the bloodiest and most decisive battles of the Middle Ages, fifteen hundred knights faced each other, of whom only one hundred and seventy were killed. The existence of armor and strong fortresses made defense more effective; a man who had armor on and was covered with weapons was not easily killed unless his throat was cut when he had fallen to the ground, and such an act was considered reprehensible according to the rules of chivalry. Moreover, it was wiser to capture a knight and demand ransom for his release than to kill him and arouse the enemy’s desire for revenge. Froissart lamented that in a battle some had been killed, for if these prisoners had been freed “it would have brought in more than 400,000 francs.” According to the principles of chivalry and mutual foresight, respect for prisoners was obligatory, and moderation had to be observed in taking ransom. Usually a prisoner swore on his honor that when freed he would go to his homeland and return with the ransom at the appointed time, and it rarely happened that a knight did not keep his promise. As a result of feudal wars, peasants suffered more than any other class. In France, Germany, and Italy every army attacked settlements, plundered the property of the enemy’s vassals and serfs, and destroyed the flocks and herds left outside the enclosure wall. After such a war, many peasants who had no ox or horse for plowing were forced to plow the land themselves, and many died of starvation.

Kings and lords tried to preserve internal peace from time to time. The dukes of Normandy succeeded in this in Normandy, England, and Sicily. The count of Flanders in his domain, the count of Barcelona in Catalonia, and Henry III for one generation in Germany achieved such success. In the rest of Europe it was the Church that took up this task. From 989 to 1050 various church councils in France compelled rulers and lords to observe Pax Dei (the Peace of God) and warned that anyone who used violence against non-combatants during war would be excommunicated. The Church of France in various centers initiated a peace movement and not only restrained many nobles from private war but also forced them to join the Church in banning combats. Fulbert, bishop of Chartres (c. 960–1028), in a famous religious hymn praised God for a peace to which people were not accustomed. Ordinary people supported the peace movement with indescribable zeal and pious believers predicted that within five years all Christendom would accept that peace program. Ecclesiastical councils in France from 1027 onward (perhaps also imitating the Muslims who declared the days of pilgrimage as sacred months in which war was forbidden on those particular days) decreed that all Christians should observe the Truce of God on particular days. According to these decrees, war was prohibited during Lent, during the grape harvest or harvest season (from August 15 to November 11), on particular holy days, and on several days of the week — which were usually from sunset on Wednesday to the morning of Monday. Finally, according to this truce agreement, only 80 days in a year were allocated for feudal wars and private disputes. These requests and urgings were effective. Gradually, with the support of the Church, and as a result of the increasing power of royal governments, the growth of cities and the “bourgeoisie,” and the beginning of the Crusades that absorbed the power of warriors, private disputes ended. In the twelfth century the Truce of God became part of civil law as well as the statutes of the countries of Western Europe. The Second Lateran Council (1139) prohibited the use of war chariots against individuals. In 1190 Gerho of Reichersberg suggested that the pope should prohibit any war among Christians, and that all disputes arising between Christian kings should be referred to the arbitration of the pope. For kings to accept such a proposal was costly; as private disputes decreased, international wars increased, to the point that in the thirteenth century the popes themselves, who in the royal game of chess used human power instead of pieces to achieve power, resorted to war to carry out their wishes.

V – Chivalry

It was from the ancient customs of Germanic military initiative, combined with the influence of the Saracens from Iran, Syria, and Spain, and also Christian notions of devotion and religious rites, that chivalry, that imperfect but chivalrous phenomenon, matured and reached perfection.

A knight was a person of noble birth — that is, from a family with title and land — who had been formally accepted into the ranks of knights. This did not mean that all “noble” born (that is, persons distinguished by their lineage) were qualified to attain the rank or title of knighthood; usually younger sons of families, except for the children and relatives of kings, did not have much land or income and for this reason could not afford the heavy expenses required for the life of a knight. Such persons were counted among the main “shield-bearers,” unless they could acquire new land and title.

A youth who cherished the idea of becoming a knight usually had to endure a long period of rigorous discipline. At the age of seven or eight he entered service as a page, at twelve or fourteen he was promoted to the rank of “squire” and bound himself to the service of a lord and was ready to serve at table, in the bedchamber, in the lord’s village, during jousting, or in the field of battle in the retinue of his master, strengthened his body and soul with dangerous competitions and sports and, through imitation and practice, learned the use of the weapons of feudal war. When his period of apprenticeship ended, he was accepted into the ranks of knights through a series of magnificent and impressive ceremonies. The candidate, upon entering the ranks of knights, first took a bath that itself symbolized the purity of the soul and perhaps also a guarantee of the purity of the body, for which reason such a person was called a “knight of the bath” to distinguish this title from those who were called “knights of the sword.” The latter group were persons who had been immediately honored with the title of knighthood as a reward for valor in one of the fields of battle. At the beginning, the new knight wore a white tunic, a red cloak, and a black robe, white being the sign of aspiring to moral purity, red for shedding blood in the path of honor or God, and black the sign of readiness to face death with dignity. He fasted for one day and spent one night in prayer in the church; he confessed his sins to a priest, participated in Mass, and shared in the rites related to it, listened to a sermon on the moral, religious, social, and military duties of a knight, and from the bottom of his heart committed himself to performing them. Then, with a sword hanging from his neck, he advanced to the altar of the church; the priest took the sword from his neck, consecrated it, and placed it back in its place. Then the candidate turned toward the lord who was seated nearby; he had to receive the title of knighthood from him; he heard from his mouth this hard question: “Why do you wish to enter the ranks of knights? If you intend to accumulate wealth and seek comfort and be respected without having the respect of knights, know that you are not worthy of such a title and your place among knights is like that of a scribe among bishops who has bought his office with gold.” The candidate had a convincing answer ready. Then the knights or women dressed him in a series of war garments such as armor, tunic, and steel armbands and handed him steel gauntlets, a sword, and knightly spurs. Then the lord, who had risen from his place, struck the candidate three times on the neck or shoulder with the flat of the sword and sometimes gave him a slap on the face, and these two were the signs of the last insults that he had to accept without retaliation. During the performance of this ceremony the lord usually uttered this phrase: “In the name of God, Saint Michael, and Saint George, I dub thee knight.” The new knight was given a spear, a helmet, and a horse. He placed the helmet on his head, mounted the horse, brandished the spear in the air, drew the sword from its sheath, rode out of the church courtyard, distributed gifts among his retainers, and arranged a feast for his friends.

Now the knight had the privilege of risking participation in tournaments to become more skilled in the arts of war, endurance, and courage. These tournaments, which first appeared in the tenth century, became more widespread in France than elsewhere and somewhat elevated the surging emotions and forces that had caused the disintegration of feudal life. In some cases a herald was sent by a great lord or king to the surrounding areas to announce the news of a particular person’s knighting or the visit of a sovereign or the marriage of a member of the royal family and to urge them to celebrate. Knights who wished to participate in such ceremonies went to the designated city, hung the emblems of their family nobility from the windows of their residential rooms, and hung their special coats of arms over castles, monasteries, and other public buildings. Spectators examined these banners and emblems, and anyone who had suffered harm at the hands of a knight had the right to complain to the organizers of such tournaments. Usually the organizers listened to the complaint and if the right was on the side of the plaintiff, they excluded the guilty from participating in the competition; this exclusion was “a blot on the shield” of the knight. Amid the enthusiasm of the spectators, first horse dealers came to the knight to provide him with a mount, then it was the turn of the tailors to adorn him and his mount with fine garments, and money changers who would give ransom for the defeated, as well as groups of fortune-tellers, acrobats, mimics, singers, epic reciters, wandering scholars, prostitutes, and high-ranking ladies. The feast assembly was decorated for singing and dancing, meeting people, brawling, and reckless betting on the contests.

A tournament might last up to a week or only one day. In a tournament held in 1285, Sunday was the day of assembly and rejoicing; Monday and Tuesday were devoted to jousting; Wednesday was a day of rest; and on Thursday the tourneyers (armed horsemen) engaged in a mock battle from which the name of the entire ceremony, tournament, was also derived. The site of the competitions or battlefield was the square of a city or any open remote area surrounded by platforms and stands, and wealthier nobles gathered in these places with medieval luxurious clothing to watch the contests of the opponents; ordinary people stood around the area and observed the proceedings. The stand of the noble spectators was decorated with wall hangings, tapestries, curtains, flags, and coats of arms of noble families. Before the start of the competition, and whenever an opponent achieved a brilliant victory during the competition, musical tunes rose to the sky. During the contests, lords and noble women distributed coins among the standing people, and the people accepted those coins with cries of “charity!” and “blessed!”

Before the first contest, the knights first entered the battlefield with heavy steps in their shining equipment, followed by the lords who were mounted. Sometimes women for whom the knights were willing to draw the sword to exalt their name pulled them with golden or silver chains. Usually every knight carried on his shield, helmet, or spear a kerchief, veil, cloak, bracelet, or ribbon that his chosen lady had taken from her own clothes for this purpose and handed to him.

In the jousting contest on horseback, rival knights faced each other alone. While holding the steel spear extended toward the opponent, they charged at each other at full gallop and delivered strong blows to each other. If either of them fell from his mount, according to the rules the other was also obliged to dismount and continue the fight on foot. Until one of the parties loudly demanded the end of the contest, or became incapacitated due to exhaustion or injury or death, or the contest was stopped by order of the judges or the king. Then the victor presented himself before the judges of the contest and with special ceremonies received his prize from them or from a graceful lady. Several contests of this type might take place in one day. The most important part of the festival program was devoted to the tourney. The tourney consisted of the arraying of two opposing groups of knights who fought each other like a scene from a real war, although their weapons were usually blunt. With all this, sometimes these mock combats also caused casualties, as in the tourney of 1240 in Neuss sixty knights were killed. In these group tourneys, just like a real war, the opponents captured each other and demanded ransom for the release of prisoners. The horses and weapons of the prisoners belonged to the victors. The interest that knights had in money was even greater than their love of war. In the fabliaux there is the story of a knight who protests to the Church for condemning the tournament, saying that if the Church’s orders in this regard are effective, the only means of his livelihood will be lost. When all the competitions ended, the knights who had survived, together with the noble spectators, spent the night in feasting, singing, and dancing. The victorious knights had the privilege of kissing the most beautiful women and listened to poems and melodies composed in memory of their victories.

In theory, the knight was supposed to be a hero, a nobleman, and a chaste person. The Church, out of its eagerness to tame wild two-legged animals, intertwined the foundation of knighthood with a series of oaths and religious ceremonies. The knight came to believe that he should never speak except in truth, defend the rights of the Church, rise to the support of the weak, establish peace in his region, and lead the way against the crowd of infidels. The knight’s loyalty to his overlord was far more binding than the love of father and son. The knight was the protector of all women and the defender of their honor. Toward all knights, by virtue of mutual help and respect, he had the duty of brotherhood. In war he was permitted to fight other knights, but if he captured one of them, he had to treat him in the same way as a guest. For this reason, when French knights were captured at Crécy and Poitiers, until ransom was paid for their release, they were in complete comfort and freedom, guests of the victorious English knights, and shared in the feasts and competitions with their hosts. Feudalism above the conscience of the common people caused the elevation of the honor of the aristocratic class and a code of conduct that was necessary for the nobility of knights — in other words, it obliged the knight to be brave in war, to fulfill feudal obligations with complete honesty, and without any restriction to serve all knights, all women, and all the weak or poor. In this way, virtus (manliness), after a thousand years of Christianity’s emphasis on feminine virtues, once again regained the masculine meaning it had in the period of imperial power. Chivalry, despite the religious halo it had around itself, was a sign of the victory of the notions of the Germanic, pagan, and Arab peoples over Christian ideas. Europe, which had been attacked from all sides, once again needed martial virtues.

But what has been said so far about chivalry was theoretical. The knights who behaved according to these high standards were few in number, just as only a few Christians were able to attain the high positions peculiar to self-sacrificing Christian believers. But human animal nature stained this ideal like the other. The same bravery that one day participated courageously in a tournament or combat might the next day be a faithless criminal. He might boast of his honor as he boasted of his fine attire and, like Lancelot, Tristram, and more real knights than these two, with adultery disrupt noble families. It was possible that he would talk nonsense about supporting the weak and at the same time strike down unarmed peasants with the sword. He looked with contempt upon the laborer on whose handiwork the foundation of his own bravery rested and often treated with violence, and sometimes in a savage manner, a woman whom he himself had sworn to protect and hold dear to his heart. Such a person attended Mass in the morning, plundered a church in the afternoon, and at night drank so much that he had no qualms about committing fornication. Gildas, who lived among British knights in the sixth century — the same century in which some poets composed epics in praise of Arthur “that famous class of knights of the Round Table” — describes such acts of theirs. The writings of the French chronicler and poet Jean Froissart are full of mentions of the harsh behavior and betrayals of such knights whose words were all about loyalty and justice. While German poets composed odes in praise of chivalry, German knights were engaged in fisticuffs, arson, and plundering the property of innocent travelers in public streets. The Saracens during the Crusades were astonished at the savagery and tyranny of the Christian knights. Even Bohemond, the great warrior, to show his contempt for the Greek emperor, sent a load of severed thumbs and noses before him. Such persons, although rare, were frequently seen. Of course it is a futile idea to expect sainthood from soldiers. In order for a person to kill his enemy in the best possible way, he must possess countless virtues in his world. These harsh knights defeated the Moors at Granada, drove the Slavs from the Oder River, and expelled the Magyars from Italy and Germany. These were the same kind of people who tamed the Norsemen, turned them into Normans, and with the tips of their swords transferred French civilization to England. They were exactly the sort of people they had to be.

Two factors moderated the barbarity of chivalry: the first was woman, and the second was Christianity. The Church was to some extent able to direct the warlikeness of the feudal age toward the Crusades. Perhaps what helped the Church in this matter was the spread of the veneration of the Virgin Mary, the mother of Christ. Once again the virtues of the female sex were praised to block the bloodthirsty nature of strong men. But probably the women of that age themselves, by appealing to tangible and rational matters, had far greater influence than this in transforming the warrior man into a noble individual. The Church disapproved of the role of women in tournament fields and the world of poetry, and for this reason a conflict arose between the morals of the noble ladies and the moral teachings of the Church that in that feudal world led to the victory of the women and the poets.

Romantic love, or in other words love that imagines the beloved in an idealized form, perhaps exists in every age and time, but its intensity or weakness is to some extent proportionate to the delay and obstacles that stand between desire and union. Until our own age it rarely happened that love was a motive for marriage. And if at the height of the development of chivalry we see that there is no connection between love and marriage, we must consider those conditions more natural than the requirements of our own age. In most periods, and above all in the age of feudalism, women married men because of their property, and loved other men because of their attractiveness. Poets, because of poverty, were forced either to marry women of the lower class or to love women of the high class from afar and dedicate their highest lyrics to these women whose hands were short from their skirts. The distance between lover and beloved was usually so great that even the most passionate lyrics were considered only as elegant praise, and a lord of good manners gave gifts to poets who composed lyrics about his wife. In this way the viscount of the region and hospitality and his favors did not withhold from Peire Vidal, the French troubadour — who composed loving poems addressed to the viscountess, his wife, and even attempted to seduce her; but this amount of generosity was not something that could always be expected. The troubadours of this age claimed that marriage, because it combined maximum opportunity with minimum temptation, was in no way able to be an inciter or supporter of idealized love; even a chaste poet like Dante apparently never thought of composing loving poems addressed to his wife; or that composing such compositions for another woman, whether single or married, would be considered an improper act. The knight in this matter agreed with the poet that the object of his love should be another woman, not his own wife, and usually the knight’s heart should be captivated by the love of another knight’s wife. Although some knights’ fidelity in marriage should be suspected, nevertheless it must be known that these men mostly laughed at “pure love,” gradually came to terms with their wives, and found solace by participating in wars. According to some accounts, even knights paid no attention to women’s love affairs. For example, in the French epic Chanson de Roland, we see the great warrior Roland, when giving up the ghost, not thinking even a little of his betrothed Aude, while when Aude learns of her beloved’s death, she dies of grief. Nor were all the women of this age romantic beings, and it was only from the twelfth century onward that many of them came to believe that a woman should have, in addition to her husband, a lover who really, or in the world of imagination, loved the woman. If the love affairs of the Middle Ages can be believed, the knight became committed and obliged to serve a woman who gave him a banner; the woman could entrust him with important and dangerous tasks and send him on a journey to perform a task; and if the man performed that important task well, he expected that, as a reward for service, he would embrace that woman or fulfill the desire of his heart. This “reward” was the hardship that the knight endured. In this case, every victory that belonged to the knight was dedicated to his lady; in the heat of battle it was the name of that woman that became the war cry of the warrior, or in the last breath came out of his throat. In this matter again feudalism was not a part of Christianity but its opposite and rival. Women, whose sphere of love had been narrowed from a religious point of view, rose to demand their freedom and shaped their moral principles as they wished; the cult of worship of the real woman rose to compete with the veneration of the Virgin Mary. Love independently claimed another value for itself; offered other ideals for service, and separate rules for human conduct and, even while using religious expressions and customs, ignored religion itself in a scandalous manner.

Such a complicated separation between love and marriage caused many problems in morals and social customs; like the age of Ovid, writers with all the subtlety peculiar to solving moral problems engaged in discoursing on such issues. During the years 1174 and 1182, in a date that is not certainly known, a person named Andreas Capellanus (or Andrew the Chaplain) composed a collection called a treatise on love and its remedy, in which various matters including the principles and fundamentals of “pure love” were discussed. Andreas limits this kind of love to the noble class; he boldly assumes that this love is the surge of illegitimate emotions of a knight for another knight’s wife, but considers its distinguishing feature to be submission, becoming a slave in a ring, and serving the woman. This book is the most important source for the existence of “courts of love” in the Middle Ages in which noble women answered questions of admirers about such idealized loves and left their verdicts as a legacy. If Andreas’s statements have any credibility, in his age the greatest woman involved in this affair was the poet princess known as Countess Marie de Champagne. One generation before this countess, such an exalted position belonged to her mother Eleanor of Aquitaine, the most charming woman in medieval society, who for some time was queen of France and then queen of England. According to Andreas’s writings in this book, the presidency of the court of love in Poitiers belonged to this mother and daughter. Andreas knew Countess Marie of Champagne well, served as her private chaplain, and apparently his purpose in writing the treatise on love was to publish Marie’s opinions and judgments on this subject. Andreas says in this treatise: “Love teaches everyone to increase good manners;” he assures the reader that the harsh nobility of Poitiers, under Marie’s leadership, became a society of generous women and refined men.

The poems of the troubadours of the Middle Ages contain many references to such courts of love that were administered under the supervision of high-ranking ladies such as the viscountess of Narbonne, the countess of Flanders, and the like in Pierrefonds, Avignon, and other regions of France. As it is related, the disputes referred to such courts were mostly from women, and sometimes from men; ten and sometimes fourteen, and even sixty women gave verdicts in these disputes. In these courts they resolved differences, reconciled lovers who had quarreled; and fined anyone who violated the relevant regulations. In this way (according to Andreas) Marie, Countess of Champagne, on April 27, 1174, in answer to a question to this effect — “Can true love exist between women and men who are married?” — gave a negative answer, because she believed that “lovers give everything to each other without any motive of necessity, while men and women who are married are forced by duty to bow their heads in submission to each other’s inclinations.” The same witty Andreas says that all courts of love were unanimous on thirty-one cases of the “laws of love,” as follows: 1) Marriage should not be an excuse for refraining from loving. ... 3) No one can truly love two persons at the same time. ... 4) Love never remains constant; it always either increases or decreases. 5) Favors that are not shown willingly are tasteless. ... 11) Love for women who love only with the intention of marriage is an improper act. ... 14) If the object is obtained too easily, love is reprehensible; pleasure obtained with many difficulties makes love precious. ... 19) If love suddenly begins to decline, it soon disappears and rarely returns to its original state. ... 21) Love always increases as a result of jealousy. ... 23) A person who has become prey to love eats little and sleeps little. ... 26) A lover cannot withhold anything from the beloved.

These courts of love, provided they actually existed, were among the entertainments of the social circles of noble women; busy barons paid no attention to these formations, and amorous knights established regulations for themselves. But there is no doubt that idleness and increasing wealth caused the emergence of a series of love affairs and customs for loving that filled the story of these love affairs with the verse collections of medieval troubadours and the poems of the early Renaissance period. The Florentine historian known as Villani (c. 1280–1348) writes in June 1283:

On the feast of Saint John, when the city of Florence was happy, quiet, and at peace ... a society of a thousand people was formed, all dressed in white and calling themselves servants of love. This group successively prepared a series of competitions, amusements, and dancing with ladies. Nobles and burghers moved to the sound of music and the blast of trumpets, and at noon and night feasts were held. This court of love lasted almost two months and was the most magnificent and famous of its kind that had been seen in Tuscany until this date.

Chivalry, which began in the tenth century and reached its peak in the thirteenth century, suffered from the barbarities of the Hundred Years’ War, received a mortal blow from the ruthless hatred that caused the division of the English nobility in the Wars of the Roses, and was destroyed in the blaze of the religious wars of the sixteenth century. But chivalry left clear traces in society, education, social customs, literature, art, and the common vocabulary of medieval and modern Europe. The hierarchy of chivalry — such as the Order of the Garter, the Bath, the Golden Fleece — increased so much that their total in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain reached 234 and schools like Eton, Harrow, and Winchester mixed the ideal of the chivalric ideal with “liberal” teachings and created a method for training the character and developing the will of the young that was unparalleled in the history of education. Just as the knight learned manners and gallantry toward women in the king’s court or the halls of lords and nobles, in the same way he transferred some of these “noble manners and behaviors” to those who were socially lower than him. The politeness and courtesy of the modern age is medieval chivalry, but in a milder form. The literature of Europe from the epic Chanson de Roland to the story of Don Quixote became rich by paying attention to knights and developing issues related to their lives, and the revival of this subject and renewed attention to it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was one of the exciting elements in the Romantic literary movement of Europe. However much exaggeration and nonsense that has flowed from the pens of writers on this subject and however great the difference between the actions of knights and their ideals, it must be said that this creed is one of the greatest achievements of the human spirit. The art of living is far more magnificent than other types of art.

In such a perspective, the image of the feudal age is not only a tale of serfdom, illiteracy, exploitation, and violence, but is really a scene of lively peasants who clear wildernesses, interesting people who are powerful in speech, love, and warfare; the story of knights committed to observing the rules of honor and performing service who prefer fame-seeking and adventure to security and comfort and mock the danger of death and hell; the biography of women who patiently toil and raise their young in peasant cottages, the tale of noble women who mix the most compassionate prayers of the Virgin Mary with the most audacious sensual poems and refined love — perhaps feudalism helped elevate the status of women more than Christianity. The heavy task of feudalism was to reestablish political and economic order in Europe after a century of destructive invasions and a world of calamities. In this task feudalism succeeded, and when it began to decline, modern civilization benefited from its heritage and rose from its ruins.

The Dark Ages is not a period that a researcher looks upon with arrogant contempt. The researcher can no longer consider the ignorance and superstition, political fragmentation, and economic and cultural poverty of this age worthy of reproach; on the contrary, he is amazed at how Europe straightened its back after successive blows from the Goths, Huns, Vandals, Muslims, Magyars, and Norsemen and preserved all these ancient arts and knowledge amid those catastrophes and upheavals from the ravages of time. The scholar has nothing but a sense of respect for the likes of Charlemagnes, Alfreds, Olafs, and Ottos who by force restored order to this chaos; for the likes of Benedicts, Gregories, Bonifaces, Columbas, Alcuins, and Brunos who with great patience revived morals and literature from the ruins of their age; for bishops and artists who had the ability to lay the foundations of lofty churches, and anonymous poets whose ready talent did not cease lyric composition in the intervals of terror or wars. — For all these, nothing but respect. Government and the Church were forced to start again from the first brick, just as Romulus and Numa had done a thousand years before. Turning wars into cities and training savage tribes into city-dwelling people required a courage far greater than what was necessary to build cities like Chartres, Amiens, and Reims, or to cool the fire of Dante’s vengefulness and turn it into the highest poem.