IN HIS LONG AND DISTINGUISHED career Richard Abels has shown a commendable breadth of interests no less than an admirable depth of analysis. Touching even briefly on a few aspects of that range of interests, I offer this contribution to his Festschrift. First, since crusade has been one of the many topics engaging Professor Abels, I am encouraged to consider an aspect of crusading propaganda, even though I cannot claim personal credentials as a crusade historian and only approach that subject through long study of chivalry, elite violence, and practiced knightly piety. Second, Abels has demonstrated a commendable recognition of the value of artistic and material artifacts as historical evidence. Since this approach parallels my own efforts to utilize medieval imaginative literature as valid and valuable historical evidence, I will welcome his testimony whenever I may be summoned before a tribunal for the scholarly heresy of my own approach. Finally, I will attempt to link the propagandistic use of exempla, colorful moral stories for sermons, meditation, or simple enjoyment, not only with crusade but with key chivalric modes of thought in general.

Surely, as Abels recognized, we should cast our evidentiary nets widely, to take in a generous haul, and never deny ourselves a rich catch of evidence, even if we must analyze what we find. In that spirit I would like to extend or at least focus the case for imaginative evidence through the use of exempla and miracle stories, as presented in sermons (that presumably reached many); and I will turn in particular to manuscript books of tales made for reflection and entertainment (presumably the property of elite households). These exempla (with characters and incidents worthy of medieval literary fiction) are likely not simple and unmediated reportage; it is difficult for moderns, at least, to believe that they “really happened” just as narrated. And if they were, in fact, piously created rather than simply neutrally recorded, their significance for scholarly analysis is actually enhanced; for from them we can manage a crucial look into mentalité.

These sources have not, it seems to me, been incorporated as fully as they might usefully be into our scholarly enterprise. Despite some outstanding exceptions – Christoph Maier in Zurich comes readily to mind – our general studies of crusade and our class syllabus are not replete with exempla. I think they could be, with good results in publication and in the classroom.

Viewed, as it often still is, from a neo-Romantic perspective, chivalry becomes a force for order and hedge against violence, but this represents decidedly post-medieval conceptions. European medieval chivalry actually constituted the ideals and practices of the warrior elite, elaborating views on licit violence, lived piety, valorized status, gendered relationships, and the distribution of wealth. This chapter takes chivalric violence as its focus, carefully distinguishing when medieval sources are describing reality and when they present idealistic plans for reforming knighthood. The search is for authentic knightly frames of mind and courses of action. Clearly, they needed some framework to guide their demanding lives and as elite warriors obviously essential in their world, they could choose and shape working codes that met their needs and simply ignore or modify troublesomely restrictive conceptions thrust at them. Of the many sources close to practicing knights used in the chapter, two receive special emphasis, the History of William Marshal (the biography of the manor cross-Channel knight of late 12th and early 13thC) and the Book of Chivalry (written by the leading French knight of mid 14thC). Both show the powerful role of this warrior code emphasizing the role of prowess in the search for honour, sustained by religious piety showing divine blessing on knighthood as one sustaining society.

This introductory chapter of volume II of the Cambridge World History of Violence, which focuses on the thousand years between 500 and 1500, or what is also known as the Middle Millennium, examines .institutions and forms of violence in the geographical area including Japan and China, Central Asia, North Africa, and Europe, with two additional chapters extending coverage into Aztec and Mayan culture.The topics of this introduction are set in four contexts in which violence occurred across this broad chronology and vast territory.They are: the formation of centralized polities through war and conquest; institution building and ideological expression by these same polities; control of extensive trade networks; and the emergence and dominance of religious ecumenes.Attention is also given to the idea of how theories of violence are relevant to the specific historical circumstances discussed in the volume’s chapters. A final section on the depiction of violence, both visual and literary, demonstrates the ubiquity of societal efforts to confront meanings of violence during this longue durée.

Late in the summer of 1340 the army of Edward III was besieging the town of Tournai, loyal to the French crown. A French army under Philip VI had manoeuvred nearby with the ambition of relieving the siege. The river Marque, seemingly impassable, separated the two forces. Yet as the chronicler Jean le Bel records, one evening:

This fleck of an incident floating on grand currents of political and military history raises some of the most basic issues we can discuss as we seek to understand and represent medieval warfare. This simple scene, more stark than standard accounts of triumph and glory, draws us toward fundamental conceptions about licit violence and those who justly perpetrated it; we step just behind the rich screen of the usual medieval representation in manuscript pages or many painted or carved works. The chroniclers, artists and craftsmen who penned, painted or sculpted reveal the mindsets of their patrons within the ruling elite. Upon these medieval works much modern analysis and scholarly representation depends.

Chivalry may sometimes seem to slip through our fingers and separate into discrete spheres. This quicksilver quality may tempt scholars to jettison use of the term altogether, considering it too fragmented to sustain meaning. This view, emerging from understandable impatience with sweeping generalization, resembles what medieval philosophers would have termed nominalism with its focus on specific phenomena alone as having meaning, while the general, classifying category is granted no genuine existence. Adopting this view, martial or honor culture might be granted existence in particular traits, attitudes, and acts, but an overarching idea of chivalry would be thought to fail to catch anything general for historical analysis.

Yet the very term chivalry was continually and confidently spoken and written throughout half a medieval millennium. Not all the terms we employ as modern scholars studying those centuries can make this claim to reality in the society they are meant to describe. Feudalism as an abstract noun is a modern construct intended to encapsulate basic aspects of medieval society; but it was not a word used in the Middle Ages and has caused seemingly unending debate among scholars. Chivalry, however, was a term used reflexively by medieval people from the late eleventh century and the twelfth century through the remainder of what we consider the medieval period and beyond. It was their term. They thought it could and should convey important meaning. Their reliance on the term sets our goal of understanding what it meant to them and why they used it.

If some scholars imitate nominalists and avoid the term as overly general, other scholars avoid the term for nearly opposite reasons. They would grant that the values we analyze in chivalry were real, but insist that in fact the ideas or behaviors we are observing in certain medieval centuries represented nothing more than the eternal warrior code. In this view, how warriors think and how they act remain at base a constant, and this enduring code represents what is truly important in scholarly analysis: doughboys in the First World War, Greek hoplites, Native American dog soldiers of the Plains, Carolingian milites, Japanese samurai, high and late medieval knights – all were a part of the grand procession of warriors whose essence is not dependent on specific social and cultural context of time and space.

Modern cinematic audiences must feel they understand knightly emotions. The righteous wrath of knights fills screens with a swirl of bodies, blades, and blood. In fact, “getting medieval” on someone has come, in common parlance, to suggest unrestrained violence fueled by equally unrestrained emotions. Yet from another angle and with little sense of contradiction, the imagined chivalrous show deliciously amorous sensitivity; with hearts thumping in ample chests, they speak soft, poetic lines about intense feelings of love, or perhaps even sing them with lute accompaniment, to demure ladies on balconies. Although usually strong, silent types, when standing tall amidst a courtly audience the knights express finely felt pride in birth and accomplishment, or project outrage at any imputed dishonor, employing elaborate speech, with dramatic gestures to match.

Such popular views can claim at least some historical merit, catching a panoply of intense emotions that infused chivalric thought and actions. Distinct traces of such feelings and consequent actions appear throughout a wide range of sources, from narratives within chronicles to vividly dramatic scenes in imaginative literature. All this evidence presents displays of intense emotions that accompanied important occasions and conveyed or enhanced their meanings.

Yet popular books and films assume that our medieval forebears were in essential ways and at all times and social levels just like us. Is this not how they appear in popular media? Their costumes may be more dashing and colorful, their speech charmingly quaint, but their emotions appear simply cut along lines of an eternal pattern. From such an ahistorical viewpoint, any questions about medieval emotions simply self-destruct. Why should emotions among the chivalric elite require any special focus when we can look within ourselves and understand all?

In fact, medieval evidence contradicts this common line of thought. Even if some broad affective human traits appear in every era, the relative importance of particular emotions and their embodiment in social roles and relationships have surely varied. A modern emotional template cannot be force fit upon medieval society in general or on the knights in particular. Contrary to the modern commitment to casualness and informality (coupled with at least theoretical egalitarianism), medieval emotions proudly operated in formal and heroic mode and in the service of social, political, and religious hierarchy. Speech best conveyed meaning and secured assent when delivered in the high style; actions that were formally dignified and dramatically presented best secured results.

Insight into chivalric continuity and change can be found in what might seem a minor incident described in one of our finest sources, the History of William Marshal. As the great rebellion broke out against Henry II in 1173, his eldest son, Henry the Young King, turned against his father and prepared to fight for a degree of autonomy he had never been granted, Henry being a prudent father. The Young King's entourage reminded him that he had never been knighted and argued that taking this formal step in the crisis “would make the whole of your company more valorous and more respected, and would increase the joy in their hearts.” According to Marshal's biographer, the Young King accepted their advice and declared he would be knighted by “the best knight who ever was or will be, or has done more or who is to do more…” This was, of course, William Marshal, his biographer tells us. Stepping up to the Marshal with sword in hand, the Young King says, “From God and from yourself, My lord, I wish to receive this honour.” William girded him with the sword and “asked that God keep him most valorous, honoured and exalted…” The entourage viewing this short and simple ceremony is studded with counts and barons (you may be sure!), but the poet proudly says of the Marshal, “And yet he had not one strip of land to his name or anything else, just his chivalry.”

Strong ideas about chivalric function, status, and ideology animate this narrative of an affecting ceremony. The function of the warrior stands out clearly. The Marshal is chosen to knight the Young King because he is the best, and this evaluation comes from a celebrated patron of valorous deeds in tournament on the eve of a civil war in which even more intense fighting could be expected and enacted for higher stakes. In short, the Young King was considered a good judge of the knightly function of prowess; the poet/biographer assures his audience that the Young King, through his generosity to masterful warriors, even those who were landless, will revive chivalry.