Apologies in advance for the length of this part.
The Book of the Order of Chivalry
Ramon Llull wrote the most popular handbook, The Book of the Order of Chivalry, probably between 1279 and 1283. It reached a wide readership in its original Catalan (Libre qui es de l’ordre de cavalleria); in French translation (Livre de l’ordre de chevalerie) it reached an even wider audience, before being translated into English and transcribed into print by Caxton (The Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry) in the last quarter of the fifteenth century.
Llull was the ideal person to write a handbook for knights. He began his adult life as a knight himself and was thoroughly immersed in chivalric culture and literature before experiencing the great conversion, probably in 1263, that sent him on a radically new course. After recurrent divine visitations he became a mystic, a systematic and prolific philosopher, a missionary for the conversion of Muslims and Jews, and one of the founding figures of Catalan literature. But he apparently never became a cleric, however close he was to the Franciscans in thought and life.
The showy, easily remembered, and often quoted statements in his book are all in praise of knighthood, even of the sort of knighthood that clerical critics might view through narrowed eyes as merely ‘earthly chivalry’. Llull likes and praises it all: jousts and tournaments, war in defence of one’s lord, the liberal life of hall and hunting. The thin story frame for his treatise is built around that stock figure the wise old hermit who—we learn with no surprise—turns out to be a former knight.
A young seeker after chivalry encounters him by his fountain, asks questions, and receives not only a lecture but also a reading assignment, a little book that he will take to court for the instruction of all. It is, of course, the very book the reader holds. The hermit, now pale and ascetic, had formerly been the sort of hero with whom any knight could identify: ‘[He] had long maintained the order of chivalry and done so by the force and nobleness of his high courage and wisdom and in adventuring his body had maintained just wars, jousts and tourneys and in many battles had many noble and glorious victories.’
On such honourable men Llull can scarcely lavish enough praise. They form an ordo alongside that of the clerics and rank only a little lower than those whose hands produce God’s body on the altar. If only these two high orders could be free of error, Llull says, the world would be all but free from error.
The knights, if anything, ought to be advanced in honour. Ideally, each knight should have a kingdom or province to rule, an honour prevented only by the unfortunate shortage of suitable territories. Certainly, knights would make excellent judges, if only they were learned, and chivalry is, in itself, so high a subject that it ought to be taught in schools. There can be no doubt that knights are the natural counsellors for kings and princes; to advance the nonknightly to such positions is an offence against chivalry, which produces the men best qualified for rule, best fit for distributing justice. In his Ars Brevis, Llull in fact defines chivalry as ‘the disposition with which the knight helps the prince maintain justice’.
Llull introduces his general theme by telling a myth of origins. It is a story of a fall and a redemption through chivalry. At issue are all the basic matters concerned with securing right order in the world. The myth relates that at some point in the swirling mists of the past the great virtues—charity, loyalty, truth, justice, and verity—had fallen, producing injuries, disloyalty, and falseness, with social consequences of error and trouble in the world.
Fearing disorder and injustice, the populace divided itself into thousands and from each chose the best man to be a knight; they likewise selected the horse as the best beast to carry him in his work. From that time forward the knight has carried out a high and essential mission: he secures order in the world. For fear of him the common people hesitate to do wrongs to each other; for fear of him they till the soil. Just as the clerks (who are brought into the myth without explanation, since it is not their myth) incline the people to devotion and the good life, the knights ensure the order that makes civilized life possible.
Llull makes this same point in slightly different terms in his Felix (though here he reverses the roles of hermit and knight). In response to the hermit’s quizzing him about what a knight is, ‘the knight replied that a knight was a man chosen to ride on horseback to carry out justice and to protect and safeguard the king and his people so that the king could reign in such a manner
that his subjects could love and know God’. Yet such praise is only half the picture.
Although Llull nearly worshipped chivalry as an ideal, his first-hand knowledge of knighthood as it worked in the world shaped everything he says about it. In fact, his love for chivalry as it might be never eradicates his deep fear of chivalry as social fact. In the Book of Contemplation, for example, he refers to knights as ‘the Devil’s ministers’, and asks pointedly, ‘Who is there in the world who does as much harm as knights?’
At one point in the Tree of Science he pictures a hermit asking a knight if he understands the order of chivalry. The knight explains that in the absence of a book on the subject he does not, in fact, understand chivalry. Were there such a book, the knight adds, ‘many knights would be humble who are prideful, and just who are criminal [injurioses], and chaste who are licentious, and brave who are cowardly, and rich who are poor, and honourable who are dishonourable’.
Llull here, of course, clearly if indirectly announces a rationale for the book on chivalry which he himself wrote; in the process, he explicitly establishes the reforming nature of his book. Knights can and must be made better in basic categories of their lives.
Llull knows that he is in a sense whistling past the graveyard in The Book of the Order of Chivalry. It will be difficult to refashion the men who cause so much disorder into effective upholders of order. Each gilded wine goblet that Llull raises to toast knighthood thus contains a bitter residue of criticism. The basic dichotomy appears in advice given by the hermit within the very myth of origins:
Beware, squire, who would enter into the order of chivalry what you shall do. For if you become a knight you receive honour and the servitude due to the friends of chivalry. For of so much as you have more noble beginnings and more honour, just so much are you more bound to be good and agreeable to God and also to the people. And if you are wicked you are the enemy of chivalry and contrary to its commandments and honours.
Following this pattern, Llull’s discussion of each chivalric virtue so lauded in the book quickly inverts to become a sermonette against the vice it corrects. The virtues of the body (such as jousting, tourneying, hunting) must not be exercised at the expense of the virtues of the soul. A knight must protect women, widows, orphans, and weak men; to force women and widows, to rob and destroy the feeble, to injure the poor, is to stand outside the high order of chivalry. A knight must have castle and horse so that he can patrol the roads, deliver justice in towns and cities, and encourage useful crafts there; to play the highway robber, to destroy castles, cities, towns, to burn houses, cut down trees, slay beasts, is disloyal to chivalry. A knight must seek out and punish robbers and the wicked; to thieve himself or to sustain other robber knights is to miss the basic point that honour is the supreme good, infinitely more valuable than mere silver and gold.
The list runs on in this vein, one worry after another balanced on the knife edge of reform which stands between fulsome praise and dark warnings. Llull does, it is true, move at one point beyond the undifferentiated company of knighthood to stress the importance of hierarchy. He opens his treatise with the familiar parallel between social and political hierarchy in human society and natural hierarchy in the created world. As God rules the planets which in turn control the earth, so beneath God the kings, princes, and great lords rule the knights, who, in their turn, rule the common people.
On the whole, however, the thrust of his book is to reform chivalry by enlightening individual knights, by changing the way they think, rather than by stressing the exterior force of any institutions or by placing them in a distinctly subordinate layer in the hierarchy. In some instances he specifically urges the body of right-thinking knights to act as a policing agency themselves, admonishing them even to be willing to kill those knights who dishonour the order of chivalry, as in the case (which so obviously troubles him) of knights who are thieves and robbers, wicked and traitorous. His formal hope, whatever his private estimate, remains the correction of each knight through education, reason, and exhortation.
The prominence of clerical ideas will be as striking to the reader as the total absence of any idea of clerical institutional power. Many pages of the treatise are filled with what most modern readers will consider tenuous moral meanings attributed to each piece of the knightly equipment, with summary accounts of the theological and cardinal virtues, with warnings against the seven deadly sins.
Yet the treatise preserves a character that is not, finally, clerical. It accepts too many aspects of the chivalric life that were questioned or even condemned by ecclesiastics. Though it formally sets up the clerical ordo as highest, it edges chivalry nearly to the same mark. The hermit who dispenses wisdom is apparently a layman and former knight, not a cleric; and he is found at a forest fountain, not in any church. Llull’s reform draws on the ideas of clergie, in other words, without compromising the degree of lay independence so essential to the knightly self-conception.
Likewise, although he portrays knights as the chief props and active agents of royal power, his book is not really royalist. If only the earth were big enough, after all, each of his idealized and reformed knights would properly be a king, or something very close to that high rank. He never fully confronts the tension between the formal statement of hierarchy which opens his book and his continued portrayal thereafter of an idealized society of knightly equals—powerful and busy men, carving away evil from the world with their broadswords and even doing away with the rotters who give chivalry a bad name. The earthly social hierarchy which parallels that of the heavens seems quickly to recede and to become almost a backdrop; it certainly does not function as the key mechanism for providing ordered life.
In short, like the men for whom he wrote, Llull was deeply immersed in the contradictions chivalry brought to the complex and difficult issues of public order. He wanted to be a reformer of chivalry, not merely a singer of its praises. Yet he was a pragmatic man; his popular book urged reform that came wrapped in gold leaf and that argued its case along lines that most in his audience could find tolerable. We can take instruction both from the book’s popularity and from Llull’s mixed hopes and fears.
NB I'll post the rest looking at the last two major books in a couple of later posts.
