Download PDF | Samuel A. Claussen - Chivalry and Violence in Late Medieval Castile,The Boydell Press, (2020).
245 Pages
Introduction
The medieval knight Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known as El Cid, died over a thousand years ago as the ruler of the minor state of Valencia on the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula; his historical significance is debatable. The values he represented, though, long outlived him. The ideals of medieval chivalry – the guiding principles of medieval knights – with which El Cid was familiar, would also have been familiar to knights at the end of the Middle Ages. The great 15th-century knight Rodrigo Ponce de León, for example, thought of himself as a “new Cid” and, if the two men could have sat down and chatted, they would have found much that they had in common.1 El Cid himself was animated by an early manifestation of medieval chivalry and later medieval knights of Iberia transformed him into a chivalric hero, even as they edited the facts of his life in order to mold him into an image of themselves.
They told stories and sang songs of him, highlighting his valor in battle, his defense of his honor, and his loyalty to his king. Late medieval Iberians were imagining El Cid in a way that served their own needs, achieved their own social and political ends, and confirmed their own cultural values. Medieval chivalry in the Iberian Peninsula focused strongly on valor in battle, violence against one’s enemies, and service to God on the battlefield, and these values were projected onto the hero who had died hundreds of years before they were born. The legend of El Cid was important to late medieval knights because it allowed them to place themselves in a long line of powerful heroes, and to see their own virtues and values become timeless. Although medieval chivalry slowly began to wane in the 16th century, remembrances of it continued to animate key moments in the Spanish Golden Age and the Age of Exploration. Conquistadors, noblemen, and explorers imagined themselves as medieval knights going forth in service of God and the lord king, augmenting and defending their honor, and pursuing violence against their enemies.
They imagined themselves as living versions of the great romances of medieval Iberia, discovering fantastic new lands and slaughtering non-Christians. After the empire fell by the 19th century, Spain sought to reinvent itself as a nation. Artists, politicians, and writers turned to the ideals of the Middle Ages to create a national identity for Spain, and they placed chivalry in their service in order to do so.
From the earliest times, medieval chivalry has been imagined and reimagined in the service of contemporary goals, whether those pertained to an individual knight of the Middle Ages, a monarch seeking power and glory, or a conquering warrior in Mexico or Peru. The ideas of chivalry have been immensely powerful throughout Iberian history, even as they have been modified, edited, or even abused. The image that graces the cover of this book is one such piece of reimagined chivalry. Created by the Spanish painter Juan Vicens Cots in 1864, the painting is titled Primera hazaña del Cid, or The First Deed of El Cid. El Cid’s first act as a young man, according to some medieval and early modern stories, was taking vengeance on Count Lozano, a man who had insulted El Cid’s father. El Cid beheaded the count and presented the head to his father – the scene depicted in Cots’ work.
The young hero stands proudly in the light in full chain mail, with his bloody sword in one hand and the head of his enemy in the other. An invisible wind seems to nobly tussle his hair and tunic. El Cid’s father leans in to gaze at the head with incredulity, perhaps at his son’s bold deed, even as the other young men at the table recoil in horror at the grotesque scene. Aside from being an arresting image, Primera hazaña del Cid is remarkable because it represents the appropriation of the violent medieval past in the service of the modern world. Cots operated in a romantic and nationalist world that idealized the medieval past. For 19th-century romantics and nationalists the medieval world was exciting and honorable, even if it could be frightening and mysterious. But most importantly, it was the period in which national identities were truly formed. From the perspective of nationalists in the 1800s, Spain became Spain as a result of its experience in the Middle Ages.
The animating force of that medieval nativity was chivalry and all that went with it – honor, nobility, holy war, and violence. To be sure, this was partly an imagined history, but the realities of the Middle Ages loomed large for the modern world. Nationalist thinkers needed an ideology and a worldview that ennobled Spain as a nation, held its various peoples together, and gave Spain and Spanishness meaning. The selection of medieval chivalry and war as a defining feature of 19th- and 20th-century Spanish nationalism would matter a great deal as Spanish people debated who they wanted to be in the modern world. Indeed, the idea that Spain had been formed as a result of heroic medieval knights fighting for God and for Spain would be a particularly virulent component of certain strains of Spanish nationalism.
Francisco Franco imagined himself as a latter-day El Cid, serving God by destroying godless communists and anarchists and building Spain into a powerful state worthy of its historical legacy. One relic of this attitude was the title page of an essay written by Darío Fernández Flórez in 1939. Below the title, “Dos Claves Históricas: Mio Cid y Roldán” [Two Historical Keys: El Cid and Roland], is typed “MADRID 1939 AÑO DE LA VICTORIA” – The year of victory (Franco’s victory in the Spanish civil war). On the following page, the essay is dedicated to “the caudillo”: Franco.2 The medieval past was an essential part of Franco’s self-fashioning. Though Franco has been dead for almost fifty years, the Spanish world is not done with medieval chivalry. In an election in Andalucía in 2018, eighteen seats went to the relatively new political party, Vox, which advocates for a powerful Spanish nationalism, rejecting Basque and Catalonian separatist movements. Similarly, in the general election in November of 2019, Vox placed third in the polls, capturing 10% of the vote and securing 24 seats of the 350 in the Congress of Deputies.
Vox envisions a fundamentally Catholic Spain, railing against Muslim immigration, and after the electoral victory in 2018, a Vox social media account tweeted “The Reconquista will begin in Andalucían lands”, accompanied by a video of men riding horses, overlaid with music from Lord of the Rings (another artifact of medievalism).3 The reconquista, a modern historiographical term referring to the effort by Christians to rid the Iberian Peninsula of Islam, was a key part of medieval Iberian chivalric ideas. Even today, then, medieval ideas are used very loosely but very powerfully by people with strong political agendas. One wonders if Cots, Franco, and the leaders of Vox understood the implications of medieval chivalry, particularly as it pertains to violence. To be sure, the idea of reconquista or holy war was not just understood, but actively incorporated into the political programs of modern nationalists. But violence pervaded medieval chivalry at an even deeper level than simply a drive to exterminate non-Christians. As citizens of the modern world, if we hope to speak intelligently about how history ought to be used in our politics and society, we need to try to understand ideas such as chivalry and violence on the terms in which they existed in their own time. This book seeks an understanding of medieval chivalry in the Kingdom of Castile during the Trastámara period, and chivalry’s relationship with violence.
The Trastámara Period
Most readers of this book, even if unfamiliar with late medieval Spanish history, will know the basic story of the Catholic Monarchs: Isabella, the queen of Castile (r. 1474–1504), married Ferdinand, the king of Aragon (r. 1479–1516), and together they unified Spain into a single country, ejected Islam from the peninsula, introduced the Inquisition, and sent Christopher Columbus off to the New World, thus ushering in the Golden Age of Spanish history. Readers may be familiar with some of the figures of that Golden Age as well: the great painter Diego de Velázquez, the powerful emperor Charles V (r. 1519–1556), or, most likely, the world-renowned playwright Miguel de Cervantes. Even if we accept such a specious and facetious summary of the “glory” of Spain at the dawn of the early modern period, we should be left wanting more. The supposed political, religious, cultural, and ideological unification of Spain – the beginning of the Spanish Golden Age – was remarkable precisely because of the period that preceded it. The Catholic Monarchs did not peacefully inherit their thrones and casually choose to send Spain into the world more aggressively. Instead, the success of the Catholic Monarchs and their Habsburg heirs in the late 15th and 16th centuries grew out of intense disorder and chaos in Iberia in the 14th and early 15th centuries. It was the ability of such rulers to overcome chaos and disorder that allowed for their successes. The chaotic period that predated the 16th century was that of the Trastámara dynasty. The chapters of this book are organized thematically rather than chronologically. As such, a brief chronology is included here in order to help orient the non-specialist.4 When King Alfonso XI (r. 1312–1350) died in 1350, he was initially succeeded on the Castilian throne by his son, Pedro (r. 1350–1369). For a variety of reasons, some of which will be discussed in Chapter 1, Pedro was challenged for the throne almost immediately by his bastard half-brother, Enrique de Trastámara. Between 1351 and 1369, the brothers fought, seeking support not only from the various noble families of Castile but also from foreign powers. Enrique found support from France and Aragon, while Pedro was championed primarily by England. As such, this Castilian civil war became one more theater of the ongoing Hundred Years’ War which ravaged much of western Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries.5 At the end of the war in 1369, Pedro was defeated and killed by Enrique and his supporters. King Enrique II (r. 1369–1379) established a new dynasty, which would rule Castile for the next century and a half: the Trastámara dynasty. Enrique and his two immediate successors (his son, Juan I (r. 1379–1390), and his grandson, Enrique III (r. 1390–1406)) set about consolidating the Trastámara ascendancy by rewarding their supporters and punishing those Castilian noblemen who had resisted them. Part of this process entailed granting lands, titles, and latitude of action to some of the most powerful lords in Castile. As such, despite their success in securing the throne of Castile for themselves, the early Trastámaras also weakened their own authority in the kingdom, allowing the knights and nobles of the realm to assert themselves more independently and aggressively in Castilian war and politics. This slow process of the weakening of Castilian royal authority was dramatically accelerated in late 1406, when Enrique III died unexpectedly and was succeeded on the throne by his infant son, Juan II (r. 1406–1454). A joint regency by Juan’s mother, Queen Catalina (of Lancaster), and his uncle Fernando (later Fernando de Antequera and Fernando I of Aragon (r. 1412–1416)) preserved some of the Crown’s authority, but the long minority, unsurprisingly, resulted in the young King Juan being dominated by the powerful men surrounding him. Upon attaining his majority, Juan relied heavily on powerful court favorites – men such as the Constable Álvaro de Luna. As a result of such favoritism and of Juan’s own political weakness, the kingdom devolved into multiple periods of civil discord, precipitated by the nobles of the realm and by Juan’s own relatives, who hoped to secure wealth and power for themselves. When Juan died in 1454, his son, Enrique IV (r. 1454–1474), succeeded him. Enrique relied on favorites just as his father did, but he was more assertive than his father in trying to reclaim royal authority. In response to the Crown’s attempt to rein in unruly nobles, those very nobles rebelled against Enrique and proclaimed first his half-brother Alfonso and then his half-sister Isabel as the legitimate ruler of Castile. The end of Enrique’s reign was occupied with civil war for the throne. When Enrique died in 1474, his supporters continued fighting against Isabel’s claim by supporting Enrique’s daughter, Juana. By 1476, the civil war came to a close with Isabel (r. 1474–1504) as the victor. Alongside such internal problems, Castile’s foreign wars, entanglements, and adventures were critical to the disorder of the period. As part of the ongoing Hundred Years’ War, Castile sent knights and retinues to France to fight against the English on multiple occasions. Similarly, Castile and Portugal were at war frequently over questions of territory, dynastic successions, and segments of the Hundred Years’ War. Wars with Navarre and the princes of Aragon were also ubiquitous, and frequently led to the formation of factions within Castile who took to fighting one another and sometimes fighting against the king himself. While these wars against the other Christian kingdoms of western Europe were significant, the intermittent wars against the Islamic Kingdom of Granada would leave a stronger mark in the Castilian (and Spanish) psyche over the centuries. Castile’s southern neighbor was sometimes imagined as a vassal state of Castile, sometimes as a territorial rival, and sometimes as a religious enemy which must be exterminated. As a result, war with Granada was often – though not always – tinged with religious or even crusading overtones. As we will see in Chapter 3, different approaches to this holy war played an outsized role in the success or failure of various kings and nobles. As Castilian policymakers wavered over how vigorously to prosecute the war against Granada, some knights and nobles undertook their own wars against Iberian Islam and even fought against fellow Christians when the intricacies of the holy war became too complicated. External wars contributed to the chaos of the Trastámara Period. It is no understatement to suggest that most of the Trastámara Period was a troubled time for the Kingdom of Castile. Political, social, religious, martial, and socioeconomic conflict and violence were commonplace, leading to instability and disruption throughout the kingdom. This book examines the turbulent Trastámara Period and seeks to explain why there was such trouble, violence, and disorder in Castile. Ultimately, those individuals who undertook the violence, war, and disruption, together with the ideology that informed their actions, were responsible for much of Castile’s difficulty in the late Middle Ages. Knights and chivalry were the chief causes of the problems of the Trastámara Period.
Chivalry and Violence in Trastámara Castile
The years between 1369 and 1474 represent a formative period in Castilian history, marking the dominance of the Trastámara family over Castile (as well as Aragon and Navarre), and laying the foundation for the reign of Isabel I, which witnessed the unification of Spain and the establishment of the global Spanish empire. Yet the period is one of the most chaotic and disruptive in Castilian history. The first century of Trastámara rule witnessed a more powerful nobility arrayed vis-à-vis the Crown, regular civil strife and civil war, foreign wars and invasions of Castilian territory, and destruction in the cities and towns of the kingdom. How can this transition have occurred? How is it possible that in the century leading to Castile’s preeminence among the states and kingdoms of Europe and the world, Castile was wracked with such disorder? John Edwards has argued that Isabel and her husband, Fernando II of Aragon, consolidated their rule after Isabel came to power in Castile by leveraging a more effective central government in order to maintain internal peace. He points to the establishment of the Santa Hermandad as a means of doing so. This was a body designed to enforce law, maintain peace, pursue offenders, and mete out royal justice. Edwards notes that the Hermandad also helped the Catholic Monarchs to recruit a national army under royal control and allowed the central government to collect taxes without recourse to a consultative body. In short, Edwards identifies the slow development of the apparatus of central government, which finally came to fruition in the late 15th century.6 Certainly the tools of an early modern state were necessary for Isabel and her husband to restore order in Castile and then expand their joint kingdoms into a global empire.
But tools of state alone cannot explain the change in Castile’s fortunes. We must understand and analyze the dominant lay ideology of late medieval Castile in order to understand how to arrive at the success of the Catholic Monarchs. Ideas about violence permeated the thoughts and identity of the Castilian lay elite – the knights, nobles, and men-at-arms. Throughout this period of demonstrably intense violence in thought and deed, Trastámara Castile was at the mercy of such individuals whose first impulse in nearly all aspects of life was to resort to violence. The argument at the center of this book has several components. Firstly, the book will argue that knights lived a violent lifestyle. Late medieval Castilian knights were not simply refined courtiers and gentle poets. They may have played both of these roles, but they were first and foremost warriors whose primary activity in life was violence. Secondly, late medieval warriors defined themselves by their capacity for violence. Their very identity revolved around the furiously blazing star of vigorous and violent action – on the battlefield, as Christians, as a social elite, and as political actors. Thirdly, the chivalric elite actively thought about their relationship with violence and discussed important issues concerning that violence. They were concerned about how their violence affected their rewards in this life and the next. They wondered if they ought to listen more closely to clerical strictures, even as they generally chose to disregard them. They discussed how they ought to serve the king and the common good, though they usually decided that their own interests shaped the royal interest and the interest of the realm. Knights, like most people in most times and most places, spent time thinking about their world as their thoughts informed their actions and their actions informed their ideas. Finally, knightly violence often presented a considerable challenge to other actors or segments of society. The Trastámara kings often found it difficult to reconcile their own interests with knightly violence and with the ideology which informed it. Bishops and clerics pleaded for knights to stop killing fellow Christians. Commoners formally objected as knights violently tore down their homes, destroyed their crops and spilled their blood, explicitly recognizing that chivalric ideology was helping to fuel such destruction. The late 14th and 15th centuries were a period of crisis for the kingdom of Castile, and chivalric violence was at the heart of this crisis. Three powerful themes ran through the violent ideology of late medieval Castilian knights. The first was the powerful and abstract concept of honor, sitting at the root of chivalric violence. More than any other force, the drive to accumulate and defend personal honor drove knights to violent action and helped to construct a knightly identity. The second was that a knight’s linaje (family status and ancestry) was closely connected to his sense of honor. The concept of family honor and family achievement magnified the knightly commitment to honor and, as a result, magnified knightly violence beyond the personal. The third was a conception of chivalric violence as part of a divine plan. Over and over again, knights expressed their belief not only that their brutal actions were not evil or immoral, but that they pleased God.7 In advancing this multilayered argument, this book will engage with historians of chivalry and violence in the general European context and in the specifically Castilian context. Nearly a century ago, Johan Huizinga helped to open a new field of inquiry in medieval studies when he examined the ideas and cultural expressions of the late Middle Ages. Huizinga’s argument revolved around the idea that the late Middle Ages was marked by a “violent tenor of life” which was hidden with “ideal forms, gilded by chivalrous romanticism, a world disguised in the fantastic gear of the Round Table.”8 This description of the relationship between a violent reality and a pleasant cultural veneer atop it serves as the starting point for this book’s historiographical engagement, because it takes seriously the possibility of the study of knightly culture and knightly ideas. In short, Huizinga allowed that expressions of chivalry and knighthood were a worthwhile area of study. Through the 20th and 21st centuries, historians of chivalry and knightly ideas owe a debt to Huizinga for pioneering the field, and some have continued to advance his thesis. José Luis Corral, writing more than ninety years after Huzinga’s pioneering Autumn of the Middle Ages, similarly argued that knights in the High Middle Ages may well have lived a chivalric life, but that by the late Middle Ages the nature of such a life had changed. Because, Corral argued, knights and nobles had become less relevant due to powerful national governments and the march of military technology, chivalry in the late Middle Ages was no longer an attainable reality. Instead, chivalry was simply a “disguise,” and the forms and symbols were an empty and melancholic echo of past glories.9 Yet most of those who followed in Huizinga’s footsteps have moved in directions that he might not have anticipated. Instead of accepting his argument that chivalric ideas and cultural expressions were a soft veneer hiding the true and frightening tenor of late medieval life, scholars have more recently insisted that a more direct connection existed between ideas and reality. In the mid-20th century, the Spanish historian and philologist Martín de Riquer expanded on Huizinga’s thesis, looking specifically at late medieval Spain. Riquer sought to connect life and art more fully, suggesting that the two regularly influenced one another and that, as a result, the lives of knights in the late Middle Ages were at times adventurous, bellicose, or full of showy heraldic flourishes and colorful adornments. For Riquer, knights actively aspired to the chivalric life, imitating the tropes of chivalric literature even as their thoughts and deeds shaped chivalric ideology.10 Riquer’s methodology is a useful one which has been underutilized by historians in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Where Riquer operated at a fairly broad level, making general arguments about ideas, art, and behavior, other historians have articulated more specific arguments concerning exactly how knights understood chivalric ideology and their relationship to it. Maurice Keen, in his magisterial treatment of chivalry, suggested that the ideals of the chivalric ethos were very real for medieval knights and that, as a result, they served to change knightly behavior. For Keen, chivalry was a softening and ennobling force that helped to restrain the violence of the Middle Ages and produced a society in which knights were moral exemplars.11 Similarly, David Crouch has argued that knightly literature as early as the 12th century produced chivalric courtiers who were as concerned with the peaceful exercise of good government as they were with a violent lifestyle.12 In the Iberian context, Joseph O’Callaghan has employed a similar approach. In a trio of monographs, O’Callaghan has worked diligently to assert that Iberian knights fighting the religious enemy in al-Andalus were the western equivalent of knights on crusade in the eastern Mediterranean. Papal blessings, the preaching of holy war, the forgiveness of sins, and the larger conflict between Christendom and Islam, O’Callaghan argues, meant that holy Iberian warriors were no less Christian warriors than their crusading counterparts.13 Lying at the heart of O’Callaghan’s argument is an assertion not only that Iberian knights existed in the same intellectual plain as their trans-Pyrenean counterparts, but that they were morally equals as well. As good knights fighting for Christendom, Iberian knights contributed as much as French, English, and German knights did. In connecting ideas and reality, other historians have highlighted less positive aspects of the influence of medieval chivalry. Richard Kaeuper, focusing on the question of public order in the Middle Ages, has argued that knightly violence was responsible for a good deal of public disorder throughout the medieval period. In contrast to Keen and Crouch, Kaeuper has insisted that chivalric ideas expressed in literature, chronicles, and other sources acted as an impulse for disruptive knightly violence. For Kaeuper, chivalric ideas and reality were closely connected, and the most powerful component of chivalric ideology was the worship of prowess. To be sure, Kaeuper acknowledges that a great deal of chivalric literature sought to make knights into good Christian warriors, defenders of the public good, and even gentle courtiers. However, he argues that such reform-minded efforts were ubiquitous throughout the Middle Ages, strongly suggesting that the problems of knightly violence and chivalry persisted throughout the period.14 Kaeuper’s methodology and argument seem particularly productive for an examination of chivalry and violence in late medieval Castile. The historiography of chivalry and medieval Castile has centered on similar issues. Teofilo Ruiz has highlighted the same destructive tendencies of the knightly class. Ruiz tends to approach the question using the tools of social history, acknowledging a high degree of knightly violence while focusing more on its impact on the Castilian peasantry. Marking knightly violence as one characteristic of “Spain’s century of crisis,” he has suggested that the violence of the elites from about 1300 to about 1500 brought the kingdoms of Iberia close to complete fragmentation. As a result, in the late 15th and 16th centuries, there would be religious, institutional, political, and cultural responses to noble violence.15 Ruiz’ observations are apt here and this book seeks to expand on his work through an interrogation of the ideology that sustained, informed, produced, and was produced by knightly violence. Ruiz’ position, though, has not always been embraced by other historians of medieval Castile. Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco, in his 2010 work aptly titled Chivalry and Order, argued that by the 14th century we can see clerical, royal, and urban influences on chivalric ideology that resulted in a chivalric ideology which actively restrained violent action on the part of knights and nobles.16 Identifying the creeping influence of humanism, RodríguezVelasco suggests that “the creation of knighthood is a process that transforms disorderly violence into institutionally regulated violence, and sets a structure that buttresses the civic values of a peaceful society.”17 He goes on to argue that through the 14th century, efforts of Alfonso XI to institute and control a royal order of chivalry, the economic interests of the rising class of urban knights, and the peaceful ideology of clerics, “chivalry emerges from a system of institutional violence to become a substantial component in a discourse of peace.”18 The implication carried in this argument is that because there were powerful actors in late medieval Castile who ostensibly desired a gentle and peaceful chivalry, such behavior was produced. Also disagreeing with Ruiz’ assessment of late medieval violence, but approaching the question from a different direction, Cecilia Devia acknowledges the violence of the chivalric elite in late medieval Castile, while emphasizing that it was primarily a constructive force in society. Devia’s approach draws on anthropological methods which assume that violence in pre-modern societies was a carefully balanced and calculated means of resolving disputes. In her most recent work, she has not only sought to examine how knightly violence created hierarchies in late medieval Castile, but has analyzed violence “in its constructive, positive aspect,” improving society through social interactions and exchanges, economic interactions, the building of power structures, the construction of apparatuses of justice, and laying the foundations for the cultural expressions of late medieval Castile.19 For Devia, late medieval violence was primarily a positive force, building the structures of society that produced the modern age. The argument of this book will be much closer to Kaeuper’s and Ruiz’ than to Rodríguez-Velasco’s or Devia’s. Based on the evidence from the Trastámara period, we must acknowledge that knights were especially violent, that they thought about their violence and incorporated it into their identity, and that their violence presented serious challenges to the stability of the central government, to the people of Castile, to their Christian and Muslim neighbors, and complicated their relationship with powerful theological ideas articulated by clerics. At a certain level, both Rodríguez-Velasco and Devia are correct in their assessments. For the former, we cannot doubt that kings asserted their supremacy over knights and chivalric ideology, just as clerics claimed to direct knights and feed them their religious ideas. We must recognize, though, that knights had their own ideas; the evidence of this book will demonstrate that knights regularly diverged from royal or clerical initiatives. For the latter, we might acknowledge that the potency of knightly violence would eventually be coopted by the Crown in the early modern period and helped to fuel the rise of the Spanish empire. Such an acknowledgement, though, does not guarantee that knightly violence in the period from 1369 to 1474 was productive and creative for this outcome. This book will refute Devia’s articulation of a progressive characteristic of knightly violence. Castilian knights in the late Middle Ages were not usually concerned with building a better government, with laying the foundations of a global economy, or ensuring that the king’s justice functioned according to grand ideals. For the most part, they were concerned with wielding their swords to protect their honor. If there were results of knightly violence that had other effects, we should not imagine that it was by design.
Concepts
In the modern world, “chivalry” often suggests a code of behavior, especially of men towards women. The mind conjures visions of Sir Walter Raleigh laying his coat in a puddle so that Queen Elizabeth’s feet would not get wet, or men holding the door open for women – surely evidence that chivalry is not dead. Chivalry in this modern sense is seen as a prescriptive set of rules by which boorish males become gentlemen. Such a conception of chivalry has a certain link to the medieval world, but it is created from a romantic Victorian reading of medieval texts. The Victorian misreading comes from the prescriptive nature of much of our medieval chivalric literature. Such literature instructed knights how they ought to behave rather than describing how they did behave. In other words, chivalric literature often recognized problems such as violence against women, destruction of peasants, or damages to churches. The literature would be written to show that a model fictional knight (such as El Cid, or, in the broader European tradition, Sir Galahad) would avoid such nasty behavior. Historians in the 19th and early 20th centuries accepted such prescriptive works as accurate descriptions of medieval knighthood. Instead of accepting that chivalric literature was attempting to address a problem in society, romantic historians saw medieval knights as the actual embodiment of the virtues described in the literature. In short, the reformative element of medieval chivalry has come in the modern world to define the entirety of chivalry.20 The term “chivalry” (caballería) was typically used in medieval Europe in three interconnected ways. Firstly, it could refer to a body of knights or warriors. A nobleman might bring his chivalry with him to the battlefield, suggesting that he had a retinue of armed (and likely mounted) men with him. This definition could be used much more broadly as well. The chronicler Diego de Valera noted that King Enrique IV had “so many and such great means to recover the land which the Moors in Spain had usurped … and with such noble chivalry such as he had in his kingdoms, his proposition in wanting to make war was holy and good.”21 Enrique’s advantage consisted of the number and quality of knights and men-at-arms in his service. Secondly, the term “chivalry” could refer to deeds committed by a knight or man-at-arms, typically on the battlefield. The word is used with this connotation much less frequently in the Castilian world than in other parts of Europe, but it does appear from time to time. As a boy, the famous knight Pero Niño was told by his tutor that “[h]e who is to understand and use the art of chivalry is not suited to spend a long time in the school of letters.”22 Fernando del Pulgar claims that the count of Alva, “was raised in the martial discipline, and always from his youth desired to perform in the habit of chivalry worthy things of laudable memory”.23 Finally, chivalry could refer to the ideas and values of the lay elite of medieval Europe; in this sense, we can speak of the ideology or worldview that was chivalry.24 Medieval writers deployed the term in this sense occasionally, as when the writer Pedro de Corral lamented the death of a prince of the 8th century, asking God “how it should please you that I should see the death of the mirror of chivalry of all the world,”25 or when the reforming cleric Alfonso de Cartagena wrote that fighting “in jousts or tournaments … [was] a game or rehearsal [for warfare], but not a principal act of chivalry.”26 But more often, they simply discuss the ideas and values that were at the heart of the ideology of the knightly elite of their world without specifically designating everything as a component of the abstract concept of chivalry. Nevertheless, they are certainly describing the larger set of values and ideas that they call chivalry. Chivalry as a more abstract idea is the main focus of the present book, and its various components, such as honor, prowess, status, largesse, and piety, will be discussed at length in the chapters that follow. In the past several decades, historians of late medieval Castile have sought to identify the various grades of knighthood. First of all, we must observe that all nobles were referred to by the term hidalgo. A man of hidalgo status had special legal privileges and, in theory, a close relationship with the Crown. Both hidalgos and non-noble knights existed in a loose hierarchy which distinguished between the various ranks of the caballería. At the top were the títulos, or grandes, men who had been granted lands and titles by the Crown.27 These men were few in number but were often the most visible and powerful nobles in society. In the 15th century, the number of títulos began to grow significantly, reflecting the larger number of men who were raised to nobility by the Trastámara kings. Below the titled nobility was the widely defined group of noble knights, the caballeros hidalgos. These were the traditional knights of medieval Europe. They were defined by a military profession and were members of a family of some significance. Below the noble knights were escuderos, or squires, men who were not dubbed knights but attended knights and embraced warfare as their profession. These three divisions (títulos, caballeros hidalgos, and escuderos) are the easiest to define as the chivalric elite, the subject of this book. They were men who subscribed to chivalric ideals, who usually fought for a living, who most likely owned horses and arms, and who belonged to noble families. Enrique de Villena, a Master of Calatrava in the early 15th century, summed up this approach, saying The estate of knights I understand to be rico hombres [the higher nobility], the noble vassal, the infanzon [a member of the lower nobility], the armed knight, gentleman, and all the others who are hidalgos to whom it is appropriate to undertake martial exercises and to multiply the virtuous and good customs of the conservation and defending of the common good.28 For Villena, nobility itself had a necessary martial component and, as a result, all who were nobles and carried arms (as they all ought to), should be considered knights. Other members of late medieval society who do not fit into this tidy schema but whom we still must consider in this book are those men who embraced war as their profession but were either not nobles, not knights, and sometimes neither nobles nor knights. When medieval writers referred to this large and poorly defined group, they sometimes used the term gentes de armas – men-at-arms – and other times simply referred to them as gentes, with context showing that they were soldiers, horsemen, archers, etc. At times the voices of these men can be harder to hear, but they were a large and significant group that almost certainly embraced most of the ideals analyzed in this book. We can surmise as much through several means. Firstly, we have cases such as Gutierre Díez de Games, a chronicler of the famous knight Pero Niño. We have no evidence that Díez was ever knighted, nor that he was of noble lineage. But we do know that he was a soldier and that when he wrote he enthusiastically expressed chivalric ideas. Sometimes, to be sure, he was simply expressing his lord’s ideals, but other times, he makes fairly clear that he is expressing his own opinions. Those opinions are almost always in line with concepts of honor, violence, and divine sanction. Secondly, chroniclers describe the actions of men-at-arms or “men” alongside the actions of knights and nobles, seeking honor and glory on the battlefield, wreaking havoc among the enemy, and discussing questions of right behavior. As Andrew Cowell has argued, while lords and noble knights themselves are more prominent in primary sources, “those mounted warriors supported by the lords or linked to them in relationships of a fundamentally military nature” ought to be included in an analysis of the chivalric elite.29 Thirdly, we know that the late Middle Ages represents a broadening of the social pyramid in a general sense, and we know that this includes the expansion of chivalric influence as well. Richard Kaeuper, examining England and France from the 13th century, has argued that “the chivalric ethos in fact generalized to all who lived by arms, whether of noble family or not … it touched all men-at-arms.”30 Kaeuper’s evidence is drawn both from treatises of late medieval writers and the reality that many warriors could not afford the costs and obligations of legal knighthood.31 For Castile, our evidence is most plentiful in the latter case – that there were poorer men who aspired to knighthood in their actions – but also in the evidence of the language used by chroniclers and the records of central government. The records of the cortes, for example, regularly refer to formal categories – caballeros and hidalgos – and add generic third categories such as “powerful men” or “companies.” What we ought to draw from this is that knights were regularly accompanied by men who acted and lived a chivalric lifestyle, even if they were not formally acknowledged as such. Just as there were non-noble and non-knightly members of the chivalric elite, so there were knights who are not included in this definition. Because there were advantages to knighthood – tax breaks, social status, economic benefits – the late Middle Ages, in Castile as in other parts of Europe, saw a growing number of men taking up knighthood who had little or no desire to actually carry out the martial and violent functions of that profession. These men, often wealthy merchants, became known as caballeros de premia or caballeros de cuantía. Often, they were descended from urban frontier knights, known as caballeros villanos, and they sometimes retained that designation as well. By the Trastámara period, though, as the frontier had moved away from these cities, the martial role of these knights began to disappear.32 Legally, they were still required to fight or provide the arms and armor for another man to fight in their place, but there was a fairly widespread perception that many of these men were shirking their responsibilities.33 Between this process and the desire of wealthy men to claim the benefits of knighthood, an entire class of knights developed that were not strenuous fighters and often not fighters at all. The caballeros de premia were criticized in their own time for claiming the benefits of knighthood without fulfilling the martial functions that knighthood entailed. This book will not include these knights as part of the chivalric elite. It seems clear that they were not animated by nor had any desire to accept fundamentally chivalric ideas. They were largely knights in name only – certainly not in practice, and probably not in thought. Finally, we have a very exclusive group of men who are partially included in this group: the kings of Castile themselves. Kings were certainly members of the chivalric community – they had generally been knighted themselves and the exercise of arms on the battlefield was a key part of their identity. As kings, though, they had one foot outside of the chivalric world. In addition to being knights, they were also rulers and statesmen, and at times we see them acting differently from typical knights. Instead of resolving whether they belong inside or outside of this group, this book will consider the issue of the relationship between kings and chivalry at key moments when complications in that relationship arose. The chivalric elite that this book deals with, then, is broadly defined. In the most general sense, any man whose actual profession was the exercise of arms is included. Naturally, this does not include all men who ever fought – peasant levies, Muslim mercenaries, and others who were not regular members of elite Castilian society or who did not bear arms as their profession are excluded. All of the other categories described above had some amount of fluidity. Membership in any legally defined group in Castile, as in Europe more broadly, was constantly shifting.34 Ultimately, sorting out whether a given author, knight, nobleman, or man-at-arms had sufficient legal or social standing to qualify as part of a narrowly defined chivalric elite becomes not only impossible but unnecessary. Given the various and overlapping grades of knights, nobles, and fighting men in late medieval Castile, it may be helpful to move past strict legal definitions or precise questions of privilege and title when defining the chivalric elite. Rather, we ought to understand them as constituting a cultural community – a diffuse group of individuals who shared social, religious, and personal values. One did not necessarily have to be knighted to be a part of the community that consumed chivalric literature, embraced the ideals of knighthood, and saw themselves as part of the chivalric community.35 The beating heart of the chivalric elite was honor, an abstract concept dealing with one’s reputation and abilities. We can define honor, drawing on other theorists, as a man’s public persona, identity, worth, and ability, as perceived by his peers through his actions and his reputation. Julian PittRivers defined honor similarly as “the value of a person in his own eye, but also in the eyes of his society. It is his estimation of his own worth, his claim to pride, but it is also the acknowledgement of that claim, his excellence recognized by society, his right to pride.”36 In short, a man of appropriate social status was born with a certain amount of honor to his name which reflected what people expected of him. As an adult he would be expected to defend his honor against those who would diminish it through insults, physical attacks on his person or holdings, attacks on his family, counterclaims against his titles or possessions, or any other action that would make him seem a less important or powerful man than he claimed to be. At the same time, a good knight would seek to increase his honor above and beyond his birthright. Honor could be increased through good service to the king, through the awarding of new titles, and through taking new land from his enemies, among other means. The purpose of defending and seeking honor was the social value that honor carried – it functioned as social currency throughout the Middle Ages. A man who was seen as very honorable was well respected by his friends and enemies, could expect to be favored by his king, and, in the most general sense, was a leading member of his family, community, realm, and the order of chivalry. As Pitt-Rivers argues, the abstract concept of honor in Mediterranean history provided “a nexus between the ideals of society and their reproduction in the actions of individuals,” linking the expectations of chivalric society to the desires and actions of the knight himself.37 In late medieval Castile, as in much of the rest of late medieval Europe, the primary means of accumulating and defending honor was through violent action. David Gilmore has argued for a broader theoretical concept of honor, which would include means for cooperation, a sense of honesty, hospitality, and mutual respect.38 What we see in late medieval Europe is likely a relatively extreme case of honor being fundamentally connected to violence. In the 15th century, there were other means for accumulating and defending honor, but they were less reliable. In medieval Castilian sources, no method was so highly valued as putting one’s hand to his sword to vindicate himself. By the very nature of their abilities, knights resorted first to violent action to expand their honor, often at the expense of another, and had little choice but to defend their honor violently as well. The logic works itself out easily enough. If a knight made a violent attack on his chivalric neighbor, the neighbor’s only real choice was to defend himself and his honor violently. If he failed to do so, his honor would have been called into question and the only means of making up his honor deficit would be through positive violent action equivalent to the negative violent actions he had suffered. A reciprocal economy of honor formed the most crucial sociocultural framework of late medieval Castile for the chivalric elite. Honor by its very nature was not a private affair. Simply resolving one’s conflicts or perceived slights to one’s honor behind closed doors was not and could not be sufficient. Because honor was a public representation of a man’s reputation and ability, slights to and vindications of honor had to be dealt with in a very public way.39 In practice this meant a clear statement of a knight’s intent to revenge himself for a perceived insult, followed by a verifiable follow-through on the stated intent.40 The public character of honor violence implied a showy act of violence and a concern that other knights and nobles would be aware of the action. As a result, our sources are riddled with the evidence of violence based on honor. Far from simply a distortion of the evidence, honor violence was a regular and important part of life. As we will see, knights’ concern for the public vindication of their honor resulted in discussions amongst themselves, reported by chroniclers, premised on how their peers would react to their choice to perform violence or not. Fear of their honor being publicly called into question resulted in skirmishes and, in several cases, open warfare within and outside of Castile. Perhaps most significantly, the extreme love of honor and fear of shame led knights and men-at-arms to take outsized vengeance for any possible slight to their honor. If a man was insulted, shamed, or defeated in battle, the appropriate chivalric response was to violently seek vengeance on the perpetrator, preferably in greater proportion than the injury done to him. A key component related to knightly honor and violence is the concept of linaje. Literally “lineage” in English, the term linaje encompasses much more than a man’s genealogical predecessors. Linaje encompasses a man’s ancestry as well as his living family, their titles and holdings, their family history and accomplishments, and their failures. In short, as Faustino Menéndez Pidal de Navascués, puts it, “The honor – and also dishonor, of course – thus reaches from each of the past and present components of the linaje and falls onto each and every one of its members.”41 There was a corporate character to linaje in the Middle Ages, as no man existed outside of his family, his ancestry, and their reputation. A man’s advantages and disadvantages were tied up with the deeds of his relatives past and present. Rafael Sanchez Saus has articulated this point more vigorously than perhaps any other historian, arguing that linaje was “a community of affections and interests, a receptacle of a familiar past without which the medieval man would not be able to conceive of himself, and a projection made into the future of his set of values and his aspirations.”42 When we spoke above of a man being born with a certain amount of honor, it was through his linaje that his endowment was determined. Birth into a great linaje implied that a knight’s ancestors had worked vigilantly to preserve and augment their personal and familial honor and placed the burden of that family history on the young knight’s shoulders. Incumbent upon him was the duty to preserve the accomplishments and honor of his family through his words and deeds. Linaje and the development or invention of an honorable family history was valuable to knights because it provided automatic entry into the chivalric elite.43 A man born into a respected linaje certainly had the responsibilities of belonging to a great family, but he did not have to preemptively prove himself as a member of the chivalric elite. As importantly, his foundational honor was already higher than that of a man who sought to rise from lower origins. From the beginning of his knightly career, he could rely on the reputation that his family had provided him as he sought to build his own public persona. At the dawn of the Trastámara age in the late 1360s, much of the new nobility would lack clear family histories, as they were often either junior branches of greater families or, in some cases, new families altogether.44 Thus, linajes of the Trastámara period worked diligently to assert the strength and history of their families, providing their sons with an automatic claim to nobility, membership in the chivalric elite, and an advantage over those who could not claim a linaje. 45 Indeed, the creation of a family history was also a purposefully ideological act. Carlos Heusch asserted in no uncertain terms that the creations of family histories in the Trastámara period represented “the idea of a ‘linajistic fiction’, that is to say the manipulation of history with specific ends which proves that it is a propagandistic literature.”46 As Heusch has observed, the writers of these linaje histories often compared and contrasted the subject linaje to another in order to demonstrate preeminence in a particular region. By making the hero of a given linaje a great knight (sometimes the greatest knight), genealogical authors implied that the family itself had inherited the glory and honor of the linaje’s forebears. The historical accuracy of the work was less important than that it should plausibly lay out the great deeds of arms and the honorable words and actions of the historically important members of the linaje. These sources, then, not only created the foundational honor for their knightly scions but also broadcast models of ideal behavior for knights of the family.
Sources
The ideology of chivalry helped to direct the actions and behavior of the social group which both produced and embraced it. Ideology was articulated, modified, and changed by members of the chivalric elite while at the same time knightly behavior was informed, influenced, and guided by chivalric ideology which involved the projection of ideals into an analysis of the present and an understanding of the past. In short, chivalry was often prescriptive – it articulated ideals about how knights and men-at-arms ought to behave. We must be careful here because the ideology itself could be influential enough that it might also end up describing knightly action even as it prescribed. A methodology that attempts to sift out prescriptions from descriptions must inform our engagement with various classes of sources. The three main classes of sources used in this book are examined below. A variety of other kinds of sources will be dealt with individually as they appear throughout the book.
Many chivalric ideas come from imaginative literature. In late medieval Castile, this includes a few epic poems, a few romances, a body of folk ballads called romances, and a few other odds and ends. Kaeuper has argued convincingly that literature represents the ideals, fears, and hopes of the knightly elite, and his methodology applies to Castile as much as to France and England.47 Angus MacKay has similarly suggested that “the ballad audience – like society itself – was dominated by the ethos of the caballeros.”48 As such, we can read the romances as representing the ideas and desires of frontier chivalric society. The fantastic or unrealistic nature of imaginative literature undoubtedly excited and inspired knightly audiences, offering them a superlative vision of all that of which they were capable. Importantly, all of the imaginative literature used in this study contains ideas relating to the practice of violence. When, in the late medieval epic poem Mocedades de Rodrigo, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar enters his first battle as a pre-teen and gloriously slaughters dozens of his enemies, we understand that the author was positing prescriptive ideals about knightly masculinity, namely that it was expressed through violence.49 When the Arthurian knight Tristan fights an enemy count in single combat, lowering his lance and spurring his horse forward, we understand that the author was articulating an ideal of knighthood, namely that knights ought to know the tools of their trade (the lance and horse, in this case) in order to win honor and glory. Not only were writers articulating these ideas, but readers were consuming them. Evidence of knightly readership (or at least listenership) exists in scattered references in other sources. The family history of the Ponce de Leones, for example, described the deeds of Rodrigo Ponce de León, saying that “Roland in his time could not do more.”50 Similarly, Gutierre Díez de Games warned his readers to “make sure that you do not believe false prophecies … such as are those of Merlin and others.”51 In Aragon, in the late 14th century, Prince Juan named his three mastiffs Amadís, Ogier, and Merlin, for the legendary knights of Spain, France, and Britain, respectively.52 All of these writers casually mention figures from imaginative literature, suggesting that they were familiar with the romances and epics in which these figures appeared and, more importantly, that their readers would find them immediately accessible. After all, a medieval author would have little reason to make a cultural reference that his readers would find incomprehensible. For knightly readers, imaginative literature was not only accessible, but probably quite popular. Noel Fallows has shown that Alfonso de Cartagena, bishop of Burgos, in several of his works, entreated Castilian knights to stop reading of the deeds of Lancelot and Tristan, and instead look to the deeds of historical figures as exemplars of chivalry.53 If Cartagena was encouraging knights to stop reading imaginative literature, it stands to reason that knights were reading imaginative literature. The final question concerning imaginative literature is whether or not it had any impact on knightly action. Certainly the ideas articulated in imaginative literature were incorporated into the turbulent currents of chivalric thought, but did these ideas find expression in real life? The simple question of whether knights became violent as a result of their imaginative literature is the wrong question to ask. Knights, as part of the dominant lay elite of medieval Europe, already lived in a violent society and operated under certain assumptions concerning violence, as evidenced by their very role in society as warriors. In other words, they did not need imaginative literature to spur them to violence. Imaginative literature functioned to influence the way they thought about the exercise of violence and could augment or modify knightly violence. In much the same way that a modern television series dealing with political culture might color viewers’ understanding of the democratic process because we already operate in a democratic society, medieval imaginative literature colored the knightly understanding of the appropriate and inappropriate use of violence within a society where violence was a regular part of life.54 One excellent example of the tropes of knightly literature directly influencing knightly action is the passo honrosso of Suero de Quiñones. This Castilian knight appeared at the court of Juan II and requested and received permission from the king to hold a month-long tournament at a bridge in northern Castile. He swore to wear a chain around his neck, claiming that he had been imprisoned by the love of a lady. The goal was ostensibly to free him from his prison through deeds of arms which, presumably, would lead his lady to return his love. The tournament sounds like something out of Arthurian romance, or perhaps an episode from Amadís de Gaula or Tirant lo Blanch. Any knight who crossed the bridge where Quiñones and his nine companions were waiting was required to joust with Quiñones and his companions until the company broke 300 lances.55 This seemingly ridiculous arrangement echoes older forms of chivalric literature so well that it is difficult to imagine that art and life were not interacting with one another. Chivalric imaginative literature must be taken as having some bearing on the thoughts and behavior of real historical knights. Much of the historical evidence of medieval Castile comes from the major chronicles written throughout the period. These often serve as baseline accounts of the major events of medieval Castile and were typically written by men close to the king or queen. As such, they were often written with a sympathetic approach to the monarch, yet they provide historians with key information about the grand narrative of Castilian history. For example, Pedro López de Ayala, eventually the Grand Chancellor of Castile, wrote chronicles of the reigns of Pedro, Enrique II, Juan I, and Enrique III. As a partisan of the Trastámara cause, a soldier who had participated actively in the wars of the Trastámara monarchs, and a diplomat who had represented their interests abroad, Ayala obviously presents a biased account of the events of his day.56 If, however, we want to learn about the worldview of a leading Castilian knight and the political, social, and military circles in which he operated, Ayala’s work presents an excellent account. Chronicles hostile to the monarch, though, are equally valuable. While Ayala and other monarchfriendly chroniclers like him (e.g. Fernán Pérez de Guzmán for Juan II, Diego Enríquez de Castillo for Enrique IV, or Andrés Bernáldez for Isabel) may offer praise for a monarch and justify his actions from a chivalric point of view, chroniclers who were hostile to the monarch, as Diego de Valera and Alfonso de Palencia were toward Enrique IV, help to present a vision of how knights and the chivalric elite might condemn the leaders of their day. In a sense, though, the political persuasions of the various chroniclers do not matter as much as the way that they talk about specific individuals, events, ideas, and behaviors. Such “minor” incidents comprise a significant part of the chronicles of late medieval Castile. Almost all of the chroniclers consider knightly behaviors on the battlefield, questions of loyalty or disloyalty to the king or queen, moments of intense violence against all members of society, religious warfare, etc. In other words, the chroniclers help us to build a cohesive narrative of Castilian history, but they are more useful in presenting chivalric ideas, both explicitly and implicitly. This is partly because, unlike earlier periods in the Castilian and European Middle Ages, many of the chronicles of the Trastámara period were written by members of the chivalric elite. Ayala actively participated as a knight in the wars of the late 14th century. Similarly, his nephew, the chronicler Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, fought at the battle of Higueruela, a clash between Castile and Granada in 1431.57 The chronicler Diego de Valera fought on the battlefields of the war with Granada as well as in other theaters across Europe, balancing a life of the mind with a life of arms.58 Even the scholarly Alfonso de Palencia helped to organize the logistical arrangements for the Catholic Monarchs’ assault on Gran Canaria in the late 1470s.59 The chronicles, in other words, can also serve as a somewhat reliable account of the events of the Trastámara period, even as they encompass the thoughts and viewpoints of members of the chivalric elite. The apparent problems of using the chronicles as evidence are easily transformed into advantages in gaining insights into the chivalric mind. For example, in Chapter 2, we will see that chivalric chronicles do not always discuss how many peasants or agricultural workers perished when orchards and vineyards were destroyed. We lose crucial evidence about the lives of common people, but we gain an understanding that chivalric writers thought of such people as fundamentally unimportant. Chronicle evidence is therefore key in accessing some core assumptions of chivalric ideology. Just as kings sought supporters to write the histories of their reigns, elite warriors commissioned their own biographies or family chronicles, a group of sources which we might define broadly as “chivalric biographies.” This class of documents includes works such as Gutierre Díez de Games’ El Victorial, an encomiastic account of the chivalric deeds of his lord, Pero Niño; the anonymous Coronica del yllustre y muy magnifico cauallero don Alonso Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno, which glorifies the martial life of one of the most powerful Andalucian family’s forebears; the anonymous Hechos del condestable Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, which seeks to justify the eponymous hero’s noble status through a recounting of his chivalric activity; and Historia de los hechos del marqués de Cádiz, which establishes the Marquis of Cádiz as a knightly hero in the mold of Roland or El Cid. Each of these biographies, naturally, is heavily biased in favor of its subject. This is precisely what makes them so valuable in understanding the chivalric mindset. Pero Niño was a great knight because he fought so vigorously in battle, according to his chronicler. Alonso Pérez de Guzmán was a model of chivalry because he was willing to sacrifice his family for military victory.
Miguel Lucas de Iranzo presented himself as worthy of noble status because he was willing to prosecute a holy war against Islam. The chivalric biographies are often fanciful, frequently formulaic, and sometimes dubious in their historical accuracy, but they represent the mindset of powerful and respected Castilian knights and they therefore offer us a window into the medieval chivalric mind. Chapter 1 will examine the origins of the Trastámara nobility and the development of their political identity and ideology. Born of a bloody conflict between two claimants to the Castilian throne, the Trastámara nobility would be defined through violent political action, beginning with their rebellion against King Pedro the Cruel, the last member of the ruling Borgoña dynasty, and their support for Enrique de Trastámara, the founder of the new dynasty. Through military support of the Trastámara kings, knights found economic, social, and political reward. More than any other action they could take, knights understood that good fighting on the battlefield was the surest way to advance their political position. The favorites of the 15th century – Juan Furtado de Mendoza, Álvaro de Luna, Juan Pacheco, and Beltrán de la Cueva – all conceived of themselves first and foremost as vigorous knights and only secondly as courtiers or politicians. Where we have their words or ideas expressed, they argued that their privileged positions near the king were a result of their good military service to him. The Trastámara nobility also claimed a political right to advise the king and share in the government of the realm. To attain a position of influence near the king and to remove rivals from such positions, knights and nobles regularly resorted to violent action. Declaring themselves to be acting in the service of the king, knights would take up arms against the king and his advisors in order to secure their own political positions. Chivalric ideology on this point was remarkably flexible. Knights sought to define for themselves what good service to the king entailed and, as a result, knights on opposite ends of a given political crisis could both claim to be performing loyal service. A central component behind the chivalric political identity of late medieval Castile was a jealously guarded autonomy. The Trastámara nobility was happy to serve the king when it advanced their interests, but for decades they resisted royal encroachment on their traditional right to fight when and where they pleased. Chapter 2 takes up the question of the social position of the Trastámara nobility. The knightly class relied on their legal and cultural right to honor won through deeds of arms to set themselves apart from the rest of the people of Castile, specifically the peasants and urban dwellers. The common folk could not accumulate honor in the same way or to the same degree that knights and nobles could and, as such, existed in a separate conceptual category. Most knights and nobles found that they began life with a certain amount of honor inherited from their chivalric ancestors. Peasants and merchants could rarely make such grand claims, and this cemented their existence as a fundamentally inferior social cohort. From a social standpoint, knightly ideology clearly demarcated the difference between the chivalric world and the non-chivalric world. Because knights could accumulate honor in a way that was not feasible for peasants, they had a right to commit violence as well, and they did not hesitate to do so. A great deal of the violence committed by the Trastámara nobility was aimed not directly at fellow knights, but at the peasants and urban dwellers who made up the bedrock of the medieval economy. In theory, knights preferred to exercise their sword arms against the greatest warriors in the land, but in practice, plenty of honor could be won in any martial activity. Knightly ideology allowed for and even valorized the destruction of commoners and their goods. Indeed, knights could rest assured that the God of the Old Testament had long blessed destruction against the subchivalric segment of society. Our sources record a constant and bitter reaction on the part of commoners against knightly violence. For the most part, the complaints of the common people were unsuccessful in their attempts to redirect chivalric bloodshed. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the violent activity for which knights most lived: warfare. Chapter 3 examines the ideology surrounding holy war, the superlative knightly activity in late medieval Castile. Although the reconquista had largely sat idle since the late 13th century, knights in the late 14th and 15th centuries continued to hold up the ideal of holy war as a crucial expression of their identity. Looking to the deeds of their ancestors, Trastámara nobles emphasized the deeds of arms they had accomplished against the infidels and sought to defend and augment the honor of their linajes by protecting their gains and seeking to win more territory from the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada. For the Trastámara nobility, the honor to be won in the holy war existed at an individual level, at a familial level, and even at a kingdom level. There was a real sense that, as subjects of Castile, Castilian knights needed to seek vengeance on the Muslim enemy for the dishonor done to Spain in the 8th century. Divine sanction, multiple opportunities for honor, and a historical imperative all fed the ideology of holy war in late medieval Castile. The ideology of holy war became so powerful in this period that it had an impact on the stability and order of the kingdom itself. Fernando de Antequera, one of the regents during the minority of Juan II, enjoyed widespread love and support among the nobility for his successful resumption of the holy war. During Juan’s majority and the reign of his son, Enrique IV, a slow royal response to the knightly clamor for holy war contributed to the problems experienced by both of those kings. In other words, the idea of holy war manifested through real chivalric actions and helped to steer the course of Castilian history. As important as holy war was, though, it was not the only means for a knight to win honor. Chapter 4 explores the reality that much, if not most, of the battlefield experience that most knights would see occurred in war against fellow Christians. Castilian knights in the late Middle Ages fought against their Portuguese, Navarrese, and Aragonese neighbors and served as allies of the Kingdom of France against England during the Hundred Years’ War. In addition, there was ample opportunity to fight against their Christian neighbors in Castile during the civil wars, rebellions, and infighting that marked the Trastámara period. Even when there was not a kingdomwide civil war, knights found opportunities to fight against their Castilian neighbors, fellow vassals of the king of Castile. Inter-Christian warfare was a regular and lauded activity among late medieval Castilian knights and nobles. Just as there was an ideology of holy war, there was an ideology of interChristian warfare, though it was not often expressed in a succinct and organized fashion. Instead, it existed in the cultural ether of late medieval Castile. In literature, in historical writing, and in the records of central government, there existed a firm belief that fighting against fellow Christians was a way to win honor and a way to please God. At the same time, knights and nobles intellectually and emotionally saturated with the deeds of their ancestors sought to defend and augment the honor passed down to them. Because so many noble linajes understood their family honor to be bound up with the holy war, the war against Islam itself contributed to violence against fellow Christians. In other words, competing Christian claims to lands and cities previously held by Muslims could and did spur Castilian knights to fight one another. To maintain their families’ ancient achievements against the religious enemy, late medieval knights often found it necessary to fight Christians even when the opportunity to fight Muslims existed. Chapter 5 examines chivalric violence and identity as it pertained to gender. The masculinity of medieval knights was envisioned through violence. Chivalric men were men largely because they fought. Manly violence was perpetrated not just against peasants or fellow knights, but also sometimes against women in acts of rape and sexual violence. Chivalric prescriptions largely proscribed such violence, which attests to the reality that it occurred. Men, though, were not the only participants in chivalry; elite women also embraced chivalric ideology. At times elite women served a very passive and submissive chivalric role, encouraging men’s deeds of arms, praying to God for their success, and, importantly, producing male heirs to continue a man’s linaje. At other times, women took a more active role that has largely been passed over in traditional understandings of the Middle Ages. Women could and did direct and incite violence on behalf of themselves, their families, and their families’ honor. While they rarely took up arms themselves, they clearly understood chivalry as an animating force. Prime among such women was Queen Isabel, who understood chivalric ideology better than most of her predecessors on the throne of Castile. She was especially committed to prosecuting the holy war more actively, thus shaping a very active female chivalric role for herself.
The late Middle Ages represent a violent period in Spanish history. Not only was violence being performed on a regular basis, but it was being performed in various ways and against diverse individuals and groups: men and women, the king himself and the peasant in the field, the fiendish religious enemy and pious Christian warriors. If we want to take the endemic violence of the late Middle Ages seriously, we must acknowledge that that violence took place and we must attempt to comprehend the ideas that informed and directed that violence. Bloodshed was not undertaken by medieval knights because they were brainwashed by the holy church or directed by a perfect prince. Knights developed an ideology of violence – chivalry – and embraced it on their own terms. As offensive as modern people might find the idea, violence was important to medieval knights, forming a core part of their identity in political, social, religious, familial, and professional terms. To understand the dominant figures in Castilian society at the cusp of Spain’s union, empire, and march into the modern world, we must grasp their ideas about themselves and their world. Violence was the linch-pin of chivalry.
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