The Flower of Chivalry with C.J. Adrien

Gary: Today's special episode is by C.J. Adrien. Best-selling author of historical fiction and noted scholar, C.J. Adrien is also teaching a class on chivalry on Medievalists.net. Today he is talking about chivalry and the long history of how this largely French practice came to be and ultimately ended.

C.J. Adrien: Hi. I’m C.J. Adrien. Today, we are going to explore the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 as a lens through which to understand the rise, evolution of, and fall of the concept of chivalry in medieval Europe.

It was a cold morning in France on September 19, 1356, on the outskirts of the city of Poitiers. I imagine the men-at-arms could see their breath wafting in a quiet northerly breeze, dew on the grasses, and perhaps even their armor, as a fog lingered in the far-off countryside. The French, under the banner of Jean II, arrived at the field of battle with one goal in mind: to halt Edward the Black Prince’s devastating scorched-earth campaign across France. Edward had betrayed every tenet of chivalry his forebears had sought to forge in the fire of war as a means to curb violence in the feudal order. He was a man bent on expediency and one who worshipped one thing above all: victory. Opposite Edward stood Geoffroi De Charny, a Burgundian knight loyal to King Jean II, a prominent member of the Order of the Star, and the man who had written the literal book on chivalry. Where Edward risked unravelling the loose set of virtues that had allowed the landowning gentry of Western Europe to maintain a monopoly on violence, De Charny sought to preserve them. Their confrontation put the institution of knighthood and chivalry at a crossroads: would the chivalric ideal hold under De Charny, or would it end in the mud and blood of battle against the ruthless Black Prince? And how did we get here?

While chivalry did not end at Poitiers, to understand how and why the battle between De Charny and Edward the Black Prince proved so consequential to the development, evolution, and sunsetting of Chivalry, and with it the entire feudal order, it’s essential to understand how it all came about. For that, we have to rewind the clock some four hundred years to the last gasp of the Carolingian empire.

Charlemagne was lucky. Upon his death in 814, he had a single son, Louis, to inherit his lands. The empire he had so painstakingly forged would survive him. However, by the time Louis ascended the throne, he already had three adult sons, which presented a problem. The Franks still followed the Germanic tradition whereby every legitimate male heir had a right to an equal share of his father’s landholdings. This legal tradition had caused the collapse of numerous Frankish regimes in the former Roman province of Gaul (or what we today would call France).

The Carolingians would be no different. At first, Louis appeared to have pulled off the impossible: at the council of Worms in 823, he established the partition of the empire, and his sons Lothaire, Louis, and Pepin did not protest it. For a time, they had avoided what had befallen the Franks time and again since Clovis: civil war. But a year later, Louis’ wife passed away and, on the recommendation of his nobility, he remarried. Their union produced a fourth son, Charles, who was owed an equal share of their grandfather’s onquests. Upon attempting to redraw the lines of inheritance, the eldest three sons rebelled, sparking decades of interfamily fighting that culminated in a catastrophic clash at the Battle of Fontenoy-en-Puisaye, in which some sources claim that two-thirds of the nobility perished in the mud and blood, including one of the four brothers, Pepin.

Charles, the youngest, inherited the lands of Aquitaine and Neustria, among a few others, constituting a rough boundary that loosely resembles modern France, though quite a bit smaller. The wars of succession had taught him an invaluable lesson: that he needed to discard the old Germanic law of dividing one’s land equally among male heirs and institute a new rule: to pass land and title to the eldest male heir, a practice known as primogeniture. While his move did not guarantee his own progeny’s ability to maintain power, the Western Frankish realm managed to remain intact to a significant degree, unlike the other parts of Charlemagne’s former empire. In the 10th century, a new royal line emerged under Hugues Capet, who reformed the institution of the crown to ensure continuous succession, becoming the first king of France.

Alongside the implementation of primogeniture, another development—the introduction of the stirrup somewhere in the middle of the 8th and 9th centuries in Western Europe—gradually reoriented the economics of war from a democratised, everyone-can-go-marauding sort of setup—think Vikings—to a rather expensive endeavor. The stirrup led to advancements in animal husbandry, especially in horses, leading to the breeding and training of larger and larger warhorses that would become the destriers of the high medieval period. These animals required vast resources to breed, train, and upkeep, but their role in warfare proved revolutionary. A mounted armored knight on an armored destrier was, outside of other mounted knights, virtually indestructible.

Certainly, violence among the lower orders of society did not subside overnight, but as the 10th and 11th centuries progressed, access to the tools of war required larger and larger amounts of wealth, and consequently, violence became the privilege of those who could afford it. The Battle of Hastings in 1066 proved consequential in part because the Normans brought mounted knights to a shield wall fight. When William took the throne, he implemented the same economic principles that had allowed their creation throughout England in a system called feudalism.

And here is where the nobility of the middle and late 11th century ran into problems. Since violence and warfare had become the privilege of the wealthy, it meant that all the landowning gentry’s sons took up the martial tradition. Conversely, most of them could never hope to inherit land, especially if they had an older brother. They arrived, then, at a situation where Normandy, France, and even England, had a surplus of rich-kid fighting men with nowhere to direct that energy except at each other and, unfortunately, society’s most vulnerable. Raids on towns, villages, even monasteries and churches, were not unheard of. The landowning gentry had thus established a monopoly on violence, but they seemed powerless to stop their spoiled children from using their skills of war on their subjects. They were now faced with a situation where landless knights with no hope of succession risked unraveling the new, very advantageous socioeconomic order that had emerged as a means to stabilize the realm.

Thus started an urgent race to figure out how to stop the literal bleeding. Two major camps emerged with competing ideas. First, the church took it upon itself to write a few angry letters, known as the Peace and Truce of God, which attempted to regulate the when, where, and how of fighting. When that didn’t work, because of course it didn’t, the landowning gentry took matters into their own hands. They created the tournament, where the martial class could test their mettle, earn reputation, and even win prizes and wealth. The early tournament bore little resemblance to the manicured jousting competitions we are most familiar with today. They were mock battles, where two sides gathered on a tournament field with boundaries stretching miles, and they charged at each other in a chaotic melee before splintering off and chasing each other all over the place. It was a dangerous affair, and while the goal wasn’t to kill anyone, men were killed.

It was within the tournament setting that the ransom culture emerged. A knight could join a tournament, and if he captured another knight, he could ransom him back to his estate. In doing so, he could win tremendous wealth on the tournament circuit—or lose it all. The goal then changed from killing to capturing, and even in real war, knights started to capture and ransom their enemies over killing them where possible. It was a positive development for the landowning gentry. The most famous knight of the tournament era was William Marshall. Born the son of Norman knight who disowned him, he managed to find a sponsor to help him join in the early tournaments. He invented an ingenious technique that allowed him to capture the bridle of another knight’s horse so he could lead them back to his camp for ransom. Marshall made a proverbial killing, earning so much wealth and reputation that he was offered the hand of a noblewoman in England who owned a castle, he became the private bodyguard of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and served five English kings.

The church, on the other hand, denounced the tournaments, considering them places of sin and debauchery, which they were. So, desperate to have their say in curbing the violence, they decided to export it. Hence, the first crusade was called by Pope Urban II. Now, the conditions that led to the calling of the First Crusade are numerous, but among them was the notion that the youth bulge of budding young knights needed to be directed somewhere outside Christendom. Except, something unexpected happened.

The first people to answer the call to crusade were not knights, but commoners. Led by an obscure figure named Peter the Hermit, and with the help of a petty knight called Walter Sans-Avoir (translated to Walter who has nothing), a rabble of one hundred thousand peasants gathered over the course of their march East, earning the title The Peasant’s Crusade. This was not what the Byzantines had expected—not by a long shot. And no one at the time would have wanted one hundred thousand people of any kind to show up at their doorstep. Emperor Alexios denied the crusaders entry, but he did do them the favor of ferrying them into Anatolia. From there, the crusade devolved into a pitiful affair. The Seljiuk Turks made quick work of them and within two engagements almost all of the crusaders had been killed.

This episode may seem out of step with a show on chivalry, but it’s quite pertinent. You see, what the peasant’s crusade exposed was an underlying current of danger to the ruling elite. Given the right motivation and zeal—in this case a chance at salvation—peasants could mobilize in vast numbers. The damage they wrought across central and eastern Europe on their way, including the destruction of several prominent Jewish communities, reinforced the notion among the landowning gentry that they needed to find a way to keep violence an exclusive privilege of the elite, and to justify that privilege to their subjects. In other words, they needed to find a way to convince everyone of their right to hold that privilege and convince common folk of their ineligibility to take up arms.

A few months later, the nobility of Western Europe organized into the Prince’s Crusade. When they arrived, however, they received their second slap to the face. The Byzantines, whose rich martial tradition stretching back to the foundation of the Roman empire, epitomized the highest ideals of civilization, and they found the so-called Frankish knights, or knights from France, problematic. The emperor’s daughter, Anna Komnene, wrote a scathing rebuke of them in a document called the Alexiad, describing them as barbaric, bloodthirsty, lustful, and all around unbecoming of the Christian faith. Her testimony circulated among the nobility in France, and, historians have argued, it applied pressure toward the further development, refinement, and implementation of a set of ideals we would later call Chivalry.

And while the nobility at home reeled from the shame and embarrassment of their sons on crusade, their sons continued on into the Middle East, and, not without a few bumps in the road, managed to conquer vast swathes of land, including Jerusalem. Successful in their endeavor, they created the Crusader States, and thereby established a separate sandbox in which the emerging ideals of chivalry could be tested, refined, and improved. Far removed from the constraints of their homelands and, strangely, the yoke of the papacy, the crusaders had to find a way not to tear each other to pieces. Now, the crusades are a vast and complex subject, and so for the sake of staying laser-focused on the development of chivalry, there are three important themes to remember: that the first crusade forced the knightly class to face their bad behavior, that they were exposed to the Frusiya—a sort of chivalric code of the muslim world, which taught that warriors should also be cultivated and educated— and, the emergence of holy orders such as the knights templar and knights hospitallier created a bridge between the conflicting ideals of martial and Christian life, turning knighthood into a holy, moralized vocation rather than a birthright.

These three themes would, over the course of decades, lead the landowning gentry of Europe to become obsessed with their self-image. While the ideals historians today ascribe to chivalry had not yet fully taken form, they were, in effect, within the zeitgeist of the time. And that’s where romantic literature burst onto the scene, and it all started with a peculiar new form of storytelling: historical fiction.

Prior to this development, the knightly class enjoyed a certain art form performed in their halls at feasts and tournaments. Chansons de Geste, or songs of great deeds, recounted the exploits of the knightly class back to the time of Charlemagne. The most famous of these was the Chanson de Roland, or Song of Roland, recounting a romanticised and loosely historical last stand of one of Charlemagne’s knights at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass. It features an honorable knight, Roland, who, in his bid to behave in the most knightly way possible, waited too long to sound his oliphant for help, and so he was slain by an enemy army of Saracens. In true history, he was ambushed by Basque fighters, but in the spirit of medieval literature, why let facts get in the way of a good story? And a good story it was. In fact, it was precisely the kind of story early knights wanted to hear—it valorized their martial prowess, honor, and loyalty. But by the mid-1100s, it became clear that these stories were not enough to justify the elite’s monopoly on violence. Peasants would not accept being ruled by a rowdy band of thugs who profited from their toil. And the peasants’ crusade had made it clear that the image of chivalry needed to resonate with them.

Enter Chrétien de Troyes, most famous for composing a series of Arthurian epics that we today would consider historical fiction. Through these epics, De Troyes initiated the codification of Chivalry by portraying the knightly class as one of moral duty, sacrifice for the greater good, and protector of the vulnerable. His works, paid for and commissioned by the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s daughter Marie de Champagne (which tells us this was a mandate of the ruling elite) reached a much wider audience than just knights in their feasting halls. They disseminated throughout society and altered public perception of knights and chivalry toward an institution designed for the protection of the masses. As a tool of legitimacy for the ruling elite, it had a profound effect.

By the early 13th century, Chivalry had developed a core set of ideals that De Charny would echo in the 14th century. Those were: Prowess, or the ability of a knight to win. Largesse, or his wealth and how generous he was with it. Loyalty was how well a knight upheld his oaths of fealty. Piety, his devotion to God, and his moral conduct. Vérité, or truth, was a measure of honesty in all matters. Honor, which meant behaving in a manner becoming of a knight. And Justice, which meant upholding the laws of God and man, and defending the weak.

But all was not well with the flower of Chivalry. Frequent and persistent disputes and campaigns of war carried out by the knightly class, with the peasantry bearing the brunt of the damage, continued to tarnish the reputation of knights as moral, God-fearing servants. The tumultuous 13th century did much to undermine the image the knightly class wished to project onto its subjects. And by the time the Hundred Years’ War began in the mid-14th century, it had become clear that even the knightly class no longer believed in the idealistic vision of their vocation.  Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales provides a clue to the pervasiveness of society’s simmering rejection of the Chivalric ideal. In the tale of Sir Thopas, Chaucer deliberately makes it a clumsy, sing-song, childish romance in verse, with a laughably flat knight-errant hero. The story is filled with cliché adventures and imperfect rhymes, and Chaucer the character delivers it so poorly that the Host interrupts him mid-story and tells him to stop because it’s unbearable. It’s Chaucer’s way of parodying the overblown chivalric romances that had become formulaic by the late 14th century. In other words, “Sir Thopas” is a send-up of the genre’s tired tropes. And tired they were.

Tired of playing by a set of worn-out rules that put them at a disadvantage over the king of France’s much larger knightly class, the English changed course. Lauded in modern times as a crowning achievement of technological advancement, the battle of Crecy, in which the longbow won the day against the flower of chivalry, was in its day a signal for what was to come: Chivalry be damned, we will win at any cost.

Edward the Black Prince was a young man at Crecy. How impressionable he would have been, and how much the battle must have spoken to him. He had watched his father ignore the centuries-old social order, and the result was victory. What man wouldn’t question the established way of things? Thus began his decades-long terror campaign across the former Frankish realm. To him, chivalry was a fantasy designed to keep him subordinate to the French king.

French knights resisted the change. As is the case in France today, there is a right way of doing things and a wrong way. That cultural leaning has its roots in the case for chivalry that De Charny proposed. If we throw it all out, then we are no better than the commoners we swore to defend, or even worse. And so, he wrote a manual for knights titled A Knight’s Own Book of Chivalry. In it, he established all the rules and codes of conduct befitting a knight, hoping that he might sway even the English to return to their sanity.

And so we return to that day on September 19, 1356. The fog had thinned by the time the French deployed, yet the ground still clung to dew and mud. King Jean II arrayed his army in divisions, confident that numbers would carry the day. Ahead of them, the English and Gascons stood fast in a defensive position flanked by hedgerows, the longbowmen hidden like thorns in a hedge of steel.

The first French charge stumbled into those arrows. The sky hissed. Horses screamed as shafts punched through mail and leather. Men slipped, fell, and were trampled. Again and again, French cavalry pressed forward, only to break against the thorn wall of archers and dismounted men-at-arms. The press grew tighter, hotter, more desperate.

Near the king, Geoffroi de Charny held the Oriflamme aloft. The red silk snapped and fluttered, a signal that France would give no quarter, that this was holy war. Charny had lived the code he wrote: loyalty, piety, prowess, largesse, truth, justice, honor. Each virtue burned in him now, a fire that kept his arms steady while chaos roared around him. Chroniclers say he fought with extraordinary valor, cutting down men until the ground was slick and the staff grew heavy in his hands.

The English pressed closer. Captains barked, and men surged in waves. The French line wavered, and even the king’s guard strained to hold. Charny did not yield. He bore wounds but stood firm, the Oriflamme high, his body a wall against the tide. They closed around him—English knights who in another age might have sought ransom, but today followed the ruthless creed of the Black Prince.

He fell there, at the king’s side, still clutching the sacred banner. His death was as deliberate as his life, a last argument that war could be bound by honor. But honor could not stop the press of bodies, the arrows, the weight of a strategy that valued victory above virtue. King Jean was captured, his sons taken, and the French nobility broken.

On that field outside Poitiers, the Flower of Chivalry lay in the mud. With Charny’s blood bled the dream of a code that could restrain violence and ennoble it. The banner he refused to yield was torn from his grasp, and with it, the last breath of an ideal centuries in the making. What rose in its place was a harsher truth: the ushering of the age of the longbow and the chevauchée, of mercenaries and fire. The world had changed. And Geoffroi de Charny, knight and author, fell with the old one.

And so began the slow death of the institution of knighthood. It would persist in a weakened form for another hunred or so years, but the calamity at Agincourt in 1416 sealed its fate. In its wake arose the centralization of power, the formation of standing armies and conscriptions, and a new world order that would make violence the exclusive right of the state. This has been a broad, high-level overview of the rise, evolution, and decline of Chivalry, which I am teaching more in-depth in a course at medievalists.net. You can find the course link in the description of this video, or head to the site medievalists.net.