Jose Sanchez Toledo’s Medieval Knights: The Age of Chivalry is
an ambitious attempt to examine the lives, motivations, equipment, social
status, and cultural milieu of medieval knights. In only 134 pages,
copiously laden with illustrations, he seeks to “take an in-depth
look into the history and methodology of the Medieval knight, and provide
the reader with a detailed study of this romantic age.” Therein
lies the primary danger for this text. While Mr. Sanchez has an enthusiasm
and love for the topic that shines clearly through the pages, the book
as a whole is too ambitious, insufficiently analytical, and does not satisfy
the scholarly reader.
Mr. Sanchez divides his book into a number of thematic chapters, all following
a roughly chronological schema that introduces us to the topic through
late Roman comitatenses armies, carries
us through some difficult terrain as “Feudalism”, and finally
deposits us next to Renaissance cannons and pikemen to be witnesses to
the “death” of chivalry at the hands of evolving technology.
The chapters are themselves of mixed quality. Mr. Sanchez, who is
himself an historical re-enactor, is clearly most comfortable discussing
the nuts and bolts (occasionally literally) of the world of knights. His
chapters on weapons, armor, and war-horses are among the most valuable. While
they do not offer much by way of original research or analysis, they present
the subject matter clearly and concisely. These chapters are also
bolstered by valuable artists’ renditions of the evolution of medieval
equipment. This gives the introductory reader easy access to general
changes in medieval weapons and armor, though the heavy reliance on photographs
of historical re-enactors to demonstrate historical events is worrying.
It is in the chapters devoted to society, culture, and settings that the
limitations of the book become apparent. I do not intend to criticize
every chapter in the book, but I do want to highlight some of the more
problematic aspects of a few selected chapters. His chapters on Feudalism,
Epic and Romantic poetry, the social origins of knighthood, and the historical
settings of the period are most demonstrative of the analytical and narrative
problems with the book.
His chapter detailing the role played by “Feudalism” is a
good example of the problems inherent throughout the book. Mr. Sanchez
does not seem to appreciate the problems and limitations inherent with
the term “Feudalism”, tensions that have been debated within
the scholarly community for over thirty years. Instead he creates
the impression that medieval society was run by a systematic and well-organized
social construct of lords and vassals. He does not raise issues of
noble independence, nor concerns about the applicability of “Feudalism” to
all parts of Europe at all times. He also seems to equate mounted
knights as being demonstrative of Feudalism, and that without one the other
could not exist.
Mr. Sanchez makes an admirable effort at introducing the importance played
by Epic and Romance poetry on knightly culture, but he fails to treat them
with sufficient skepticism, and instead reads them as almost entirely descriptive
texts of knightly behavior, or what knightly behavior “ought” to
have been. In his words, the world of the knight was “awash
with infidels, merchants and villains” and the knights had to transcend
this evil world with “honourable behavior, nobility and decorum.” (19) He
does not raise the issues of authorial bias or prescription, favoring instead
to argue that epic poetry sought to instill “the principles of protecting
the weakest groups of society from potential abuses of power and injustice
derived from the misuse of force.” (18) He continues by linking the
ideological culture of medieval knighthood with (unnamed) Greek philosophers
and the Meditations of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. He concludes
by saying that “Those who were conferred with the Order of Knighthood,
with its high moral significance, must surely have taken inspiration from
these sources.” (19) Finally, Mr. Sanchez uses Chretien de Troyes’s Perceval,
and the Prose Lancelot (which he wrongly attributes to Chretien)
as exemplars of knightly behavior. While they certainly were written
to influence knightly behavior, they were but one voice in the argument
over knightly behavior, rather than definitive statements as he presents
them.
Leaving aside the normative idea of an “Order of Knighthood”,
this interpretation of the literary evidence is highly positivistic and
anachronistic. In his analysis, Epics were designed to moderate knightly
violence and bend them to the will of their lords. Furthermore, the
new Romances were distinguished from Epics in their focus on generosity,
frankness, compassion, and courtesy, and that these clearly were focused
on ladies, rather than the older blood-and-guts style of the Epic. While
there is some truth to this interpretation, it artificially eliminates
the continuing role played by violence and knightly prowess in Romance.
He then writes, “The lust for power and riches, combined with the
arrogance of those who considered themselves superior, occasioned some
sad pages in the history of Knighthood.” (20) While Victorian gentlemen
might have nodded in approval at Mr. Sanchez’s interpretation, the
vast amount of literary evidence of the exultation of violence and knightly
independence present in these texts belies his analysis.
His chapter detailing the social origins of knights advances this theme
of the romantic decline of knighthood. He bemoans the practice of
arming common soldiers as knights on the battlefield, though since he incorrect
in his assertion that knights were the mounted soldiers on a medieval battlefield,
this complaint is largely unnecessary. He writes, “With the
passage of time, the old values were perverted and the glorious old Order
of Knighthood degenerated.” (26) This goes hand-in-hand with
his assertion that for a thousand years the heavy cavalry, composed entirely
of knights, was an unstoppable battlefield force. He completely ignores
the groundbreaking work of Matthew Strickland, and others, who have shown
the crucial importance played by infantry in medieval battles, including
knights who fought on foot.
The various national “summaries” contained in his chapter
on the “Settings”
are largely unhelpful. They vary in quality, with the Scandinavian
and Italian sections faring worst, the English, French and German sections
being a bit better, and the Spanish section coming out the best. In
no case, however, is there a consistent narrative at work, nor an analytical
framework. It is, instead, generally a chronological list of rulers,
usually with no more than a few sentences description of their impact on
military affairs. There is no attempt to contextualize these rulers,
nor to craft an argument of larger themes regarding the development of
their
“nations”. The section on the Crusades and Crusader states
is written entirely from a positivistic European perspective. He
begins his section on the First Crusade with the exulting, headline-style
sentence, “Jerusalem is taken!” (95) All subsequent crusades
are dealt with according to the over-arching meme that they were merely “support
expeditions to delay the inevitable loss of the Holy Sites.” (96)
This is highly anachronistic and ignores amounts of evidence regarding
the social, cultural, religious, and economic motivations for “crusading”.
Mr. Sanchez’s book suffers from a very outdated and positivist conception
about what a medieval “knight” was, or perhaps more importantly,
what he
“ought” to have been. He portrays the medieval knight
as an inherently servile and subordinate figure, existing only to gain
the favor of his king or queen. Nowhere is this more evident than
in his chapter on tournaments, in which he argues that the overarching
purpose of tourneying was to gain the favor of courtly ladies. At
no point does he treat knights as independent agents, nor does he consider
the importance of the views of other knights. He almost considers
this when he discusses the fact that knights loved hunting and falconry,
since the falcon was a lone hunter, and was seen as the ruler of the avian
kingdom. He does not, however, follow the logic of this to craft
a more compelling or accurate portrayal of medieval knights. His
narrative approach is unmoored from firm analytical groundings, and thus
is superficial, highly selective, and unpersuasive.
Ultimately, this project was too ambitious for what it ended up being. As
the bibliography demonstrates, the author relied almost entirely on very
general studies of the period, and would be well served by reading works
by Marcus Bull, Helen Nicholson, Richard Kaeuper, Maurice Keen, and David
Crouch, among others. Mr. Sanchez would have been better suited to
writing a more focused book on the material aspects of knighthood, a topic
for which he is seemingly well-qualified and for which his expertise would
more than likely lead to a valuable contribution in popular history.