Order and Chivalry: Knighthood and Citizenship in Late Medieval Castile

ORDER AND CHIVALRY

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor

Edward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series

is available from the publisher.

ORDER AND

CHIVALRY

KNIGHTHOOD AND CITIZENSHIP

IN LATE MEDIEVAL CASTILE

Jesús D. Rodríguez-Velasco

TRANSLATED BY

Eunice Rodríguez Ferguson

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA • OXFORD

Publication of this volume was aided by a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities

Simultaneously contracted in Spanish with Ediciones Akal, Madrid, as Ciudadanía, soberanía monárquica y caballería: Poética del orden de caballería

English edition copyright © 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rodríguez Velasco, Jesús D.

Order and chivalry : knighhood and citizenship in late medieval Castile / Jesús D. Rodríguez-Velasco ; translated by Eunice Rodríguez Ferguson.

p.   cm. — (The Middle Ages Series)

978-0-8122-4212-6 (hardcover : acid-free paper)

Simultaneously contracted in Spanish with Ediciones Akal, Madrid, as Ciudadanía, soberania monárquica y caballería: Poética del orden de caballería.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Knights and knighthood—Spain—Castile—History. 2. Social classes—Spain—Castile—History. 3. Feudalism—Spain—Castile—History. 4. Chivalry—Spain Castile. 5. Castile (Spain)—Social conditions. 6. Castile (Spain)—History, Military.

CR5819.R636    2010

Je dédie ce livre à Aurélie Vialette

Hier—das meint diese Stadt die von dir und der Wolke regiert wird von ihren Abenden her.

—Paul Celan

CONTENTS

Introduction

One. Ritual as a Strategy for Chivalric Creation

Two. Poetics of Fraternity

Three. The Presence of the Confraternity

Four. The Order of the Sash

Five. Rewriting the Order

Six. Poetics of the Chivalric Emblem

Conclusions

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Poetics of the Ordo

This investigation arises from the question of how a social class is created. Such an inquiry belongs in an exceedingly complex territory where it is necessary to parse the diversity of voices that participate in this creation as well as the interests that motivate each of these voices. It is difficult to determine whether a social class is the object of a creation, or the subject of that creation. One of the aims of this study is to probe this difference by examining the various forces and voices that created the chivalric class.

Chivalry is an integral principle of Western politics, society, and morality. It encompasses the framework of moral and political categories that underpin interpersonal networks as well as relationships between genders or between institutions throughout Western culture—categories that have ramifications in everyday Western vocabulary, such as loyalty, gallantry, adventure, friendship, civil life, and honor. Some of its ramifications are also among the most questionable of Western political, military, and moral categories: crusade, reconquest, gender inequality, and social asymmetry. Nevertheless, knighthood subsumes all these concepts, as if this class in a permanent state of creation—a perennially inchoate poetics—were the ideal laboratory for the incorporation of all these ideas into discourse. The most cogent argument for the social and political worth of the chivalric class is the fascinating strategy that it represents: 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. This study also seeks to ascertain how this political transformation of civilian life took place during the advent of modernity.

This research is a radical departure from my previous work on chivalry. In it, I endeavor to overstep the traditional debate on chivalry presented in my 1996 book, El debate sobre la caballería en el siglo XV (The Debate Regarding Chivalry in the Fifteenth Century). I will venture into a scarcely studied field that is fundamental to understand the construction of modern structures of power. The present study will focus on how certain bourgeois groups that accrued a growing economic importance set up new spheres of power by invoking and reinventing discourses on chivalry. It will also examine the genealogy of the bourgeois voice and its process of institutionalization as it came to dominate urban centers and became one of the central powers of the imperium. This genealogy will reveal how rising bourgeois groups deployed their strategies by producing manuscripts, both public and private, and building an archive that they sought to control. These documents reveal how these bourgeois groups express their newly acquired voice, how they display their bodies and occupy the urban space, and how they manifest this, as a new expression of power, before the king, thereby creating a modification in the realm of monarchical sovereignty.

The main objects of inquiry in this book are certain documents and their creators, who set forth the rules for others to follow. These texts resemble the law without being the law. They are mostly private documents that unveil the relationship between the group of human beings they interpellate and a particular class, or ordo. Each of these documents constitutes, implicitly, a poetics of the ordo.

The poetics of the ordo, or poetics of the order, is the textual enactment that will lead to the creation, construction, and configuration of a social class.¹ In the Middle Ages there were no social classes per se—or at least none that were consonant with the notion of social class that arose in the West following the revolutionary periods of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An ordo is the basic concept used in the Middle Ages to designate a self-contained social group with a well-defined sociopolitical role. An ordo is also known as an estate; indeed, in medieval Spanish the term estado is more frequently used than orden.²

Nevertheless, the concept of ordo that will be used in this book differs from the exact concept of ordo often theorized during the Middle Ages. The aim of this book is not to build a particular theory of ordo, and, likewise, it is not a research on Medieval theories of ordo. Therefore, there will be little accord between the concept of ordo with which we will work in this study and the one engaged by Georges Duby in his classic Les trois ordres (1973) or, more recently, by Francesco Maiolo in Medieval Sovereignty (2007), where he analyzes the theoretical, political, and legal aspects of ordo in the Italian fourteenth century—taking Marsile of Padua and Bartolo of Sassoferrato as a point of departure. This book explores pragmatic theories on how an ordo is created, instead of advancing an already codified theory to which it must conform on a conceptual level.

It is necessary to reassess the notion of social class, since the shift between social class and ordo plays an implicit yet critical role in this book. An ordo is predicated on its own containment, following the theological hierarchical principle that engendered it—the Celestial hierarchy by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite—and was adopted by feudalism later on. This principle informs the familiar medieval aphorism that dictated that every man must remain in his estate. An ordo is not a description of any given or ideal society, but rather a topology of society, a theory of its limits and frontiers. It not only delineates what belongs to the subject, but also what is beyond its reach. A social class, on the other hand, is dialectical and comparative; incessantly questioning its own limits or even the assumption that it is a container that can be socially defined. The key focus of this study is the displacement between ordo and class. In the documents studied here the poetics of the ordo questions whether it is a social container with defined limits, thereby forcing it into a dialectic.

There inheres in this dialectic an unbounded respect toward the concept of order and, consequently, toward the segregation of a society divided into orders. It would be difficult to find a text or other cultural object that proposes the dissolution of society’s orders—or of the social model based on the concept of order. Any social dialectic articulated around the poetics of the ordo has order itself as its referent: class, category, and structure are not subject to destruction or deconstruction. Neither does the poetics of the order seek to advance an alternative social system to that of the ordo, or of the state. Rather, its inquiry attempts to read between the folds of the existing system. The dialectics of order is not exterior, but interior to the very concept of order.

The reason for this respect of a system of order as a social model, lies in the ways in which the concept of ordo is used as a compass to seek peace. Peace and order are in a reciprocal relationship: any form of peace is order and order is fundamental for any form of peace. Peace is at the root of medieval political theology, owing to the wide influence of Augustinian thought throughout the entire Middle Ages and beyond. It is perhaps the concept that most clearly illustrates political theology: existence—the act of being—in any possible domain, is depicted in Augustinian theory as politics, as civilian life. Civilian life is thereby underwritten by a typology of nine categories of peace that range from the particular (inner peace) to the most general (eternal peace).³ Heavenly Jerusalem and earthly Jerusalem—the city of God and the city of men—are mutual projections of each other: earthly Jerusalem is modeled after the heavenly version, but the population of heavenly Jerusalem depends on the actions of earthly beings. Giorgio Agamben has expressed this idea in a phrase that echoes Augustinian politics and metaphysics: "Politics therefore appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living and the logos is realized."⁴ In this case, the threshold is the Augustinian concept of peace defined as order.

Originally, the ordo was like a contract allowing pacification. In medieval vocabulary, peace is etymologically related to the idea of pact: it is a negotiation toward a degree of stability derived from a shared acknowledgment of political, social, and power relations.⁵ Saint Augustine expresses the relation of dependency between social peace and order as follows:

Pax animae irrationalis, ordinata requies appetitionum. Pax animae rationalis, ordinata cognitionis actionisque consensio. Pax corporis et animae, ordinata vita et salus animantis. Pax hominis mortalis et Dei, ordinata in fide sub aeterna lege oboedientia. Pax hominum, ordinata concordia. Pax domus, ordinata imperandi atque oboediendi concordia cohabitantium. Pax civitatis, ordinata imperandi atque oboediendi concordia civium. Pax caelestis civitatis, ordinatissima et concordissima societas fruendi Deo et invicem in Deo. Pax omnium rerum, tranquillitas ordinis. Ordo est parium dispariumque rerum sua cuique loca tribuens dispositio.

[The peace of the irrational soul is the harmonious repose of the appetites, and that of the rational soul, the harmony of knowledge and action. The peace of body and soul is the well-ordered and harmonious life and health of the living creature. Peace between man and God is the well-ordered obedience of faith to eternal law. Peace between man and man is well-ordered concord. Domestic peace is the well-ordered concord between those of the family who rule and those who obey. Civil peace is a similar concord among the citizens. The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and one another in God. The peace of all things is the tranquility of order. Order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal, each to its own place. (690)] ⁶

The poetics of the ordo is one of the doors leading to the house of power where peace and ordo are negotiated, thus becoming power. Model and system, the ordo is also a pact, a work to restore the idea of peace in all its typological and social breadth in the domains of the political and the metaphysical. Throughout this book, the metaphor of power as space, and more concretely—following thus the Augustinian typology of peace spaces—as a lodging, a house, a chamber, a room, and a city, is crucial. Thus this research will delve into those spaces: the rooms of negotiation, the courts, the royal chamber, the practice of the space, and the city (both inside and outside its walls). By means of the poetics of ordo, I will explore the social, political, and, above all, the jurisdictional interactions within civil and urban spaces, where knightly confraternities establish their relation to monarchical sovereignty.

Chivalric Fable

This relationship between peace and order is essential to an understanding of the role of chivalry as a laboratory for social change. Medieval knighthood rises amid the tempestuous fog of groups who engaged in recalcitrant violence. It succeeds in incorporating itself into institutions of peace before it ultimately consolidates these very institutions. That is, chivalry emerges from a system of institutional violence to become a substantial component in a discourse of peace. The creation of chivalry takes place within the category of nobility and, during its first two centuries, chivalry’s regulation bifurcates into ecclesiastic stipulations and the norms of a fledgling monarchy.⁷ The stigma of the organization of a social class, or ordo, between ecclesiastical power and monarchical power will remain with knighthood throughout its history and will place it at the center of power dynamics: shifts in which the acquisition of judicial, jurisdictional, political, and cultural power is negotiated and settled into practice. Within dynamics of power the documents and alliances studied here advance new theses on knighthood as a vehicle for the transformation of authority, especially urban and monarchical jurisdiction and sovereignty.

How is chivalry used to achieve these ends? The answer is what this book refers to as the chivalric fable. The chivalric fable is the process through which chivalry becomes a political, juridical, and intellectual tool. The hermeneutic principle of this process is partially rooted in Richard Rorty’s concept of social hope.⁸ The chivalric fable conveys the hope that through a series of diversely codified political and moral acts, the subject can achieve social recognition and assume jurisdictional authority.

The fable, an Aristotelian concept after all, is a rhetorical device and a literary structure. Literary structure is the most prevalent form in the theoretical construction of knighthood. A theoretical articulation through literature may posit courtly life as the construction of a space of cultural cooperation where nobles and clerics come together—and where performances are staged based on all manner of narratives, particularly those with a literary or musical element. The theoretical efficiency of the literary narrative is essential to rhetoric and poetic theory, from its inception, by way of affectum—emotions, or the several forms of catharsis. Rorty has reiterated this aspect; according to him, literary construction aids the articulation of dialectical experiences—comparative descriptions of the world and language games—in a way that the abstract forms of theory or philosophy cannot, since it is based on the relationship between theory and human emotions.⁹ In the case of knighthood, these emotions, catharses, or affects are related to some of the fundamental themes of the chivalric framework: anagogic and tropologic salvation through actions, love, and friendship.

The chivalric fable was originally staged by clerical voices in the space of the court. The fable is woven around a fairly simple, but highly effective narrative structure. The plot (or rhetorical argumentum) usually involves a character who lacks name or fame and can only bear a blank coat of arms—with no heraldic signs. Either this character occupies a dubious or unknown position in his lineage, or his lineage has declined.¹⁰ In the fable he may earn a name, distinction, heraldic signs, fame, and status within the structure of power through an individual display of virtue dictated by a theoretically articulated chivalric model. This denouement of the fable renders social hope explicit.

These texts articulate a chivalric model that frequently assumes the structure of a pedagogical fable to secure theoretical depth, as the narrative pauses to allow a qualified individual to posit this theory to the protagonist. A salient example is Lancelot, perhaps the most universal of medieval knights, whose chivalric model is based on the education that he receives from the Lady of the Lake, just as his kindred are exiled.¹¹ In another example, the Valencian novel Tirant lo Blanc by Joanot Martorell (published in 1490), Tirant, traveling to the courts that will knight him, is delayed so that a hermit who had once been a noble knight can instruct him. In their meeting and subsequent interaction, Tirant and the hermit are both separated from society: the former because he is yet to become someone (although he will later become the megaduke of the Byzantine Empire, and nearly the emperor), and the latter because he has decided not to be someone, after abandoning chivalric life.¹² This pedagogic fable is similar to the one depicted in its sources, Ramon Llull’s treatise Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria (1279–1283) and the thirteenth-century romance Guillem de Vàroic.¹³ There are multiple chivalric models engendered by this pedagogic fable. Among the many examples I could mention are Merlin’s education of King Arthur; Don Juan Manuel’s hermit knight; Zifar and his two sons, Garfín and Roboán, in the Libro del cavallero Zifar (ca. 1330); or, in the same work, the relatively unique case of Zifar’s enlightenment after meeting Ribaldo, a popular, non-noble and nonchivalric character who becomes the caballero Amigo (Sir Friend) and conde Amigo (Count Friend).¹⁴

The fable launches several crucial transformations. The most relevant of these changes occurs when the meaning of chivalric virtue is fixed or when the model that the knight must follow is constructed. The order of discourse can change in the secondary pedagogical fable, incorporated into the larger fable, once a concrete social hope is advanced. Hence, it is in the process of defining a social hope that the discourse of chivalry is reformulated.¹⁵

The chivalric fable, however, comprises a much more complex problem. It answers the question of how knighthood may be used productively. This question addresses the theoretical problem of how a chivalric fable comes to life in all its political, social, and pedagogical angles; as well as the pragmatic one of how it may transform a concrete order.

It is in the establishment of this direct relationship between the theory and the praxis of knighthood where the sway of chivalric order as a social hope is settled. What, exactly, constitutes this social hope? How does it manifest itself? The discourse on knighthood rendered at the heart of the fable is reformulated upon the sphere of social hope. This social hope is a discursive act, a performance in which individuals or groups (chivalric orders or urban knighthood congregations, for instance) synthesize their depiction of the sociopolitical benefits of chivalry.¹⁶ Social hope is thus manifold. It entails the consolidation of a collective well-being and of possible aspirations reserved by, and for, particular segments of society.

Chivalry as we know it takes shape around the eleventh century and the pedagogical and ritualistic model that frames it is oriented toward the creation of controls for social violence. Clerical voices that appropriate and dominate the discourse on chivalry center it in the social ambit of nobility. This is a nobility regulated by Christian law and designed to benefit other social groups. The aspiration, or hope, that is created for them is that of salvation. This anagogic hope, however, has a significant tropological element: from this moment forward, knighthood will evolve not as the fearsome social class that it was but as the defender of the weak, the most generous and courteous class. This model gave rise to others, including the idea of courtly generosity (largitas or largesce in the medieval vocabulary), dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as well the representation of the court as schola, an educational institution with a political angle.¹⁷

Chivalry is a political and social apparatus (dispositif) where every locus of action or cultural practice is theoretically defined. This notion may be elucidated by Clifford Geertz’s adaptation of Weber’s concept of culture, which proposes that since man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of laws but an interpretive one in search of meaning.¹⁸ These webs of significance—the whole semiotic, spatial universe, the articulation of a voice, modes of representation, and systems of relationships—are cultural operations that make it possible to construct both social and private hope. It is therefore fitting to delve into the cultural conditions that led to the construction of social hope through chivalry.

The analysis of this chivalric social hope reveals that not only are these hopes plural, but they also form complex constellations. Because of the social hope that sustains it, an ordo is an apparatus that can be useful to many structures and discourses of power. Different classes or centers of power can invoke the social hope of chivalry to demand different and even mutually exclusive privileges. King Alfonso XI’s reasons for creating a discourse on chivalry are quite distinct from those of Don Juan Manuel, yet both dispute the hope that chivalry could entail for the social and political life of Castilian ricos hombres (high nobility), caballeros hidalgos (noble knights), or caballeros villanos (bourgeois knights, non-nobles who lived mainly in the cities). A distinction is often made between the discourse of chivalry and the discourse of nobility—or between clerical discourse and that of lay nobility—but this distinction is a delusion of historiography derived from the tendency of nineteenth-century scientific logic to polarize branches of traditions. What the genealogy of knighthood shows us is not that there are two branches of chivalric social hope, but that chivalry constantly develops and incorporates innovative discourses and orders.

The poetics of the ordo is an attempt to understand the specific creative and institutional processes that reconfigured chivalry in the liminal space between theory and practice. This process deploys a strong juridical language that constitutes a particular and dialectic expression of a public hope by inserting the institution in a dialogue between pedagogy and narrative that is at the core of the chivalric fable.

The Texts

The didactic nature of medieval literature is always emphasized. The term medieval literature itself encompasses textual forms that are clearly beyond what modern traditions deem to be literature—especially after the eighteenth century.¹⁹ Medieval literary didacticism includes narrative texts, poetry, and dramas yet also large compilations of philosophical, theological, political, and juridical texts, among others. It is not unusual to find chapters devoted to the Siete Partidas, for example, in medieval literary anthologies.

Nonetheless, the concept of didacticism is ill suited to the vastness of what we usually refer to as medieval literature. Didacticism is based on the transmission of a series of relatively stable codes, where every textual resource available is engaged. This hinders our appreciation of the complexity of the textual and intellectual production of the Middle Ages.

The problem of didacticism has been addressed by Julian Weiss in The Mester de Clerecía: Intellectuals and Ideologies in Thirteenth-Century Castile, where he concludes that to speak of didactic medieval literature and textual production in general is to undermine the originality of medieval intellectual contributions. Although the weight of tradition is extraordinary, especially when it comes to the rhetorical artifacts at play, the culture of the late Middle Ages was innovative on politics, law, moral relations, and tropological models—even more than anagogic models. Hence I never use the concept of didacticism (assuming it is indeed a concept) or marshal the concept of ideology. I argue that the originality of medieval texts lies in their theoretical reach and in their relentless, permanently inchoate drive to elude ideology and focus on inquiry.

The notion that medieval texts are highly theoretical aids the study of texts on knighthood. They are even independent of other textual, literary, and rhetorical texts, as each chivalric text advances a theory on knighthood, on its role in the social, political, and moral universe—and on the path to salvation. Chivalry is theory, and that’s why the embedding of a pedagogical fable within the chivalry fable is of absolute essence.

Chivalric theory permeates all the texts on knighthood and produces interactions between them that have not been sufficiently studied. This book will delve into many of them. The most striking example is the historiographic narration of the knightly investiture of Alfonso XI of Castile, as it enacts the chivalric and monarchical theory introduced in a chanson de geste—the Mocedades de Rodrigo—later incorporated into the Crónica de Castilla. This process of interaction is crucial to the creation of chivalric theory and is a constant quest to shape diverse cultural discourses. Knighthood is prominently theoretical, so I will also address the interaction among theoretical texts. Although my main sources are the regulations of chivalric institutions, these cannot be read without taking into account the textual and imaginary models that interact with them on a theoretical level.

Dynamics and Forms

Knighthood traditionally resides in the diffuse space of adventure and displacements across the physical and mystical frontiers of the kingdom and between the concepts of monarchy and social order. Medieval courts were also adventurous; they were in constant movement and, instead of itinerant, in this book I cast them as nomadic institutions. Even court members were so variable that they were impossible to name. The cleric Walter Map, a government official under the English king Henry II Plantagenet, stated in his book about the court, De nugis curialium (probably written before 1189), that the members of the court were in permanent mutation and that hodie sumus una multitudo, cras erimus alia (to-day we are one number, to-morrow we shall be a different one).²⁰ This constant shifting is an integral part of the permanent mythology of knighthood.

Whenever possible, this book will avoid such indeterminacy to analyze both chivalric citizenship and monarchical sovereignty. It will define, as precisely as possible, what constitutes these spaces, movements, and objects in which the poetics of the chivalric order is enacted. It will engage in a series of methodological considerations regarding the dynamics of power and how they are manifested. Dynamics of power are the processes by which potential and kinetic energies vie for the creation of spaces to negotiate the organization and control of jurisdictions. The metaphors of potential and kinetic energies point to the two central themes of this book: the planning of movement and the creation of networks (as elements of a potential dynamics) and their enactment in spaces in and out of city walls (as elements of a kinetic dynamics). It will examine three actors: the king who seeks the consolidation of central jurisdiction based on monarchical imperium (the ruling principle of modern absolutisms); the nobility, which strives to preserve its jurisdictional privileges vis-à-vis monarchical authority, based on feudal or lordship traditions; and the rising bourgeoisie, which tries to secure participation in the institutions erected by and within monarchical sovereignty.

A significant portion of this investigation is devoted to the examination of procedures for the assertion of power. There are two main expressions, or signifiers, of power: a documental aesthetics and the production of presence. Documental aesthetics refers to all the formal and formally regulated procedures, generally through legislation and legislative practice, articulated in the realm of the dead voice (that is, in authorized writing) to create what thirteenth-century procedural law designates as an authentic person.²¹ Production of presence—a termed coined by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht—implies methods of metonymic creation of resources whose physical appearance interferes with cognitive processes in such a way that the signifier itself becomes an epistemological barrier for the signified. Instead of an interpretation or a hermeneutical cycle, the production of presence evokes another presence—or another absence. From a rhetorical point of view, the enacted presence is a metonymy, instead of a metaphor or an allegory.²² In this study, the production of presence involves books, urban spaces, manifestations of the physical strength of certain forms of citizenship, or material and heraldic signs, among others. The production of these elements will be key to our understanding of the poetics of the order.

Each of the six chapters of this book is devoted to the poetics of the chivalric ordo in knighthood’s development and transformation throughout the kingdom of Castile and León. Most studies on chivalry have an ample scope and tend to discuss medieval chivalry in general. The Middle Ages, however, constitute an impregnable period. To address it as a whole while discussing chivalry is to omit a number of issues that require a genealogical perspective rather than a historical approach. In fact, this study conceives of itself as a chapter in a genealogy of chivalry. The chronological expanse covered will be relatively brief—approximately the period between 1300 and 1350—that is, the reign of Alfonso XI of Castile and León. Nonetheless, since most of the problems associated with chivalry during this period arose between the end of the twelfth century and the end of the thirteenth, this earlier period will be our inevitable frame of reference. Likewise, certain political issues regarding urban chivalry and monarchical power, as well as the transformations of chivalry between 1300 and 1350, regarding urban chivalry as well as monarchic power, only come to the fore in later periods and we will also take those into account.

Chapter 1 delves into rituals of chivalric incorporation and into the political, juridical, and cultural apparatus articulated through these rituals. This chapter begins with the first Castilian rituals, which take place in the twelfth century, and covers the various issuances of new ones until the mid-fourteenth century. The analysis of these rituals will evince the political strategies present in the various theses of entry into knighthood.

The reign of Alfonso XI of Castile began with a regency council who governed on behalf of the king. In an attempt to negotiate a degree of power and to secure protection from the regency council and other high-nobility authorities, several Castilian cities organized a Hermandad de Caballeros (Brotherhood of Knights) in 1315. This brotherhood produced a document that details rules for its assertion of power, titled Cuaderno de la Hermandad de Caballeros (Manual of the Brotherhood of Knights). Chapter 2 analyzes this Cuaderno as a method of regulation of chivalric structures and citizenship within its jurisdictional spheres.

The Hermandad of 1315 comprised a network of cities linked by knighthood. Urban chivalry launched other initiatives, however, that endeavored to set the location of its power within the city. Chapter 3 analyzes such congregations in the city of Burgos, specifically the Cofradía de caballeros de Santa María de Gamonal and the Cofradía de caballeros de Santiago (Confraternities of the Knights of Santa María de Gamonal and of Santiago). This chapter will show how the sway over urban space is asserted and the projection of chivalric citizenship positioned vis-à-vis monarchic sovereignty. These unique confraternities were not led by knights from the noble classes but by the caballería villana, or urban bourgeois knights.

The king’s creation of chivalric orders arose simultaneously during this period. The great royal prerogative—which for many years provided a vindication for monarchical authority and absolutism—had resided in the capacity to create nobility, gradually effacing the limits of theological nobility. The king had used knightly investiture initially as a method for the creation of nobility. This bond between monarchical power and knighthood was indeed the lion’s share of royal sovereignty. The importance of the king’s creation of chivalric orders and its relationship to the knightly organizations of different origin is best apprehended in this context. The first noble chivalric order of monarchical origin in Europe is the Order of the Sash, created and organized by King Alfonso XI of Castile. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze this order through extant documents, particularly its regulatory manuscripts.

Chapter 6 addresses the external markings that established chivalric presence in both space and time: heraldic emblems. The vast majority of knightly narratives and regulations center around the production of a seal—the chivalric emblem—generally studied from a functional or descriptive perspective. This chapter identifies the political strategies that advance the poetics of the emblem to show how each one proposes its own version. This chapter, like Chapter 1, exceeds the chronological scope defined for this study, since the apparatus of the emblem, just like that of the ritual, is of an archetypal nature that defies geography as well as history.

The conclusions of the book will elucidate the numerous questions that still arise out of the theses developed by my research, underscoring one in particular: the relevance of this poetics of the chivalric order to the construction of the political structures of modernity.

CHAPTER ONE

Ritual as a Strategy for Chivalric Creation

A configuration of gestures, actions, and statements that follow a determined order, a ritual is also an apparatus that advances specific hierarchies of power.¹ Rituals establish relations of power and construct their own concept of authority through ceremonial events. Rituals and their creation define the systems of domination and subjection of an institution, a society, or any other collective entity.²

The construction of rituals probes how authority is the result of agreements by human beings or is imposed upon them. Power relations result from a complex process of negotiation in the late Middle Ages that substantiated the demarcation and control of jurisdictions—the twofold space, territorial and political, where laws are issued and enforced.

The analysis of ritual elucidates the criteria that create an institution, as well as the poetics of the subject that gives life to the institution through incorporation—as his body becomes part of a political body or a particular society. Ritual is the gateway into a given jurisdiction and a way to negotiate authority: it compels the subject to adopt a certain identity through the explicit, public, and spatial acceptance of the norms that regulate an institution or collectivity. As a rite of passage, a ritual takes place upon a single physical body and transforms it into a political subject pursuant to a legal and political regime.

As an apparatus, ritual is the enactment of an invisible transformation using visible and audible elements (either perceivable or conceptual), in which an individual becomes a different political and juridical subject; a transformation discernible during a carefully crafted time and space.

A ritual also leaves a discernible, charismatic marker of transformation. The process is generally framed within what Carl Schmitt termed political theology, or the idea that the constitutive elements of modern politics are but secularized versions of theological models.³ Ritual, which reveals the imperceptible, also modifies the subject’s body—typically through costume, scars, or other manifestations of pleasure or pain. These markings serve to distinguish the subject from others: a recognition (quite literally, a re-cognition) of his place in social stratification. Ritual is articulated in both the plane of the imperceptible (often linked to a theological realm) and the perceptible (the sociopolitical sphere).

The ritual of chivalric investiture presents a specific problem that is sui generis, since the invisible politico-theological transformation of the subject also creates a new social class. Chivalric investiture impacts not only the individual who is knighted, then, but also the whole order, or ordo, to which he now belongs. It is necessary to analyze the link between chivalry and its rituals of initiation to unveil the issues of power and subjection framing the creation and evolution of chivalry—and its role in jurisdictional transformation.

Most medievalists who have focused on chivalry have endeavored to describe these diverse rituals, both religious and secular, and nearly all have depicted them as the result of a preestablished tradition that accurately enacts events in the social life of knights and their relation to the monarch and the clerical state.

I approach the matter from a radically different perspective, arguing that rituals of knighting should be studied as an attempt to represent established hierarchies that constantly reveals its inability to reorder social and political life around chivalry. Invoking Castile as a model, I posit that the proliferation of different forms of chivalric ritual in a variety of texts—of different genres and social origins—issues many definitions of the concept of power. The Castilian model also illustrates how relations of subjection are negotiated in the monarchic political model.

In the present chapter, I consider the procedures that create and critique a social class: knighthood, or the chivalric order. Throughout history, chivalry has been used to manipulate relations of power. Chivalry has also served to fashion theories on lineages, political systems, and civil and moral life.

Written texts—or writing and reading—are, according to Emmanuel Lévinas, methods of being (11–12). Hence, they require their interlocutors to situate themselves on a different plane from that of external events. Texts about rituals rarely establish direct relation with concrete events, and when they do, this relation only frames a more general reflection. These texts theorize on the political and theological displacement that ceremonies produce. Although I may occasionally link ceremonies with specific events and problems, my main concern is how rituals theorize this displacement.

Medieval Castile is unique in significant ways. While we can date the creation and configuration of aristocratic chivalry in almost all of Europe at around 1100 (Flori, L’idéologie du glaive; L’essor de la chevalerie), Castilian chivalric discourse, particularly texts on the regulation of chivalry, arise between a century and a century and a half later. The aristocratic chivalry of Castile originates in the Cortes of Alfonso VIII of Castile (r. 1158–1214) and that of Alfonso X of Castile and León (r. 1252–1282) and fulfills a specific need—to establish a monarchic political model marked by the monarch’s acquisition of central jurisdiction and the limitation of nobiliary jurisdiction, whether clerical or secular. Throughout the acquisition of this central monarchic sovereignty, or imperium, the creation and regulation of knighthood has a critical role. It is through chivalry that the monarch redefines the nobility that surrounds him. In the new monarchic model, chivalry is configured to create a new sociopolitical identity for the nobility with an innovative angle: it will be the king who reserves the right to create this new social category. In this chapter, I will show how this notion changes as monarchs and nobles deploy the chivalric apparatus in social spaces that bear no direct relation with traditional aristocratic or dynastic categories.

A king stands in an apparently contradictory position with respect to chivalric practices and rites of entry. This contradiction is generally resolved through the assertion of a fundamental element of monarchic power: the king’s legal independence, as established in Roman law by the principle of rex legibus solutus (literally, the king is not subject to the law). When this principle is questioned, as is the case upon the publication of the various editions of the Siete Partidas, the monarch must resolve this contradiction through the invocation of his unique theological bonds.⁴ Thus, to acquire central