CHAPTER III.

THE KNIGHTS OF CALATRAVA AND OF ST. JAGO-OF-THESWORD IN SPAIN.

CHIVALRY made the like progress in the centre as at the extremities of Europe.

About the year 1147, Alphonso the Fighter, King of Castile, took from the Moors the fortress of Calatrava, in Andalusia. Eight years afterward, the Moors prepared to recover it from Don Sanchez, the successor of Alphonso. Don Sanchez, intimidated by their design, caused public proclamation to be made. that he would give the town to any person who would defend it. None durst undertake the task but a Benedictine of the Cistercian order, named Don Didacus Velasquez, and Raymond, his abbot. They threw themselves into Calatrava with the peasants and dependants on their monastery of Fiterno; they armed the lay brothers, and fortified the menaced town. The Moors, being informed of these preparations, relinquished their enterprise; Raymond, the abbot, retained the place, and the lay brothers were transformed into knights, who assumed the appellation of Calatrava.

These new knights in the sequel made several conquests from the Moors of Valencia and Jaen. Favera, Maella, Macalon, Valdetormo, La Fresueda, Valderobbes, Calenda, Aquaviva, and Ozpipa, fell successively into their hands. But the order sustained an irreparable check at the battle of Alarcos, where, in 1195, the Moors of Africa defeated the King of Castile. The knights of Calatrava were almost all cut off, together with those of Alcantara and St. Jago-of-the-Sword.

We shall not enter into any particulars respecting the latter orders, the object of whose institution also was to fight the Moors and to protect travellers from the incursions of the infidels.1

We need but take a general survey of history at the period of

1 See Schoonbeck, Giustiniani, Helyot, Fleury, and Mariana.

the institution of religious chivalry, to be convinced of the important services which it rendered to society. The order of Malta in the East protected reviving commerce and navigation, and for more than a century was the only bulwark that prevented the Turks from inundating Italy. In the North, the Teutonic order, by subjugating the roving nations on the shores of the Baltic, extinguished the focus of those terrible eruptions which had so often desolated Europe: it afforded time for the progress of civilization, and for the perfecting of those weapons which secure us forever from future Alarics and Attilas.

This will not appear to be mere conjecture, if we observe that the expeditions of the Normans did not cease till about the tenth century, and that the Teutonic knights, on their arrival in the North, found a renewed population, and innumerable barbarians, who had already overflowed the adjacent countries. The Turks, coming down from the East, and the Livonians, Prussians, and Pomeranians, advancing from the West and North, would have harassed Europe with a repetition of the scenes produced by the Huns and Goths, from whose ravages it had scarcely recovered.

The Teutonic knights, indeed, rendered a twofold service to humanity; for, while they brought the savages into subjection, they obliged them to embrace a social life and to attend to agritultural pursuits. Christburg, Bartenstein, Weissemburg, Wesel, Brumberg, Thorn, most of the towns of Prussia, Courland, and Semigalla, were founded by this military religious order; and, while it may boast of having insured the existence of the French and English nations, it may also assume the merit of having civilized the whole of the north of Germany.

But there was another enemy still more dangerous, perhaps, than the Turks and the Prussians, because fixed in the very centre of Europe :-the Moors were several times on the point of enslaving Christendom. Though these people seem to have had in their religion, which allowed polygamy and slavery, and in their despotic and jealous disposition, there was an invincible obstacle to civilization and the welfare of mankind.

The military orders of Spain, therefore, by their opposition to the infidels, like the Teutonic order and that of St. John of Jerusalem, prevented very great calamities. The Christian knights

1

supplied in Europe the place of hired soldiers, and were a kind of regular troops who always repaired to that quarter where the danger was most urgent. The kings and the barons, being obliged to dismiss their vassals after a service of a few months, had frequently been surprised by the barbarians. What experience and the genius of the age could not effect was accomplished by Religion; she formed associations of men who swore in the name of God to spill the last drop of blood for their country. The roads were rendered safe, the provinces were cleared of the banditti by whom they were infested, and external foes found a barrier opposed to their ravages.

Some have censured the knights for pursuing infidels even into their own countries; but such are not aware that, after all, this was but making just reprisals upon nations who had been the first aggressors. The Moors exterminated by Charles Martel justify the Crusades. Did the disciples of the Koran remain quiet in the deserts of Arabia? Did they not, on the contrary, extend their doctrines and their ravages to the walls of Delhi and the ramparts of Vienna? But perhaps a Christian people should have waited until the haunts of these ferocious beasts had been again replenished! Because our forefathers marched against them under the banner of religion, the enterprise, forsooth, was neither just nor necessary! Had the cause been that of Theutates, Odin, Allah, or any other than that of Jesus Christ, it would all be considered right enough.1

See note TT, at the end. After perusing this extract from Michaud's History of the Crusades, the reader will be better prepared to understand the following chapter of our author on chivalry, in which he seems to include the period when the institution had more or less degenerated. Chivalry, in its first development, was an instrument of peace, an agent of morality. The knight, on his accession to the order, swore "to fear, reverence, and serve God religiously, to battle for the faith, to die rather than renounce Christianity, to be faithful to his lord, to support the rights of the weak, of the widow and the orphan, never to offend the neighbor deliberately, never to undertake an action through a motive of sordid gain, and to keep his faith inviolably in regard to all." Such was the kind of chivalry that the Catholic Church sanctioned, that was extended by the Crusades, and that rose to its loftiest expression in the military orders. Hence it became in the hands of the Church a most powerful auxiliary for the advancement of civilization.

But, as Digby well observes, we must carefully distinguish between this kind of chivalry, which was a form or expression of Catholic life, and that which,

CHAPTER IV.

LIFE AND MANNERS OF THE KNIGHTS.

SUBJECTS that address themselves chiefly to the imagination are not always the easiest to be delineated,—either because, taken altogether, they present a certain vagueness more pleasing than any description that can possibly be produced, or because the reader always goes beyond your representations. The mere word chivalry, the mere expression an illustrious knight, imply something wonderful in themselves, which no details of explanation can surpass. They embrace every thing, from the fables of Ariosto to the exploits of real knight-errants; from the palaces of Alcina and Armida to the turrets of Coeuvre and Anet.

It is scarcely possible to treat even historically of chivalry without having recourse to the troubadours who sang its exploits, as we adduce the authority of Homer in all that relates to the heroes of antiquity. This the most rigid critics have admitted. But then the writer has the appearance of dealing in nothing but fictions. We are accustomed to such barren and unadorned truth, that whatever is not equally dry has the semblance of falsehood. Like the natives of the icy regions of the pole, we prefer our dreary deserts to those climes where

La terra molle, e lieta, e dilettossa,

Simili a segli abitator produce.1

The education of the knight began at the age of seven years.

at a later period, was but the embodiment of a worldly principle. The former claims our admiration, because it was an agent of immense good in the diffusion of sound morals. The latter, on the contrary, which aimed solely at the exaltation of material beauty, which pushed virtue to extravagance by assuming the existence of higher motives than those of the Christian faith, which introduced an imaginary and independent principle of honor outside of the duty imposed by the divine law, and which, consequently, undertook to legitimatize the duel, or the resentment of injury by deadly combat,-such chivalry, far from being approved by the Church, was always held in abhorrence. See Moehler's Hist. du Moyen Age, p. 320; Digby, Ages of Faith, b. i. and ix. T. Tasso, canto i. stanza 62. 2 Sainte-Palaye, tome i. part 1.

Duguesclin, while yet a child, amused himself in the venerable avenues to his father's castle by representing sieges and battles with little peasant boys of his own age. He was seen forcing his way through the woods, struggling against the winds, leaping wide ditches, climbing elms and oaks, and among the heaths of Brittany already giving an earnest of the hero destined to be the saviour of France.1

The aspirant to knighthood soon passed to the office of page in the castle of some baron. Here were inculcated the first lessons of fidelity to God and the fair sex. Here, too, the youthful page often conceived for the daughter of his lord one of those durable attachments which prodigies of valor were wont to immortalize. Vast Gothic mansions, venerable forests, large solitary lakes, cherished, by their romantic aspect, those passions which nothing was capable of destroying, and which became a kind of enchantment or fatality.

Excited by love to valor, the page practised the manly exercises which opened for him the way to honor. Mounted on a mettlesome steed, he pursued with the lance the wild beasts in the recesses of the woods; or, training the falcon soaring in the skies, he compelled the tyrant of the air to alight, timid and submissive, on his skilful hand. Sometimes, like the young Achilles, he sprang from one horse to another while flying over the plain, at one leap bounding over them or vaulting upon their backs; at others, he climbed, in complete armor, to the top of a bending ladder, and, fancying himself already on the breach, shouted, Mountjoy and St. Dennis! In the court of his lord he received all the instructions and examples adapted to his future life. Hither were constantly repairing knights, both known and unknown, who had devoted themselves to perilous adventures, and were returning alone from the kingdoms of Cathay, from the extremities of Asia, and all those extraordinary regions, where they had been redressing wrongs and fighting the infidels.

"There you saw," says Froissart, speaking of the house of the Duke de Foy, "there you saw in the hall, the chamber, and the court, knights and esquires going and coming, and heard them

Vie de Duguesclin.

2 Sainte-Palaye, tome i. part 7. 3 Sainte-Palaye, tome ii. part 2.