Divine Kings and Noble Parasites... How Could that Go Wrong?

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The last roots of the arts of the West post made an unorthodox claim about the Gothic period. We charged it with being the beginning of a path that led to the cultural brownfield of the present day because it collapsed the distinction between sacred and secular in a way that hadn't happened before. This post will make that case more strongly. This is not to say that the two weren't blurry from the start. Constantine essentially fused the old Imperial cult of the Empire with the Church and the Byzantine emperors claimed to be its head.

Christ crowns Romanos II and Eudoxie, 945-949, ivory, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

There was some disagreement over the identity of this imperial Byzantine couple. It's now thought to show Emperor Romanus II (938-963) and his wife Bertha of Italy who changed her name to Eudoxie. Their wedding was between 944 and 949, giving the date for the piece.

The art shows the Emperor as the direct proxy for Jesus, with an authority that comes from God alone. This would be the dream scenario for Western rulers - many of whom claimed to be authorized by God. But attempts to be head of the Church never gained much traction, Henry VIII's absurdity notwithstanding. 











In the West, the popes emerged as spiritual authorities, but as heads of a man-made organization - the Church - conflict and confusion with secular power was inevitable. This became particularly acute around the turn of the 11th century with the clash over privileges and control of resources known as the Investiture Controversy, and continued until the turn of the 14th with the so-called Papal Monarchy. It is important to note that it wasn't just the- monarchs pulling sacred authority closer to them. The papacy was also aggressively encroaching on the secular.

Emperor Frederick II is excommunicated by pope Innocent IV, from the Summa de dignitatibus et virtutibus clericorum et laicorum, second quarter 14th century, Bodleian Library MS. Laud Misc. 632 f. 45r

Excommunication - expelling from the Church and therefore salvation - was a common way for medieval popes to try and force obedience. Here the emperor loses crown and scepter. 






Using religious sanctions as coercion blurred the lines between sacred and secular influence. This was by design - the popes were trying to flex secular muscles - but it gradually dragged them into political disputes and undermined the moral authority that comes with being above the fray.

Chroniques de Saint-Denis, between 1332 and 1350, British Library Royal 16 G VI f. 374v.

Illuminations depict Pope Innocent III excommunicating the Albigensians (left) and a massacre of Albigensians by crusaders (right). The Albigensans are better known as the Cathars - a gnostic luciferian sect that Innocent preached crusade against. 

The Church understood that heresy was intolerable, but this crusade was more political than spiritual. While Catharism was wiped out, the French motivation was to bring the independent Languedoc region under control of the French crown. The horrific massacres were also done by secular nobles commanding the crusading forces. 

Whatever Innocent's motivations, and the anti-clerical blather of later historians, the secular and sacred are blurred to the point of being indistinguishable. The illuminations capture this with the pope gesturing, then armored knights attacking.

The Albigensian Crusade was nominally a success, but the papacy's reliance on the French crown bound it more closely to the king of France. When the secular - sacred conflict came to a final head in the early 14th century, this tie was a likely factor in the relocation of the papacy to Avignon in the south of France.

Arnolfo di Cambio, Pope Bonifacius VIII, around 1298, Opera del Duomo Museum, Florence

Boniface VIII (1294-1303) took the idea that the papacy was the supreme power in Christendom to an extreme. His bull Unam Sanctam of 1302 asserted that the pope was head of a single unified Church and that therefore all else was subordinate to him. This caused a festering conflict with French King Philip IV to break out into the open and French clergy sided with Philip to reject the bull. Boniface excommunicated the king and Philip had charges of heresy, idolatry, murder, sexual impropriety and other crimes drawn against the pope. 

The charges were supported by Boniface's unusual practice of erecting statues of himself in various churches as symbol and reminder of his power. Like this one. 








The loyalty of the French clergy to the king over the pope is an excellent example of how national identity and politics complicated the older sacred-secular split. In political matters, the French clergy were French first. The situation came to a head when Philip sent armed mercenaries to attack and capture the pope.

Pope Boniface being arrested at Anagni by King Philip IV’s men, 14th century, from Giovanni Villani’s Nuova Cronica, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticano, Chigiano L VIII 296, fo. 176r.

Boniface was rescued when the townspeople counterattacked, but he had been treated roughly. He died a month after returning to Rome. 







Boniface's successor lived less than a year and the conclave to choose a new pope was bitterly split between French and Italian factions. The eventual choice, the French Clement V was essentially a marionette of the king - rolling back claims of papal supremacy, suppressing the Templars on Philip's behalf, then moving the papacy itself to Avignon in 1309.

The career of this sorry puppet is as clear an illustration of the breakdown of fundamental secular-sacred distictions in the Gothic period. As a reminder - Suger was renovating Saint-Denis in the 1140s, and Chartres Cathedral was pretty much complete by 1220. The huge papal palace built in Avignon in the middle of the 14th century is Gothic in style.

Palais des Papes, 1330's-1364, Avignon


We're generalizing - it's inevitable with big historical patterns - but what was different about the later Middle Ages is the increasing blurring of the sacred-secular split. Nobles had been pushed into the Church from the beginning and the papacy was always subject to Roman politics, but there is a change as the Middle Ages progresses. One big factor came up in the Boniface VIII/Philip IV example - the emergence and strengthening of national interests and identities. Although as we will see, the "national" didn't have much of a chance before it was jacked by aristocratic elite interests. And these had little interest in the nation beyond a parasite for its host.

Early medieval Europe was dominated by a huge Frankish empire - first the Merovingians, then the Carolingians. Italy and the British Isles were outside its direct control and Spain was under Mohammedan rule, but the bulk of the continent was controlled by the Franks. Regional differences existed, and various nobles held sway over their areas, but there was only one overarching government.

Frankish Empire from the Merovingian roots to the height of the Carolingians.


In a situation like this, division into secular and sacred authorities makes the most sense. But the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire paved the way for the eventual rise of the European nation-state. Regions declared themselves kingdoms, principalities, counties, and so forth, and the rise of the Ottonians only ensnared part of the old Frankish realm. Powerful kingdoms like France began to form, and while borders were fluid, there wouldn't be a return to the old united Europe. In this context, secular and sacred became differing relations between papacy and various monarchies, with the monarchies vying for influence over the popes.

The situation was exacerbated by the pope's own claims to secular power.

Rome was the capital of a small territory called the Church or Papal States, making the pope a petty noble as well as supreme spiritual leader and engaging him in Caesar's business as well as Gods. This emerged as the popes gradually assumed rulership of the old Byzantine Duchy of Rome

Papal control over the territory was strengthened through negotiation with the Lombards who conquered Byzantine north Italy. It was codified by the Franks who crushed the Lombards with the encouragement of the popes. This alliance reached its height when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor.




















A fragmented political landscape brings new ideological concerns, especially involving legitimacy. The Franks had migrated into Europe along with other Germanic tribes at the end of the ancient world. They didn't attack Rome like the Huns or Goths, but are part of the demographic shift known as the Migration Period. Their supremacy was the result of several factors:

E. Crété, Charles Martel à la bataille de Poitiers (732), color lithograph in H. Grobet, Histoire de France, Paris: Emile Guérin, 1902.


* The Ostrogoths were wiped out by the Byzantines.

* The Vandals and Visigoths were wiped out by the Mohammedans.

* The Anglo-Saxons and Danes were in remote areas.

* The Franks under Charles Martel stopped the Mohammedan advance, leaving them dominant in Europe.

* After they allied with the papacy and crushed the Lombards, there was no one to challenge them.




The Carolingians ruled by strength of arms - by right of conquest - but argued that their rule was sanctioned by God. The reality was that they had seized power from the Merovingian Dynasty is what was pretty much a coup. All the more reason to shore up their claim to the throne. This likely played into Charlemagne's agreement with the pope's decision to crown him Emperor of the West. The pope was looking for a counterweight / replacement to the Byzantine Emperor, and Charlemagne got to reactivate a claim to the old Roman imperium. But there was a larger issue re. secular and sacred power.

If the pope crowns the emperor, where does imperial authority come from?

Friedrich Kaulbach, The Coronation of Charlemagne, by 1903, oil on canvas, Maximilianeum, Munich

Charlemagne didn't care for the answer.

But the Carolingian Empire didn't last a century, leading to a new territorial map and new monarchs with even less legitimacy than Charlemagne had. This gave us fake histories, like the one expressed at the necropolis at Saint-Denis - with Capetian and later kings claiming Merovingian descent. But it also gave us clearer national identities.

Dagobert the Merovingian's tomb is in Saint-Denis, but he wasn't French. Louis IX and Abbot Suger were. They were claiming Frankish royal legitimacy in a new national landscape. The very notion of rulers from different dynasties and backgrounds somehow forming a proto-French monarchy is rewriting history along nationalist lines.

Tomb of Dagobert, 1263-64, Saint-Denis, Paris

Dagobert was king of the Franks from 629 to 639 and is considered the founder of Saint-Denis. He was also the first king buried there. His Gothic tomb was only added in the 1260s and fits him into the lineage of unrelated Capetian French kings. 

The idea was to manufacture a national royal history that rewrote the past to support the present. The idea of creating this specifically "French" lineage is a good sign of the new national identity. 













National identity created another axis alongside the old secular/sacred split. You can see it at the Royal Abbey - literally the two in one. French Church + French monarch = French order. The same French Church that will back Philip IV against the pope and move the papacy to Avignon. And since this order rested on the a French crown that didn't even exist a few centuries earlier divine sanction was all the more important.

The notion of sacred kingship is as old as human civilization, and would later develop into the European ideology of the explicit divine right of kings. What we're seeing in Gothic France is king, church, and nation bound together into a sort of conceptual unity. Like the royal west end and ecclesiastic east end in Suger's renovated basilica of Saint-Denis.

Clothar II leads the Franks in battle against the Saxons, from the Grandes Chroniques de France de Charles V, 1375-80, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f.63r.

Or in the French fleur-de-lys. The lily was connected to Clovis and the Merovingian Frankish kings as a symbol of purity celebrating his conversion and the ampulla that held the oil used to anoint him. That is, a symbol of his divine right to rule. Later French monarchs revived the fleur-de-lys to show their connection to the Frankish past and own divine right to rule. 

Not surprisingly, the old Frankish kings start getting depicted in the new French heraldry. Like Merovingian King of the Franks Clothar II who ruled from 595-613. Over 700 years before this image in the Grand Chronicle of a French king.

Albrecht Dürer, Charlemagne, oil on wood, 1512, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg

Charlemagne's empire spanned France and Germany. Both nations would claim him as a forerunner. Note that this was painted 700 years after his death and includes contemporary French and German symbols.

The orb and cross became a common symbol of European royalty and their essentially religious status. It's hard to find a more succinct, and easily overlooked symbol of this blurring of secular and sacred in national kingships.















As secular and sacred authority blur together in national kingdoms, Gothic art visualizes these changes. And not just in direct references to the spheres overlapping. We saw in the last post how Suger conceptualized the beauty of the Church in terms of number of gems and total weight in gold and silver - the sort of accounting for lucre that seems more appropriate to a monarch.

We also neglected to mention that Suger was also a Cluniac abbot, which puts his dispute with St. Bernard in clearer context. It isn't just that he was promoting a royal treasury concept of religious beauty - he was doing so at a time when the obsession with worldly luxury in his order was coming under attack from the new austere Cistercians. The worldly focus becomes more conscious and deliberate when there is a clear alternative.

Extensive treasure uncovered at the Abbey of Cluny.












The point here is not to declare the Gothic impious. Who can know the hearts of those is the distant past? The soaring vaults and stained glass light of the great cathedrals were offered to the glory of God, and it is hard to imagine more perfect statements of collective faith.

Cologne Cathedral, started 13th century, completed 19th century
The rib vaulted ceiling looks like its floating on a sea of glass. Entering a Gothic cathedral feels like walking into a miracle. Which was the point - the experience was intended give the impression of drawing closer to heaven. All the better for putting you in a spiritual frame of mind.


The point is to see how the art of the West moved away the formula we worked out using ancient Greek terms earlier in the Roots of the West journey. How it lost sight of episteme. And since art is an expression of society, we need to consider how the artistic aspects of society also lost sight of it. Or more accurately, how the nature of the episteme informing art changed.

First a quick recap of the Greek-derived terms. If you are interested in their derivation and development, click for a link to the post this graphic was pulled from. We found three terms that fit together to make a pretty good working definition of art. Not to say that this is the ultimate definition, but that so far it's proven solid. The terms are techne, episteme, and phronesis - they have accents as well, but since those are annoying to type and we're anglicizing things, they're being left out. The concepts still stand.

Techne is skilled craft. It’s material-level on the ontological hierarchy, and follows culturally-specific customs rather than universal rules. The key is that it is skilled. Art isn't easy - it's talent refined to mastery. Otherwise you get the modernism where a perverse "art world" anoints talentless dyscivic garbage. 

Episteme refers to higher abstract principles - the metaphysical ideals that a culture holds most important and that are immaterial. Truth, Beauty and the Good. These don't change.  

Phronesis is the coming together of the two - techne guided by, serving, and expressing episteme in artistic form. This is the art of the West. Technical skill to express abstract values. 

The mistake to define art as either the making or the ideals - it is the coming together of the two. It is different from "craft" or "skilled labor" because it's main purpose is to communicate episteme in material terms, whereas craft objects can require refined skill and be aesthetically pleasing but have a primary functional purpose other than purely communicating episteme in some way. That's not to say that the art of the West is "autonomous" - that's modernist jibber jabber intended to exclude meaning and skill. Click for a post on that toxic nonsense. The art of the West is purposeful, but the purpose is to express episteme - abstract truths that aren't obvious in the world around us.

The formula:

The earlier posts on this showed how these terms align with our ontological hierarchy. Techne at the material level, Episteme as abstract or ultimate reality, and phronesis where they meet. Episteme then is that which is True, and Truth (with the capital T) is only knowable by faith. But we can express truth at the level we can grasp - in material form - turning techne into art. Remember - the True and the Beautiful are essentially the same thing - we like to say Beauty is what Truth looks like, which works if we remember that we're looking at metaphysical absolutes and not anything we can see optically. So small-t truth expressed through techne is small-b beautiful.

Daniel Gerhartz, Drift off to Dream, oil on canvas, 2006

Painting by a contemporary artist that captures timeless truths about human bonds and relations in a technically skilled and pleasing matter. It is beautiful because it conveys something beyond the painter's techne. It reaches for episteme, and achieves phronesis.

Real art marries technical skill to higher truth to create beauty, and it is the allegiance to Truth that keeps it from going off the rails. It doesn't have to be pleasant. Many truths are miserable. But the miserable truths are miserable because of their negative judgment in episteme. Without the lighthouse of Truth as a guide, the best art can shoot for is allure, and allure is subjective. It's just technique. Without a higher principle to serve, it's merely a material thing. And material things are malleable. They're easily changed, denatured, and hollowed out. 

The soul-stirring beauty of Gothic art comes from the application of highly refined technical skill to the glory of God - or top-level techne to Truth in its purest form. Like Sens Cathedral 

North transept and rose window of Sens Cathedral (Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Sens), 1135-1534, rose window, 1516.

The date puts it in the last stage of Gothic design called the Flamboyant because the details resemble flames instead of the usual Gothic geometries. The window is stunning - a paradise of angels over the story of the Archangel Gabriel.

Applying technical skill to the glory of kings disconnects it from Truth and redirects it to human vanity. Tecnhe and opinion rather than techne and episteme, leading to allure at best. Like Richard II of England and the Wilton Diptych.

The Wilton Diptych, 1395-99, egg tempera on oak panel, National Gallery, London
Exquisite International Gothic piece depicting King Richard II of England with saints venerating the Madonna. 



The least attractive thing about the Wilton Diptych is the king - a a great patron of the arts, but ham-handed ruler who bungled his way into being deposed and murdered. The best thing you can say about his rule is that he wasn't as bad as Shakespeare made him out to be. But the odds that he was singled out by Jesus are minimal.

The national kingdoms of the later middle ages open the door to subordinating Truth to national ideologies embodied in a dude.

And then there's the aristocracy...

Detail from a tapestry with scenes of a boar and bear hunt, probably from Arras or Tournai, Netherlands, 1425-30, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

How could society function without them?

















... or more accurately, the nobility. Because when it comes to the secularization of art, Suger's proto-churchianity is just a twinkle compared to the full-blown parasite class that develops towards the end of the Middle Ages.

But this group also has deep roots that take time and socio-cultural change to blossom.

The origins of the European nobility are foggy because we just don't have the records to really trace where they come from. And the detailed information that we do have shows that there is a lot of regional variation during the early Middle Ages - say 6th -8th centuries. In general, they seem to have roots in both the old Roman and new Germanic socio-political orders, but the specifics play out differently in different places.

Pierre Olivier Joseph Coomans, Roman Banquet, 1876, oil on canvas, private collection

Some Roman aristocrats with extensive land holdings maintained influence well after the fall of the empire, and slowly merged with the Frankish elites.








A good look at the state of scholarship is the book Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe: Concepts, Origins, Transformations, edited by Anne Duggan. A good piece of the early chapters are available online. In general, the early nobility show some combination of militatry skill, proximity to ruler, and heredity membership in a noble bloodline, although this is very loose.

Emmanuel Fremiet, King Merovech's Victory over the Armies of Attila the Hun at the Battle of the Catalaunian Field in 451, 1867, silvered bronze mount of an armoire, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Merovech, the legendary founder of the Merovingian Dynasty may not have existed, but this 19th century relief captures the martial nature of early Frankish nobility.






Among the Franks, we see an imperfectly defined elite that tends to involve family lineages, but could also be open to newcomers who distinguished themselves in some ways. These noble families had different forms that reflected the Franks own recent migratory history - some sort of clout in the area they settled in mixed with long-distance alliances and connections. Close family ties were favored, but broad networks could be drawn upon when needed.

Carolingian Nobles Dress, 1834, copper engraving 


The Carolingian rulers tried to shape this loose nobility into a ruling aristocracy, and were somewhat successful in promoting exogamous marriage and encouraging alliances. This was successful, to the extent that the various lords, officials, and high clergy in the empire mostly came from high-status families. Again, there were exceptions, especially in the Church, where there was some potential for upward mobility. The idea was to stabilize his empire with a defined noble leadership class with regional bases. This is consistent with Charlemagne's other empire-building initiatives, like Christianization, subduing bordering enemies, and developing arts and learning in central schools.

Jean-Victor Schnetz, Alcuin and other clerics present manuscripts to Charlemagne in the Palace of Aachen, before his court, 1830, 1830, Louvre, Paris

Any empire will develop a network of courtiers. The Carolingian version was pieced together from this eclectic scattering of noble families.

















It is notable that the network of magnates established by the Carolingians outlasted them - the petty kings that claimed regional power after the empire crumbled came from this class. Look at the maps.

Europe in 900

You can see how the Carolingian Empire fragments into smaller kingdoms. East and West Francia are the kernels of modern France and Germany, and the seeds of Eastern European nations are visible.

Fragmentation seems to have been the order of the 10th century - England is a cluster of tiny kingdoms and even the Caliphate in North Africa broke up along tribal lines.

Jump forward a century and the Ottonian Dynasty has laid the foundations of the Holy Roman Empire. But it is much smaller than the Carolingian Empire, and Eastern nations are forming. 

England has also coalesced into a country, along with rival France.















Tracking the development of the European nobility is complicated historically by the fact that the early law codes - neither the Roman Codex Theodosianus of 312 nor Clovis' Salic Law of around 500 - don't mention nobles as a legal class. We know they existed in practical terms, but weren't formally defined at the beginning of the Middle Ages. We do know that different regional legal codes developed in the Frankish empire that were focused mainly on protecting property rights, but varied locally. This suggests that the development of laws probably reflected differences in the nature of the nobility in different regions. Because one thing that becomes clearer over time is the connection between nobility and land.

Over the 9th and 10th centuries, the formerly wide-ranging aristocratic families become more connected to a single place, with hereditary inheritance becoming the norm. Land was given to nobles by the king and a reward for past service and an obligation of future support.

The Gravensteen (Castle of the Counts), from 1180,  restored over 1893–1903, Ghent, East Flanders, Belgium. The site was first fortified around 1000 but burned around 1176 and was replaced by this castle. Details added during the 19th century restoration like the flat roofs and the windows of the eastern outbuilding, are not believed to be historically accurate.

And the gatehouse. This was the residence of the Counts of Flanders until 1353 and a great illustration of how the establishment of noble estates became the basis for their military and economic power.












Noble landholding opened the way for the feudal system - a network of obligations and alliences that tied lesser nobles to greater ones and to the common folk who worked the lands. Initially appearing as a sort of mutually-beneficial protection system, feudalism brought considerable wealth to those who were landholders.

The whole system was based on land ownership and martial service. The king essentially owned the country and gave parcels to vassals who become nobility and they or the king did the same to lesser retainers or knights. These nobles served their lords with military force and/or money. The peasants or serfs at the bottom worked the estates of every level but owned nothing. 

This diagram captures the basics, but isn't to scale. About 90% of the population were bottom tier. 






In theory, the the peasants at the bottom benefited from protection and got to keep some of what they produced off their lord's lands. In practice, this was minimal, considering the "protection" component dwindled as strong nations with central armies formed, and the lords determined what portion they kept. Peasants or serfs were also tied to their lands - more chattel than slaves - without any freedom of movement. The enormous inequity, where a handful of increasingly practically useless parasites vacuumed up enormous resources gave us the later medieval aristocrats of the International Gothic period.

Related to the noble was the knight - a highly trained aristocratic warrior who fought from horseback and was master of several weapons. Not all nobles were knights, but they came from similar roots in military service and considerable wealth. Knights could be awarded land of their own and serve as essentially petty nobility.

Count Albrecht von Heigerloch and knights attack a tower, from the Codex Manesse, 1305-1340, illumination on parchment, Heidelberg University Library, Cod. Pal. germ. 848, f. 42r

Well-armed and armored, knights were formidable in advantageous circumstances. The adoption of the stirrup starting in the late 9th century opened the way for heavy cavalry charges. Not all heavy cavalry were knights - some were men-at-arms, but all knights were heavy cavalry. 

Count Albrecht II of Hohenburg and Haigerloch fell in the battle against Otto III in 1298. 












The knight has loose roots in the Roman equestrian class, or equites, since cavalry was expensive and soldiers able to maintain a horse were by necessity of the upper classes. But the direct ancestor was the Frankish cavalry that developed during the Carolingian period. The early Frankish armies tended to fight on foot with elite infantry traveling on horseback, but over time this developed into a proper mounted cavalry. The mobility offered by horse was essential for covering the vast distances of the empire.

Wayne Reynolds, Carolingian cavalry attack on Viking warriors, late 9th century, in David Nicolle, Carolingian Cavalryman AD 768–987, Osprey Publishing, 2005

Viking raiders were increasingly successful as the Carolingian Empire collapsed into infighting and fragmented. But they had to employ evasive tactics against the armored cavalry because even the fearsome Norsemen were slaughtered in open-field fights against this foe.



In the later Carolingian period, these fighters were rewarded with land and status, and this was really cemented with the collapse of the empire. Without the central authority, defense against threats was more localized and strong local lords were important. Enter feudalism.

Knight and Castle Wallpaper


It was only in the 12th century - the Gothic era - that we see a clear social distinction between Knights proper and non-knightly mounted cavalry known as men-at-arms. But the training of a knight had been established well before that. What the new status brought were social class and Christianization - the idea of chivalry based on a romanticized notion of the Crusades. Then over the 12th and 13th centuries this gets turned into fictional codes - the idealized obligations that the Christian knight was expected to abide by.

And this is where things begin to go off the rails.

 

Alphonse Mucha, Heraldic Chivalry, oil on canvas, late 19th century

Modern images of the "chivalrous" Middle Ages are fictional. Like the ridiculousness of a knight in full tournament regalia and 15th century plate armor riding alone with a damsel in court gown through a wilderness. This is D & D, not medieval history.







There are three different things to consider.

Number one is the historical reality of the mounted fighter going back to Roman times that we've considered here. While this was varied, certain values like bravery, skill, and service were valued. The Crusades brought this into a Christian context - the notion that the knight fights to defend the Church. The truth was that many knights were terrible people and that Crusaders had a range of motivations.

The Templars were the most formidable of the Crusaders and famous for their and discipline and religious devotion. They became the model for fictional depictions of holy knights.  

The Arthurian Red Cross Knight is an anachronism - the fiction that idealized Templars could be found in the aftermath of the fall of Rome.






Which brings us to number two.

The common notion of knightly chivalry was high medieval fiction from the fantasy of the day. That is, courtly literature written by gamma troubadors for the parasite class of aristocrats - none of whom knew anything about a battlefield - that made up "knightly codes" out of whole cloth. These were about as real as the Jedi in Star Wars, but captured the imagination of a nobility that was drifting further from actual combat. Consider the stories of King Arthur. In modern times, many people can't distinguish between this imaginary "chivalry" and the historical reality of the armored warrior.

Eugène Delacroix, Amadis Delivers Princess Olga from Galpan's Castle, 1860, oil on canvas, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Or Amadis of Gaul. It's hard to imagine a less accurate account of warfare and tactics in the Middle Ages. 

The stories of "knighthood" were being written centuries after the heyday of the armored warrior. 

Part of this is due to a change in the aristocracy. As national armies grew larger and professional soldiers played larger roles, the nature of warfare changed. And new weapons and tactics made the armored heavy cavalry increasingly obsolete. Of course the nobility kept their land, wealth, and privilege - they just didn't have to personally fight anymore. So they could enjoy fake tales about what knights were while feasting and screwing around.

The most famous, and most historically nonsensical aspect of this literary chivalry was the knight's devotion to the lady. This is connected to the contemporary courtly love tradition - the idea that pining endlessly over an unattainable woman was somehow ennobling. The chivalry version is that the knight is dedicated to the service of women or a woman in a chastely obsessive way. Not surprisingly, this was promoted by morally bankrupt minstrels under female aristocratic patronage.

Miniature from the Codex Manesse, 1305-1340, illumination on parchment, Heidelberg University Library, Cod. Pal. germ. 848, f. 82v

It's hard to imagine something less consistent with the warrior ideal dating back from the Carolingian cavalry, let alone the fierce dedication to Christian virtue that defined the Templars. 

The cucked moral weakling of the chivalric romance tradition is a prototype attack on the masculine qualities needed to secure and protect a society. In this case, actual warrior ethos was inimical to pampered parasite aristocrats and the rising financial and legalistic powers of the new merchant and banking class. 










The kernel of this nonsense  comes from a culture where aristocratic marriages were arranged for political or dynastic purposes, and rarely had any actual affection. If a couple were in love, it was purely coincidental and very rare. Infidelity was common as a pressure valve, but lip service had to be paid to Christian morality. When the Band points to the Gothic period as opening the path to modern degradation and cultural atavism, the notion of sleazy adulterer Lancelot as a "hero" is a fine place to start. Basically the nobility perverts marriage as Biblical helpmate into tool of parasitic privilege, then doubles up by perverting "love" into lying, sneaking, and breaking oaths to God.

Edmund Leighton, The End of The Song, 1902, oil on canvas, private collection

Like this scuzzy creep in Leighton's famous picture. The courtly love-chivalry axis was pure inversion - the ennobling lies and transforming deceit into a plus, because it's titillating. Then planting this pustulent rot in the heart of the aristocratic ethos that would set the path for art and culture.








The same pattern reverberates in our modern elites - pay lip service to what passes for contemporary morality while privately lusting for power and feeding base appetites. All the while using art and culture to degrade that morality in their own debased image.

Number three is an extension of number two - the courtly slime of the 13th and 14th century carried forward into the Renaissance - when actual knights were purely historical artifacts. This would be the 15th century nonsense like Malory's Le Mort Darthur - an elaboration of the inane Arthur cycle that served as a template for centuries of misrepresentations of the Middle Ages - and the nonsensical jousts and tournaments of the Burgundian court. By this point, the knight had been militarily obsolete for ages, so nobles put on elaborate mock fights. Like prize fighters with weapons or SCA with skill.

How Lancelot fought the six knights of Chastel d'Uter to save the knight of the badly-cut coat, illumination from Tristan in Prose,1479-1480, Chantilly, Musée Condé, 0645 (0315) f.222

Nobody in 6th century Britain looked or fought like this. Neither did anyone in 15th century France. 

This is imaginary combat based on Renaissance tournaments and troubadour tales and has less to do with real history and combat as an Errol Flynn movie, because there is a chance that the Errol Flynn movie got some costumes more or less right. 












But the movie parallel holds in another way - the "fight" scenes in these chivalric romances are just tournament jousts projected into a facsimile of the outside world. The same way that movie fights are just choreographed versions martial arts or boxing matches. A soft, coddled pleasure-seeking audience has no idea what a real fight looks like, let alone one to the death with hand-to-hand weapons. Instead a sport-entertainment substitute is offered up as the real thing, where ludicrous "codes" like chivalry or whatever bullshido supposedly motivated the modern martial arts hero version. You only get this when the audience is protected from any real conflict.

Put another way, it didn't resemble a stylized tournament when the arrows were raining down at Agincourt.

Arthur Hughes, Overthrowing of the Rusty Knight (also known as Gareth Helps Lyonorr and Overthrows the Red Knight), 1894-1908, oil on panel, private collection

This is the version that was picked up by emasculated 19th century Romantic pussies like the poet Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelite painters. We would be less harsh if it had been simply acknowledged as fantasy from the jump. Instead it led to this retarded idea of an "Age of Chivalry" as something to get back to. A more honest appraisal of human nature would have been preferable and more socially productive. Bullshit about female nature has done grievous harm to the West.  










So by the end of the Middle Ages, whatever martial value the nobility may have provided was replaced with parasitic, pleasure-seeking, elites peddling lies about their supposed virtues. Imaginary fake knighthood took the place of actual service in a court world that contributed nothing but consumption. And when their land holdings were insufficient to preserve their bloated lifestyles, they turned to the new economy that was emerging at the end of the Middle Ages - merchants and bankers. People often wonder how the bankers gained such power over our world. The answer is that this started centuries ago, when the parasitic aristocrats of the late Middle Ages borrowed huge sums of money to fund profligacy and warfare at the expense of their own people. Professional armies were expensive.

Dominicus Custos, Jakob Fugger the Rich, colored copperplate engraving from Fuggerorum et Fuggerarum imagines, commissioned by Philipp Eduard Fugger, Augsburg, 1588, colored copy from 1618, Bavarian State Library , BSB-Hss Cod.icon. 380

The Fuggers were Augsburg bankers, merchants and miners that dominated the European economy in the 15th and 16th centuries, eventually buying their way into the nobility - like the Medici that came before them and the Rothschilds afterwards. Jakob the Rich seen here made an Imperial Count by Emperor Maximilian I in 1514 

Fugger money bankrolled Charles V's election as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519.  

Carl Becker, Emperor Charles V with Jakob Fugger, 1866, oil on canvas, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

This picture shows Jakob Fugger, near the end of his life, voluntarily burning Charles V's promissory notes. This was a favor to the emperor as well as a demonstration of just how wealthy he was.  








Because, as we've noted, the aristocrats didn't see the common folk as their people. The parasite class of late medieval aristocrat didn't fight or even raise and inspire levies that did. They had no contact with the people working under them. Ditto for the high clergy. They truly became a separate culture - with more in common with their peers in other nations than their own co-nationals.

Professional soldiers like the German Landsknechts and Spanish tercios, with new weapons and tactics like massed pikemen and firearms transformed warfare. Both the mounted knight and peasant levy disappeared into obsolescence, though the night was reborn as a romantic figment.

Bernard of Orley and William Dermoyen, Imperial Army Advance and Attack on the French led by Francis I, first of seven tapestries representing the Battle of Pavia, between 1528 and 1531, wool, silk, silver and gold, National Museum of Capodimonte  

What is important to notice about this is how the nobility essentially jacks the emerging nation-state before it even really gets off the ground. The Carolingian Empire breaks up into the forerunners of distinct countries, but the aristocratic nature of the rulership coalesces into a a more international-minded elite culturally that is divided and generally hostile to the peoples it rules over. There never was a golden age of national unity - the nobility was developing in parallel to the nations. What we noted at the beginning as national interests complicating the secular sacred split were actually elite ones.

The players have changed, but the problem of the elites and the inherent cultural conflict that results is something any new form of organic nationalism will have to attend to.

The split between proto-globalist elites and people is easy to see in the religious sphere. Historians have long pointed out that the late Middle Ages was a time of intensifying public piety. Consider:

Gothic Reliquary of the Virgin and Saints, late 13th century, gilt copper set with mother of pearl, rubies, rock crystal, turquoise, and other gems, Walters Art Museum  


The cults of saints, relics, and pilgrimages to go see them...

Shrine of the Virgin, around 1300 from the Rhine Valley, oak, linen covering, polychromy, gilding, gesso, Metropolitan Museum of Art


...the growing cult of Virgin Mary...

Priest Carrying the Host in a Monstrance, detail from a Missal, Franciscan use, in Latin France, Angers ca. 1427 The Morgan Library & Museum; MS M.146, fol. 141v



... and devotion to the Eucharist and the feast of the Corpus Christi all took off in the later Middle Ages.

Maestro del San Francesco Bardi, St. Francis of Assisi altarpiece, first half  of 13th century, Santa Croce, Florence; St. Clare of Assisi altarpiece, 1280s, tempera on panel, Santa Chiara, Assisi

Clare was one of Francis' first followers and founder of the Poor Clares, the women's version of the Franciscans. 

Immensely popular saints like Francis of Assisi and Dominic launched influential religious movements and new forms of art like the altarpiece were invented to depict them.

Miracle Windows depicting St. Thomas a Beckett, late 12th century, Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral

Scenes of the miracles attributed to the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury that turned the cathedral into a major pilgrimage destination.

The Gothic flooded Christendom with stunning buildings and new forms of devotional art.















We could go on, but this should at least give a sense the late medieval intensification of popular piety that we mentioned.

And all the while, the aristocracy was intensifying their love of money and luxury. Of course there were some legitimately pious aristocrats, but they were a small minority. And as the new merchant and banking elites came into their own, it was Team Parasite-style luxury living that they aspired to.

Limbourg brothers, September, between 1412 and 1416, painting on vellum from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry f. 9v, Condé Museum  

A depiction of peasantry outside the Château de Saumur.

Perhaps the most stunning manuscript of the International Gothic, this was made for the brother of the King of France.  The scenes are idealized in their depiction of a happy productive countryside, but the contrast between host and parasite couldn't be clearer. 

So divine kings and parasitic nobility. How could that go wrong? Consider that this was the structure that ushered in the modern world and it's not hard to see how a landed, alien, profligate gentry gradually ceding real power to the new money class doomed it from the start.

This is a good place to break. We'll take up the art more systematically next time. Until then, let's late a look at the aristocrats using the land, while the serfs take a swim.

Limbourg brothers, August, between 1412 and 1416, painting on vellum from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry f. 9v, Condé Museum  

A depiction of falconry outside the Château d'Étampes.