Order and Chivalry. Jesus D. Rodriguez-Velasco

      As has never been accomplished in this world,

      So that I might rescue Greece from great trouble.”

      Once the prince concluded his prayer,

      He kneeled down and kissed the step,

      And then stood up and girded his sword;

      This was the day when Greece claimed to have arrived.

      Before the prince moved from that place,

      He armed more than five hundred deserving men;

      To all of them he gave armor of serious value,

      Since all were men who would offer something in return.

      He mounted his horse and rode out to show his equestrian skill;

      He managed with his horse to thrill those present;

      People came from every city and town to see him,

      And everyone said: “The Creator has come to our aid.”]

      (Cañas Murillo, Libro de Alexandre, 159)⁶

      Alexander does not follow any specific type of ceremony and the poem’s description does not make it possible to compare it to other ceremonies found in historical narratives. It is extraordinarily generic. The only ceremonial detail that might be gleaned from these verses is the prayer and the petition of the benedictio ensis, or blessing of the sword, in a prayer to God by the aspiring knight himself.⁷ The most notable aspect of this ceremony is not that Alexander takes up arms himself, but that it is he, not a cleric, who solicits the blessing of the sword. This gesture asserts independence from both secular authority (i.e., the nobility) and lettered clerics, as the poet reiterates throughout his verses.⁸ The ceremony culminates when Alexander girds on his sword and, immediately afterward, arms five hundred knights. This last act is the one instance that appears to be linked to some type of custom, or consuetudo, as seen in verse 120d: “e, com’era costumbre, sus donos ofreçer” [“and, as custom dictated, to offer his allegiance”]. Finally, the prince engages in a display of horsemanship to the surprise of the inhabitants of the cities (“cada conçejo” [“every city and town”]). The sphere of action of this ceremony is broad—it subsumes three different societal states: independence from the clergy, dominance over nobility, and admiration from the citizenry.

      This display before the three societal estates serves to underpin the creation of the figure of an independent and dominant monarch, unencumbered by either lineage or intellectual and theological authorities. Indeed, neither members of the aristocracy nor the clergy may participate in this performance except as spectators.

      Investiture is a promise of action or reform. The narrative of investiture is essential to the Book of Alexander, to the extent that, as Amaia Arizaleta has argued, it supersedes the coronation itself (La translation, 245–46).⁹ To the motifs identified by Arizaleta, we might add another: in this scene of chivalric investiture, the poem pointedly questions Alexander’s legitimacy, generating a serious crisis of identity. Just a few verses earlier, the poem cast doubt on the belief that Alexander is the legitimate son of Philip II of Macedon and even remarks on the fact that, by pushing him off a tower, Alexander has murdered Nectanebo—the Egyptian man who was supposed to be his true biological father. As a result, Alexander’s right to inherit the throne of Macedon through the conventional avenue of patrilineal descent is challenged, and it is only his own heroic and chivalric virtue that earns him the throne.¹⁰

      The articulation of the chivalric fable is crucial here. The poem inserts the promise of chivalric action as the protagonist is facing an impasse with respect to traditional structures of power. The proposed solution is the renovation of these structures and the transformation of the historical conditions that frame this crisis. The chivalric fable is imbued with meaning by its insertion into a pedagogical fable in which the chivalric hero receives technical knowledge. In the case of Alexander, the pedagogical fable is binary, and in both cases provided by Aristotle. On one hand, Aristotle has trained Alexander as if he were a cleric, offering him knowledge rooted in the liberal arts. Later, with respect to Alexander’s patrilineal identity crisis, Aristotle has endowed his student with historical knowledge that allows the chivalric hero to recapture territory as well as his political and economic independence. Within the fictional timeframe of the poem, Greece was mired in a period of powerlessness and was straining under the fiscal pressure imposed by the Persian Empire.¹¹ Alexander’s assertion of independence through knighthood mirrors the Greek will for independence from to the Persian Empire and its recovery of territorial and political jurisdiction.

      In terms of the textual tradition, Alexander’s knighting ceremony constitutes a distortion of the best-known ceremonies and those best established by ecclesiastical discourse. It also stands as a fragmentation of those ceremonies best known through chivalric narrative discourse, frequently transmitted in Latin and French texts. But it is also possible that both the distortion and the fragmentation of existing knighting ceremonies are the rule rather than the exception in the case of textual representations of such ceremonies. This is perhaps best examined from a perspective recently suggested by Philippe Buc. Buc focuses on ceremony and ritual during the Early Middle Ages, but his formulation is also valid for a phenomenon such as chivalry, which exists mainly through the later medieval period. According to Buc, due to their prominence, rituals afford us only a problematic glimpse into medieval political culture. He affirms that “they were too momentous for their depictions not to be highly crafted” (Dangers of Ritual, 9). Therefore, the unpolished quality of most written accounts of knighting ceremonies from medieval Castile is perplexing. These written accounts variously depict the passage into knighthood, but many are also allusive, fragmentary, and somewhat disconcerting. Perhaps because the rituals in question are so well known that it does not seem necessary to describe them in detail, or perhaps because they lack the ceremonial importance generally ascribed to them—especially when compared to French, German, and Latin clerical sources.

      The problem deepens when a ceremony is richly described, although this happens only infrequently. For the purposes of this discussion, it can be circumscribed to a very brief period of time: between the Partidas 2.21 (around 1260) to the knighting ceremony of Alfonso XI (held in 1332). There are a few other examples from the same period: that of the powerful Castilian noble Don Juan Manuel (1282–1348), who deals with this issue in his Libro del cavallero et del escudero (Book of the Knight and the Squire; 1326–1327) and in the Libro de las tres razones (Book of the Three Reasons; ca. 1337); the Cantar de las mocedades de Rodrigo (Song of Rodrigo’s Youth; ca. 1370); and the case of the double investiture of Roboán in the Libro del cavallero Zifar (Book of the Knight Zifar; ca. 1330).¹² I will undertake an analysis of these texts later in this chapter.

      To speak of chivalric investiture, Latin authors from Castile always use an essentially inscrutable expression: cingulum militiæ accingere, to put on the military sash. This “military sash” is an accessory associated with the republican and imperial eras of Rome. It was a sign of distinction and consisted of a thin golden sash wrapped around the soldier’s waist, adorned along the front with fringe made of the same material. This military sash was no longer worn during the Middle Ages, and therefore not issued to new knights.

      In its Roman context, the expression cingulum militiæ accingere refers to the entry of a soldier into the ordo equitum, the most distinguished group in the Roman cavalry. This, as Claude Nicolet has demonstrated, constitutes an ordo in itself. Nicolet’s study is even more interesting in that it reveals a fundamental tension between entry into the ordo equitum and the obtaining of noble rank within the Roman republic (Nicolet, L’ordre equestre à l’époque républicaine).¹³ The situation is akin to that in medieval texts on monarchic power: the king who invests the knight also confers noble rank upon him. This monarchic prerogative is the keystone of the significant sociopolitical transformations beginning to take place at the start of the fourteenth century.

      It can be argued that the use of the expression cingulum militiæ accingere during the medieval period was