Order and Chivalry. Jesus D. Rodriguez-Velasco

that it would be difficult to identify it with one concrete source or influence. It is possible to situate it within a specific time period, as it appears at precisely the moment that we have been discussing, but even with regard to its application to the militia Christi, the expression can just as easily be attributed to Saint Augustine as to Saint Bernard, since the former uses the expression cingulum militiæ Christianæ in his Epistula 151 and in other places. I do not argue here that such influence does or does not inform the verbal formula. What I do wish to underscore, however, is that such influence does not give us sufficient motive to ascribe a given meaning to the expression and to situate it, unavoidably, within a concrete series of temporal and intellectual paradigms.

      A discussion focused on this apparently minimal detail leads me to a series of conclusions about the precise manner in which Hispano-Latin sources narrate the knighting ritual during the reign of Alfonso VIII—when there was no specific form of regulation of either aristocratic knighthood or its ritual systems, and its translation into Castilian was carried out in the scriptorium of Alfonso X, at a time when a form of such regulation has already been formulated. The first of these conclusions recognizes that it is impossible for clerical authors working in Latin to frame the knighting ritual in accordance with a form of expression contemporary to the political act that they must describe. They instead recast a form of imperial language that corresponds to a hierarchy significantly different from the event that they are narrating. Thus, the verbal formula effectively creates the event, and in so doing casts the monarch as imperator. This imperial frame for the ritual act of chivalric investiture indicates a displacement of the modes by which hierarchy and the concept of dominion are organized within these texts. Also projected upon them is the double image of the Imperium Totius Hispaniae based on Castilian centrality, as well as its profession of legitimacy through the Holy Roman Empire. The second conclusion acknowledges that it would be impossible for these clerics to render a verbatim translation of the Latin verbal formula and that it would need to be supplemented with more contemporary vocabulary rather than classical language.

      In the divergence between the imperial and Castilian expressive forms, the greatest transformation of European chivalry is forged in the form of a systematic legal code: Alfonso’s Partidas 2.21. The promulgation of laws within this code provokes a crisis with respect to chivalric investiture. This crisis leads to a small series of responses with more precise descriptions, not only of chivalric investiture, but also of the symbolism of the entire knighting ceremony in all its theological (or de-theologized) and political breadth. Hence, what was no more than an accident within the unstable universe of chivalry becomes a central element for debate as a result of the Partidas. The Partidas, in effect, are the only expression of ritual that legally constitute “good ritual”—according to the expression coined by Philippe Buc—by becoming an integral part of the legal code, revoking all the other laws and rendering other rituals as dysfunctional or “bad” ones.

      It is in this sense that it can be said that the Partidas constitute an invention of chivalry. Of course chivalry, in all its possible expressions, existed before the redaction of the Partidas, yet all the legal discourse revolving around chivalry had been essentially casuistic and localized. In the end, the institution of chivalry lacked both definition and rules according to which it might be interpreted. As evidenced by the work of María Isabel Pérez de Tudela y Velasco (Infanzones y caballeros), Carmela Pescador (“La caballería popular”), and Concepción Quintanilla Raso (Nobleza y caballería), among others, the great difficulty for the study of Castilian chivalry resides precisely in the fact that prior to the second half of the thirteenth century, there was no systematic definition of chivalry itself (Rodríguez-Velasco, “Invención y consecuencias de la caballería”). Furthermore, when such a definition is produced in the work of Alfonso X, the change is so radical that it ends up disorienting readers accustomed to consulting local legal codes (fueros), cartularies, and other legal and political documents. The Partidas do not merely invent or reinvent chivalry, they also mandate an alteration in how one might study knighthood itself. In fact, the Partidas do not introduce a transformation of knighthood, but rather a transformation in the manner in which chivalry was conceived of and discussed; they introduce a definitive debate in the universe of chivalry. It is in this sense erroneous to assert that the Partidas imposed a massive legal transformation with regard to matters associated with knighthood, even as it is also misleading to argue that they did not.¹⁶

      The wholesale transformation of chivalric discourse is a theme that is too broad to be dealt with adequately in the present book. I have traced this transformation in various earlier studies (“De oficio a estado,” El debate, and “Invención”), and Georges Martin has advanced very similar arguments (“Control regio de la violencia nobiliaria”). The main idea is that in the thirteenth century, chivalric discourse is, above all, a discourse of the growing political power of the monarchy, a political theory in which the king seizes the political and juridical core of power.¹⁷ Chivalry constitutes one of the politico-juridical forms by which the nobility might be subjected to the central jurisdiction and it implies the construction of a social class that is furnished with systems of horizontal solidarity.

      The institution of chivalry is not just an autonomous social construct, but also a natural alliance. Knighthood is not only pursuant to title 21 of the Second Partidas; rather, it is necessary to read it in relation to the concept of nature and of natural bonds as they are laid out in title 24 of the Fourth Partidas. The theory of knighthood developed in the Partidas entails reorganization of nobility and of new forms of subjection to the king.¹⁸ These new forms of subjection are based squarely on the incorporation of the idea of natural bonds: the knight, vested by the king, acquires an indissoluble natural bond with him—a bond that is directly translated from the hierarchical bonds of divine origin and theological interpretation.

      Laws 13–16 of Partidas 2.21 cover the entire ceremonial process of chivalric investiture, from the moment in which the squire is prepared to receive knighthood until his sword is ungirded, with the legislator conferring all the political and institutional significance upon each gesture and movement. These four laws synthetize the entirety of chivalric knowledge and inscribe it within a theater of memory that culminates with the pain and the physical marking produced by the ritual slap—the final element in the elaboration of this ritual. The entire process adopts a sacramental form of purification, affirmation, and progressive patronage throughout the roughly twenty-four hours in which the ritual takes place. The process begins with a bath, then the head is washed, the clothes are selected, and the vigil and prayer are performed (law 13). After this, the family member contracted by the new knight is presented to his patron (law 16). The knighting and the girding of the sword take place next (law 14), followed by the patron ungirding the new knight’s sword (law 15).

      By means of the ritual, the new knight develops bonds. His internal, imperceptible transformation manifests itself through the different processes in which the knight subjects himself to different entities whose hierarchical station supersedes that to which he must submit. The first of all these trials is a subjective transformation, as he must meditate on his new station and enter into direct contact with God, without any ecclesiastical mediation, while he is physically cleansed and participates in the vigil. The knight will immediately acquire three more bonds. The first is of a horizontal nature and binds him, through the idea of “brotherhood” (law 14), to the rest of his comrades, with whom he establishes ties of solidarity. The other two are vertical bonds. The first is the one that develops between him and the person who knights him, and the second is between him and the person who ungirds his sword, thereby becoming his guarantor. His subjection with regard to the person who knights him is fundamental insofar as chivalry is later described as a natural bond.¹⁹ With regard to the bond associated with the patron, it is so important that law 16 details the obligations that the new knight has just contracted with the former. Law 16 concludes with a pedagogical flourish, advising squires awaiting investiture to pay particular attention to the choice of their patron: “Et por ende los caualleros noueles, pues que tan grand debdo han con los que les descinnen las espadas, deuen catar ante que la fecho vengan quien son aquellos a quien han de rogar que sean sus padrinos pora descennirgelas” [“Wherefore new knights, since they are so indebted to those who ungird their