Even women on occasion put on armor and mingled in the mêlée. Gaita, the wife of Robert Guiscard, fought in the front rank of the Normans in their conflict with the Greeks. When the crusades were in progress many a fair woman adopted the martial costume. The Amazonian Brunhilde is scarcely overdrawn by Scott in “Count Robert of Paris,” and the Moslem heroines of Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered,” stripped of their supernatural resources, might have figured in the Christian camp.
Walter Scott put into the mouth of the Greek Nicephorus a pertinent description of his fellow-Christians of the West: “To whom the strife of combat is as the breath of their nostrils, who, rather than not be engaged in war, will do battle with their nearest neighbors and challenge each other to mortal fight, as much in sport as we would defy a comrade to a chariot-race.”
It is but just to say that, if the Greeks were amazed at the warlike propensities of the Catholics, they expressed no wonder at their cruelty. In this they themselves even excelled their more robust rivals. The dungeons of Constantinople were filled with political offenders whose eyes were torn from their sockets; and more than one imperial candidate resumed his place of honor among a people whose waving banners he was unable to see. The Greek differed from the Frank and German, the Norman and Saxon, chiefly in being a coward and choosing to glut his brutal instincts with the use of the secret torture, the poisoned cup, or the dagger in the back of his victim, rather than with the sword and battle-axe in open fight.
To a people such as we have described the appeal for the crusades, in which the imagined cause of heaven marched in step with their own tastes and habits, was irresistible.
CHAPTER III.
CHIVALRY—RULES—EDUCATION OF KNIGHT—CEREMONIES—INFLUENCE ON CHARACTER.
The call for the crusades, while appealing powerfully to the warlike disposition of the people, would not have succeeded in rousing Europe had there not been in the popular heart at least the germs of nobler sentiment. The vitality of conscience notwithstanding its degradation, and an inclination towards the exercise of the finer graces of conduct in spite of the prevalent grossness, manifested themselves in the rise of Chivalry.
The picturesqueness of knight-errantry, and the glamour thrown over the subject by poetry and romance, may mislead us as to the real character of this institution. We must distinguish between the ideals of knighthood and the actual lives of those who, from various motives, thronged the profession. We must not confound the Chivalry of these earlier and ruder ages with that of its more refined, though somewhat effeminate, later days. It would be an equal mistake to pose the half-savage Saxon for a picture of the gallant Provençal, because they were fellows of the same order. But, making all allowance for variations, defects, and perversions in Chivalry, the institution went far towards redeeming the character of the middle ages. Among the articles of the chivalric code were the following:
To fight for the faith of Christ. In illustration of this part of his vow, the knight always stood with bared head and unsheathed sword during the reading of the lesson from the gospels in the church service.
To serve faithfully prince and fatherland.
To defend the weak, especially widow’s, orphans, and damsels.