We have seen in the case of the troubadours something of the nature of the extravagant amorous devotion avowed for his lady by the knightly poet. Though this exaggerated passion and romance is one of the concomitants, it is not the fundamental idea or the best part of chivalry. Originally, perhaps, a mere association for mutual defence and support, the order of knighthood soon came to have a deeper and a better purpose, a wider significance; it assumed the sanctity of a religious institution, for which long years of careful preparation were deemed necessary, and which imposed serious duties.
To defend the weak and the oppressed was what the soldier of God swore to do; and first in the list of those needing his defence were women. The knight was not only the sworn defender of woman from all physical wrong and oppression, but he must guard the honor of her name. Courteous and gentle he must be toward women himself, and from others less gentle he must compel at least outward respect. In the statutes of many an order of knighthood we find provisions like those set forth by Louis de Bourbon when, in 1363, he established the order of the Golden Shield: "He enjoined (the knights) to abstain from swearing and blaspheming the name of God; above all, he enjoined them to honor dames et damoiselles, not submitting to hear ill spoken of them; because from them, after God, comes the honor men receive; so that speaking ill of women, who from the weakness of their sex have no means of defending themselves, is losing all sense of honor, and shaming and dishonoring oneself." It was also about this time that Marshal Boucicaut established the order of the Knights of the Green Shield, fourteen in number, whose special purpose was the defence of women, and on whose shields was a blazon representing a woman clothed in white. This same sentiment we find persisting even in Brantôme: "If an honest woman would maintain her firmness and constancy, her devoted servitor must not spare even his life to defend her if she runs the least risk in the world, whether of her honor or of evil-speaking; even as I have seen some who have stopped all the wicked tongues of the court when they came to speak ill of their ladies, whom, according to the devoirs of chivalry, we are bound to serve as champions in their affliction."
The devotion to woman which we find becoming the dominant feature of the chivalrous ideal rises at times to sheer extravagance, mere moonshine madness. A knight vows devotion to his lady-love; to prove that he is the truest lover in the world and she the fairest dame, he wears a patch over one eye and engages in mortal combat with anyone who ventures to smile at this absurdity. Another takes his station on the highway and compels every passing knight to joust with him, because he has vowed to break three hundred lances in thirty days in the honor of his lady. Or there is Geoffrey Rudel, who falls in love with the Countess of Tripoli on hearsay; they say she is the most beautiful and lovable woman in the world; therefore he loves her, and therefore he goes on a crusade that he may see the lady. On the voyage he falls ill, and lands in Tripoli sick nigh unto death. The lovely countess, touched by the tales of his devotion, comes to his bedside; at once the glow of health returns to the dying lover, who praises God for preserving his life long enough to permit him to see his lady. When he died, soon after,--for the sight of the lady did not effect a permanent cure,--the countess had him buried in the church of the Templars, while she herself took the veil.
But if there is moonshine madness in the ideals of chivalry, there are also better things. Devotion to woman rises to the point of adoration; why should it not, when at its base is really the fervor of worship, the mystic worship of her whom the Middle Ages delighted to honor, Mary, the Mother of God? Let us content ourselves here with what Lecky has so well said in his History of European Morals: "Whatever may be thought of its theological propriety, there can be little doubt that the Catholic reverence for the Virgin has done much to elevate and purify the ideal of woman, and to soften the manners of men. It has had an influence which the worship of the Pagan goddesses could never possess, for these had been almost destitute of moral beauty, and especially of that kind of moral beauty which is peculiarly feminine. It supplied in a great measure the redeeming and ennobling element in that strange amalgam of religious, licentious, and military feeling which was formed around women in the age of chivalry, and which no succeeding change of habit or belief has wholly destroyed."
The fact that this love of the Virgin finally became a recognized force is a proof of how much stronger are love and romance than theology and dogma; for the strict religious theory of the Church had always been opposed to the elevation of women to a very high plane of adoration. While the Fathers of the Church praised and practised chastity as the highest virtue, and in consequence honored virgins above all others, they never forgot that it was the sin of woman which had "brought death into the world and all our woe"; they never forgot to twit the daughters of Eve with this fact, and to call them vas infirmius--"the weaker vessel." All through the ages when Christianity was struggling to maintain its own, the saints and martyrs, the holy hermits, in whom the Church delighted, fled the very sight of woman, and shuddered at her touch as at a contamination. Yet, in spite of this, or along with this, there was growing the adoration of a woman, the mother of Him whom the world called the Son of God. Little was known about her; so much the better for the pious hagiologists, who thought they did no wrong in piecing out scant fact with abundant legend. A regular cult of the Virgin arose, reaching such proportions that the Church had to do something to recognize it. Numerous festivals were established in her honor, some with the sanction of the Church, some without that sanction, some celebrated throughout Christendom, some only locally: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Purification, the Assumption.
The mystic worship, the tendency to find hidden meanings in things of the most ordinary appearance to the lay eye, the extravagant symbolism, were at their height in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The scholastic theologians and sermon writers applied their fantastic methods to all phases of the religious life; so we must not be surprised to find them treating even the Virgin in this way. One of the extraordinary instances which we can give occurs in a sermon delivered in Paris by the Chancellor of the university, Stephen Langton, later Archbishop of Canterbury. His name, by the way, is Latinized for us as Stephanus de Langeduna, whence it was easy and flattering to deduce Stephanus Linguæ tonantis. As a text the preacher takes nothing more nor less than a popular song, Bele Aalis main se leva, of which the following is the sense: "Sweet Alice arose in the early morn, dressed herself and adorned her fair body, and went into the garden. There she found five flowrets, of which she made a chaplet covered with roses. By my faith, therein has she betrayed thee, thou who lovest not." It is a little love song; and the author, whoever he may be,--probably some forgotten strolling minstrel who saw the girl go into the garden and wrought the incident to suit his fancy,--certainly had no religious intent. But Stephen Langton endeavors to make a mystic application of the song to the Virgin, and, as he says, "thus to turn evil into good." Let me quote a few lines of the sermon to show how this tour de force was accomplished. "Videamus quæ sit Bele Aeliz.... Cele est bele Aeliz de qua sic dicitur: Speciosa ut gemma splendida ut luna et clara ut sol, rutilans quasi Lucifer inter sidera, etc.... Hoc nomen Aeliz dicitur ab a quod est sine et lis litis, quasi sine lite, sine reprehensione, sine mundana fæce." It may be of interest to translate this as a specimen of the sermon of the first quarter of the thirteenth century: "Let us now see who is Bele Aeliz.... She is bele Aeliz of whom it is said: Beautiful as a jewel, shining as the moon and brilliant as the sun, glistening as Lucifer among the stars, etc.... This name Aeliz is formed from a, which means without, and lis, litis, which is as much as to say without dispute, without blame, without mixture of the dregs of the world." The worthy theologian then proceeds to what is undoubtedly the most difficult problem of his interpretation to demonstrate the connection of the garden, the chaplet, and the five flowers with the Virgin. "Who are these flowers? Faith, hope, charity, humility, virginity. These flowers did the Holy Ghost find in the blessed Virgin Mary..." The closing verses are, he says, directed against pagans, heretics, blasphemers, whom he scripturally addresses thus: "Depart, ye accursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels."
The enthusiasm of the clergy in behalf of the Virgin was matched by that of the people. Nothing was more popular than the hymn to the Virgin, scarcely distinguishable, in the ardor of some specimens preserved to us, from the contemporary love songs to women of flesh and blood. Clerks and laymen composed these songs, vying with each other in the fervor of the sentiments they expressed, writing in Latin, in French, in mixed Latin and French, praising the mere physical beauty and grace of her whom they called rose des roses et fleur des fleurs. One can read these things without shock only when one remembers that there was nothing but devotion of a purely spiritual kind intended by them, a fact of which it is sometimes hard to persuade oneself. As an example, and not an extreme one, it might do to substitute merely the name Marie for that of Aalis in the song used for Langton's sermon.
Besides these songs there were plays representing miracles ascribed to the Virgin, and legends without end grew up in which she was the intercessor for poor mortality. She becomes almost identified with the attribute of Mercy assigned to the Godhead, and some of the souls alleged to have been saved by her are not always worth the saving, according to modern standards of morality. A legend, repeated in many forms, tells us, for example, of a clerk of Chartres (presumably a clerk in the cathedral), "proud, vain, rude, and so worldly and licentious in his habits that he could not be restrained." With all his rakish ways, however, there was one thing that this man of God never omitted to do: "He would never pass before the image of Our Lady... without kneeling;" and once on his knees, "his face wet with tears, he saluted her many times most humbly, and beat his breast." Now the clerk was killed by an enemy of his, and then the world began to speak ill of him, and, on account of his notorious bad habits, they buried his body in a ditch outside Chartres. Thirty days, or nights, afterward, "she from whom springs all pity, all mildness and sweetness and love, and who never forgets her servants," appeared in a dream to one of the other clerks and reproached him bitterly for the dishonor done her servitor, of whose piety she then told him. The clergy of the city marched out to the grave of the clerk; and when it was opened they found "a flower in his mouth, so fresh and full of bloom that it seemed as if it had just blown there"; while the tongue with which he used to praise the Virgin was preserved from corruption, "as clear as is a rose in May." The moral of this story, one would think, would be anything but salutary; it is only when one recognizes the simple, unsophisticated piety which inspired it, and reflects upon its teaching of greater gentleness, greater charity in judging others, that one can admire it.
To the mediaeval mind, indeed, the Virgin was not very unlike a heroine of romance, and it was no disrespect to deck her out in fancy as gorgeously as some fair Elaine or Iseut. The story of this latter heroine, whose name no two will spell alike,--Iseut, Ysoult, Isolde, Isout, Ysolt,--is one typical of the age of romance and chivalry, and one which we shall give, despite its familiarity. By way of preface it may be well to remark that the story has been told so often that the variations introduced by this or that reviser are not to be distinguished from the original.
The mother of Tristan was Isabelle, sister of King Mark of Cornwall, who, dying when her son was born, asked that he be called Tristan, or Tristram, "that is as much as to say, sorrowful birth." The boy was hated by his uncle, King Mark, who tried to make away with him; but the youth escaped to France, where he won the love of King Faramond's daughter, and was in consequence compelled to flee again to Cornwall, where a temporary reconciliation with Mark was effected. Then there came out of Ireland a knight, Sir Morhoult, to claim tribute due to the Irish king by King Mark. Tristan fought with the stranger, wounded him unto death, and was himself wounded by the poisoned lance of his adversary. Only in the country where the poison was brewed was there hope of succor for the wounded hero; and accordingly Tristan set out for Ireland, in a boat without sails and without rudder, albeit well victualled. The helpless boat, however, bore its precious burden safely to Ireland.