Not but the foundation of this refined gallantry was laid in the ancient manners of the German nations. Cæsar tells us how far they carried their practice of chastity, which he seems willing to account for on political principles. However that be, their consideration of the sex was prodigious, as we see in the history of their irruptions into the Empire; where among all their ravages and devastations of other sorts, we find they generally abstained from offering any violence to the honour of the women.
IV. It only remains to account for that “character of Religion,” which was so deeply imprinted on the minds of all knights, and was essential to their institution. We are even told, that the love of God and of the ladies went hand in hand, in the duties and ritual of Chivalry.
Two reasons may be assigned for this singularity:
First, the superstition of the times, in which Chivalry arose; which was so great, that no institution of a public nature could have found credit in the world, that was not consecrated by the churchmen, and closely interwoven with religion.
Secondly, the condition of the Christian states; which had been harassed by long wars, and had but just recovered a breathing-time from the brutal ravages of the Saracen armies. The remembrance of what they had lately suffered from these grand enemies of the faith, made it natural, and even necessary, to engage a new military order on the side of religion.
And how warmly this principle, a zeal for the faith, was acted upon by the professors of Chivalry, and how deeply it entered into their ideas of the military character, we see from the term so constantly used by the old Romancers, of Recreant [i. e. Apostate] Knight; by which they meant to express, with the utmost force, their disdain of a dastard or vanquished knight. For, many of this order falling into the hands of the Saracens, such of them as had not imbibed the full spirit of their profession, were induced to renounce their faith, in order to regain their liberty. These men, as sinning against the great fundamental laws of Chivalry, they branded with this name; a name of complicated reproach, which implied a want of the two most essential qualities of a Knight, COURAGE and FAITH.
Hence too, the reason appears why the Spaniards, of all the Europeans, were furthest gone in every characteristic madness of true chivalry. To all the other considerations, here mentioned, their fanaticism in every way was especially instigated and kept alive by the memory and neighbourhood of their old infidel invaders.
And thus we seem to have a fair account of that PROWESS, GENEROSITY, GALLANTRY, and RELIGION, which were the peculiar and vaunted characteristics of the purer ages of Chivalry.
Such was the state of things in the Western world, when the Crusades to the Holy Land were set on foot. Whence we see how well prepared the minds of men were for engaging in that enterprize. Every object, that had entered into the views of the institutors of Chivalry, and had been followed by its professors, was now at hand, to inflame the military and religious ardor of the knights, to the utmost. And here, in fact, we find the strongest and boldest features of their genuine character: daring to madness, in enterprises of hazard: burning with zeal for the delivery of the oppressed; and, which was deemed the height of religious merit, for the rescue of the holy city out of the hands of infidels; and, lastly, exalting their honour of chastity so high as to profess celibacy; as they constantly did, in the several orders of knighthood created on that extravagant occasion.