Samuel A. Claussen
Chivalry and violence in Late Medieval Castile
(Boydell & Brewer, 2020), 244 pp. $99.00
The striking iconographic choice of the cover of this book, which features the hero who embodies the Hispanic chivalric ideal by antonomasia, the Cid, is to be praised. This aestheticization of chivalric violence recalls the importance of the idealized myth of the Middle Ages in nationalist ideology, particularly in the nineteenth but also in the twentieth century (Primera hazaña del Cid, Juan Vicens de Cots, 1864). The pride of the young Cid as he holds up the severed head of his enemy over the family table, and the frightened retreat of the guests, already say a great deal about the links between nobility, honour and violence, and about the enduring weight of this ideology, forged at the end of the Middle Ages and which continues to permeate the definition of the hero and the prowess. The glorification of just violence, noble violence, is in fact an ideological construction deeply linked to the myth of the Reconquest, and we can understand how necessary this reflection is for understanding Spanish identity. The author makes no mistake in alluding to the conservative Vox party’s campaign and its appropriation of the Reconquest theme in 2018. Since then, the term has even become the name of a French far-right party whose founder is a candidate in the 2022 presidential elections.
In an interview, the author confesses that the idea for the book came to him in 2008 while reading a fiction novel, Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Malory, in which violence is omnipresent. It therefore took him ten years to gather all the material and compose this book, which addresses the issue of violence through a vast corpus of fiction and non-fiction texts (whose bibliography is spread over three pages). Thus, we find numerous chronicles, archival documents and decisions of Cortes, novels of chivalry such as the Libro del caballero Zifar, Tirante el Blanco or Amadís de Gaula, poems… we can appreciate that in his desire to demystify the relationship between chivalry and violence, the author has not neglected or discarded the idealizing sources of literature. They offer a valuable counterpoint, show the need to regulate the use of violence and allow the other sources to be illuminated.
The question posed is opposed to the ideal and fictional image of chivalry as an armed group governed by a powerful ethic and acting only for the good of the most humble, defending the virgin, the widow and the orphan. The book brings to light the deep links between chivalric identity and violence in various forms: against laboratores, Christians, the religious enemy, women. The red thread of violence thus makes it possible to cross this period marked by numerous events while keeping one’s gaze focused on a notion that offers a particularly fertile key to reading. We are delighted to see the major events and actors of the late Middle Ages dealt with in this book, which is a good example of a reflection on violence. For the greater pleasure of the medievalist reader, there are also much lesser known cases drawn from archives or correspondence.
The military theme has been extensively studied, but new perspectives and methods offer a fresh look at the subject. Dr. Claussen’s work is a continuation of Richard Kaeuper’s Chivalry and violence in medieval Europe (1999), whose contributions he takes up again, considering the cult of violent prowess as an essential factor of disorder, but focusing on the case of the Iberian Peninsula. In this sense, Dr. Claussen opposes the conclusions of Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco (Order and Chivalry: Knighhood and Citizenship in Late Medieval Castile, 2010) for whom chivalry is above all an agent of regulation and institutionalization of violence.
In this collection (“Warfare in History”), this is the first book devoted to the Hispanic world, which reminds us that history books devoted to the study of military art and chivalric identity have mostly neglected this key culture. This is indeed the European territory where Christianity was directly confronted with Islam, which gave rise to the reinforcement of the legitimacy of the noble body to violence. This is in fact the first book in English to deal with this very subject, but the concern to re-examine medieval history through the prism of violence is a current one. very recent works are worth mentioning (all regrettably not cited in this book), like the one by Malte Griesse, Monika Barget and David de Boer (Revolts and political violence in early modern imagery, Brill, 2021), the book coordinated by Esther López Ojeda (La violencia en la sociedad medieval, Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 2019), the one by Philippe Haugeard and Muriel Ott (Droit et violence dans la littérature du Moyen âge, Classiques Garnier 2013), or Sean McGlynn’s work (By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare, Phoenix, 2009).
The chronological framework chosen by Dr. Claussen is very coherent, since it is the period of the Trastamares dynasty which the author deals with, from 1369 to 1492, from the accession to power of King Henry II of Castile until the reign of Isabella the Catholic. The capture of Granada and the subsequent territorial expansion that led to the construction of an empire appear as the crowning achievement of a certain logic of violence that is the main theme of the book. This period is marked by great instability, conflicts of succession, and the contestation of royal authority by the high nobility. This forms a succession of almost uninterrupted crises where violence plays a major role in defining the relationship between the royal power and the nobility, between the nobility and the people, between Christians and Muslims, and finally, between men and women. The period dealt with by Dr. Claussen begins with the assassination of Peter the Cruel, King of Castile, by his half-brother, which allows the violent accession to power of a dynasty in search of legitimacy. This initial mark determines a certain fragility of the royal dynasty and the disputes that will constantly lead to its authority, such as during the turbulent reigns of John I and Henry IV, which are well treated here.
The book is divided into five chapters. The first focuses on Knights and Kings (and allows us to address the crucial question of their favourites and their excessive influence on certain Trastamarian kings); the second on Knights and Commoners; the third on the Holy War; the fourth on the war between Christians; and the fifth on chivalric violence through the prism of gender. The real originality of this last chapter must be underlined. However, on reading it, one is left wanting: little space is given to the diverse forms of violence against women, spoliation, brutality, abduction, rape, or even enclosure, although the author alludes in the notes to recent works that offer a new perspective on women. It must be acknowledged that the choices made here by the author correspond to the overall logic of the book, which is primarily interested in armed violence and in those who perpetrate violence. Perhaps the fields of application of violence should have been more clearly defined, because in the end the book focuses on war (just look at the table of contents), whereas many other types of violence exercised by chivalry could be (and are) considered and it would be useful to clarify their typology (physical, economic, legal, symbolic, etc.).
Some questions remain unanswered: The specificity of Hispanic society in relation to the rest of Christendom, and the treatment of the Jews, which is totally ignored, even though the “pacification” carried out by the Catholic kings and the reinforcement of royal authority involved their persecution and expulsion, as well as the creation of the Inquisition (another subject that is completely absent from the book, even though alluding to it would give us a lot to think about in terms of the legitimisation of state violence and the outlet for violence towards scapegoats). We would also have liked to see Castile illuminated by the diversity of cases in the Iberian Peninsula. This is particularly true of Aragon, where violence was prevalent and whose study would serve to put the Castilian case into perspective, especially as the book ends with the union of the two crowns through the marriage of the Catholic kings. Finally, the question of noble violence and its ‘domestication’ cannot be understood without addressing the curialization of morals (Norbert Elias) and the use of the Court as a tool for putting people in line, a Court that is hierarchical and codified, governed by modes and protocol, in short a universe that makes it possible to spectacularize the figure of authority in order to better extinguish violent dissensions.
These small additions are hardly criticisms of this excellent work, but rather avenues for further reflection on violence. As proof of the fruitfulness of Dr Claussen’s demonstration, the reader wish to continue to explore the facets of this violence, its actors as well as its victims, and to understand how it was tamed and channeled in the service of modern Hispanic splendor. This book is therefore an excellent read, accessible and clear for non-specialists, and an invitation for all to think about violence, its justifications and its legal monopoly.
Julia Roumier
Bordeaux Montaigne University (AMERIBER), France.
