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CHAPTER ONE

Ritual as a Strategy for Chivalric Creation

A configuration of gestures, actions, and statements that follow a determined order, a ritual is also an apparatus that advances specific hierarchies of power.¹ Rituals establish relations of power and construct their own concept of authority through ceremonial events. Rituals and their creation define the systems of domination and subjection of an institution, a society, or any other collective entity.²

The construction of rituals probes how authority is the result of agreements by human beings or is imposed upon them. Power relations result from a complex process of negotiation in the late Middle Ages that substantiated the demarcation and control of jurisdictions—the twofold space, territorial and political, where laws are issued and enforced.

The analysis of ritual elucidates the criteria that create an institution, as well as the poetics of the subject that gives life to the institution through incorporation—as his body becomes part of a political body or a particular society. Ritual is the gateway into a given jurisdiction and a way to negotiate authority: it compels the subject to adopt a certain identity through the explicit, public, and spatial acceptance of the norms that regulate an institution or collectivity. As a rite of passage, a ritual takes place upon a single physical body and transforms it into a political subject pursuant to a legal and political regime.

As an apparatus, ritual is the enactment of an invisible transformation using visible and audible elements (either perceivable or conceptual), in which an individual becomes a different political and juridical subject; a transformation discernible during a carefully crafted time and space.

A ritual also leaves a discernible, charismatic marker of transformation. The process is generally framed within what Carl Schmitt termed political theology, or the idea that the constitutive elements of modern politics are but secularized versions of theological models.³ Ritual, which reveals the imperceptible, also modifies the subject’s body—typically through costume, scars, or other manifestations of pleasure or pain. These markings serve to distinguish the subject from others: a recognition (quite literally, a re-cognition) of his place in social stratification. Ritual is articulated in both the plane of the imperceptible (often linked to a theological realm) and the perceptible (the sociopolitical sphere).

The ritual of chivalric investiture presents a specific problem that is sui generis, since the invisible politico-theological transformation of the subject also creates a new social class. Chivalric investiture impacts not only the individual who is knighted, then, but also the whole order, or ordo, to which he now belongs. It is necessary to analyze the link between chivalry and its rituals of initiation to unveil the issues of power and subjection framing the creation and evolution of chivalry—and its role in jurisdictional transformation.

Most medievalists who have focused on chivalry have endeavored to describe these diverse rituals, both religious and secular, and nearly all have depicted them as the result of a preestablished tradition that accurately enacts events in the social life of knights and their relation to the monarch and the clerical state.

I approach the matter from a radically different perspective, arguing that rituals of knighting should be studied as an attempt to represent established hierarchies that constantly reveals its inability to reorder social and political life around chivalry. Invoking Castile as a model, I posit that the proliferation of different forms of chivalric ritual in a variety of texts—of different genres and social origins—issues many definitions of the concept of power. The Castilian model also illustrates how relations of subjection are negotiated in the monarchic political model.

In the present chapter, I consider the procedures that create and critique a social class: knighthood, or the chivalric order. Throughout history, chivalry has been used to manipulate relations of power. Chivalry has also served to fashion theories on lineages, political systems, and civil and moral life.

Written texts—or writing and reading—are, according to Emmanuel Lévinas, methods of being (11–12). Hence, they require their interlocutors to situate themselves on a different plane from that of external events. Texts about rituals rarely establish direct relation with concrete events, and when they do, this relation only frames a more general reflection. These texts theorize on the political and theological displacement that ceremonies produce. Although I may occasionally link ceremonies with specific events and problems, my main concern is how rituals theorize this displacement.

Medieval Castile is unique in significant ways. While we can date the creation and configuration of aristocratic chivalry in almost all of Europe at around 1100 (Flori, L’idéologie du glaive; L’essor de la chevalerie), Castilian chivalric discourse, particularly texts on the regulation of chivalry, arise between a century and a century and a half later. The aristocratic chivalry of Castile originates in the Cortes of Alfonso VIII of Castile (r. 1158–1214) and that of Alfonso X of Castile and León (r. 1252–1282) and fulfills a specific need—to establish a monarchic political model marked by the monarch’s acquisition of central jurisdiction and the limitation of nobiliary jurisdiction, whether clerical or secular. Throughout the acquisition of this central monarchic sovereignty, or imperium, the creation and regulation of knighthood has a critical role. It is through chivalry that the monarch redefines the nobility that surrounds him. In the new monarchic model, chivalry is configured to create a new sociopolitical identity for the nobility with an innovative angle: it will be the king who reserves the right to create this new social category. In this chapter, I will show how this notion changes as monarchs and nobles deploy the chivalric apparatus in social spaces that bear no direct relation with traditional aristocratic or dynastic categories.

A king stands in an apparently contradictory position with respect to chivalric practices and rites of entry. This contradiction is generally resolved through the assertion of a fundamental element of monarchic power: the king’s legal independence, as established in Roman law by the principle of rex legibus solutus (literally, “the king is not subject to the law”). When this principle is questioned, as is the case upon the publication of the various editions of the Siete Partidas, the monarch must resolve this contradiction through the invocation of his unique theological bonds.⁴ Thus, to acquire central jurisdiction, the king begins a process predicated in part on his independence from civil law and his ability to deploy theological resources.

This central jurisdiction grants him control over civil legislation. In Castile, this appropriation takes place over a period of time that likely comprises the reigns of Alfonso VIII and Alfonso X, as well as that of Fernando III, the first to rule both Castile and León (1199–1252, king of Castile from 1217 and of León from 1230). Judging by the juridical manuscripts of the period, the political need to create monarchic legislation begins with Alfonso VIII, who is likely the author of the project that would later become the Fuero Real first promulgated in 1254 by Alfonso X. Both the Fuero Real and the other legislative works redacted also by Alfonso in the thirteenth century (the Espéculo and the Siete Partidas) provide for the king’s appropriation of the jurisdictional sphere, allowing the king to limit or vacate any local and aristocratic legal regulations that interfered with his centralized power.

This jurisdictional control also affected clerical power. The king manifested his will to take gradual control of ecclesiastical legislation, a process that culminated in the redaction of Partidas 1 (Primera Partida), a promulgation of Church and canon law issued from the monarchic jurisdiction. Moreover, the process by which a monarch obtains his independence with respect to the powers of the clergy implies a laicization of the kingdom as a whole. Within this process of laicization, the two most important social groups are knights and lettered royal officials. The Siete Partidas even refer to the latter group as knights while the Partidas 2 maintains that “la sabiduría de los derechos es otra manera de cauallería con que se quebrantan los atreuimientos e se endereçan los tuertos” [“the wisdom of the law is another kind of knighthood, by means of which boldness is crushed, and wrongs are righted”] (2.10.3).

The analysis of texts on rituals of knighting elucidates how the monarch attains jurisdictional domination as well as independence. The texts studied in this chapter have very different origins yet are produced during the period in which the king gains the authority to adjudicate: from the beginning of the thirteenth century to the middle of the fourteenth century. I will pay particular attention to texts produced in the first half of the fourteenth century.

Texts from this period unveil a genealogy of the chivalric social class, the institutions it comprises, and their varied practices and configurations. In fact, these texts are dissimilar in terms of the authority they claim. Some are poetic, giving rise to literary traditions of a moral and political order. They impose their presence on well-defined social spheres, affecting mainly the royal space and retinue itself, dominated by lay and clerical nobility. Others appear as historical narratives that recast epic themes like those of the Cid to theorize the formation of the kingdom of Castile and León as well as its monarchic and chivalric models. The texts address the need to challenge the social order, questioning the notion of royal imperium. Finally, other texts issue from royal legislative authority, intent on modifying the political and social structure of the kingdom. The particularities of each text will be noted in due course. The genealogy of this social order’s creation cannot be traced along a chronological or teleological line leading to an objective. It should be seen as an unstructured interaction, a series of dialectical experiences in which each text offers a substantial redefinition of the problem it addresses. Again, every ritual is an apparatus, a discursive strategy for the definition of power relations as negotiations of territorial and political jurisdiction.

The corpus of texts on rituals of chivalric investiture of medieval Castile is relatively small, especially when compared with texts produced in other European political contexts—notably the kingdoms of France and England or the Holy Roman Empire. Compounding this difficulty, the Castilian texts that mention rituals of knighting are not always very specific. It is therefore important to focus on the precise vocabulary that they employ and to analyze it closely.

The texts studied in this chapter conjure very diverse formulas. For instance, ceñir la espada [“to gird on one’s sword”], in the Cantar de Mio Cid (Poem of the Cid) and the Libro de Alexandre (Book of Alexander)—both written during the reign of Alfonso VIII. We also find cingulum militiæ accingere [“to gird the military sash”] in Latin texts from the same period and hacer caballero [“to make one a knight”] in Castilian chronicles such as the Estoria de España (History of Spain) from the reign of Alfonso X or the Valeriana Chronicle, redacted and printed in 1481. Nonetheless, all these references clearly depict some form of ephemeral ceremony, a performative moment in which a particular speech act gives rise to the transformation of a political subject: someone who was previously not considered a knight becomes one and acquires a series of privileges, social distinction, and fiscal exemptions.

Many texts offer a relatively explicit description of a ritual of chivalric investiture. The Book of Alexander is a poetic piece, written in the context of Alfonso VIII’s Cortes and using clerical meters—along the parameters of the mester de clerecía, which the poem briefly theorizes in its second stanza. It is based on texts in Latin (the Alexandreis of Walter of Châtillon) and French (the Roman d’Alexandre).⁵ The poem summarizes a specific chivalric ritual. The Book of Alexander does not depict it as the objective practice of a custom, but rather as an enactment of the will of the hero. The poet relishes in the description of the arms that have been crafted for Alexander, and marvels at the ferocity of his horse, Bucephalus, before describing the ceremony from an intimate perspective:

El infant fue venido por las armas prender,

mas, como fue de seso e de buen connoçer,

antes quiso a Dios una oraçión fer.

e, com’era costumbre, sus donos ofreçer.

“Señor—dixo—que tienes el mundo en poder,

a qui çielo y tierra deven obedesçer,

Tú guía mi fazienda sit cae en plazer,

que pueda lo que asmo por mí acabeçer.

“Tú da en estas armas, Señor, tu bendiçión,

que pueda fer con ellas atal defunçïón,

qualque nunca fue fecha en esta difinçión,

porque saque a Greçia de grant tribulaçión.”

Quand la oraçión ovo el infant acabada,

enclinó los ynojos e besó en la grada,

desent alçós un poco e çiñós la espada;

es día dixo Greçia que era arribada.

Ante que se moviesse el infant del logar,

armó más de quinientos de omnes de prestar;

a todos dio adobos muy graves de preçiar,

ca todos eran tales que lo querrién pechar.

Cavalgó su cavallo e salió al trebejo;

el cavallo con él fazié gozo sobejo;

viniénlo sobre sí veer cada conçejo,

dizién todos: “Criador nos ha dado consejo.”

[The prince came to take up arms,

But, as he was sensible and wise,

He first chose to pray to God,

And, as custom dictated, to offer his allegiance.

“My Lord,” he said, “who has all the world in his power,

Whom heaven and earth must obey,

Guide my actions if it pleases you,

So that I might accomplish my objective.

“Give these arms, my Lord, your blessing,

So that with them I may carry out such annihilation

As has never been accomplished in this world,

So that I might rescue Greece from great trouble.”

Once the prince concluded his prayer,

He kneeled down and kissed the step,

And then stood up and girded his sword;

This was the day when Greece claimed to have arrived.

Before the prince moved from that place,

He armed more than five hundred deserving men;

To all of them he gave armor of serious value,

Since all were men who would offer something in return.

He mounted his horse and rode out to show his equestrian skill;

He managed with his horse to thrill those present;

People came from every city and town to see him,

And everyone said: “The Creator has come to our aid.”]

(Cañas Murillo, Libro de Alexandre, 159)⁶

Alexander does not follow any specific type of ceremony and the poem’s description does not make it possible to compare it to other ceremonies found in historical narratives. It is extraordinarily generic. The only ceremonial detail that might be gleaned from these verses is the prayer and the petition of the benedictio ensis, or blessing of the sword, in a prayer to God by the aspiring knight himself.⁷ The most notable aspect of this ceremony is not that Alexander takes up arms himself, but that it is he, not a cleric, who solicits the blessing of the sword. This gesture asserts independence from both secular authority (i.e., the nobility) and lettered clerics, as the poet reiterates throughout his verses.⁸ The ceremony culminates when Alexander girds on his sword and, immediately afterward, arms five hundred knights. This last act is the one instance that appears to be linked to some type of custom, or consuetudo, as seen in verse 120d: “e, com’era costumbre, sus donos ofreçer” [“and, as custom dictated, to offer his allegiance”]. Finally, the prince engages in a display of horsemanship to the surprise of the inhabitants of the cities (“cada conçejo” [“every city and town”]). The sphere of action of this ceremony is broad—it subsumes three different societal states: independence from the clergy, dominance over nobility, and admiration from the citizenry.

This display before the three societal estates serves to underpin the creation of the figure of an independent and dominant monarch, unencumbered by either lineage or intellectual and theological authorities. Indeed, neither members of the aristocracy nor the clergy may participate in this performance except as spectators.

Investiture is a promise of action or reform. The narrative of investiture is essential to the Book of Alexander, to the extent that, as Amaia Arizaleta has argued, it supersedes the coronation itself (La translation, 245–46).⁹ To the motifs identified by Arizaleta, we might add another: in this scene of chivalric investiture, the poem pointedly questions Alexander’s legitimacy, generating a serious crisis of identity. Just a few verses earlier, the poem cast doubt on the belief that Alexander is the legitimate son of Philip II of Macedon and even remarks on the fact that, by pushing him off a tower, Alexander has murdered Nectanebo—the Egyptian man who was supposed to be his true biological father. As a result, Alexander’s right to inherit the throne of Macedon through the conventional avenue of patrilineal descent is challenged, and it is only his own heroic and chivalric virtue that earns him the throne.¹⁰

The articulation of the chivalric fable is crucial here. The poem inserts the promise of chivalric action as the protagonist is facing an impasse with respect to traditional structures of power. The proposed solution is the renovation of these structures and the transformation of the historical conditions that frame this crisis. The chivalric fable is imbued with meaning by its insertion into a pedagogical fable in which the chivalric hero receives technical knowledge. In the case of Alexander, the pedagogical fable is binary, and in both cases provided by Aristotle. On one hand, Aristotle has trained Alexander as if he were a cleric, offering him knowledge rooted in the liberal arts. Later, with respect to Alexander’s patrilineal identity crisis, Aristotle has endowed his student with historical knowledge that allows the chivalric hero to recapture territory as well as his political and economic independence. Within the fictional timeframe of the poem, Greece was mired in a period of powerlessness and was straining under the fiscal pressure imposed by the Persian Empire.¹¹ Alexander’s assertion of independence through knighthood mirrors the Greek will for independence from to the Persian Empire and its recovery of territorial and political jurisdiction.

In terms of the textual tradition, Alexander’s knighting ceremony constitutes a distortion of the best-known ceremonies and those best established by ecclesiastical discourse. It also stands as a fragmentation of those ceremonies best known through chivalric narrative discourse, frequently transmitted in Latin and French texts. But it is also possible that both the distortion and the fragmentation of existing knighting ceremonies are the rule rather than the exception in the case of textual representations of such ceremonies. This is perhaps best examined from a perspective recently suggested by Philippe Buc. Buc focuses on ceremony and ritual during the Early Middle Ages, but his formulation is also valid for a phenomenon such as chivalry, which exists mainly through the later medieval period. According to Buc, due to their prominence, rituals afford us only a problematic glimpse into medieval political culture. He affirms that “they were too momentous for their depictions not to be highly crafted” (Dangers of Ritual, 9). Therefore, the unpolished quality of most written accounts of knighting ceremonies from medieval Castile is perplexing. These written accounts variously depict the passage into knighthood, but many are also allusive, fragmentary, and somewhat disconcerting. Perhaps because the rituals in question are so well known that it does not seem necessary to describe them in detail, or perhaps because they lack the ceremonial importance generally ascribed to them—especially when compared to French, German, and Latin clerical sources.

The problem deepens when a ceremony is richly described, although this happens only infrequently. For the purposes of this discussion, it can be circumscribed to a very brief period of time: between the Partidas 2.21 (around 1260) to the knighting ceremony of Alfonso XI (held in 1332). There are a few other examples from the same period: that of the powerful Castilian noble Don Juan Manuel (1282–1348), who deals with this issue in his Libro del cavallero et del escudero (Book of the Knight and the Squire; 1326–1327) and in the Libro de las tres razones (Book of the Three Reasons; ca. 1337); the Cantar de las mocedades de Rodrigo (Song of Rodrigo’s Youth; ca. 1370); and the case of the double investiture of Roboán in the Libro del cavallero Zifar (Book of the Knight Zifar; ca. 1330).¹² I will undertake an analysis of these texts later in this chapter.

To speak of chivalric investiture, Latin authors from Castile always use an essentially inscrutable expression: cingulum militiæ accingere, to put on the military sash. This “military sash” is an accessory associated with the republican and imperial eras of Rome. It was a sign of distinction and consisted of a thin golden sash wrapped around the soldier’s waist, adorned along the front with fringe made of the same material. This military sash was no longer worn during the Middle Ages, and therefore not issued to new knights.

In its Roman context, the expression cingulum militiæ accingere refers to the entry of a soldier into the ordo equitum, the most distinguished group in the Roman cavalry. This, as Claude Nicolet has demonstrated, constitutes an ordo in itself. Nicolet’s study is even more interesting in that it reveals a fundamental tension between entry into the ordo equitum and the obtaining of noble rank within the Roman republic (Nicolet, L’ordre equestre à l’époque républicaine).¹³ The situation is akin to that in medieval texts on monarchic power: the king who invests the knight also confers noble rank upon him. This monarchic prerogative is the keystone of the significant sociopolitical transformations beginning to take place at the start of the fourteenth century.

It can be argued that the use of the expression cingulum militiæ accingere during the medieval period was metaphoric. It is more likely, however, that it is the expression preferred by those who worked in chancery Latin and among those who had, at the same time, advanced juridical, historical, and theological knowledge. The specific places within Castile where we find this expression reveal a cultural setting of this sort. The anonymous author of the Historia Roderici (History of Rodrigo; ca. 1147) employs it in a very specific way: “Hunc autem Rodericum Didaci Santius, rex tocius Castelle et dominator Hyspaniæ, diligenter nutriuit et cingulum militie eidem cinxit” [“That Sancho, king of all Castile and ruler of Hispania, raised up Rodrigo Díaz with all his love and put the military sash on him”]. (Martínez Díez et al., Historia latina de Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar 54).¹⁴ The language here is not neutral. It deploys terms and expressions that belong to imperial chancery Latin, and the Latinate institutions of the empire of Justinian and Theodosius. King Sancho, who knights the Cid, is here referred to as “king of all Castile,” a phrase that enjoys a semantic confluence with the Imperium Totius Hispaniae [“Empire of All Hispania”] formula coined by Alfonso VI (1040–1109, self-proclaimed Imperator Totius Hispaniae in 1070) and made to take on greater prominence during the reign of Alfonso VII (r.1126–1157, referred to as imperator from the beginning of his reign), the same period during which the History of Rodrigo was composed.

The bishop and historian Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (1170–1247) makes use of the cingulum militiæ accingere formula when speaking of the knighting of Conrad III Hohenstaufen (1173–1196), son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (1122–1190), and likewise that of Alfonso IX of León (1171–1230), both carried out by Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1188 in the city of Carrión de los Condes:

Mortuo rege Fernando successit ei eius filius Aldefonsus. Hic fuit homo pius, strenuus et benignus, set susurronum vicissitudine mutabatur; et a consobrino suo Aldefonso rege Castelle et Sancio rege Portugalie infestatus circa primordia regni sui uenit ad rege Castelle, et in curia Carrionis accintus ab eo cingulo militari, manum eius fuit in plena curia osculatus; et in eadem curia rex Castelle nobilis Aldefonsus Conradum filium Frederici imperatoris Romani accinxit similiter cingulo militari.

[With the death of King Fernando (II of León), his son Alfonso (IX of León) succeeded him to the throne. He was a pious, strong, and good man, but he was much altered by the vicissitudes of events and was attacked by his cousin Alfonso, the king of Castile, and Sancho, the king of Portugal. Near the beginning of his reign he went to the king of Castile, and in the curia of Carrión he had the military sash put on him by this same king and he kissed his hand in front of the full curia; and in that same curia the noble Alfonso, king of Castile, similarly put the military sash on Conrad, the son of Frederick, the Roman emperor.] (Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispaniæ, 246)

Thus, in both cases of chivalric investiture, the Latin scribe employs the cingulum militiæ accingere formula.

The cingulum militiæ accingere formula seems to have no directly comprehensible meaning in Spanish, if we are to judge based on how it is translated within the Estoria de España, composed in the scriptorium of Alfonso X. There is a certain degree of anxiety in the manner in which this translation is produced. The translators do not seem to think that the reference to the military sash is self-explanatory, so in each case they add a supplement to reinforce its meaning. While they maintain the archaeological substratum of the expression that they have inherited, they incorporate another, more modern one that may reveal a good deal about the ritual act that is taking place:

(Alfonso IX de León) fue guerreado de su primo don Alffonsso, rey de Castiella, et de don Sancho, rey de Portogal, çerca de los comienços de su regno. Et ueno estonçes el rey don Alffonsso de Castiella a Carrion a cortes que fizo y; et cinxo alli este rey don Alffonsso de Castiella la çinta de caualleria a don Alffonsso rey de Leon, su primo cormano, et armol alli et fizol cauallero; onde esse rey don Alffonsso de Leon beso alli la mano a don Alffonsso rey de Castiella ante todos, la corte llena. Et en essa misma corte otrossi esse noble rey don Alffonsso de Castiella çinxo la çinta de caualleria et su espada a don Corrado fijo de don Fradric emperador de Roma et fizol cauallero.

[(King Alfonso IX of León) went to war with his cousin Alfonso, king of Castile, and Sancho, the king of Portugal, near the beginning of his reign. At that time, King Alfonso of Castile arrived in Carrión to preside over his Cortes; and there King Alfonso of Castile put the sash of chivalry on King Alfonso of León, his first cousin, and there armed him and made him a knight; at which point King Alfonso of León kissed the hand of King Alfonso of Castile in front of everyone at the full Cortes. And at this same Cortes the noble King Alfonso of Castile girded the sash of chivalry and his sword on Conrad, the son of Frederick the Emperor of Rome and made him a knight.] (Menéndez Pidal, Primera Crónica General de España, 666–67; emphasis mine)

The act of chivalric investiture that the Latin text narrates seems to be much more focused on the presence of Conrad than that of Alfonso. In both cases, the ceremony expresses in its entirety an act of domination, but it is of a totally distinct nature. The domination of Conrad by Alfonso is related to the political alliance being sealed on this occasion, namely the matrimonial alliance between the son of the emperor and the daughter of the king. The knighting of Conrad by Alfonso sets into practice an imperial ritual, derived from the very terminology of the Roman Empire. In the expressive re-elaboration that makes up the Castilian version of this narration, Castilian historians must translate not only the formula’s signifier, but also its referent. The ceremony, as well as the mode in which it is expressed, seems foreign, like something that shares the provenance of the person knighted.

The concision in the expression of the ceremony is also surprising. Research devoted to medieval rituals spells out the process by which the texts that narrate these ceremonies not only reproduce them in great detail, but also state their meaning, giving rise to the theological and political traditions of ritual hermeneutics. Both characteristics are absent in this narrative.

This absence explains why, upon narrating the dramatization of seignorial domination and of the imposition of the Castilian over the Leonese, the historian contents himself with a reference to the knighting of Alfonso IX of León. The crucial detail is the kiss of the hand that Alfonso of León sees himself obliged to give Alfonso of Castile in the presence of the entire Cortes (Rodríguez-Velasco, “El Cid y la investidura caballeresca”). This act of corporal subjugation, the body inclining itself in the traditional act of accepting one’s lower place within a hierarchy of power (as opposed to the relation of relative equality implied by a kiss on the lips), amid the full Cortes is a powerful sign of the manner in which social actors during the late medieval period worked to reorganize hierarchies of national power within the Iberian Peninsula and in line with Castilian imperial projects.

Alberto Montaner has accurately suggested that the expression cingulum militiæ cingere refers to the action of having the sword girded. In its late medieval Castilian context, the Roman military weapon has disappeared from the field of the formula’s referent, and it seems to have been substituted by a weapon not only fundamental for armed confrontations but also for chivalric distinction. For Montaner, the epic formula “que en buena ora cinxó espada” [“who in a good hour girded on his sword”] applied to the Cid is a clear example of such a reference, and should be read as “en buen momento fue armado caballero” [“at a good time was knighted”] (“Prologo” cxvli).¹⁵ Montaner maintains the use of this formula in the History of Rodrigo and the Historia de rebus Hispaniæ (History of Hispanic Matters). Finally, along the same lines, in the Poem of the Cid, it is clearly associated with the reign of Alfonso VIII and emerges from Cistercian textual and intellectual models through texts authored by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, such as Liber ad milites templi de laude novæ militæ (In Praise of the New Knighthood). Both theses—the notion that Rodrigo and the Cid were first redacted during the era of Alfonso VIII (the period in which I believe that we should situate the beginning of the monarchy’s interest in the institution of chivalry) as well as the idea that Saint Bernard and the Cistercians exerted their influence—seem acceptable (Rodríguez-Velasco, “Vida y estirpe de Colada y Tizón”). It may not turn out equally acceptable, however, that both theses should be supported by a study of the formula in question. It is so vague, so universal, so commonly employed by both lay and ecclesiastical authors, at least since Theodosius, 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 swords should, before the deed is performed, very carefully consider who those persons are whom they request to act as their godfathers by ungirding them”] (Craddock and Rodríguez-Velasco).

The consequences of this process of acquiring bonds are crucial in the description of the structures of power and the equilibrium of powers that are produced within them. The laws allow us to dissect the organization of the social class the knight joins through this ritual and the type of relation that this class establishes with the sociopolitical ambit in which it is forged. This political structure includes the subject’s reflection on his own identity, and it can be considered as a form of “technology of the subject.” The law excludes all types of intermediation during this phase of the ritual, as it is the individual who must contemplate the theological-political conditions of his new status. It is about a process in which the subject discovers or becomes aware of his own conditions within the sociopolitical system and of the transformation that is operating within him. According to the law (Partidas 2.21.13), this self-reflection takes place during a vigil in which the time normally reserved for sleep is employed for a specific and ritual hygiene of the body that allows for the emergence of the new subject. It is in this series of modifications to the body and spirit of the knight-to-be that the creation of social class takes place, thereby integrating him into the horizontal and vertical structure previously mentioned.

On another level, this horizontal and vertical relationship founded on the creation of the chivalric subject represents the means by which the coordinates of chivalry are established—that is, the localization in political space of the very social category or ordo (which I also refer to as class). These coordinates are a strategy that enables the delimitation of chivalry within a concrete form of power relations. This localization defines how the agents that participate in the creation of social class reach mutual balance. A horizontal relationship impresses the idea of solidarity and friendship upon the knights, establishing a sense of sociopolitical equality independent of one’s dynastic origin. A vertical relationship provides two great pillars that serve to sustain chivalry. The first is the king who grants knighthood and in territorial terms transfers the concept of ordo from its theological origin. The second pillar secures the intimate relationship between the individual knight and his patron or teacher. The political, moral, and educational situation here assigns to the social class a precise mission to which these two pillars have a metonymic relation. Chivalry is not a social class liberated from all collective obligation. The key to the creation of this social class manifests itself here, therefore, in the plane of action and political defense of the monarch and that of moral action in agreement with certain educational criteria detailed in Partidas 2.21.20.

The fact that this ceremonial protocol formalizes these bonds should be viewed in light of the absence of any law, before the Partidas, with respect to the type of bond formed through the act of chivalric investiture. Alfonso X, however, could not allow such an important relationship to emerge without describing it. Title 24 of the Fourth Partidas, which deals with alliances, stipulates that nature is the most important bond among men, thereby translating and codifying hierarchical relations formerly associated with theology:

Naturaleza tanto quiere dezir como debdo que han los omes unos con otros por alguna derecha razon en se amar e en se querer bien. E el departimento que ha entre natura e naturaleza es este: ca natura es una virtud que faze ser todas las cosas en aquel estado que Dios las ordeno; naturaleza es cosa que semeja a la natura e que ayuda a ser e mantener todo lo que desciende della.

[Natural relationship means an obligation that compels men to love and cherish one another for a just reason. There is a distinction between nature and natural relationship: nature is a force which causes everything to remain in the condition directed by the bond of God; natural relationship is something which resembles nature and allows for the existence and preservation of everything derived from it.] (4.24.1)

Among these obligations, chivalry features prominently:

Diez maneras pusieron los sabios antiguos de naturaleza. La primera, e la mejor, es la que han los omes a su señor natural, porque tan bien ellos como aquellos de cuyo linaje descienden, nascieron e fueron raygados e son en la tierra onde es el señor. La segunda es la que aviene por vasallaje. La tercera por criança. La quarta por cavalleria. La quinta por casamiento. La sexta por heredamiento. La setena por sacarlo de captivo o por librarlo de muerte o deshonrra. La octava por aforramiento de que non rescibe precio el que lo aforra. La novena por tornarlo christiano. La dezena por morança de diez años que faga en la tierra maguer sea natural de otra.

[The wise men of ancient times established ten kinds of natural obligation. The first, and most important is the relation which men sustain towards their natural lord, because they, as well as those from whom they are descended, were born and settled, and exist in the country of their said lord; the second is derived from vassalage; the third, that which arises through nurture; the fourth, springs from knighthood; the fifth, marriage; the sixth, from inheritance; the seventh, from rescue from captivity or liberation from death or dishonor; the eighth, from emancipation, for which the party who granted it received no reward; the ninth, arises through becoming a Christian; the tenth, through a residence of ten years in a country, although the party may be a native of another.] (4.24.2)²⁰

The list is ordered hierarchically, as is customary in Alfonsine texts. The incorporation of chivalry within the list of natural bonds represents an innovation of the Partidas with respect to the Espéculo, Alfonso’s earlier systematic legal work, which only considered six types of natural bonds (Rodríguez-Velasco, “De oficio a estado”; “Invención”). Within the context of this innovation, Alfonso gives chivalry a prominent place. In this way, Alfonso does not only incorporate chivalry into political and juridical discourse; he also configures it as one of the principal means by which a theological hierarchy is translated into positive law.

The reasons for the production of this innovation reside in the strategies defined by ritual, that is, by the way in which this apparatus determines power relations. This apparatus is a way of transforming the structure of the kingdom, as it gives rise to a social class that is defined by the power of the monarch to construct all categories of the nobility. Critiques of this power, which proliferate throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, point out that the king is violating a natural right by essentially creating nobles by fiat during knighting ceremonies. The argument is predicated on the notion that it is on strictly theological grounds, and without any supplementary political aspect, that the existence of the nobility is justified. The differentiation between the theological and the political issues from the work of Bolognese jurist Bartolo of Sassoferrato (1314–1357), who distinguishes between theological nobility and civil and political nobility. This differentiation, as well as the debate surrounding it—which would endure for almost two hundred years and eventually become a criteria for the formation of the modern state—provides clear evidence of the strength of the thesis presented by Alfonso X in the process of creating chivalry, its rituals, and its relation to natural bonds. The strength of these theories and the presence of the chivalric ordo throughout Europe facilitate a dialogue that generally takes the form of a debate. This debate does not have as its ultimate goal a critique of the particular elements of the ritual, but these elements offer theoretical alternatives to regal sovereignty and the central jurisdiction of the monarchy.

The first is the case of Don Juan Manuel (1282–1348), a member of the high nobility and nephew of Alfonso X. Don Juan Manuel begins his textual activities more or less at the moment at which King Alfonso XI (1311–1350) comes of age in 1325 and assumes the throne. Don Juan Manuel has contributed to the tutoring of the young king and even served as regent; after 1325, however, he begins to distance himself from the politics set out by the monarch. The greater part of Don Juan Manuel’s written work is indeed guided by these personal political motivations. They do not dismiss, however, the theoretical and political importance of this magnate’s complex work, namely, that if he learns to write—in an inchoate sense—it is precisely to be able to develop theories regarding power relations. Don Juan Manuel’s Libro de la caballería (Book of Chivalry), in fact, written in 1325 and no longer extant, contained a rereading (most likely critical) of title 21 of the Second Partidas Judging by the summary of this work included in his Libro de los estados (Book of States) (1330), this book would have been a compendium on chivalry based squarely on Alfonsine law.²¹

The only reference Don Juan Manuel makes to a knighting ceremony is in the Libro del cavallero et del escudero, a work directly influenced by the Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria (Book of the Order of Chivalry), composed between 1279 and 1283 by Mallorcan philosopher Ramon Llull (1232–1316). Llull’s work causes a fundamental turn away from Don Juan Manuel’s previous positions, particularly regarding knightly investiture. The knighting ceremony that Llull describes is much more complex than the one devised by Alfonso, since apart from describing the gestures and movements of the ceremony, Llull also specifies the mode in which mass should be conducted and the type of sermon that should be delivered. According to Llull, the cavayler spiritual [spiritual knight] plays a fundamental role in this ceremony, while the secular role is reduced to the participation of he who conducts the ceremony, without the participation of a patron (197–200). The symbolism of arms that Llull develops is also decidedly religious, rendering the knight a bearer of a series of theological and political values (201–6), while Alfonso explicitly distances clerics from all chivalric ceremonies and from chivalry itself.²² Finally, Llull’s Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria fits within the broader Llulian project (De arte inveniendi veritatis, (The Art of Finding the Truth), which develops a logical and philosophical system of tropology and anagogy.²³ This system forms the axis around which Llull’s notion of chivalry revolves and serves as the ultimate source for the creation of truth. Llulian discourse is based on theology and philosophy and is thus inseparable from a concern with the production of truth.

When Don Juan Manuel opts for the production of theological and philosophical truth within an explicitly Llulian framework, as opposed to the production of legal truth as framed by Alfonso, it is because he wishes to pose a specific question: how would it be possible to create a new political framework that supersedes the construction of sovereignty designed by the juridical model of central monarchic jurisdiction. He engages chivalry to explore the theological bonds of the nobility, steering away from the Alfonsine proposition to create a uniquely political or civil nobility.

Llulian influence in Don Juan Manuel is not only evident in the reproduction of the chivalric fable and its relation to the pedagogical fable (e.g., the hermit teacher, the book in which both read). We also see it in its own content, in the symbolisms and figures used by the Castilian noble, as well as in his knowledge about nature. The symbols and figures depict the arms of the knight as traces or marks of a theological mission. As established by Llull, who is in dialogue with the chivalric French literature of the Arthurian cycle known as the Vulgate, the achievement of knighthood resides in a transformation of the candidate’s body by its vestments. This external modification of the body is, however, a process that may alter the soul. Each of the pieces of the knight’s armor provides the body with means of defense or attack, but these amount to no more than a visible representation of the invisible process that is taking place: the pieces of armor are the theological virtues that dress the soul, and the sword mirrors the Christian cross. Knowledge of Nature, not unlike knowledge of natural relations, is an apparatus or strategy whereby a body of knowledge is mystically transmitted to a knight who aligns himself with an estate and officium of theological origin.

Don Juan Manuel’s reading is a strategy to separate the knight, or the noble, from the sort of subjection Alfonso imposes. This apparatus defines a power relationship that does not surpass the realm of the perceivable and therefore cannot be controlled either juridically or jurisdictionally. For Don Juan Manuel, the knighting ritual is also a sacramental act that emulates priestly ordination. As such, it does not define a social construction, but rather a holy office within a theological hierarchy. It bears remembering that his doctrine of the three orders and their sacramental aspects derives from a reading of the angelic hierarchy developed by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (ca. 500 C.E.). The elderly knight (now a hermit) who educates the squire in Juan Manuel’s book describes the investiture ceremony in a straightforward manner, as a way in which all bonds and systems of subjection and dominion are effectively eliminated: “la cavalleria a mester que sea y el sennor que da la cavalleria et el cavallero que la reçibe et la espada con que se faze. Et asi es la cavalleria conplida, ca todas las otras cosas que se y fazen son por bendiçiones et por aposturas et onras” [“chivalry requires that the lord who performs the knighting and the knight himself be present along with the sword with which the act is performed. Thus is chivalry fulfilled, and all else that takes place during the ceremony is meant to accrue blessings, adornments, and honors”] (Cinco tratados, 13).²⁴

The sobriety of the Libro del cavallero et del escudero (Book of the Knight and the Squire) shatters the Alfonsine ceremonial system and its corresponding juridical and political significance. Don Juan Manuel is mainly concerned with what might be termed a “clean” transmission: he who is a knight bestows knighthood upon one who is not, given that “este estado non puede aver ninguno por si sy otri non ge lo da” [“one cannot have this estate by his own will if someone else does not bestow it upon him”] (Cinco tratados, 13). In this conveyance of knightly status, however, the Book of the Knight and the Squire does not offer any explicit form of domination by the one who performs the knighting over the one who is knighted.

Over his nearly twenty-five-year writing career, Don Juan Manuel did not always hold the same opinion on the topics he wrote about. It seems reasonable to assume, for example, that in his no-longer-extant Book of Chivalry he accepted, albeit nominally, Alfonsine theories of chivalry. He soon reconsidered his position, however, as he sought increased independence for the nobility vis-à-vis central sovereignty and jurisdiction that the monarchy sought to establish. Between one ritual and the other, between that of Alfonso and that of Don Juan Manuel, a subject liberation movement is articulated, although in this case it is a noble subject, a rico hombre that hopes to safeguard his jurisdictional and political rights before a growing monarchic power. Don Juan Manuel is a noble who not only considers himself to be the king’s peer, but also sees himself as the only legitimate member of the royal genealogy who might still wear the crown.²⁵

A few years after having composed the greater part of his work on political theory (likely soon after 1335), Don Juan Manuel returns to the subject of chivalry in the Libro de las tres razones (Book of the Three Reasons). Here Don Juan Manuel distinctly observes the political turn that chivalry is taking through the efforts of Alfonso XI. For this king, as for his great-grandfather Alfonso X, chivalry can be wielded as a constitutional and institutional tool to dominate the nobility and consolidate monarchic power. It is this project that Don Juan Manuel aims to control while never acknowledging the king’s right to knight him.

In fact, Alfonso XI requests this right of Don Juan Manuel, along with other members of the high nobility in 1332. During his coronation ceremonies, Alfonso XI asked that all nobles allow themselves to be knighted by his hand and that they accept the system of subjection that such a ceremony imposed. Most nobles acquiesced, but Don Juan Manuel refused. He even went so far as to break the natural bond of vassalage that he had with Alfonso XI. In the Book of the Three Reasons. Don Juan Manuel explains the reasons why he cannot be knighted yet is able to knight others. This idea contradicts the principle that he advanced in the Book of the Knight and the Squire, which states that only knights can grant knighthood. His revised thinking amounts to a fracturing of chivalric rituals: he does not simplify them as he does in the Book of the Knight and the Squire; instead he completely erases them. Don Juan Manuel thus denies the potential universality of investiture, illustrating at least one case in which it cannot be applied. This exception constitutes the will to create a crisis of the law itself.

The debate surrounding chivalric investiture directly affects the highest ranks of the kingdom’s hierarchy. Historical documents frequently point out that as many nobles as commoners rejected knightly investiture.²⁶ These considerations are systematically accompanied by a description of the king’s program to transform the institution of chivalry. From another perspective, the construction of chivalry is also frequently accompanied by a description of its decadence. It refers to an alleged lack of rigor throughout texts that debate chivalry in both secular and clerical spheres, as it was invented and formalized both morally and legally to fulfill complex processes of social and political transformation by juridical, civil, and canonical means.

There is no other monarch in Castile and León who has more faith than Alfonso XI in the possibility of reordering his relationship with the nobility through chivalry. Don Juan Manuel radically differed from this position and is one of the nobles who disquieted the king (and the cities, as we will see later). Paradoxically enough, the knighting ceremony of Alfonso XI, perhaps the most well known of all Castile’s investiture ceremonies, does not aim to knight the king himself.²⁷ It should be read as the acquisition of a right and a state through which he may legally order the nobility by way of an investiture legally issued by his own hand. Not having been previously knighted himself, however, Alfonso would not have been able to knight the long list of nobles, among them powerful and ricos hombres, who are mentioned in the Crónica de Alfonso XI (Chronicle of Alfonso XI).²⁸

Knightly investiture imposes a dialectic between dependence and independence in the discourse on chivalry. It is a dialectic of domination that fractures the fixed hierarchy that the chivalric structure and its artifacts may impose on the double plane of knowledge (studium) and power (imperium).

It is exceedingly interesting that this dialectic of domination appears much more explicitly in a poetic work composed around 1370 and known as the Cantar de Rodrigo (Song of Rodrigo), or Las mocedades de Rodrigo. Through the use of poetic language and its capacity to be disseminated and to influence society, the depiction of Alfonso XI’s chivalric investiture is set forth in literary form, with the corresponding allegorical values, as was designed and narrated in the chronicles of the period. The Song of Rodrigo is a central text of the medieval Castilian canon that revolves around the character of the Cid and the assertion of his role as an independent vassal—although not a rebel vassal, as some scholars have claimed (Funes and Tenenbaum, Mocedades).²⁹ Modern scholars have paid insufficient attention to the role of this work in the formation of the legend of the Cid, perhaps because the poem has been consistently isolated from the codicological and textual context in which it was transmitted, a longer historical piece known as Crónica de Castilla o del Campeador (Chronicle of Castile or of the Cid).³⁰ To understand the poem’s place in fourteenth-century Castile, it would be necessary to ascertain the significance of a work that subsumes notions of political and feudal independence with a Castilian chronicle on the subject of the Cid. Considering the manuscript itself and its time and place of production, such an inquiry would shed light on the broader jurisdictional matters that concern the present chapter.

The Song of Rodrigo highlights a scene in which the Cid convinces King Fernando I (ca. 1010–1065) that he should emulate the former’s own independence. The text underscores here the issue of independence, immediately followed by instructions for the performance of coronation and chivalric investiture ceremonies:

Et quando lo sopo Rodrigo,

caualgo muy priuado.

Entre dia & noche a Çamora es llegado

al rrey se omillo. & nol beso la mano

Dixo “Rey mucho me plaze

por que non so tu uassallo

Rey fasta que no te armasses

non deujas tener Reynado

Ca non esperas palmada de moro

njn de christiano.

Mas ve velar al padron de Santiago

quando oyeres la missa

Armate con tu mano

et tu te ciñe la espada

con tu mano & tu desciñe como de cabo

[fol 196rb] e tu te sey el padrino

et tu te sey el afijado

Et llamate cauallero del padron de santiago

E seryas tu mj señor

Et mandarias el tu Reynado.

[And when Rodrigo heard this,

He rode off as fast as he could.

In one single night he arrived at Zamora;

He knelt down, but he did not kiss the king’s hand.

He said, “My king, this greatly pleases me,

Because I am not your vassal.

My king, until you are knighted,

You shall not have a kingdom.

Do not receive a hand from Muslim

Or Christian,

But go observe the vigil of arms in honor of Saint James.

When you have heard mass,

Knight yourself with your own hand,

And gird on your sword

In the same manner, and then

Ungird it afterward.

You will be your own godfather,

And you will be your own godchild;

Call yourself a knight of Saint James,

And you will be my lord,

And you will rule your kingdom.]³¹

The enormous littera notabilior (in red, with a height of four lines, in the Paris ms) punctuates a verbal formula that is simultaneously imperative and reflexive. The ármate [“knight yourself”] formula is the maximum expression of independence and at the core of King Ferdinand I’s dual acquisition. On one hand, by knighting himself following the ritual described in this text, Ferdinand acquires all the legitimacy of monarchic sovereignty, given that the ritual does not require him to form any bonds with an investor or patron who would ungird his sword. The second acquisition, the vassalage of the Cid, functions as a mythological reinforcement. In this act, the Cid, supreme figure of nobiliary independence from the monarchy, also becomes a vassal of a monarch who recognizes his version of power. By securing the vassalage of the Cid, who has previously refused to kiss the royal hand, he in turn secures that of all the high nobility and adds it to the increasing sphere of monarchic jurisdictional power.³²

The ceremony that the Cid describes has its foundation in the political issue raised in the corresponding section of Partidas 2.21. As declared by the Cid, chivalric investiture cannot be avoided; it is compulsory. This notion echoes the institutional rigor of the Partidas, which stipulates that the king’s coronation should follow his investiture. The compulsory nature of the ritual allows the monarch to construct the ordo, since he is the source and origin of this social class. The ordo descends from the king; it is an extension of his own body.

In Fernando’s case, however, it is necessary to modify the ritual to prevent the king from demanding fealty in ways that limit his independence. As the passage demonstrates, the ceremonial process of debt acquisition (in summary, girding on the sword, receiving a symbolic blow on the neck, and ungirding the sword) is decisive for the Cid. He wants to accept the good ritual, the legal ritual. Contrary to Don Juan Manuel, he is not interested in eliminating or deconstructing the ritual; he accepts its order and its political and juridical consequences. All he proposes is a substitution of subjects, or better yet a multiplication of the subject: it is the king who must adopt all the political personae who participate in the ceremonial process of investiture and accept as primary his natural bond with the apostle Saint James, patron of Spain.

Although Leonardo Funes and Felipe Tenenbaum have attempted to date the composition of the Song of Rodrigo to a period prior to 1300, it is difficult to disengage it from the chivalric project of Alfonso XI, at least on this aspect.³³ On the other hand, the determined influence of the Partidas could even lead us to date this part of the work (if not the primitive poem in its entirety) to around 1340 or later. Even the date of initial redaction proposed by Alan Deyermond—around 1360—seems perfectly plausible (Epic Poetry and the Clergy).³⁴

The specific date of the poem’s composition is not as important as how historical poetry engages political theory, and how an awareness of the two genres is constructed through the ceremonies. It is, ultimately, a language game—the linguistic and logical context where a particular semantics makes sense and is performed by the instances before whom an utterance has been produced. We can, therefore, keep in mind that the ceremony—the ideation and development of the apparatus—is in essence a semiotic investigation of the constituents that order themselves for its functioning. In this sense, the Song of Rodrigo constitutes an unusual epic text in which theories and forms of political independence are articulated according to legal documents whose vigor is either recent or soon to be enforced.³⁵

Within Alfonso XI’s literary circle, and in his knighting ceremony, the value of ritual is called into question, or at least submitted to very different theses. We find the most salient example in the Libro del cavallero Zifar.

The Libro del cavallero Zifar is a prose narrative first redacted sometime around 1330.³⁶ It narrates Zifar’s recovery of the monarchic state from which he descends. This loss and recovery mirrors the loss and recovery of his own family—his wife, Grima, and his two sons, Garfín and Roboán.³⁷ Once he has accomplished this recovery, through anagnorisis, the narrative focuses on the moral education that he provides his two sons, achieving a connection between the chivalric and pedagogical fable, the two genres that together form the theoretical structure for chivalry in the Zifar. The book also narrates the double knighting of Roboán, which poses political questions meriting further examination.

Roboán’s first knighting takes place as the result of the acknowledgment between Zifar (now recognized as the “Knight of God”) and his two sons. The ceremony is not explicitly described: “el rey los resçibio por sus vasallos, e fizolos caualleros con muy grandes alegrias segund el uso de la tierra” [“the king received them as his vassals, and he very happily made them knights according to the usages of the land”] (BNF Esp. MS 36, f. 72v). One of the manuscripts of this work, which may be dated near 1468 and currently found in the French national library (BNF Esp. MS 36), has close to three hundred miniatures in addition to the text. One of them, located on folio 72v, provides a graphic representation of the knighting ceremony, but the image does not correspond to any textual description of knightly investiture in Castilian. In this image, Roboán and Garfín are kneeling before their father, while he taps their shoulders with the tip of his sword. It is likely that the miniaturists—who were not part of any Peninsular workshop—did not have access to any textual version of the ceremony and depicted a popular image from their country of origin (likely somewhere in central Europe).

It is in the second knighting ceremony, when the emperor of Trygrida (also known as the “Emperor Who Does Not Smile”) knights Roboán, that the latter offers an explanation of the ritual by which his father has transformed him into a knight:

Preguntole el enperador de commo le fezieron cauallero, e el dixo que touo vigilia en la eglesia de Santa Maria vna noche en pie, que nunca se asentara, e otro dia en la mañana, que fuera y el rey a oyr misa, e la misa dicha que llegara el rey al altar e quel diera vna pescoçada, e quel çiño el espada, e que gela desçiño su hermano mayor.

[The emperor asked him how he had been knighted, and he said that he held a vigil in the Church of Saint Mary for an entire night on his feet and never sat down, and the following day, in the morning, the king went there to hear mass. Once mass was over, the king went to the altar and gave him a blow to the neck and girded his sword, and then his older brother ungirded it.] (Wagner, El libro del cauallero Zifar, 440)

Except for certain changes in order, this knighting ceremony is based on the section of the Partidas 1 have mentioned above. For the emperor of Trygrida, who doubts whether it is opportune to knight Roboán a second time, the description of the ceremony definitively convinces him to do so: “Agora vos digo, dixo el enperador, que puede resçebir otra caualleria de mi, ca grant departimiento ha de la costunbre de su tierra a la nuestra” [“‘Now I say to you,’ said the emperor, ‘that he can be knighted again by me, as there is a great difference between the customs of his land and ours’”] (Wagner, El libro del cauallero Zifar, 440).

The difference in ceremonial forms is not the only argument that the emperor employs to justify a new investiture. It is, however, the ultimate argument, summing up all others. The argument that the emperor submits appears precisely as he first manifests his desire to make Roboán a knight and his doubts regarding a second knighting ceremony. It is this argument that allows us to investigate the issue of the definition of relations and conflicts of power among which chivalry is given birth:

“Señor,” dixo el infante, “¿que es lo que pierde el cauallero sy de otro mayor cauallero puede resçebir otra caualleria?” “Yo vos lo dire,” dixo el enperador, “que non puede ser, por el vno contra el otro, quel non estudiese mal, pues caualleria auia resçebido del.” “¿E non vedes vos, dixo el infante, que nunca yo he ser contra el rey mi padre, nin contra vos por el, ca el non me lo mandarie nin me lo consejaria que yo fallesçiese en lo que fazer deuiese?” “Bien lo creo,” dixo el enperador, “mas ay otra cosa mas graue a que ternian los omes oio: que pues dos cauallerias auia resçebido, que feziese por dos caualleros.” “E çertas,” dixo el infante, “bien se puede fazer esto, con la merçed de Dios, ca queriendo ome tomar a Dios por su conpañero en los sus fechos, fazer puede por dos caualleros, e mas, con la su ayuda.”

[“Sir,” said the prince, “what does a knight lose in being knighted again by some greater knight?” “I will tell you,” replied the emperor, “that it cannot be done by one knight to oppose the other, he cannot act against one of his knighters on behalf of the other one and be without blame, since he had been knighted by him.” “And do you not see,” said the prince, “that I will never oppose my father, nor will I act against you on his behalf, because he would not order me, nor would he advise me to fail to do what I am obligated to do?” “I believe so,” said the emperor, “but there is a more serious matter that we should be aware of: if a man is knighted twice, he should act as two knights.” “Clearly,” replied the prince, “this can be done, with the mercy of God, because if a man wishes to take God as his companion in his actions he can do deeds as two knights, and even more, with His help.” “You should receive knighthood from your father and no other man.”] (Wagner, El libro del cauallero Zifar, 439)

Roboán’s answer is an affirmation of the loyalty he owes his father and natural lord. It is also a confirmation of the hierarchies to which the principles of natura and naturaleza are bound, as defined by Alfonso X in Partidas 4.24. The subjective and objective loyalties of the chivalric individual (father, lord, God) are above the solemnities of admission into knighthood. While the first are necessary, the investiture is totally contingent and can even be reduplicated. Family bonds, as interpreted by the individual, cannot be similarly modified.

The ceremony imposes a formal difference but does not amend the political contracts previously established by natural relations. The ceremony indicates a manifestation of affect, amor: the joy of the father upon recovering his sons and that of the Emperor Who Does Not Smile at finding Roboán—affect that is also political yet precedes the ceremony and could exist in its absence.

The political thesis posited in the dialogue between the emperor and Roboán concerns two different spheres of medieval power relations. It is the dialectic of natural bonds taking shape in the concrete space between familial and political bonds. We find several specific examples of this dialectic in the political events of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Castile, such as the rebellion of Sancho IV against his father, Alfonso X, which resulted in the latter’s loss of the throne. The knighting ceremony plays a crucial role in this case, since Sancho refuses to be knighted by his brother Fernando, as King Alfonso had ordered. Jaume I, the king of Aragon, advised Sancho to be knighted by none other than his father (“que predades cavalleria de vostre padre e no d’otro homne”), but the king does not knight Sancho.³⁸ A similar case of political and familial conflict dealing with chivalric investiture is that of the “denaturation” of Don Juan Manuel regarding Alfonso XI.

In light of these events and their concrete reality, the Zifar proposes a different dialogue, issuing from what might be described as au-dessus du réalisme (in Lévinas terms). The dialogue between the emperor and Roboán specifies a particular hierarchy of subjection that places chivalry beneath familial bonds. This is indeed an important thesis on the political limitations of chivalric investiture, whereby the transformation of the candidate at the time of the knighting ritual does not alter this subject’s affect toward his lineage. The ritual does not influence “vertical love,” an expression of the lineage’s genealogical hierarchy, or “horizontal love,” a manifestation of generational solidarity. These cannot be erased or restricted in their expression. The chivalric subject is modified, but not alienated from his history, his memory, or the contracted relationships that precede his admission into knighthood. This thesis counters sacramental theses, such as that of Alfonso X, Llull, or Don Juan Manuel, particularly the latter, where the knight who enters an ordo becomes a distinct subject (not unlike the ordination of the clergy) and must abandon all memory of his previous life.

The permanence of the chivalric subject’s individual affects, grounded in his history, memory, and lineage, is secure within the political discourse of the knightly corporations that concern both the nobility and the bourgeoisie. This chapter’s examination of the knighthood ritual allows the formulation of an important question: how is it possible to create a political and juridical apparatus designed to facilitate the construction of an ordo? This inquiry unveils myriad strategies and theses on the repercussions of the knighting ritual. Medieval Castilian writers, working from very different textual spaces, or perhaps exploring their own textual spaces in search of the best vantage point from which to view the problem, explore different theses on power relations, on domination, and on subjection that derive from each ceremonial proposal and knightly investiture.

Ultimately, the construction of the ordo is the creation of a social and political category. Regarding its form as well as its presence and mission within society, this category is crucial and has continued to be crucial since its creation. The creation of knighthood and chivalry through ritual, through this interior and exterior transformation of the chivalric subject, is also the creation of a subjectivity, an identity that has—throughout history and into the present—a political and moral mission of key manifestations in Western civic and moral relations.

The importance of this category explains the complex, extensive, and extraordinarily varied system of critiques and debates surrounding the creation of mechanisms of power and knowledge relative to chivalry. These critiques are frequently based on the enactment of a language game, of a “final vocabulary” (Rorty) that inserts into political tradition a manner of speaking about chivalry and about its political and juridical problems. On other occasions, the apparatus goes beyond setting a form of expression and advances a complete hermeneutics of rituals and their related forms.

In any case, this is one of the manifestations of the poetics of order, of the variations texts invoke to configure a power base underpinned by the concepts of sovereignty, domination, and subjection.

These poetics of chivalric order have a specific importance. They question nobility as a theological-political category. It is the hypostasis of theological nobility in civic nobility. While the former is uncreated and permanent, chivalry allows for a foundation of nobility, imposes a fundamental variation in the order of existence in society, and opens alternatives to the transformation of forms of dominion within the kingdom and, subsequently, within the state.

The chapters that follow will examine this scarcely studied dimension of chivalry that is fully integrated into a process of transformation manifested through a dialectic between nobility and bourgeoisie. As I will show, chivalry offers a privileged vantage point from which to explore this dialectic.