the period between 1300 and 1350—that is, the reign of Alfonso XI of Castile and León. Nonetheless, since most of the problems associated with chivalry during this period arose between the end of the twelfth century and the end of the thirteenth, this earlier period will be our inevitable frame of reference. Likewise, certain political issues regarding urban chivalry and monarchical power, as well as the transformations of chivalry between 1300 and 1350, regarding urban chivalry as well as monarchic power, only come to the fore in later periods and we will also take those into account.
Chapter 1 delves into rituals of chivalric incorporation and into the political, juridical, and cultural apparatus articulated through these rituals. This chapter begins with the first Castilian rituals, which take place in the twelfth century, and covers the various issuances of new ones until the mid-fourteenth century. The analysis of these rituals will evince the political strategies present in the various theses of entry into knighthood.
The reign of Alfonso XI of Castile began with a regency council who governed on behalf of the king. In an attempt to negotiate a degree of power and to secure protection from the regency council and other high-nobility authorities, several Castilian cities organized a “Hermandad de Caballeros” (Brotherhood of Knights) in 1315. This brotherhood produced a document that details rules for its assertion of power, titled Cuaderno de la Hermandad de Caballeros (Manual of the Brotherhood of Knights). Chapter 2 analyzes this Cuaderno as a method of regulation of chivalric structures and citizenship within its jurisdictional spheres.
The Hermandad of 1315 comprised a network of cities linked by knighthood. Urban chivalry launched other initiatives, however, that endeavored to set the location of its power within the city. Chapter 3 analyzes such congregations in the city of Burgos, specifically the Cofradía de caballeros de Santa María de Gamonal and the Cofradía de caballeros de Santiago (Confraternities of the Knights of Santa María de Gamonal and of Santiago). This chapter will show how the sway over urban space is asserted and the projection of chivalric citizenship positioned vis-à-vis monarchic sovereignty. These unique confraternities were not led by knights from the noble classes but by the caballería villana, or urban bourgeois knights.
The king’s creation of chivalric orders arose simultaneously during this period. The great royal prerogative—which for many years provided a vindication for monarchical authority and absolutism—had resided in the capacity to create nobility, gradually effacing the limits of theological nobility. The king had used knightly investiture initially as a method for the creation of nobility. This bond between monarchical power and knighthood was indeed the lion’s share of royal sovereignty. The importance of the king’s creation of chivalric orders and its relationship to the knightly organizations of different origin is best apprehended in this context. The first noble chivalric order of monarchical origin in Europe is the Order of the Sash, created and organized by King Alfonso XI of Castile. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze this order through extant documents, particularly its regulatory manuscripts.
Chapter 6 addresses the external markings that established chivalric presence in both space and time: heraldic emblems. The vast majority of knightly narratives and regulations center around the production of a seal—the chivalric emblem—generally studied from a functional or descriptive perspective. This chapter identifies the political strategies that advance the poetics of the emblem to show how each one proposes its own version. This chapter, like Chapter 1, exceeds the chronological scope defined for this study, since the apparatus of the emblem, just like that of the ritual, is of an archetypal nature that defies geography as well as history.
The conclusions of the book will elucidate the numerous questions that still arise out of the theses developed by my research, underscoring one in particular: the relevance of this poetics of the chivalric order to the construction of the political structures of modernity.
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,
