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
