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,
