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
