Escapism and Absolutism

Remarks on the End of the Middle Age

There are a few conflicts which we could consider the “closing conflicts” of the middle ages: the Hussite Wars, the Wars of the Roses, the Venetian Wars against the Turks, the Burgundian Wars, at the latest the Italian Wars. But no conflict, simply due to the timespan it covers, shaped the late medieval landscape quite as much, culturally if anything, as the Hundred Years’ War, therefore we will speak of that.

It was the last great medieval conflict. By its end, in 1453, the Renaissance, the Quattrocento, soi-disant, art and economic historians will have us know, was already taking firm root, the middle ages had already ended; the north, not firmly paralleling this development, lagged behind only by a few decades. By the war’s end, too, the doctrines of warfare in Italy and parts of Central Europe had shifted significantly: new infantry formations, the halberd, soon the massed pike formation ruled the battlefield, and in 1477 in rainy Nancy, Charles le Téméraire, one of the last rulers worthy of chivalric epithets, was killed like a boar by a Swiss peasant’s pike.

But the Hundred Years’ War, while in full swing, at its height, was fought with more grandeur. Crécy, Poitiers, etc.: battles in which, at least ideally, armies of knights, of horseback noblemen, of the chevaliers, clashed in “formal perfection”, clad in shining armour. Or not?—When we survey the conflict in the retrospect we do see these stereotypical medieval-knightly clashes, sure, but we also see, most of the time, a conflict characterized by formless, neverending chaos.

For over a hundred years, certainly with interruptions, the full potential of medieval violence was unleashed upon France, and this primarily meant: pillaging, robbery, famine, rape, tax revolts, feuds and revenge. This reality of violence, which predominantly targeted the “civilian population” of the time but also spared no nobility, and blurred the conflict lines, was contrasted with an ideal of chivalry, of the horseback noble knight, that had to be fundamentally led ad absurdum by this war, its duration, and the manner in which it was primarily conducted with increasingly new military means. One could think of the devastating effect of the longbow, almost mythical, or of the relative impotence of the chivalric cavalry at Agincourt, towards the end of the war, of the butchered nobles during the Jacquerie of 1358, or of the villages ravaged by the plague, or the brutality of the Armagnac mercenaries.

Perhaps it could be claimed that the war was “democratized” through technical and tactical means; it, at least, left less and less room for the individual heroism of the chivalric ideal. The chivalric ideal can not be sensibly upheld when villages are being burned (outside of crusading operations), taxes are being extorted, people are suffering in wretched, disease-ridden sieges, or when knights are slaughtered and mowed down by peasants with bows or pointy sticks. A disillusionment had to set in, accompanied by a fatigue with the war itself.

This chivalric ideal was a coproduct of courtly life, so much so that W. Paravicini, this fine scholar, can speak of a “chivalric-courtly culture” in toto; a culture in which chivalry and courtliness are interdependent, most evident in something like troubadour poetry.—But what happens when the battlefield, or, to be more precise: the lack of a real battlefield shows the chivalric ideal to be meaningless? What is left in that case? A purely courtly culture, Paravicini would contend. And this is the development we can observe over the course of the 15th century: the chivalric aspect is pushed aside and courtly culture is reformed.

Reformed?—The “deknightification” of courtly life, a result of the awareness of the discrepancy between ideal and reality (an awareness that points to the impending end of the Middle Ages as such), means, in practice, the abandonment of a warrior ethos in favour of new forms of courtliness: the refinement of courtly life, the formalization of all social interactions, and the containment of the inflammability and childishness of the medieval mindset, as Huizinga describes it, within the conventions of a new societal conduct. The best man was no longer the best and most honourable warrior for war itself was no longer conductable honourably.

Thus, perhaps the following picture emerges: The experience of ongoing war not only rendered the ideal of chivalry practically absurd, but also gave rise, within the dissolving knightly-noble class—in France, but especially in Burgundy, particularly after 1415, and later under Charles VII and Philip III—to a deep “weariness”, a certain fear of life, and a general tone of melancholy. Huizinga specifically points this out and provides dozens of examples of complaints about suffering and despair, which have been passed down to us, especially from the heralds of the Burgundian court.

Gurevich also emphasizes the popularity of narratives of decline and decay. These narratives of decline in the late Middle Ages were qualitatively different from those familiar to us from the High Middle Ages, from the Troubadours, from Minnesang, for they were distinctly secular tales of decline, not religious ones. The idea of a Staufer emperor slumbering in the mountains just to reemerge as saviour, or other salvationist narratives, become rare, become untenable to the courts of the late middle ages. The late Middle Ages, the era of the Western Schism and the loss of trust in the papacy, thus also appears to us as an era with at least a slight tendency toward secularization, an emerging “worldliness of culture”, quo Arnold Hauser.

Worldliness and weariness, the courtier’s lot.—In contrast to the formlessness of war, the lack of meaning to be derived from the church, and as a compensation for one's own melancholy, a counter-world is erected, a dream-world, a “special pacified space”, quo Paravicini, almost a playground in which life is increasingly formalized to withstand formlessness: the court.

The court manages to save a part of the chivalric ideal, which is more and more a secular ideal, in the directives and principles of the courtly art of living.—The figure of the Höfling, the courtier, the cortegiano, which we see in its earliest and most perfect form in 16th century Italy, in Urbino, in Milano, absords and replaces, sublates the figures of the knight.

But the courtier is a man behind walls, the court is walled-off.—An isolation from reality, born from pessimism, leads to self-centeredness; and only self-centered can the court develop into the “style-forming center”, quo Elias, the originating space for both political and cultural activity, a center that no longer needs to compete with the church or the city, as was the case with the loosely structured proto-courts of the High Middle Ages.

The competition with the city, which, with its monetarily-based patricio-meritocratic system, with its economic might and “bourgeois rights”, always threatened to level the feudal social structure. In Italy and in parts of Germany it managed to do so, mostly short-term, sometimes long-term. But the court was the perfect tool to nullify the influence of the city, extracting, diverting power.—In the pacified space of the court, which is neither the military conflict space of the land nor the economic conflict space of the city, influence, and thus power, was the product not of the most successful man, but of whoever most perfected the art of living.

A new art of living influenced by older models of the troubadours and courtly love traditions—a striving for a more beautiful life, playing, almost role-playing, a chivalric heroic idea that had no real lasting foundation and could not have one—emerged.—Literature, music, and painting flourished at courts in Dijon, Bruges, and Paris; tournaments, more removed from warfare than ever, were grander than ever; courtly love, which reached its peak in the High Middle Ages, finds new representatives and forms, poetry manages to progress; the arts of heraldry, vexillology are perfected alongside ceremonial protocols, squabbling over ranks, precedence, procedure.—But is this not all compensation, escapism?—We can sense in all of this the secular darkening, the pessimism, the melancholy. We can see in the grandeur the isolation, the meaninglessness in the face of social dissolution. But we can also see the woes of a birth.

The birth of the absolutist-modern state, for this is what it ultimately comes down to —a state in which both political decisions and developments in taste are fundamentally centralized, bound to a courtly locus, no longer influenced by informal networks but by comparatively clear, ceremonially-presented hierarchies, performed in a culture of presence—can perhaps be understood as the result of a chivalric escape from the world, a chivalric flight from the formlessness and brutality of the Hundred Years' War into the perfection and refinement of a revived courtly life.

In summa: (early) modernity is born from the attempt to escape the rise of modernity by reenacting older courtly forms, an imitation that, like all imitation, inevitably creates something new.—But what is new in this? Civilization is new. What we call “civilization” today, a certain ethics, a collection of mores, of manners, of views, of tastes, is the long-term end-product of courtly life, as Elias surveys. It wouldn’t be correct to call whatever the middle ages had, as an organic growth, a “civilization”. The early modern court is craftsman of the civilizational artifice.

At court, where the entire nobility is concentrated in a comparably small space and manners are negotiated, minds are refined, perceptions sharpened, self-control is demanded, and dignity is celebrated, something arises that had, in Europe, no real precedent.—The ceremonial order, as noted, takes shape; politics and the economy (primarily the tax apparatus) are, to modernize warfare, to extract resources, and favor the “competition of extravagance” (for generosity was one of the first virtues of a seigneur) at court, increasingly rationalized, and thus handed over to the bourgeoisie, which, if it wanted to stay relevant, had to leave the neutralized city and become a cog of the court: the birth of bureacracy.—But the minor nobility, too, had to arrange itself, deprived by an increasingly powerful central state apparatus of much of its independence, which it had asserted on the land, outside the reach of the bodies of older decision-making, thus also alienating it from its original function as a local ruling and warrior class. A primarily ceremonial court nobility arises; the nobles that couldn’t “courtify” fell down to the rungs of the nascent bourgeoisie (sometimes to reemerge victoriously centuries later).

In the end, we see, in nuce, the (early) absolutist state, a state that was slowly conceived or negotiated by pessimistic dreamers and would-be knights behind thick walls in peaceful islands amidst a sea of war, to indulge in the art of the beautiful life. One might even, in that case, describe the absolutist state as a product (and not just producer) of a certain decadence.