The Persistence of the Warrior Tradition in the Last Years of the Middle Ages: The Example of the Pas d’Armes in Burgundy under Duke Charles the Bold
By Guillaume Bureaux
Conference Paper, International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 14 May 2016
Pas d’armes de Sandricourt
Introduction: Charles of Valois, the last Valois duke of Burgundy died after only seven years reign, in front of the wall of Nancy. Highly skilled warrior, Charles was a keen amateur of jousts and tournaments, which he practiced with talent until 1468. However, Duke Charles cannot be really considered as the paragon of the chivalrous virtues concerning the end of the Middle Ages. Irascible and impulsive, he was driven up by an ambition and a thirst of power without limit other than what allows him his imagination.
While he had just risen to power in 1467, he undertakes work of strengthening his power and his authority. In 1468, the new duke of Burgundy, Charles I, called the Bold, married the young Margaret of York, the sister of king of England Edward IV in Bruges. On the occasion of this marriage which allow Charles to exit definitively from the guardianship of King Louis XI and to assure his project of “Burgundian kingdom “, his brother, the Burgundian Bastard Antoine de Bourgogne organized the Pas of the Golden Tree.
Appearing in the last century of Middle Ages, the Pas d’Armes are a real example of the undeniable interest carried by the nobility of the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance in the arts of warfare and in literature. The Pas d’Armes was one of the most spectacular chivalrous entertainments and one of the most appreciated by the public. It is in reality an evolution of the joust in which one or several knights volunteer to keep a crossroad, a door or another symbolic place. To differ from the joust, the organizers publish chapters, or letters of weapons, several months in advance. They consisted of two parts, the first one coming to place the knights defenders and aggressors in a universe with magic and fantastic dominant, the second containing rules to be followed.
It is also necessary to note that the great majority of Pas place the knights in a fiction world, in particular regarding Arthurian legend, by means of chapters, present scenery around the lists and, naturally, costumes. But, how to explain the importance of these military games while French traditional chivalry was losing is effectiveness on the battlefield? The response is perhaps to be sought in the profoundly literary character of this noble exercise.
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