by Mike Ashley
Another feature that suggests that Wolfram was following a previous script and not creating one is that his Parzival, rather than coming from Thuringia or Bavaria, is from Anjou. Chrétien makes no specific reference to Perceval’s nationality. The implication is that he is either English or Welsh; indeed, most versions call Perceval le Gallois, “the Welshman”. Making him an Angevin links him not only to the ruling house of England and Normandy, but more pertinently to the previous ruling house of Jerusalem. Fulk V, count of Anjou (whose son Geoffrey was the father of Henry II), had become king of Jerusalem through his marriage to Melisande, when her father Baldwin II died in 1131. He was succeeded by Amalric I.
The combined forces of the west never managed to regain Jerusalem after the Third Crusade, and the so-called kingdom remained in disarray, refocusing its “capital” at Acre. Fulk’s line continued through his granddaughter Isabella, queen of Jerusalem, who married (amongst four husbands) Henri II of Champagne. After her death in 1205, at the time that Wolfram was writing Parzival, the kingdom passed through a sequence of daughters and husbands, until merging with the parallel kingdom of Cyprus.
In making Parzival an Angevin in search of the Grail castle, Wolfram was identifying the castle very clearly, to contemporary eyes, as a form of spiritual Jerusalem. It was not the same as Jerusalem, but was its spiritual counterpart. Parzival’s adventures, and those of a more earthly Gawain, become joint quests to achieve control of the spiritual Jerusalem. Wolfram succeeds admirably in making the one an analogue of the other. All readers of Parzifal at the time would know what he was saying: that only the most devout and perfect Christian could achieve the Grail and, by inference, win the Holy War.
Parzival may even have become a way of excusing the creation and growth of the chivalric orders of knights in the Holy Land, the Knights Templar and the Teutonic Knights. Wolfram reveals that the Grail Knights are the “Templars”, and that the Grail castle is a hidden fortress that governs the command of the west, sending out new lords to control tenantless lands. Wolfram’s use of the world “Templars” or, more accurately, Templeisen, need not automatically mean the Knights Templar, since he is referring in general terms to those who guarded the Grail temple. But since he also dressed them in white surcoats with red crosses, the connection is inevitable.
However, the concept of the Grail Knights that Wolfram develops goes beyond the Templars, and becomes analogous to another order. The Teutonic Order of Knights, founded in 1190 and based at Acre, had been transformed in 1198 from a medical to a military order within the Knights Hospitaller. Their evolution into an independent order that fought on behalf of Christian rulers against pagan nations did not fully develop until after 1211, when Andrew, king of Hungary, hired them to combat the Kumans. Thereafter, the Teutonic Knights separated from the Knights Hospitaller and became mercenaries fighting in the name of God to protect Christians and to convert the pagans.
Wolfram makes a clever connection in the story. The symbol of the Teutonic Knights was a white surcoat charged with a black cross, covered by a dark blue mantle. The knight who becomes the Guardian of the Grail, Feirifiz (the illegitimate son of Parzival’s father Gahmuret and the Arab queen Belacane of Zazamanc), is described as “particoloured”, looking rather like a zebra, being half white and half black.
The Teutonic Knights were established under the auspices of Amalric II, king of Jerusalem. He was the fourth husband of Fulk’s granddaughter Isabella, father-in-law of Gautier, Robert de Boron’s patron and half brother of Jean d’Ibelin of the Round Table. The Master of the Teutonic Knights, at the time they developed their militaristic role in 1211, was Hermann von Salza. His family were vassals to Hermann of Thuringia on the Eisenach estate, and Salza had accompanied the Landgrave to the Holy Land in 1197, along with Henri II de Champagne. Hermann of Thuringia’s son Ludwig married Elizabeth, daughter of Andrew of Hungary, whilst another son, Konrad, later became Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights.
There are too many coincidences here. Wolfram had finished working on Parzival by about 1210, concluding with the revelation that the Grail Knights secretly assisted dispossessed rulers against the pagans to protect the Christian faith. A year later, the new Master of the Teutonic Knights, who just happened to live on the estate where Wolfram was writing Parzival, set out to do exactly that in Hungary.
It is difficult to be certain which came first, as Wolfram may have been inspired by the concept of the Teutonic Knights, and worked their principles into Parzival. However, if Wolfram was also recounting his story of Parzival to Hermann of Thuringia, perhaps in the presence of Hermann von Salza, it suggests there must have been some interplay. I strongly suspect that Hermann of Thuringia used Parzival to help prepare the way for the new role of the Teutonic Knights by showing them as serving the holiest of purposes. The Grail Knights were not simply serving Christianity; they were protecting the Grail itself, the embodiment of Christ’s spirit on earth. Under Wolfram, the Grail castle had become, on a spiritual plane, what the Papacy was on an earthly plane.
It is worth reminding ourselves that Wolfram did not write a further Grail poem. Parzival is complete in itself. Although Arthur appears in the story, he has no significant role, although his nephew Gawain does, as an earthly counterpart to the spiritual quest of Perceval. Parzival is thus only a borderline Arthurian novel. Unlike Robert de Boron’s work, which was looking toward a reunited Roman-Byzantine Empire, Parzival was looking to a united Papacy, and therefore did not need the Arthurian denouement.
At the same time as Parzival was being created, another writer, unfortunately anonymous, was also working from Chrétien’s original and developing yet a third variant of the Grail story, usually called The High History of the Holy Grail, or Perlesvaus. It is a wholly allegorical version, far removed from Wolfram’s secret history. Whereas the works by Chrétien, Robert de Boron and Wolfram were commissioned by the noble heads of Europe to promote and justify their activities in the Holy Land, Perlesvaus has the feel of a work produced by a member of the church to promote the spiritual and ethical aspects of the Grail. That suggests it was written by a learned monk or cleric, which is probably why it has remained anonymous, with no court poet claiming his hand or his patron. Perlesvaus lacks the inventiveness of Robert de Boron’s work, the style of Wolfram’s and the charm of Chrétien’s, but what it has which those three lack is sincerity. It was composed by an individual who believed in what he was writing, not necessarily in a physical Grail, but in a spiritual goal. Perlesvaus was a book written not only to entertain, but to inspire and to provide a Christian foundation to the chivalric ideal.
Perlesvaus has some features that associate it with the Cathars, or Albigensians. It promotes the concept of self-determination, that an individual can transcend from earthly flesh, which the Cathars believed was corrupt, into the purity of the spiritual, through adherence to strict rules and disciplines. Because the Cathars did not conform to the church of Rome, they were considered heretics. This meant that Grail literature might also be considered subversive, but it appears that during this dangerous period everyone was preparing their own version of the Grail in order to achieve their own ends.
Because Perlesvaus gave a set of values in addition to a fascinating treatment of the Grail story, it provided a basis for the immense work that would come in the next decade, the most subversive and successful version of them all, the Roman de Graal.
6. The Vulgate Cycle
The success of the Grail stories, and the continued popularity of Chrétien’s work, meant that by the second decade of the thirteenth century Arthurian stories were tumbling from every direction. The pseudonymous Guillaume le Clerc saw the same potential for political comment as the Grail writers in producing his Scottish adventure Fergus of Galloway, whilst the equally pseudonymous Paien de Maisières produced a slightly bawdy Gawain adventure in Le Chevalier à l’Épée. Many new knights came forward to share the limelight in Wigalois, Meraugis, Yder, Jaufré, and so on.
The proliferation of stories showed that a bedrock of tales had always been there, just ripe for the taking, amongst the Welsh and the Bretons and it seems every court poet, most of them French, but also German, Spanish, Italian, and even Norwegian, had a dozen or more Arthurian tales in their repertoire.
In addition to these writers, deep in the heart of Poitou someone was creating a masterpiece. The Vulgate Cycle, as it is called, runs to over 1,800 pages in translation (and that’s just the first three books), and forms the basis of the Arthurian story as we know it. The title “Vulgate Cycle” is not very helpful; it was so named because of a similarity in form to the early Latin Bible, also called the Vulgate. More recently, scholars have called it the Lancelot-Grail, and it is steadily acquiring other names. My own preference is for these three volumes to be known as the Roman de Lancelot, but because the term Vulgate Cycle has become so attached, I shall still use that as and when suitable.
The first three books (later expanded to five) took a totally new approach. The author chose Lancelot as the central character, and the books tell of his life. The first book, Lancelot, tells of Lancelot’s background and birth, his upbringing by the Lady of the Lake, his arrival at Arthur’s court, his early adventures, including the capture of the Dolorous Garde, and his involvement in Arthur’s war with Galehaut, who becomes Lancelot’s firm friend. It also introduces Lancelot’s love for Guenevere, and his relationship with Elaine of Astolat, which leads to the birth of Galahad. Along with a few mystical experiences, these last two facts are key to the second volume, the Queste del Saint Graal. This starts with the arrival of Galahad at Arthur’s court, and the declaration by the knights that they would search ceaselessly for the Grail. The quest by Galahad serves as the framework for the quests by other knights, including Lancelot and Gawain, both of whom fail early, with only Bors and Perceval joining Galahad at the end. The third volume, Mort Artu, continues from the conclusion of the Grail quest, with the return of Bors to Arthur’s court to tell the story. It charts the downfall of Arthur, from the plots by Agravain and Mordred to unveil Guenevere’s adultery, the fracturing of the Round Table, the wars between Arthur and Lancelot, Mordred’s usurpation of the throne, to the Battle of Camlann and the last days of the knights.
Although each book shows a different style, suggesting that they were written by different authors, there is a unified scheme to all three, which led Jean Frappier, writing in Loomis’ Arthurian Literature In The Middle Ages, to suggest that the three books had an “architect” who plotted them all, and may even have written the Lancelot, but did not write all three. Curiously, the Lancelot is the one volume that has a separate life. There is an earlier version, Lancelot do Lac, which is not as long as the Vulgate Lancelot, taking events only as far as the end of the war with Galehaut, but which is otherwise identical. This was written only a few years before the Vulgate trilogy was started, and it’s difficult to know where to draw the line. It is possible that Lancelot do Lac is a draft or early version of the Vulgate Lancelot, which was then extended when the Vulgate Cycle was conceived. We may well, therefore, have four authors, one of whom was also the grand “architect”. First came the author of the original Lancelot do Lac, then the author who continued it as the Vulgate Lancelot (also known as the Lancelot Proper), and finally the two separate authors of the Queste del Saint Graal and the Mort Artu.
Curiously, all three books ascribe their authorship internally to Walter Map, yet all modern day scholars (with the exception of Noel Currer-Briggs) are adamant that Map could not have written them. There are three reasons for this. Firstly, Map was dead by 1209, and most evidence suggests that the Vulgate Cycle was not started until 1215 at the earliest. Secondly, the stories show a limited knowledge of Wales and southern Britain, but a thorough knowledge of Poitou, where the trilogy is believe to have been composed. Thirdly, all three books are written from a Cistercian viewpoint and Map was vehemently anti-Cistercian. This last point is crucial to an understanding of the development of the Arthurian romance.
Map was born in or near Hereford, sometime around 1137. He regarded himself as English by birth but Welsh by association, and was probably of Welsh descent. He studied in Paris from 1154 to 1160, and thereafter was a clerk and justiciar to the court of Henry II, before becoming a canon of St. Paul’s (and later of Lincoln and Hereford). He was Henry’s representative at the Third Lateran Council in 1179, where he spoke out against the Waldensians (the followers of Peter Waldo who had denounced all wealth and may be seen as amongst the earliest Protestants). He was made archdeacon of Oxford in 1197, the post previously held by another Walter, the man who gave Geoffrey of Monmouth the “ancient” book to translate into Latin.
Map is known to have written a variety of works, but all that survives that is unarguably his is a collection of miscellaneous notes called Be Nugis Curialium (“Courtier’s Jottings”), consisting mostly of anecdotes and gossip, with Walter’s wry observations on court life. It includes some poems and folk tales, and though there is nothing overtly Arthurian, there are short tales such as “Filii Mortue”, about a knight who grieves after his wife’s death but is then delighted to find her amongst a fairy host, which seems to have been the basis for the Breton lai, Sir Orfeo. That makes it possible, though not certain, that Map may have collected other folktales, and perhaps even composed items upon which later Arthurian stories were based. It has been claimed, though with no evidence, that Map may have written a Lancelot poem upon which Lancelot do Lac is based. Since the rest of the Vulgate Lancelot grew from the Lancelot do Lac, it might explain why Map’s name is mentioned in the text. With Map’s delight in court gossip, the idea of a story of adultery between queen and knight might have appealed to him. As Map served in the court of Henry II and Queen Eleanor, the subject of Arthurian tales would almost certainly have arisen.
So, all the circumstantial evidence is there, but it is sadly lacking in hard facts. Most damning of all is that Map was a close friend of Gerald of Wales, who, as we have seen, had written ingratiatingly about the exhumation of Arthur’s remains at Glastonbury. Gerald refers to Walter several times in his writings, and it seems remarkable that Gerald makes no mention of Walter having written anything Arthurian. We must therefore concede that it is very unlikely that Walter Map wrote any of the Vulgate Cycle.
The question remains: why was this work attributed to him? Did his name give it a certain authority? Did he perhaps keep some records or other information that formed the basis of the cycle? I mentioned that Map attended the Lateran Council in 1179. Also there was William of Tyre, now archbishop, who had come to seek the Pope’s support for a new Crusade. This was only a few months after Philippe d’Alsace had visited the Holy Land and met William. With Map’s interest in folk tales, it is possible that he and William discussed similar matters. Noel Currer-Briggs is convinced that they did, and that Map composed the Lancelot Proper and the Quest del Saint Graal between 1183 and 1189 (when Henry II died), and the Mort Artu sometime after 1192, when he had finished De Nugis Curialium.
I am not convinced that Map wrote them. The variance in style is sufficient to suggest different authorship, but also there is something in what survives of Map’s writings to suggest that he was not the type to write such a huge, sustained work. Someone who writes courtly jottings and anecdotes as much for fun as for any other purpose seldom produces a complicated, labyrinthine work of such magnitude. Also, someone renowned for speaking out against heretics and anyone who defied the Church would not then write a mystical, revelatory work containing some of the principles of those heretics.
This brings us to the matter of the Cistercians. Map’s writings include several anti-Cistercian comments, primarily because he stood for the orthodox status quo and against any schism or fragmentation. However, his main argument against the Cistercians was their use of military force. He actually denounced them at the Lateran Council, remarking that, “Christ had forbidden Christians to use force and by using force the Templars had lost all the territ
ory that the apostles had won by peaceful preaching.” Map’s argument was not against the Cistercian movement as such, but against what they had become.
The success and evolution of the Cistercians had been fast, and was due primarily to Bernard of Clairvaux (for whom the famous monastery and the breed of mountain dog are named). The Cistercians had been founded in 1098 by Robert of Molesme, who was related to the counts of Champagne. Robert had become dissatisfied with the practices undertaken by the Benedictines, obtained a dispensation to undertake reforms, and set up a new religious order at Cîteaux. Bernard joined the order in 1112, bringing a new vitality and charisma with him. New foundations were established, including one at Clairvaux in 1115, of which Bernard became the abbot. It was Bernard who championed the Knights Templar. At the Synod of Troyes in 1128, Bernard succeeded in securing official recognition of the Order and drew up the organisation’s rules.
The first Cistercian pope, Eugenius III, was elected in 1145, and it was in response to his demands that, in the following year, Bernard made a rousing speech in the presence of Louis VII and Queen Eleanor, promoting the Second Crusade. Louis prostrated himself before Bernard and “took the Cross”, a stage-managed affair if ever there was one. The Second Crusade was a disaster and Bernard, not understanding how it could have failed, believed it must be because of the sins of the Crusaders. He vowed to lead a new crusade himself, but was eventually talked out of it because of his ill health. He died soon after.
Over the next fifty years, the heads of the Cistercian order became more active and violent. Their condoning of the destruction of Constantinople in 1204 was another blot on an already saturated copybook.
Unfortunately, worse was to come. One of the heretical movements threatening the Catholic church were the Cathars, who claimed themselves as the “pure” ones, and railed against the corruption of the Catholic clergy and the pompousness of church doctrine. The Pope was determined to eliminate them, but all attempts failed. The last straw came when the Papal legate, Peter of Castelnau, was murdered in 1208, at the instigation – it was believed – of Raymond, count of Toulouse. The Pope sanctioned revenge and in 1209 Simon de Montfort, who was acting on behalf of the abbot of Cîteaux, Arnaud Amaury, seized Raymond’s lands. The entire population of Béziers, over 20,000 men, women and children, were slaughtered. When de Montfort hesitated and asked the abbot how he would identify the heretics, Arnaud famously replied: “Kill them all. God will recognise His own.”