Wargames

by Martin van Creveld

  Men, women, and wargames

  If it is true that many men like to watch a catfight, it is equally true that many women are by no means averse to watching men shed each other’s blood. In this as in many other things, women appear to have their feet more firmly planted on the ground than men. Men may be content with counters on a checkered board or else with virtual combatants shooting one another on the screen; but women prefer the real thing.

  To begin at the beginning, there may or may not have been any women present when David slew Goliath in front of the Israelite and Philistine armies assembled in the Valley of Ellah. Later, though, they celebrated his feat by chanting “Saul hath slain in his thousands, and David in his tens of thousands.” This, the Old Testament tells us, understandably made Saul “very wroth.”112 With great fights/nonsense fights the situation was very different: on such occasions women, while enjoying immunity, often were present. They were even expected to encourage their menfolk and assist them by holding the ring, serving refreshments, dressing the wounded, and the like. One suspects that, had they been absent, the fights would not have been nearly as popular as they appear to have been. Unfortunately it is too late to find out.

  In the single combat between Menelaus and Hector, Helen herself served as the prize. As the story about Sempronius’ wife going to the circus without his permission proves, Roman women loved gladiatorial shows as much as men did. The man about town and amatory expert Ovidius, who was a contemporary of Augustus, noted that the amphitheater was a good place for picking up girls. “As bees, having gained their dells and fragrant pastures, flit over the blossoms and hover over the thyme; so hasten the smartest women to the crowded games . . . They come to see, they come that they may be seen, to chastity that place is fatal.” So numerous were they that they made one’s head spin; one could approach them by helping them arrange a cushion, or else by setting a stool under a dainty foot.113 No less a person than Claudius’ fourth wife Agrippina is described as watching the bloody spectacle. To do so she was dressed in a beautiful gold-woven chlamys, a kind of military cloak. It was closed with the aid of a brooch or pin and was normally worn by active men; numerous sculptures show that it was often draped around the body in such a way as to conceal nothing. Whether, on this occasion, that was how Agrippina wore it is of course a little hard to say.114 The empress’s box was located right opposite that of the emperor. Other elite women had the very best seats, known as the summum maenianum in ligneis (Maennius’ top-ranking wooden balcony, called after the man who invented it) reserved for them. It was situated in such a way as to prevent the sunshine from spoiling their complexions.

  Another group of privileged female spectators were the Vestal Virgins, the priestesses of the hearth-goddess Vesta who had sworn to spend thirty years of their lives practicing sexual abstinence. In the theater they were assigned ringside seats. Of them, the fourth-century AD poet Prudentius has the following to say:115

  What a sweet and gentle spirit she has! She leaps up at each stroke, and every time that the victorious gladiator plunges his sword into his opponent’s neck, she calls him her sweetheart, and turning her thumb downward this modest maiden orders the breast of the prone gladiator to be torn open so that no part of his soul should be hidden, while the secutor looms above him, panting as he presses in with his weapon.

  Tertullian, in a famous passage already quoted in a different context, says that men committed their souls to the gladiators, and women both their souls and their bodies.116 There is plenty of evidence to back him up. Almost to a man, gladiators were social outcasts. This did not prevent them from receiving the kind of female attention nowadays reserved for actors, football players, and boxers.117 Graffiti found among the ruins of Pompeii have an eloquent tale to tell. “Cresces, lord of the girls” reads one of them; “Celadus, the Thracian who makes the girls’ hearts beat faster,” runs another. Aware of their attractiveness, some gladiators took on erotically charged names.

  According to Festus, a second-century AD grammarian, it was customary for newly wed brides to have their hair parted with the point of spear, preferably one which had been dipped in the blood of “a defeated and killed gladiator.” The link between the arena and sexuality is also brought out by a relief from Beneventum in southern Italy showing a heavily armored gladiator fighting an enormous penis. A somewhat mysterious metal object now housed at the archeological museum in Naples depicts a small male figure, a gladiator. He has a huge sexual organ: however, the glans is formed like the head of a ferocious dog with powerful jaws. The dog’s head points back towards the gladiator, threatening to bite him, while the gladiator is about to castrate himself by cutting off the head with the aid of a dagger. The exact significance of the contraption, from which four small bells are suspended, is unknown. However, the link between gladiators and the god Priapus is impossible to overlook.118

  One modern authority believes that the reason why high-class women were placed as high up in the amphitheater as they were – in the Colosseum, they had to climb at least 220 steps to reach their seats – was to prevent them from getting too close to the fighters.119 The jewelry of one such woman has been found in a school for gladiators at Pompeii where she was caught by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, prompting speculation as to what she might have been doing there – a secret tryst, perhaps? At least two empresses were involved with gladiators. One was Messalina, Claudius’ third wife. Famous for her promiscuity, she was said to have maintained a room in a brothel where she entertained men. Among them was a gladiator by the name of Sabinus. Cassius Dio says that he was defeated in the arena and that Claudius and the spectators wanted him killed. However, Messalina intervened, gave an eloquent speech on his behalf, saved his life, and went on to enjoy the fruits.120 The other was Faustina, daughter of the Emperor Antoninus Pius and wife of his successor Marcus Aurelius. She was said to have fallen in love with a gladiator whom she saw marching by in a procession. Unable to get near him, yet obsessed by him, in the end she confessed to her husband. He consulted the soothsayers who advised him to have the gladiator killed and make Faustina bathe in his blood before she slept with her husband. It worked, and the spell was broken. However, evil tongues claimed that the affair resulted in the birth of Commodus who himself acted, or pretended to act, as a gladiator.121

  For as long as the world has existed, one way in which members of the lower classes could revenge themselves on powerful men was by spreading scurrilous rumors about their wives. A millennium and a half after Rome’s fall, whether or not they were true is impossible to establish. What is clear is that the phenomenon was sufficiently widespread to attract the attention, not to say envy, of contemporary writers. They wondered, or pretended to wonder, just what the heroes of the arena possessed that caused women, even high-class women, to fall for them like flies on sticky paper. Juvenal has the following to say about this:122

  Whose youth and charm have loosed such passion

  In Eppia? For whom does she put up with mockery

  And bear the name of ‘gladiatrix’?

  Look, look: it’s Sergius. Hardly any beard left

  and declared unfit for combat,

  after one of his arms was severed in a fight.

  And there’s a lot else wrong with him besides.

  His skull has been dented by his helmet

  there’s a wart on top of his nose

  between two permanently wet, red and swollen eyes.

  But he was once a gladiator, and that confers such radiance

  That she does not care at all about fatherland, family,

  hearth and home,

  these are matters of indifference to her; she is in love

  with the iron of his sword, for if this idiot had

  not held a sword, she would never have pleasured him!

  We do not know who Eppia was. Yet she must have been a lady of some standing, or else the poet would hardly have bothered to write about her. Readers should also be aware that the last line carried a
punch because, in Latin, a sword (gladius) is slang for penis.

  As we have seen, many trials by combat also revolved around women, especially those who claimed to have been sexually attacked without adducing any evidence to back them up. Seeing that the whole of chivalric culture was built around war and women, the role the latter played in tournaments was equally great.123 Early hastiludes did not take place inside specially designated courts or arenas but in an open field, even spilling over into villages. Such arrangements were hardly suitable for spectators of any sex, male or female. Perhaps the first reference to the presence of women at a tournament may be found in Geoffrey of Monmouth. Writing in the first half of the twelfth century, he says that King Arthur once held a celebration at Caerleon in Wales. First there was a banquet. Next, a tournament took place “while the dames and damsels looked on from the castle walls.”124 The anonymous German Kaiserchronik (Imperial Chronicle), which was written around 1150, has a somewhat similar tale to tell. “One day the King [Tarquinius] wanted to celebrate. The Romans organized a large tournament. The news reached the town of Viterbo. Thereupon all the ladies mounted the battlements to watch. When the Romans saw the ladies they did their best to ride as well as possible, in order that the ladies would say what excellent knights they were.”125

  Both of these instances are clearly legendary. Equally clearly, they could not have been presented as historical if the presence of ladies at tournaments had not been commonplace. More evidence comes from Moriz von Craon, an anonymous German-language poem the earliest extant copy of which dates to around 1500. Apparently it is based on a much older story that was written down some two and a half centuries earlier. The events described in the poem took place, or were supposed to have taken place, during the 1170s. The beautiful Countess of Beaumont had already received various proofs of her eponymous lover’s devotion. Now she asked that he organize a tournament near her residence, justifying her request by claiming that she had never seen one. Moriz, good knight that he was, obliged, spending an immense amount of money in the process.126 One need not accept every detail as correct to realize that, as soon as the sport ceased to endanger their persons, ladies flocked to watch it and even sponsored it.

  The History of William the Marshal, written around the time of its hero’s death in 1219 but referring to events that took place during his youth forty years or so previously, may be the first historical account to mention women attending a tournament. We are told that, when William arrived at the Castle of Joigny in Burgundy, he found the countess and her ladies waiting for the planned tournament to start. To help keep them amused, he even performed a song. Once the assembled knights perceived the women coming out they could contain themselves no longer. Seizing their weapons, they threw themselves into the fight. Some ten years later this poem was followed by Heinrich von dem Tuerlin’s Diu Crône. We learn that the ladies handed over their jewelry to the knights so that they would deliver and receive powerful blows.127

  Another interesting custom first mentioned by von dem Tuerlin was that of handing over captured knights to the ladies for custody, presumably as a means of making sure that shame would prevent them from trying to escape. One knight, Peter von Stauffenberg, is specifically mentioned as doing so, lance in hand.128 By this time tournaments were no longer the wild unregulated battles they had originally been, but had long been turned into ordered affairs in which the risk to life and limb was much smaller. Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s Frauendienst dates to the middle of the thirteenth century. It purports to be both a first-person narration of the author’s deeds in serving women and a handbook for knights who desire to serve them. Among the very first activities mentioned is participating in tournaments: indeed the author claims to have done so no fewer than twelve times in the course of a single summer. He took on the strongest and most powerful in both collective and single combat, all so as to honor his lady, thanks to whose inspiration he won every bout. Only the onset of winter and cold put an end to the games, to the author’s great regret. His love, however, reminded him there were other ways in which he could serve her. On a later occasion he broke forty lances in a single tournament, which ended in making him “tired and as weak as a woman.”129

  Some women probably attended because family relationships and their own social status demanded that they do so. For example, in 1279 the English baron Roger Mortimer held a round table at Kenilworth, in Warwickshire, for a hundred knights and their ladies. Many others were present as vendors, seamstresses, and the like. Others still came in the hope of catching a husband, others still with less moral encounters in mind. Standing on the nearby castle wall or sitting on the specially built tribunes, or simply milling around, they watched the proceedings, stimulated their favorites by giving them tokens to wear or carry, and awarded prizes. When in a position to do so, they themselves organized the games. The English barons who sent a letter inviting William of Albine to participate in a tournament in 1250 did not forget to add that the victor would receive a bear contributed by “a certain lady.”130 Herzeloyde, the legendary queen in Parsifal, offered herself as the trophy. She ended up in the arms of Gachmuret, the mysterious, powerful, and incredibly rich giant who won the tournament.

  This does not seem to have been a unique episode. At a meeting held in Magdeburg (“maidens’ town”) in 1280, reputed to be the first one in which burghers rather than knights participated, the prize consisted of a prostitute, albeit that the intention seems to have been to reenact some historical episode rather than simply allow him who won her to enjoy her as he pleased. In 1331, so overfilled were the stands that carried Queen Philippa of Hainault during a tournament that they collapsed. She and her ladies-in-waiting fell on top of the knights, who were sitting further down.131 Philippa’s husband, King Edward III, is known to have issued specific orders for ladies to attend tournaments on at least three occasions. In 1342 five hundred of them were summoned to London to attend a series of jousts he was holding in honor of the Countess of Salisbury on whom, so rumor had it, he had developed a crush. Two years later he again called “women and girls (dames et demoiselles), knights and esquires, and everybody else, without excuse,” to participate in a great feast held at Windsor. The third occasion took place in 1358. The purpose was to celebrate the conclusion of peace with France. To honor King John II, who had been captured at Poitiers two years earlier and was still being held prisoner in England, he requested the presence of “the most beautiful and best-dressed ladies” of his realm.

  If knights were duty-bound to have lady-mistresses and serve them by participating in tournaments, ladies were obliged to watch them, encourage them, and love them. Certainly we may imagine that not all did so with enthusiasm. As Edward’s order that they and their menfolk attend “without excuse” shows, some probably resented the expense that was involved in finding the appropriate dress, making the journey, and paying for food and lodging. On the other hand, the opportunity that tournaments and the feasts with which they were associated offered for every kind of licentiousness was one very important reason why the church objected to them. Geoffrey IV de La Tour Landry (c. 1320–91), a French noblemen who in 1371–2 wrote a popular Livre pour l’enseignement des filles for the benefit of his daughters, has the following story to tell in this connection. A certain lady, well known for her love of pleasure, used to attend jousts on her own without her husband being present. On one occasion, the lights having gone out, she was seen in a corner with a knight. Though nothing had happened between them, her brother-in-law reported the incident to her husband who never trusted her again. The lesson that La Tour’s daughters were supposed to learn was clear. The atmosphere at tournaments was very conducive to sex, both licit and illicit. Respectable women in attendance should take the necessary precautions.132

  At Cambrai in 1385 both the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy attended a tournament held to celebrate the duke’s daughter’s marriage to the Count d’Ostrevant. The prize, Froissart says, was a clasp of precious stones taken
straight from the bosom of the duchess. Ladies also routinely gave tokens to knights to wear during tournaments (and, as various anecdotes reveal, real-life war as well). Particularly popular were pieces of clothing such as hats, mantles, chemises, sleeves, and veils. To encourage their favorite knights, ladies were even prepared to go about disheveled.133 As time went on, women’s role in tournaments tended to grow more important and more formal. They participated in the opening parades and in the mise en scène that surrounded the fighting, often taking the role of the tearful damsel in distress who had to be rescued from her wicked captor, human or animal. Calling his noblemen to participate in a tournament in 1395, King Richard II of England promised that:

  At those jousts, the noble ladies and damsels will give a horn garnished with gold to the knight who jousts best of those without; they will give a white greyhound with a collar of gold around its neck to the one who jousts best of those within. And the following Wednesday . . . the noble ladies will give a circlet of gold to the one who jousts best of those without . . . And the lady or damsel who dances best or leads the most joyful life . . . will be given a golden brooch by the knights.134

  Most of the time women’s role as prize-givers was probably symbolic, the real work of judging the outcome being left to learned specialists in the form of the heralds. However, from time to time they must have acted as actual judges, or else it is hard to see why Honoré Bonet in his Tree of Battles (1387) should argue against that practice.135

  Some of these medieval ladies went further still. They pressed their cavaliers to fight not only in tournaments and jousts but in the much more dangerous single combats and combats of champions too.136 Throughout the early modern period and down to the early years of the twentieth century quarrels involving women were among the most important ones over which duels were fought. That also applies to the last recorded duel of all, i.e. the 1937 one between Strunk and Krutschinna. Allegations of adultery, of course, were one cause. But so were sexual insults and insinuations: in short, anything that could cast doubt on a woman’s chastity and fidelity. Here and there a woman may have tried to prevent a man from fighting a duel for her sake, as Rousseau’s heroine Julie did.137 However, outside the pages of fiction such cases are hard to document. One early nineteenth-century English male writer begged “the mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters of the world” to banish “the habitual duelist” “who kills his man and triumphs over his maid” from their affections.138