Four sets of obligations
Chivalric writers and churchmen repeatedly returned to the same questions. How should a knight treat a man he has defeated? What does he owe to prisoners? What are his duties to the church? And what protection should he give to people who cannot fight? The answers were never fixed in law, and they varied by region and period, but certain expectations recur often enough to describe.
Toward opponents
In open fighting between knights, the ideal was honorable combat: fighting openly, not by deceit, and respecting an opponent’s courage. Poems and romances admire a knight who refuses to strike a man who is unhorsed or unarmed, or who offers an enemy a chance to recover. In tournaments, which were organized contests, rules about fair play, equal weapons and the conduct of the lists were more detailed than anything found in war.
War was different. Medieval commanders used ambushes, feints, raids and sieges, and these were considered legitimate. Surprise and cunning were often praised in a commander. Chivalry did not forbid them as a general rule. What was frowned on was breaking a specific promise, such as a truce or a safe-conduct, or attacking by treachery after offering friendship. The distinction between clever strategy and dishonorable betrayal was a matter of opinion and often depended on who was telling the story.
Another expectation was that a knight would not flee in disgrace or abandon companions. Yet knights also fled when battles were lost, and chroniclers do not always condemn it.
Toward captives
Capture was common, and the treatment of prisoners is where the practical and the ideal were closest. A knight who surrendered could generally expect to be held for ransom rather than killed, provided he yielded to someone of rank and the fighting was not a desperate or bitter one. The captor often had a financial interest in keeping the prisoner alive and in good health, and prisoners of high rank might be treated as guests. The famous case of Richard captivity and ransom, when the English king was held after returning from the Crusades, shows both how large the sums could be and how political such arrangements became.
Customs about ransom were widely recognized, and in the later Middle Ages disputes about who owned a prisoner could end up before authorities. Prisoners were expected to keep their word, for instance by paying the agreed sum or returning to captivity if released on parole. A prisoner who broke his parole was seriously disgraced.
Yet the protection did not apply to everyone. Common soldiers, crossbowmen and enemy civilians were less likely to be spared or ransomed. Slaughter of prisoners happened, sometimes on the battlefield for practical reasons. The killing of prisoners at the Battle of Agincourt is one well-known episode that chroniclers discussed, with some condemning it and others defending it as a military necessity. Historians still debate the circumstances.
Toward the church
The church had long sought to restrain warriors. Knights were expected to respect churches, clergy and church property, to refrain from attacking them, and to support religious institutions with gifts. Movements known as the Peace of God and Truce of God, which began in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, tried to protect clergy, peasants and certain days of the week from violence. Their success was partial, and their enforcement relied on oaths and the threat of spiritual penalties.
Knights were also expected to defend the faith. This ideal fed into the Crusades and the formation of military orders such as the Knights Templar, in which fighting and religious vows were combined. At the same time, knights regularly clashed with the church over land and taxes, and some plundered monasteries. The idea of respecting sacred spaces was often honored in theory and broken in war.
Toward the weak
Widows, orphans, clergy and the poor appear again and again in descriptions of whom a knight should protect. Some of this reflects a genuine Christian duty to assist the helpless; some reflects the more practical role of a lord, who protected those under his authority in exchange for service and rent. Writers also urged knights to avoid oppressing peasants.
The reality was harsher. In wars, the people who suffered most were often villagers, whose crops, animals and homes were targets. Raids designed to ruin an enemy’s lands, as in the chevauchee raids of the fourteenth century, deliberately harmed civilians, and few contemporaries thought this violated chivalry because the victims were enemies rather than ones the knight was meant to protect. Some chroniclers did express horror at specific atrocities.
Women also featured in the ideal. Knights were supposed to treat noblewomen with respect and not to harm them, but real treatment varied, and sieges and conquests sometimes involved violence against women.
Common lapses
Taken together, the following lapses are frequently mentioned in sources:
- Breaking oaths and truces when convenient.
- Plundering churches and monasteries.
- Killing or mistreating prisoners, particularly of lower rank.
- Harassing peasants, demanding unlawful payments or seizing goods.
- Pride and quarrels over precedence that led to needless deaths.
None of this meant the expectations were fictitious. Reputation was valuable, and a knight known as a promise-breaker could find it harder to be trusted, to win allies or to receive ransom terms. But the pressures to behave well were strongest when others were watching and when equals were involved.
A cautious summary
The expectations described above should be understood as tendencies and ideals, not rules that bound every knight in every circumstance. Evidence for them comes largely from sermons, poems and chronicles, which sometimes idealize and sometimes condemn. The safest conclusion is that knights were expected to show restraint toward equals and respect toward the church, and that those expectations were frequently overridden by war, rivalry and self-interest.