The poetics of the ordo, or poetics of the order, is the textual enactment that will lead to the creation, construction, and configuration of a social class.1 In the Middle Ages there were no social classes per se—or at least none that were consonant with the notion of social class that arose in the West following the revolutionary periods of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An ordo is the basic concept used in the Middle Ages to designate a self-contained social group with a well-defined sociopolitical role. An ordo is also known as an estate; indeed, in medieval Spanish the term estado is more frequently used than orden.2
Nevertheless, the concept of ordo that will be used in this book differs from the exact concept of ordo often theorized during the Middle Ages. The aim of this book is not to build a particular theory of ordo, and, likewise, it is not a research on Medieval theories of ordo. Therefore, there will be little accord between the concept of ordo with which we will work in this study and the one engaged by Georges Duby in his classic Les trois ordres (1973) or, more recently, by Francesco Maiolo in Medieval Sovereignty (2007), where he analyzes the theoretical, political, and legal aspects of ordo in the Italian fourteenth century—taking Marsile of Padua and Bartolo of Sassoferrato as a point of departure. This book explores pragmatic theories on how an ordo is created, instead of advancing an already codified theory to which it must conform on a conceptual level.
It is necessary to reassess the notion of social class, since the shift between social class and ordo plays an implicit yet critical role in this book. An ordo is predicated on its own containment, following the theological hierarchical principle that engendered it—the Celestial hierarchy by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite—and was adopted by feudalism later on. This principle informs the familiar medieval aphorism that dictated that every man must remain in his estate. An ordo is not a description of any given or ideal society, but rather a topology of society, a theory of its limits and frontiers. It not only delineates what belongs to the subject, but also what is beyond its reach. A social class, on the other hand, is dialectical and comparative; incessantly questioning its own limits or even the assumption that it is a container that can be socially defined. The key focus of this study is the displacement between ordo and class. In the documents studied here the poetics of the ordo questions whether it is a social container with defined limits, thereby forcing it into a dialectic.
There inheres in this dialectic an unbounded respect toward the concept of order and, consequently, toward the segregation of a society divided into orders. It would be difficult to find a text or other cultural object that proposes the dissolution of society’s orders—or of the social model based on the concept of order. Any social dialectic articulated around the poetics of the ordo has order itself as its referent: class, category, and structure are not subject to destruction or deconstruction. Neither does the poetics of the order seek to advance an alternative social system to that of the ordo, or of the state. Rather, its inquiry attempts to read between the folds of the existing system. The dialectics of order is not exterior, but interior to the very concept of order.
The reason for this respect of a system of order as a social model, lies in the ways in which the concept of ordo is used as a compass to seek peace. Peace and order are in a reciprocal relationship: any form of peace is order and order is fundamental for any form of peace. Peace is at the root of medieval political theology, owing to the wide influence of Augustinian thought throughout the entire Middle Ages and beyond. It is perhaps the concept that most clearly illustrates political theology: existence—the act of being—in any possible domain, is depicted in Augustinian theory as politics, as civilian life. Civilian life is thereby underwritten by a typology of nine categories of peace that range from the particular (inner peace) to the most general (eternal peace).3 Heavenly Jerusalem and earthly Jerusalem—the city of God and the city of men—are mutual projections of each other: earthly Jerusalem is modeled after the heavenly version, but the population of heavenly Jerusalem depends on the actions of earthly beings. Giorgio Agamben has expressed this idea in a phrase that echoes Augustinian politics and metaphysics: “Politics therefore appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living and the logos is realized.”4 In this case, the threshold is the Augustinian concept of peace defined as order.
Originally, the ordo was like a contract allowing pacification. In medieval vocabulary, peace is etymologically related to the idea of pact: it is a negotiation toward a degree of stability derived from a shared acknowledgment of political, social, and power relations.5 Saint Augustine expresses the relation of dependency between social peace and order as follows:
Pax animae irrationalis, ordinata requies appetitionum. Pax animae rationalis, ordinata cognitionis actionisque consensio. Pax corporis et animae, ordinata vita et salus animantis. Pax hominis mortalis et Dei, ordinata in fide sub aeterna lege oboedientia. Pax hominum, ordinata concordia. Pax domus, ordinata imperandi atque oboediendi concordia cohabitantium. Pax civitatis, ordinata imperandi atque oboediendi concordia civium. Pax caelestis civitatis, ordinatissima et concordissima societas fruendi Deo et invicem in Deo. Pax omnium rerum, tranquillitas ordinis. Ordo est parium dispariumque rerum sua cuique loca tribuens dispositio.
[The peace of the irrational soul is the harmonious repose of the appetites, and that of the rational soul, the harmony of knowledge and action. The peace of body and soul is the well-ordered and harmonious life and health of the living creature. Peace between man and God is the well-ordered obedience of faith to eternal law. Peace between man and man is well-ordered concord. Domestic peace is the well-ordered concord between those of the family who rule and those who obey. Civil peace is a similar concord among the citizens. The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and one another in God. The peace of all things is the tranquility of order. Order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal, each to its own place. (690)] 6
The poetics of the ordo is one of the doors leading to the house of power where peace and ordo are negotiated, thus becoming power. Model and system, the ordo is also a pact, a work to restore the idea of peace in all its typological and social breadth in the domains of the political and the metaphysical. Throughout this book, the metaphor of power as space, and more concretely—following thus the Augustinian typology of peace spaces—as a lodging, a house, a chamber, a room, and a city, is crucial. Thus this research will delve into those spaces: the rooms of negotiation, the courts, the royal chamber, the practice of the space, and the city (both inside and outside its walls). By means of the poetics of ordo, I will explore the social, political, and, above all, the jurisdictional interactions within civil and urban spaces, where knightly confraternities establish their relation to monarchical sovereignty.
Chivalric Fable
This relationship between peace and order is essential to an understanding of the role of chivalry as a laboratory for social change. Medieval knighthood rises amid the tempestuous fog of groups who engaged in recalcitrant violence. It succeeds in incorporating itself into institutions of peace before it ultimately consolidates these very institutions. That is, chivalry emerges from a system of institutional violence to become a substantial component in a discourse of peace. The creation of chivalry takes place within the category of nobility and, during its first two centuries, chivalry’s regulation bifurcates into ecclesiastic stipulations and the norms of a fledgling monarchy.7 The stigma of the organization of a social class, or ordo, between ecclesiastical power and monarchical power will remain with knighthood throughout its history and will place it at the center of power dynamics: shifts in which the acquisition of judicial, jurisdictional, political, and cultural power is negotiated and settled into practice. Within dynamics of power the documents and alliances studied here advance new theses on knighthood as a vehicle for the transformation of authority, especially