Study Finds Similarities Between Knights of Yesterday and Soldiers of Today
Medieval knights are often portrayed by modern historians as "bloodthirsty psychopaths," when in fact they were not.
(Denmark)—New research by Thomas Heebøll-Holm of the SAXO Institute at the University of Copenhagen, suggests medieval knights were not the 'bloodthirsty" men they were sometimes depicted to be.
A report in Science Nordic states that knights went to war because it was their job, just as it is today for soldiers.
"Previously," said Holm, "medieval texts were read as worshipping heroes and glorifying violence, but ...from crime statistics and letters of pardon, historians can see that people in the Middle Ages were no more violent than we are today...they had a different perception of the use of violence, including lethal violence." (Photo: Saffron Blaze)
The researcher goes on in the report to share information from a book he came across written by Geoffroi de Charny, a 14th century knight.
Some of Charny's emotions strongly resemble symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, notes Holm. "[Charney's] picture of knights shows they are very remote from the violent psychopaths that we picture them as."
Holm says Charny wrote that "knights should fight for a good cause to avoid succumbing to the pressures of war. A 'good cause' should be God's cause—a war for a higher and just cause, to reinstate law and order—and not for personal gain."
"On the one hand we can see that de Charny was a very conscientious man—and in the Middle Ages conscience was regarded as God's way of telling us how to relate to rights and wrongs," says Holm, despite the fact that war by its very nature is violent.
