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CHAP. XXII.: Of the Manners relative to judicial Combats. - Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Complete Works, vol. 2 The Spirit of Laws [1748]

Edition used:

The Complete Works of M. de Montesquieu (London: T. Evans, 1777), 4 vols. Vol. 2.

Part of: Complete Works of Montesquieu, 4 vols.

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CHAP. XXII.

Of the Manners relative to judicial Combats.

OUR connexions with the fair sex are founded on the pleasure of enjoyment; on the happiness of loving and being beloved; and likewise on the ambition of pleasing the ladies, because they are the best judges of some of those things which constitute personal merit. This general desire of pleasing produces gallantry, which is not love itself, but the delicate, the volatile, the perpetual dissembler of love.

According to the different circumstances of every country and age, love inclines more to one of those three things than to the other two. Now I maintain, that the prevailing spirit at the time of our judicial combats, must naturally have been that of gallantry.

I find in the law of the Lombards* , that if one of the two champions was found to have any magic herbs about him, the judge ordered them to be taken from him, and obliged him to swear he had no more. This law could be founded only on the vulgar opinion; it was fear, the supposed contriver of such a number of inventions, that made them imagine this kind of prestiges. As in the single combats, the champions were armed at all points; and as with heavy arms, both of the offensive and defensive kind, those of a particular temper and force were of infinite advantage; the notion of some champions having inchanted arms, must certainly have turned the brains of a great many people.

Hence arose the marvellous system of chivalry. The minds of all sorts of people quickly imbibed these extravagant ideas. Then it was they had the romantic notions of knight-errants, necromancers, and of fairies, of winged or intelligent horses, of invisible or invulnerable men, of magicians who concerned themselves in the birth and education of great personages, of inchanted and disinchanted palaces, of a new world in the midst of the old one, the usual course of nature being left only to the lower class of mankind.

Knight-errants ever in armour, in a part of the world abounding with castles, forts, and robbers, placed all their glory in punishing injustice, and in protecting weakness. Hence our romances are full of gallantry founded on the idea of love joined to that of strength and protection.

Such was the original of gallantry, when they formed the notion of an extraordinary race of men, who at the fight of a virtuous and beautiful lady in distress, were inclined to expose themselves to all hazards for her sake, and to endeavour to please her in the common actions of life.

Our romances flattered this desire of pleasing, and communicated to a part of Europe that spirit of gallantry, which we may venture to affirm was very little known to the ancients.

The prodigious luxury of that immense city Rome encouraged sensible pleasures. The tranquility of the plains of Greece gave rise to tender* and amorous sentiments. The idea of knight-errants, protectors of the virtue and beauty of the fair-sex, was productive of gallantry.

This spirit was continued by the custom of tournaments, which uniting the rights of valour and love, added still a considerable importance to gallantry.

[* ]Book ii. tit. 55. sect. 11,

[* ]See the Greek romances of the middle age.