Honor, courage, and blood: an elite ideology of violence in Trastámara Castile, 1369-1474

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of History, 2015.This dissertation examines elite violence in late medieval Castile from an ideological perspective, asking not simply how violence was perpetrated by the knightly class, but what these practitioners of violence thought about the violence they were perpetrating. By looking at sources such as imaginative literature, chronicles, and treatises, this dissertation seeks to recover the voices and the thought processes of the knights of Trastámara Castile. As part of this process, the dissertation also asks what others in Castilian society thought about knightly violence. Calls for reform came from clergymen and peasants while the Trastámara kings attempted to direct knightly violence to their own ends. Sometimes we have evidence that knights heard and thought about these criticisms of their violent profession; at other times they appear to have simply ignored calls for reform. This dissertation insists that those who constituted the chivalric elite were violent, were aware that they were violent, and embraced their violence through the construction of an ideology that largely supported their actions. Concepts of chivalry, violence, and religion were not simply ex post facto justifications for actions taken, but were informed by and helped to inform those actions. Particularly on the question of violence, we as historians need to acknowledge that ideas about violence, when placed in the context of a violent society, had real and serious effects in the world. Medieval knights were not automatons who wielded their swords only when a king or pope commanded it. They thought about their actions and built an ideology dealing with them, an ideology that continued to inform their violent deeds. In a larger sense, this dissertation seeks an answer to the question of how Castile moved from a medieval kingdom wracked by civil war and foreign invasion in 1369 to the precipice of a global empire in the late 15th century. How is it that the Catholic Monarchs and the Spanish Empire emerged out of the late Middle Ages? What would be the ideology that formed the foundation for a world empire and why was it such a challenge for the Trastámara kings