Chivalry and Bushido

If you look up "bushido" on the web, you will encounter many things, and one of them will be that bushido was a code of conduct for members of the samurai class "analogous to the code of chivalry."  Really?  Let's take a look at that idea.

I have been enjoying Maurice Keen's Chivalry (1984) lately.  In fact, just for fun, I started it during my latest trip to Japan.  Keen scoured through original documents, including popular literature of the time, as well as visual sources dating from approximately 1000CE until approximately 1600CE, in order to produce an overall idea of what chivalry was, and more importantly, what it was not.  In addition to quoting from some splendid original sources, he debunks certain "truths," including that chivalry was a concept of Christian knighthood (no) or that it really masked a corrupt warrior society (also no).  Chivalry was actually a living, secular ethical system that was consciously promulgated by a Europe-wide warrior class.  The book is a well-written, fun read, and is considered a classic of medieval history scholarship still used in classrooms.  I have been a medieval European history buff almost since the time I first learned to read, but this book came along well after I left school.  Thanks to the NYT publishing Keen's obit some months ago, I am happy to be able to enjoy what is generally considered as much of a last word on this topic as we currently have. 

So, there I was in the Old Country, reading about chivalry while naturally thinking about bushido, and while practicing some koryu with some samurai class descendants.  And you know what?  There's no analogy to be made at all between the two, except to say that both chivalry and bushido were warrior codes of a sort.  That's it.

Let's look at some tenets:

Bushido:

1. Gi - rectitude (a sense of justice)
2. Yuki - bravery
3. Jin - compassion
4. Rei - respect, politeness
5. Makoto - truthfulness, honesty
6. Meijo - Honor
7. Chugi - Loyalty, devotion
(Nitobe and other sources)

Chivalry:

1. Prouesse - skill at arms
2. Loyaute' - loyalty
3. Largesse - generosity
4. Courtoisie - politeness, also generally interpreted as protection of the weak (i.e. women and children)
5. Franchise - generally interpreted as a "free and frank" deportment that suggests good manners and virtue
(Keen, 1984, 2)

We should keep in mind that with the exception of Nitobe, a Japanese scholar who wrote Bushido in English to begin with in 1895, our ideas of bushido will be coming through a highly interpretive, Western  lens.  Nevertheless, a look at both lists brings up significant differences, as well as some implied similarities.  Prouesse for example implies bravery in the field (one can't be skilled in battle if one is known to run from a fight).  Bushido's jin suggests defending the weak, while not explicitly stating it. 

However, there seems to be no parallel, nor even an implied one, to franchise - a sense of self that reveals a virtuous nature to observers.  Here we see a reference to a sense of individuality that is lacking in the tenets of bushido.  This sense of individuality, manifested in franchise, carries through other tenets.  For example, prouesse referred to individual skill at arms, and one of the early goals of chivalry was to engage in individual contests for personal glory, an idea that never comes up in bushido (the idea that heroes would ride out during a siege, state their name, lineage and title in order to do battle with some worthy opponent that we hear in the various monogatari are literary devices - there is virtually no evidence to suggest that such individual challenges were ever issued or taken up by others).  In fact, loyalty (chugi) seems to be chief among the tenets of bushido, at least that was the thought in the early 20th century.  A quick look at medieval European history shows loyalty to be somewhat further down the list of virtues at least in actual practice.

Another tenet of chivalry that has no parallel whatsoever in bushido is the idea of largesse.  Largesse is not generosity of spirit; it literally meant spending money on others, and the literature is full of stories of poor knights who eventually lost their status by overspending. 

In fact, prouesse, largesse and franchise together were responsible for a unique aspect of European chivalry that had no parallel elsewhere - the tournament.  Keen notes that tournaments, rather than the overdressed panoplies most people think of (and which really were more for show by later in the period), began as literal training for war, and they could be brutal. Many, many men died in early tournaments, most especially in the melees - when groups of combatants would fight each other to some definite conclusion. At the very least, a knight who had a grudge against another could easily pull together some allies for a melee and kill his rival without even needing to proclaim it an "accident."  Ideally, though, the goal of a melee was to take fellow knights prisoner - victors were entitled to all of a prisoner's equipment and horses, and moreover a victor could hold a vanquished colleague for ruinous ransom.  A poor knight with enough means (begged, borrowed, etc.) to pay a tournament fee could potentially improve his fortune through prouesse (or lose his status altogether if he lost).  Ransoms eventually became so outrageous that less than super-wealthy knights of necessity formed associations in part to bail each other out in case of capture.

Sound like bushido?  Not really.  Moreover, while some knights were in fact of noble birth, not nearly all of them were.  Nobles actually did rule Europe, and kept knights in their employ.  Bushi (later samurai) became a ruling class unto themselves in spite of the nobility, and while some occupied lesser positions than others, everyone knew what constituted the ruling class. 

I could go on, but I think this very condensed look can easily show that someone who simply claims an analogy between bushido and chivalry may not be that well-versed in either.

Cool book: Chivalry, by Maurice Keen (1984) New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr.