Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

294 DEBT
out of trouble, as it were, in part by setting knights against each other,
in part by turning their entire existence into a kind of stylized ritual.137
The ideal of the lone wandering knight, in search of some gallant adventure,
on the other hand, seems to have come out of nowhere.
This is important, since it lies at the very heart of our image of the
Middle Ages-and the explanation, I think, is revealing. We have to
recall that merchants had begun to achieve unprecedented social and
even political power around this time, but that, in dramatic contrast to
Islam, where a figure like Sindbad-the successful merchant adventurercould
serve as a fictional exemplar of the perfect life, merchants, unlike
warriors, were never seen as paragons of much of anything.
It's likely no coincidence that Chretien was living in Troyes, at the
very heartland of the Champagne fairs that had become, in turn, the
commercial hub of Western Europe.138 While he appears to have modeled
his vision of Camelot on the elaborate court life under his patron
Henri the Liberal (n52-n8I), Count of Champagne, and his wife Marie,
daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the real court was staffed by lowborn
commerants, who served as serjeants of the fairs-leaving most
real knights in the role of onlookers, guards, or-at tournamentsentertainers.
This is not to say that tournaments did not become a kind of
economic focus in their own right, according to one early twentiethcentury
Medievalist, Amy Kelly:
The biographer of Guillaume le Marechal gives an idea of how
this rabble of courtly routiers amused itself on the jousting
fields of western Europe. To the tournaments, occurring in a
brisk season about twice a month from Pentecost to the feast of
St John, flocked the young bloods, sometimes three thousand
strong, taking possession of the nearest town. Thither also
flocked horse dealers from Lombardy and Spain, from Brittany
and the Low Countries, as well as armorers, haberdashers for
man and beast, usurers, mimes and story-tellers, acrobats, necromancers,
and other gentlemen of the lists, the field, the road.
Entertainers of every stripe found liberal patronage . . . There
were feasts in upper chambers, and forges rang in the smithies
all night long. Brawls with grisly incidents-a cracked skull, a
gouged eye--occurred as the betting progressed and the dice
flew. To cry up their champions in the field came ladies of fair
name and others of no name at all.
The hazards, the concourse, the prizes, keyed men to the
pitch of war. The stakes were magnificent, for the victor held