The universe of The Song of Roland is one of honor and of moral and spiritual absolutes.

Roland is strong and Olivier is wise.

We read in the repeated refrain,

Christians are right and Pagans are wrong.

The epic is made to affirm shared values of

loyalty and bravery and to punish those who betray them.

For the warrior aristocracy of the feudal age,

trial was synonymous with judicial battle,

deo judicio or the judgment of God in which

legal process and divine will remain indistinguishable.

The assumption is that nature remains

incapable of indifference to the outcome of human events,

and that the judicial process is but one

aspect of an ongoing dialogue between God and man.

Thus, we see all the prayer and swearing on

relics which are meant to draw God's attention.

Under the premise that God does not abandon

the just man and that he punishes those who fail him,

the judicial duel at the end of Roland is an attempt to elicit

supernatural intervention in human affairs to encourage God to show his hand.

"Oh God," said Charles,

"make the right between them clear."

Ganelon's trial is however,

more complicated than that.

And here we observe the beginnings of something that will

characterize legal proceedings right up to the present day.

That is, a quibbling over words.

Ganelon is accused of treason.

"Barons, my Lords," said Charlemagne the King,

"judge what is right concerning Ganelon.

He was with me, came in my army to Spain,

and took from me twenty thousand of my French, and my nephew,

whom you'll not see again,

and Oliver, brave man,

born to the court, and the Twelve Peers-- betrayed them all for money."

Ganelon defends himself however,

and his defense is to reject the accusation.

Said Ganelon, "Let me be called a traitor if I hide what I did.

It was Roland who cheated me of gold and goods;

and so I wanted to make him suffer and die;

and found the way.

But treason, no-- I'll grant no treason there."

This argument is important,

for we find ourselves for the first time in the song of Roland,

within the realm of explanation of the motivation behind human action,

within the world of psychology or intention.

But more important, we are within a universe in which words have become ambiguous.

Ganelon's case turns around the difference between two words used to describe

the same event that all the French as Ganelon reminds us have witnessed.

He is accused of treason, yet,

he claims that his actions constituted not a case of treason but of vengeance.

The difference between treason and vengeance strikes to the heart of Ganelon's defence,

"Now I had challenged Roland,

that great fighter and Oliver,

and all of their companions: King Charles heard it,

and all his noble Barons.

I took revenge, but there's no treason there."

Ganelon's assertion that he challenged Roland before killing him,

and that his actions constitute a case of vengeance

rather than treason is essentially right.

In the older feudal world,

treason referred not only to disloyalty to

one's Lord but to killing someone in a treacherous or hidden way,

thus, Ganelon's emphasis upon the openness of what he did.

But the song of Roland is a work which bridges two different worlds: An epic that

attests at least at the end and however

subtly to the strengthening of the Capetian monarchy.

The word treason, in the period that we are considering,

began to assume again the Roman resonance of

lèse majesté: A crime against the ruler or against the state.

This is precisely what Thierry means when he claims in the course of the precedings that,

"Whatever wrong Count Roland may have done to Ganelon,

he was in your service,

and serving you should have protected him."

Thierry's claim is a reminder that undercuts

the sovereignty of the local feudal unit or

the clan and that affirms the sovereignty of the state.

Thierry is a new type in the Song of Roland.

Smaller physically than the others,

dressed more finely as if he were a style statement of a more cultivated world to come.

Even his mind is more subtle than anything we have seen thus far in the poem.

For Thierry proposes something

that would have been unthinkable in the first part of Roland,

dominated by the question of war or peace,

or even in the rest of the poem,

which is dominated by moral absolutes of right and wrong, good and bad.

That is to say, Thierry suggests something on the order of a compromise.

He is willing to admit that Roland provoked Ganelon but he

still insists that Ganelon was wrong to seek revenge.

In the end, he proposes a compromise,

to execute Ganelon but to spare his family.

"I will make peace for you with Charlemagne,"

Thierry offers his opponent in the midst to battle,

but justice will be done on Ganelon.

An offer that smacks of peace, even charity,

ideas that are absent from the first half of the poem,

yet which come into play at the end,

as can be seen in this thirteenth century German image of

the execution by drawing and quartering of Ganelon.

In our next time together,

we return to Paris and to

the high Parisian Gothic style of the thirteenth century as seen in the Sainte Chapelle.

19.4 Vengeance or Treason?

Age of Cathedrals

Conoce a los instructores