Tirant Lo Blanc by Joanot Martorell

For an early example of chivalric literature – a book that no less a figure that Cervantes, author of that classic knightly novel "Don Quixote" once referred to as "the best book in the world," and therefore a work that we might expect to adhere to the traditional knightly virtues – "Tirant Lo Blanc" is kind of confusing.

Yeah, it's about a mighty knight who performs great deeds of derring do, swears up and down to abide by noble and Christian virtues like courage, generosity, and humility. He fights very hard to preserve the Christian kingdoms of his world, particularly what remains of the late Roman Empire, Christianized by the prior emperor Constantine. Tirant, like literary knights before and since, gets himself into a great romance, complicated by long travel, war, and vows of chastity. With all of that going on, he's sufficiently prideful to insist upon grabbing for himself whatever honors are going, even or especially if those include killing other Christian knights in jousts.

There's no indication in this story as to whether or not he can read, although given the historical context he very likely can't, which may explain why he never seems to read the Bible and behaves (by modern standards at least) more like a pagan warrior than a peace-loving follower of Jesus. Most surprising, he and his fellow knights spend a lot of time and energy trying to persuade their various love interests to have sex with them, and said love interests to one extent or another are eager to oblige.

This, I need hardly say, is not the way I expected knights to behave, even in fiction. It's all the more surprising in that the author, Joanot Martorell, was a knight himself. It's possible that he wanted to write a parody of knightly literature, but that seems unlikely – if my chronology is correct, knightly literature was not established enough in the year 1490 to call forth a parody. It's also possible that, since Martorell died after finishing about three-quarters of the work, his successor Martí Joan de Galba might have brought in the confusing elements, but it turns out that his authorship is not certain, and a lot of those non-chivalric incidents appear in the book's first half anyway, which Galba certainly didn't write.

Whatever the explanation, those elements do make the story a lot more interesting to the modern ear. Readers in Spain may have enjoyed a story in which the good guys behave like angels rather than human beings, but that's certainly not the case today.

Modern readers might be especially amused, or annoyed, by the relations between our title character Tirant and his lady, the (of course) extraordinarily beautiful imperial princess Carmesina. In the first place, Tirant first falls in love with her upon his arrival in Constantinople, when he goes to see the Emperor to discuss saving the Christian Empire from the Saracens. He lays eyes on the princess, who didn't have time to finish dressing, gets a glimpse of her barely-covered breasts, and that's that. She's been sought by every prince and king in the region and turned them all down, but she gets one look at Tirant and she's done for too. So they're rapturously in love, and tell their various companions all about it, but when communicating in person or by letter they lose no opportunity to ask the other why they're being so cruel – she asks him why he keeps seeking to steal her virginity (which he hasn't really done), he asks her why she's trying to kill him by ignoring him (ditto), and eventually they get so annoyed with each other that he goes off to war and she lets him go. Whereupon she bemoans his absence and threatens to die, and vice versa. I mean, what is this, a 1980s rom-com?

This brings us to another question about the work as a chivalric romance. There's plenty of battle to be seen, but a surprising percentage of the page count deals not with war or religious conflict, but with the wrangling around between Tirant and Carmesina. On top of that, there's a character called the Easygoing Widow who, despite her name, falls in love with Tirant and spends her time lying to both him and Carmesina about the lousy things each is allegedly saying about the other, and never seems to get caught. And Carmesina has another companion called Pleasure-Of-My-Life who contrives at one point to get the two of them into the same bed naked, discovers later that Tirant did not have sex with Carmesina, and spends the next day accusing him in 15th-century language of being a wimp.

With all of this going on, it makes sense that Tirant leaves to kill Saracens. He gets acknowledged and rewarded beyond anyone else for rescuing the Christian kingdom from conquest and slavery, and I suppose that is in fact his original goal, but getting away from those women has to be a nice bonus until he eventually does get with Carmesina.

Of course, everything I've said here comes at least in part from applying modern standards to a work that isn't modern. It wasn't even written in a language we would recognize as common today – Martorell and his successor, whoever that might be, wrote in Catalan. This was, and to a certain extent still is, spoken in what is now Spain, but speakers of Spanish wouldn't recognize it, because what we call Spanish is more properly called Castilian. More confusion, emerging perhaps from the fact that until a few years prior to the publication of "Tirant Lo Blanc," Spain was not one nation but three, at least.

It's also worth pointing out that the aforementioned author of "Don Quixote" was a big fan of funny books, so it's as likely as not that "Tirant Lo Blanc" gained at least part of its contemporary reputation exactly because of the dizziness I've pointed out in this review. I'll take that as permission to enjoy it for what we find in it, however anachronistic our standards might be.

Benshlomo says, Those medieval knights were real pieces of work.