In 1824 the French romantic artist Eugène Delacroix painted two knights fighting in the countryside. On the left side of his painting is a knight clad in gold armor wielding a sword and shield and mounted on a beautiful white steed with golden mane and tail. On the right is his opponent, a knight wearing black armor, wielding a mace and mounted on a brown and black horse. The painting represents a fine romantic view of medieval knights: proud, noble men engaged in single combat, with clearly delineated “good guys” and “bad guys.” We can imagine the great golden knight protecting the weak, guarding the virtue of women, and fighting for God in holy wars. In embracing Delacroix's painting, we would of course be embracing a romantic rather than a historical understanding of knighthood. Medieval knights were morally and intellectually complex and did not always attain to their own high ideals. It is a wonderful thing, perhaps, that the 21st century allows us to enjoy fantasies of medieval knighthood at the same time that we can recognize that the reality might be significantly different from our (and Delacroix’s) fantasies.

Yet Delacroix's method of accepting medieval prescriptive literature as historical reality continues to inform historical writing even in the 21st century. The modern military historian Michael Howard, in his general history of European warfare, argued that in most war in the Middle Ages knights would try as hard as they could to ease the damage to the community and would avoid targeting peasants or clerics, who were not legitimate targets. For Howard, it was a rare and extreme case that peasants, women, and children might be killed in war. Certainly, medieval clerics and some lawyers and knights argued for such a proposition. Medievalists as well have taken a fairly generous and forgiving view of medieval knightly violence. While Cecilia Devia acknowledges that violence occurred in the late Middle Ages, she argues that “violence has ambivalent functions: although it sows destruction, it also serves as an element of social cohesion, and it is this latter point that [she] emphasize[s].”