ch days of brutal
force are not the days in which mild and poetic sentiments are likely to
prevail to any perceptible extent. The contrary is true. This period
contributed to destroy whatever regard possibly existed for the female
sex. The knights, both of country and town, consisted mainly of rough,
dissolute fellows, whose principal passion, besides feuds and guzzling,
was the unbridled gratification of sexual cravings. The chronicles of
the time do not tire of telling about the deeds of rapine and violence,
that the nobility was guilty of, particularly in the country, but in the
cities also, where, appearing in patrician _role_, the nobility held in
its hands the city regiment, down to the thirteenth, and partly even in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Nor did the wronged have any
means of redress; in the city, the squires (yunker) controlled the
judges' bench; in the country, the landlord, invested with criminal
jurisdiction, was the knight, the Abbot or the Bishop. Accordingly, it
is a violent exaggeration that, amid such morals and customs, the
nobility and rulers had a particular respect for their wives and
daughters, and carried them on their hands as a sort of higher beings,
let alone that they cultivated such respect for the wives and daughters
of the townsmen and peasants, for whom both the temporal and the
spiritual masters entertained and proclaimed contempt only.

A very small minority of knights consisted of sincere worshippers of
female beauty, but their worship was by no means Platonic; it pursued
quite material ends. And these material ends were pursued by those also
with whom Christian mysticism, coupled with natural sensuousness, made a
unique combination. Even that harlequin among the worshippers of "lovely
women," Ulrich von Lichtenstein, of laughable memory, remained Platonic
only so long as he had to. At bottom the "Minnedienst" was the
apotheosis of the best beloved--at the expense of the own wife; _a sort
of hetairism, carried over into Middle Age Christianity_, as it existed
in Greece at the time of Pericles. In point of fact, during the Middle
Ages, the mutual seduction of one another's wives was a "Minnedienst"
strongly in vogue among the knights, just the same as, in certain
circles of our own bourgeoisie, similar performances are now repeated.
That much for the romanticism of the Middle Ages and their regard for
women.

There can be no doubt that, in the open recognition of the ple