Knight fever

Emperor Maximilian I liked to say he invented the joust of the exploding shields. When a knight charged and his lance struck the opposing shield — bam! — the shield shattered and the shrapnel went up like fireworks. It’s almost impossible to turn the pages of Freydal. Medieval Games. The Book of Tournaments of Emperor Maximilian I and not imagine Batman-style captions. Clank! Thwack! Kapow! The knights and princes of the painted miniatures are all-awl, all-action iron men. Their horses are hooded to stop them bolting and every harness is stitched with bells. All the horse would have heard was the jangling, not the thunder of hooves or the roar of the tiltyard crowds.

The editors of this splendid facsimile of Maximilian’s Freydal (1512–15), published by Taschen, suggest that the impact of two galloping knights in steel armour was equivalent to two small cars crashing at 40 miles per hour. What’s more extraordinary is that the knights who were knocked down generally got up again. The combined protection of concealed leather caps and steel helmets meant that the biomechanical impact on a jouster’s brain when struck and unseated would have been far less forceful than that of a car crash. Which is just as well because the gilded scenes of Freydal show some gnarly falls. As the shields and lances fly, the riders hit the dust. Necks, shoulders and backs are bent, broken and dented. One contestant hangs grimly on, upside down, grasping the horse’s neck, saved from being trampled only by a foot caught in the left stirrup. Other tournament books survive from the Middle Ages, but none show so many spectacular smash landings.

Maximilian, son of Emperor Frederick III of Germany and Eleanor of Portugal, was born in 1459 at Wiener Neustadt, and became known as ‘the last knight’. He caught the tournament bug early, attending his first one at the age of 14, held to celebrate the meeting between his father and Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy.