Tournament (medieval)

A tournament, or tourney (from Old French torneiement, tornei), was a chivalrous competition or mock fight that was common in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (12th to 16th centuries). It is a type of hastilude.

Tournaments included mêlée, hand-to-hand combat, contests of strength or accuracy, and sometimes jousts. Some considered the tournaments to be frivolous pursuits of celebrity, and even a potential threat to public order; but the shows were popular and often put on in honor of coronations, marriages, births, recent conquests or peace treatises, or to welcome ambassadors, lords, or others considered to be of great importance. Other times tournaments were held for no particular reason or simply for entertainment.

The word tournament evolved from the Middle English tornement which entered the English lexicon from the Old French torneiement around the 12th century. That noun and its associated verb, tornoier, ultimately derive from the Latin tornare ("to turn") which also gave rise to the Italian torneo, the modern French tournoi, and modern English's tourney. Tournament and its derivates had been adopted in English (via Anglo-Norman) by the 14th century.

The Old French tornoier originally meant "to joust and tilt", but came to refer to the knightly tournament more generally while joster, meaning "approach, meet" (also adopted before the 14th century) came to refer to jousting specifically.

By the end of the 12th century, tornement and Latinized torneamentum had become the generic term for all kinds of knightly hastiludes or martial displays. Roger of Hoveden writing in the late 12th century defines torneamentum as "military exercises carried out, not in the knight's spirit of hostility (nullo interveniente odio), but solely for practice and the display of prowess (pro solo exercitio, atque ostentatione virium)."

Medieval equestrian warfare and equestrian practices originate in Ancient Rome, just as the notion of chivalry goes back to the rank of equites in Roman times. There may be an element of continuity connecting the medieval tournament to the hippika gymnasia of the Roman cavalry, but with the sparsity of written records during the 5th to 8th centuries this is difficult to establish. It is known that such cavalry games were central to military training in the Carolingian Empire, with records of Louis and Charles' military games at Worms in 843. At this event which was recorded by Nithard, the initial chasing and fleeing was followed by a general mêlée of all combatants.

Documentation of equestrian practice during the 9th to 10th centuries is sparse, but it is clear that the tournament was a development of the High Middle Ages. It is recognized by several medieval historical sources: a chronicler of Tours in the late 12th century attributes the "invention" of the knightly tournament to Angevin Baron Geoffroi de Preulli. In 16th-century German historiography, the setting down of the first tournament laws is attributed to Henry the Fowler; this tradition is cited by Georg Rüxner in his Thurnierbuch as well as by Paulus Hector Mair in his De Arte Athletica.

The earliest known use of the word "tournament" comes from peace legislation by Count Baldwin III of Hainaut for the town of Valenciennes, dated to 1114. It refers to the keepers of the peace in the town leaving it "for the purpose of frequenting javelin sports, tournaments and such like."^{[citation needed]} A pattern of regular tournament meetings across northern France is evident in sources^[who?] for the life of Charles, Count of Flanders. The sources of the 1160s and 1170s portray the event in the developed form it maintained into the 14th century.^{[citation needed]}