Medieval chronicles are full of indirect warrior suicides of the sort. At times knights even directly murdered one another. The Miracles de Saint Benoît tells us that Aimo, the archbishop of Bourges, and his companions ran one another through with their swords when they were defeated by Eudes, the seigneur de Déols.

Prisoners, too, might prefer death to humiliation: Regnault, comte de Boulogne, was one; another was Jean de la Rivière, who declared, "No, I will not see the Paris rabble enjoying my ignominious death."

The chronicles also report cases of suicide after a rape that recall the death of Lucretia. Examples include the wife of Jean de Carrouges, as well as some women raped by the Normans. Other women took their own lives out of loyalty to their husbands, still others out of a sense of duty or in an attempt to save the lives of relatives.

The self-sacrifice of the burghers of Calais in 1347 also bears all the signs of altruistic suicide. Even the pious Blanche of Castile flirted with the idea of suicide after the death of her husband, Louis VIII.

At the death of Charles VII in 1461, the rumor circulated that he had deliberately stopped eating. Some claimed that he had been poisoned, but the king, weakened by an abscess on the brain, was in such a sorry state that there probably would have been little point to hastening his death.

Joan of Arc presents a more troubling case. At one point during her imprisonment (and for reasons not clarified) she threw herself from a high tower.

During her interrogation she declared that "she would rather die than live after such a destruction of good folk" (an allusion to a massacre of civilians in Compiègne); on another occasion she responded that "she would have preferred to die rather than fall into the hands of the English, her enemies."

She later contradicted these statements to declare that she had no intention of killing herself. Still, one of the accusations against her was an attempted self-homicide out of despair.

Thus the practice of voluntary death was known in the Middle Ages, but it occurred in very different ways in different social categories. The peasant or the craftsman hanged himself to escape poverty and suffering; the knight or the cleric arranged to get himself killed to escape humiliation and to deprive "the infidel" of a victory.

In the first instance we have direct suicide of what the sociologists call the "egotistic" type; in the second, indirect and "altruistic" suicide. The goal was the same, the means and motivations differed.

The dominant morality (that is, the morality of the elite) sanctioned this difference in motivation and means. Direct, egotistic suicide was considered a cowardly act of avoidance and was severely punished by torturing the corpse, by refusing the body burial in consecrated ground, by promising eternal damnation to the soul, and by confiscating the estate of the deceased.

Indirect, altruistic suicide was considered an act of courage in conformity with chivalric honor, or it was set up as a model and an example of unyielding faith unto martyrdom. Medieval society, which was governed by a military and priestly caste, was consistent with itself when it established the chivalric ideal and the quest for Christian sacrifice as the moral norm.

Voluntary Death In Literature

Literature illustrates the same dual vision of suicide, condemned in some cases and praised in others. Writers (who tended to be clerics or troubadours) usually condemned voluntary death in the name of Christian principles. There is no lack of warnings against suicide in literature. Albert Bayet lists a great many of them.

In Le conte de la belle Maguelonne, Pierre de Provence, unhappy in love, contemplates killing himself, "but as he was a true Catholic, he immediately took hold of himself and turned to the embrace of conscience." In the prose version of Lancelot, Galehaut (Galahad), who has decided to starve himself to death, is warned by priests "that if he died in that fashion his soul would be lost and damned"; the Lady of the Lake warns Lancelot that it would be a "grievous sin" if he killed himself.

In Fergus, when Galiene threatens to throw herself off a high tower rather than marry a prince she does not love, God intervenes, not wishing to lose a soul. Similarly, the lady for whom Guillaume au Faucon wants to die warns him, "Your soul will be lost." Many courtly romances--La Charette, Yvain, Beaudous, Floriant et Florete, Ipomédon, Éracles, L'Escoufle, Manekine, and Amadis et Idoine--express horror at the idea of suicide.

In popular drama, mystery and miracle plays directly expressed the Church's moral position in an incontrovertible condemnation of suicide. Works such as Les miracles de Notre Dame present suicide as the result of a despair inspired by the devil. In Les miracles de Sainte Geneviève, for example, a nun declares:

"Je me tuerais volontiers, Mais c'est d'enfer le droit sentier. Dieu, gardez-moi du désespoir!" (I would willingly kill myself, but that is the direct path to hell. Lord, deliver me from despair!).

In Rutebeuf's Miracle de Théophile the protagonist, a wicked character, wonders aloud, "Shall I go drown myself or hang myself?" Three suicides (or supposed suicides), Judas Iscariot, Herod Antipas, and Pontius Pilate, were archetypal villains, true antiheroes who met with damnation in all such plays.

In Le mystère de la Passion the archangel Gabriel declares that Herod (who has stabbed himself) "has died an impetuous, ugly, abominable, and shameful death."

A quite different climate reigns in the chansons de geste. Suicide, of course, remains a sign of failure, whatever its immediate cause or circumstances. People kill themselves because of an impossible love, out of deeply felt sorrow, remorse, or shame, or else to avoid the humiliation that follows defeat.

In short, they kill themselves because they have been vanquished and find it unbearable. The fatal act is prompted by anger or by a fit of jealousy or despair, hence by a sin. Moreover, it is above all the wicked who commit suicide, as does Gaumadrus in Garin de Montglane, who summons demons as he kills himself.

It is often the way defeated infidels die. When this is the case, they are not accorded any admiration: The Muslim who kills himself to avoid captivity, as in La chanson d'Antioche or Guy de Bourgogne, is presented as beneath contempt.

Certain chansons de geste go so far as to recommend that the Christian knight flee rather than put up a desperate resistance. In his Chronique rimée Geoffroy de Paris presents such heroic behavior as tantamount to suicide: "I hold it, to the contrary, as homicide."

In Florent et Octavian two clerics state that war is a form of voluntary death. In other stories (La Châtelaine de Vergy, for example) leaving for a crusade is presented as a worthy alternative to suicide: In this instance the duke, who has killed his wife, leaves in despair for the Holy Land.

In real life the long and perilous journey that was like a "death" for the lord separated from his family and his lands undoubtedly often served as a compensatory act, thus helping to reduce the number of actual suicides in chivalry.

Although at first sight the general tone of the chansons de geste seems hostile to suicide in any form, they repay closer scrutiny. Albert Bayet states that "among the celebrated heroes of the best known chansons, not one is himself the artisan of his own death."

To illustrate his point, Bayet lists the examples of Roland, who fights to the death with no thought of killing himself; Ogier, who asks Turpin to cut off his head when he is taken prisoner because he is loath to strike himself; Braminonde, who cries out for someone to kill him; Florence, who pleads with Miles, "Cut off my head soon"; Jérôme, who, overwhelmed with shame at having involuntarily wounded Huon, tells him, "Take my sword; cut my head"; Garsion, who asks the same service when he mistakenly kills his own brother; and Galienne, who cries out to Charlemagne, "Kill me!" None of these warriors kills himself directly, but in asking for death at the hands of someone else, are they not all committing indirect suicide?

The difference is one of pure form: The intention is the same, and the result is the same; the would-be suicide simply makes use of someone else's hand to commit the deed. All these episodes elicited the admiration of both the author of the work and the medieval listener.

The chansons de geste even include some honorable direct suicides. In Auberi Gauteron hangs himself in his father's stead; after her son's death and her husband's banishment, Béatrice throws herself from a high tower in Daurel et Beton; Dieudonné drowns himself in Charles le Chauve; Florent jumps out of a window in Hernaut de Beaulande; Doraine and Aye d'Avignon kill themselves to escape dishonor in Charles le Chauve and Aye d'Avignon.

Moreover, these examples do not include all the heroes who simply express a desire to commit suicide rather than live on after defeat.

There are many altruistic suicides in courtly literature as well. One such is Lambègue, a knight who delivers himself to the enemy to save a city under siege; another is Perceval's sister, who dies after giving her blood to save a leper woman.

In Lancelot Galehaut starves to death after learning that his friend has killed himself, and the author salutes his death as heroic. Lancelot tries to impale himself on his sword and is saved in extremis by a messenger from the Lady of the Lake.

Ritually, almost instinctively, the characters in the romances of the Round Table speak of killing themselves whenever misfortune catches up with them. Tristan throws himself off a cliff rather than submit to torture, and Yseut asks Sandret to kill her rather than allowing herself to be handed over to the lepers.

Suicide for love is even an obligatory gesture when a hero is faced by an insurmountable obstacle: Yvain, banished from his lady's sight, announces his intention to kill himself with his sword, declaring,

Qui perd la joie et le plaisir
par sa faute et par son tort,
moult se doit bien haïr de mort,
haïr et occir se doit

(Whoever loses happiness and comfort because of his own wrongs should hate himself to death. He should kill himself.)

Aucassin announces that he will crack his head open against a wall if Nicolette is taken from him; Gloriandre throws herself from a window rather than marry Clodoveus's son; Pyrame and Thisbé die together, prefiguring Romeo and Juliet; the lady of Coucy starves herself to death; a lady in Lancelot jumps off a cliff rather than live on after her lover's death; when Lancelot believes Geneviève is dead, he prepares to die, passing a rope attached to his saddle pommel around his neck. Innumerable women prefer death to dishonor.

All these suicides, of course, exhibit failure behaviors, and we must agree with Jean-Claude Schmitt that "in literature as well [as life], suicide was a supremely doleful act that could only be dictated by insurmountable grief." Yet in all these aristocratic works suicide appears as a heroic and admirable act, one that the author does not seek to condemn.

Heroes make the supreme sacrifice when it is the only way to compensate for a shameful fault or to overcome an obstacle insurmountable by human means. Through suicide they surpass their mortal condition and rise above ordinary humanity. A Roland who sought to save his skin by fleeing or who handed over his sword to the Saracens would never have become the immortal worthy of the medieval epic.

Here real-life conduct and literature were in total agreement on the distinction between noble suicide and a suicide deserving of scorn: More than the act itself, what counted were the personality and the motivation of the person committing the act.

Both in romance and in life, the peasant who hanged himself as a way out of his misery was a coward whose corpse deserved to be subjected to torture and whose soul was relegated to hell; the impetuous knight who chose death over surrender on the battlefield was a hero deserving of both civil and religious honors.

We cannot find a single instance of judiciary punishment meted out to the corpse of a noble who died by his own hand during the Middle Ages.

To Each Class Its Own Suicide

Suicide in the Middle Ages had two faces. It seems to have been rampant among commoners but to have spared nobles, who had compensatory behaviors that enabled them to avoid "self-homicide." Tourneys, hunting, wars, and crusades offered them opportunities to expose themselves to death or to sublimate their suicidal tendencies, but peasants and craftsmen had only the rope or the river if they wished to end their woes. Hence direct suicide was much more frequent among the lower classes.

This distinction can also be traced in the law and in theoretical works on morality. The noble's indirect suicide, whether he sacrificed himself for the cause he was defending or killed himself for love, in a fit of anger, or because he was afflicted by madness, was seen as altruistic.

In all cases it was excusable. What is more, suicide for love and suicide in warfare were both connected with the noble's social function and involved his social entourage, thus diluting his personal responsibility. Since noble suicide was a social act, it was to some extent honorable.

The peasant's suicide, on the other hand, was an isolated act born of egotism and cowardice: When the countryman went off to hang himself in secret, he was fleeing his responsibilities; his motivation was despair, a fatal vice inspired in him by the devil. The noble faced his responsibilities by going to a glorious death.

Allegorical representations in manuscript illuminations, stained-glass windows, cathedral statuary, and frescoes present this same dual view. For the most part these images illustrate the Psychomachia, an allegorical poem by Prudentius composed in the early fifth century in which Ira (anger) plunges a sword into her own body because she is unable to get the better of Patientia (patience, forbearance).

In medieval depictions, however, Desperatio (despair) is the chief cause of suicide, and Anger is shown either defeated by Patience or displaying her frustration by such violent gestures as tearing her clothing. Details in Giotto's decorations for the Arena Chapel in Padua, for example, show Desperatio hanging herself and Ira ripping her dress.

In treatises on moral philosophy, as in manuscript illuminations, anger--a "noble" vice--rarely leads to suicide. Except in cases of madness or "frenzy," suicide arose out of despair.continued here

info on this page is from history of suicide
by georges minois
© the johns hopkins university press