Chivalric love had, indeed, its absurdities as well as its impieties. It was a pleasing caricature of chivalry, when the knight of La Mancha stationed himself in the middle of a high road, and calling to the merchants of Toledo, who were bound to the silk fairs at Murcia, forbad them to pass, unless they acknowledged that there was not in the universe a more beautiful damsel than the empress of La Mancha, the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso. For the knights of chivalry were not satisfied to fight in defence of the ladies, and to joust in their honour, but from the extravagancy of their love, each knight maintained at the point of his lance, that his mistress surpassed all other ladies in beauty.[235] The knight Jehan de Saintré (whose education in chivalry has been already described by me) vowed to wear a helmet of a particular shape, and to visit, during three years, the courts of Europe, maintaining against all their chivalry the beauty of his mistress. Four knights and five squires, who had made a similar vow, were his companions. At a tournament held by the Emperor of Germany, the noble undertaking was held to be accomplished, and the emblems of the emprise were unchained from the left shoulder of the gallant knights and squires.[236] Indeed, wherever a knight went, to court or to camp, he asserted the superiority of his lady and his love, but he hurled his defiances not against simple merchants, as our right worshipful knight Don Quixote did, but against persons of his own rank, who were in amours as well as himself. Instances of this chivalric disposition occur frequently in chivalric history: but Cervantes caricatured the romances, and not the sober chronicles of chivalry, when, in reply to the natural enquiry of one of the merchants regarding the beauty of the lady, he made his hero exclaim, "Had I once shown you that beauty, what wonder would it be to acknowledge so notorious a truth? the importance of the thing lies in obliging you to believe it, confess it, affirm it, swear it, and maintain it, without seeing her." But the display of chivalric bravery in avowal of woman's beauty proceeded from so noble a feeling, that it must not be censured or satirised too severely, for "Who is the owner of a treasure Above all value, but, without offence, May glory in the glad possession of it?" [Sidenote: Penitents of love.]