Perceived decline of knight-errantry

Perceived decline of knight-errantry is the condition Don Quixote believes his adventures must remedy: the old vocation of defending the vulnerable has, in his view, fallen out of use while idleness and luxury prevail. He makes himself both its advocate and its attempted revival, presenting his bruised, itinerant life as evidence that knight-errantry remains necessary even when the world doubts that it ever existed.

The knight’s diagnosis

When the man in green studies his unusual appearance, Don Quixote anticipates the traveller’s curiosity by explaining that he has left home, mortgaged his estate, surrendered his comforts, and entrusted himself to Fortune in order to seek adventures. He describes his purpose as bringing knight-errantry back to life. The mission has meant stumbling, falling, and rising again, but he says he has already carried much of it out by succouring widows and protecting maidens, wives, orphans, and minors. In his account, these are not incidental acts of generosity: they are the proper work of a knight-errant, and their neglect marks the loss he has set out to repair.

Don Quixote also presents the printed history of his deeds as proof that this revival has begun to reach beyond the roads he travels. He claims that his story has already appeared in many nations and boasts that tens of thousands of volumes have been printed, with far more to come unless heaven prevents it. The boast makes the apparent decline and the supposed revival coexist: knight-errantry may be absent from ordinary belief, yet its renewed champion has become a subject of widely circulated history.

Disbelief and the dispute over history

The man in green initially treats Don Quixote’s account as confirmation that genuine chivalrous deeds can displace the fictional knight-errant stories that, in his judgment, have harmed morality and discredited sound history. But his confidence in the printed account does not amount to belief in the old institution. Don Lorenzo later clarifies that he doubts whether knights-errant of such virtue exist now or ever existed. The conversation therefore turns on more than whether Don Quixote has performed notable deeds: it asks whether the ideal he serves has any historical foundation.

Don Quixote refuses to spend the encounter trying to overcome a disbelief he sees as widespread and impervious to argument. He answers that most people deny the existence of knight-errants and says that only a miracle might make the truth plain to them. Instead, he appeals to heaven to show how beneficial and necessary knights-errant were in former times, and how useful they would be in the present. His explanation for their apparent absence is moral and social: sloth, indolence, gluttony, and luxury have triumphed because of the people’s sins. The decline, as he understands it, is not simply a change in fashion; it is evidence that society has abandoned virtues it still needs.

A revival staged before witnesses

Don Lorenzo privately judges Don Quixote a madman, though a remarkable one, and later describes him as someone whose madness contains lucid intervals. That response marks the limit of Don Quixote’s appeal: even an attentive listener can recognize the force of his speech without accepting its account of the world. The traveller’s astonishment likewise does not disappear when Don Quixote explains who he is; knowing the knight’s identity only makes him more amazed.

A later encounter gives the revival a more theatrical echo. After Master Pedro’s ape has whispered to him, Master Pedro rushes to Don Quixote, embraces his legs, and hails him as the illustrious reviver of knight-errantry, praising his deeds as support for the faint-hearted and the fallen. Sancho Panza and the surrounding company are astonished by the sudden performance. The scene supplies a public image of the recognition Don Quixote longs for, but its setting—a showman’s spectacle and an audience left perplexed—keeps that recognition distinct from proof that the world has actually restored the vocation.

Significance of the perceived decline

The state is defined by a persistent mismatch: Don Quixote reads his hardships as the cost of renewing a necessary moral practice, while other people read his appearance and convictions as signs of madness or as material for wonder. His ideal has concrete terms—protection, aid, and service to people in need—but his confidence in it cannot make his listeners share his historical claims. The resulting tension lets the novel treat knight-errantry both as an impractical answer to a changed world and as a standard by which that world’s indolence and neglect can be judged.