By the high medieval period the three words had been put to work on shields, walls, and the inside flaps of psalters. Bernard of Clairvaux, abbot of Clairvaux from 1115 to 1153, preached on perseverance for forty years and on trust for nearly as long. Thomas Aquinas, writing the Secunda Secundae of the Summa Theologiae between 1271 and 1272, argued that temperance was the virtue that kept the others from collapsing into their own excess. Without it, fortitude becomes recklessness, justice becomes cruelty, and prudence becomes mere cunning. More than a century later, Christine de Pizan put the same argument more plainly in her court treatises: temperance is the bridle on every other good. The metaphor would last another four hundred years.
The banner belongs to a long tradition of Latin mottoes worn on the body and the wall. The most famous of them, memento mori — remember that you must die — hung in Roman triumphs and medieval cloisters alike as a check on pride; its gentler companion amor fati, the love of one's fate, ran from the Stoics into the same stream. The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius returned to the theme throughout his Meditations, as Seneca and Epictetus had before him, and the tradition kept a companion phrase of its own — memento vivere, remember to live. Renaissance emblem books captioned interlaced knots nunquam frangitur — never broken. Other mottoes of the same family still travel: per aspera ad astra, through hardships to the stars; audentes fortuna iuvat, fortune favors the bold; dum spiro spero, while I breathe, I hope; and carpe diem, seize the day. Temperantia, Fiducia, Perseverantia stands in that company: not a warning and not a resignation, but a working instruction — three words for how to hold a line.
Why the Three Together
- Hound passant at the head — fiducia, the faithful watcher, drawn from Isidore and the bestiaries.
- Bridle and bit at the fess point — temperantia, the governing hand, codified by Ripa in 1593.
- Triquetra at the base — perseverantia, the unbroken loop, descended from Insular and Norse craft.
- The motto banners — read bottom-left to bottom-right to top, the order of moral development.
- The cape and the rearing horse — context, the unbridled power that the shield's emblem governs.
