The order of the three words on the banner tells its own story. Read from the bottom up — Fiducia, Perseverantia, Temperantia — and you have the order of moral development as the late scholastics understood it. You begin in trust, in God or in lord or in the fellowship of arms. Trust held against time becomes perseverance. Perseverance refined by judgment becomes temperance, the governing virtue that keeps the other two from curdling into credulity and obstinacy. The crowning word sits on top because it is, in the medieval mind, the word that crowns the soul. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that the English mercenary captain Sir John Hawkwood, who served Florence between roughly 1364 and his death in 1394, kept three words burned into the inside of his shield where only he could see them. The chronicler Filippo Villani recorded them around 1395 as fides, durare, modus — faith, endure, measure. Trust, hold, govern. The order finds its way to the men who need it.
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 the Cistercians 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. A century later, Christine de Pizan put the same argument more plainly in her Burgundian court treatises: temperance is the bridle on every other good. The metaphor would last another four hundred years.
Why the Three Together
Two virtues can be balanced; three must be ordered. The order tells you what the bearer believes about how a soul is built. This shield believes the soul is built from the ground up — trust first because nothing is built without it, perseverance second because trust without persistence is a flicker, and temperance last because the other two need a governor or they consume themselves. It is not the order of the schoolroom. It is the order of the road, the order a man arrives at after he has been knocked off a horse a few times and chosen to remount.
