Originally a personality of mediocre status raised above the peasant by his possession of expensive horse and armor, the knight slowly improved his position in society until he became part of the nobility. Although knights remained the lowest rank of the upper class, knighthood acquired a unique cachet that made knighting an honor prized by the great nobility and even by royalty. This cachet was primarily the product of the Church’s policy of Christianizing knighthood by sanctifying the ceremony of knighting and by sponsoring a code of behavior known as chivalry, a code perhaps violated more often than honored, but exercising incontestable influence on the thought and conduct of posterity.

The institution of knighthood summons up in the mind of every literate person the image of an armor-plated warrior on horseback, with the title “Sir,” whose house was a castle, and who divided his time between the pageantry of the tournament and the lonely adventures of knight-errantry. The image has the defect of being static, and it represents a concept that belongs more to legend and literature than to real life. Yet the real historical figure of the knight is not totally at odds with the popular image. He did indeed wear plate armor, but plate superseded mail only late in his long career. The “Sir”—“Messire” in French—also came late and in England still exists as a title of honor or of minor nobility. A knight sometimes lived in a castle, but the castle was rarely his own. He participated in tournaments, but the tournament’s character as pageant developed only in its decadence. He was certainly prone to adventure in his often short life, but nearly always in company and in search of income rather than romance.

In England and America the popular image of the knight is pre-ponderantly English, thanks to the overpowering appeal of the King Arthur story. Real knights, however, originated in France and were unknown in England until the Norman Conquest. The French-Welsh-English creators of the Arthur literature, who grafted onto a grain of historical fact a mass of legend about a sixth-century British chieftain, ended by creating a bizarre time warp in which knights in gleaming plate armor galloped anachronistically through the primitive political countryside of post-Roman Britain.

Though change was continuous, one may usefully divide the knight’s long history into three stages: first, the emergence of the armored, mounted soldier in the turmoil-filled ninth and tenth centuries; second, the development of the mature institution of knighthood in the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, the age of the architects of the King Arthur legend; and third, the decay of the institution as a consequence of the rise of new social forces in the late Middle Ages and early modern times.

The knight may be defined from three different standpoints, each of them important: the military, the economic, and the social.

He was first and foremost a soldier, as identified by the Latin term for him, miles, and the Anglo-Saxon cniht, cognate of “knight.” He was invariably mounted; in most languages the medieval vernacular word that replaced miles denoted horseman: French, chevalier; German, Ritter; Italian, cavaliere; Spanish, caballero. Again invariably, he was clad in armor. Thus militarily he was an armored cavalryman.

Economically, the knight was a component of the system known to historians as feudalism. In this dominant economic (and political) order of the Middle Ages, a lord granted land to a vassal in return for military and other less important services. Lord and vassal swore an oath, of protection and support on the part of the lord, of loyalty on the part of the vassal. At the height of feudalism, the knight was the cornerstone of the institution. He may be said to have formed its basic currency. The lord’s grant of land to his vassal was typically in return for the service of a specified number of knights, whose swords the vassal was able to secure in his turn by granting land to them through a similar exchange of oaths. Lord, vassal, and knight were free men, tied together by their mutual promises.

The economic prototype of the knight, then, was a free man, holding land, and owing feudal military service. Details of practice varied widely. In Germany up to the thirteenth century some knights were household retainers who shared characteristics with serfs. Throughout Europe and throughout the Middle Ages, many knights were landless and not strictly speaking part of the feudal system. Finally, in the late Middle Ages, knights ceased to perform feudal military service in return for grants of land and became plain professional soldiers, differing only in prestige, equipment, and pay scale from other men-at-arms.

Socially, even the protoknights of the early period were set apart by their expensive equipment and horses. Gradually professional pride matured into class consciousness, which was enhanced by the Church’s sponsorship. The soldiers of the earlier period may or may not properly be called knights, but the full development of knighthood came only with the acquisition of class identity.

The Western European knight may be summarized as a mounted, heavily armed and armored soldier, in most times and places a free man and a landholder, and, most significantly, a member of a caste with a strong sense of solidarity.

This book will attempt to trace the development of the medieval knight from first appearance through rise to gradual eclipse, and to assess his impact on history, using real-life knights as examples.

It will first describe the genesis of the knight and his tenth-century manifestation, a crude and violent figure virtually uncurbed by a society that had lost control over its military class. The efforts of the Church first to tame and then to harness the brute bestowed on him a dawning consciousness of belonging to an “order,” a chosen cadre with duties and disciplines prescribed by the Church, to which he came to owe a special allegiance.

The maturing eleventh-century knight, his self-image further enhanced by the designation “soldier of Christ,” a radical concept of Pope Gregory VII, undertook the unparalleled adventure of the First Crusade. Social and economic motives as well as religious ones impelled him. One motive proved ephemeral: many landless knights went to the East with thoughts of acquiring estates, but few remained. Nevertheless, the Crusade gave further impetus to the rise of the knightly class, through the broadening effect of travel, which helped lift the knight from petty provincial to European gentleman-soldier, and through his role in “the army of the Lord,” combating “God’s enemies.”

In the twelfth century, some of the same social and economic forces that lay behind Crusading led knights into an unexpected and even anomalous pursuit. Certain of them became “troubadours,” lyric poets who flourished in the sophisticated climate of southern France and who produced a body of verse that, in addition to its influence on European literature, had a high intrinsic value, now unfortunately obscured by the lapse of Provençal from an international literary language to a local dialect. The troubadours’ poetic successors, knights of northern France and of Germany, carried on the tradition as trouvères and minnesingers. Narrative poetry and prose, influenced by the troubadours, also swelled the twelfth-century literary Renaissance, reaching a climax in the Arthurian romances, a multiauthored accumulation that fixed the image of the medieval knight for himself, his contemporaries, and posterity.

The knight-errant heroes of the Arthur stories had historical counterparts whose adventures, if less fabulous, were genuine enough as they roamed Europe earning a living in tournament and battle. Those of William Marshal of England, who became the trusted counselor of kings, have been preserved in a valuable chronicle. By the thirteenth century, political developments had attached the knights firmly to the nobility and modified their role from the strictly military. The rise of a money economy and subsequent inflation increased the expenses of knighthood and created a new class of men eligible to become knights who no longer wished to be knighted but opted to remain squires. Simultaneously, commoners—rich peasants and merchants—began to invade the knightly class.

The Church’s ideal of the “soldier of Christ” was best realized in the Military Orders that fought the infidel in Spain, eastern Europe, and above all the Holy Land. The Knights Templars, Hospitalers, Teutonic Knights, and Spanish Orders of Calatrava, Santiago, and Alcantara performed their military duties with a monastic discipline that contrasted with the unruly individualism of the traditional knights. The Templars, the most celebrated of the Orders, were drawn into the unknightly profession of banking, which led first to their enrichment and then to their downfall.

The Hundred Years War (1337–1453) worked the final transformation of the western European knight from landed vassal to professional soldier. The careers of two knights, the Breton hero Bertrand du Guesclin and John Fastolf, an English knight of middle-class origins who reaped a fortune from the war, illuminate aspects of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century knighthood.

In the end the knight was absorbed into the standing army of the new national state, where he quickly lost his distinctive identity. More enduring was the influence on manners and morals of “chivalry,” an ambiguous word that sometimes refers to the corps of knights themselves, sometimes to the panoply of tournament and heraldry, sometimes to the knightly code of conduct. The title of knight survived as a lower rank of nobility and as a conferred civil or military honor. The panoply long enjoyed popularity, especially in the circles of royalty, and even made a memorable farewell appearance in the age of Victoria. The code of conduct, with its invocation of generous sentiments, has never lost its appeal, and is permanently enshrined in the literature of chivalry.

Long though its germination took, the rise of knighthood was a medieval event, not a Roman continuation. Rome possessed its own class of “knights” (equites, horsemen), originally the cavalry wing of the Roman army and source of the army’s officers. This class had by the end of the Republican period abandoned its military role and become army contractors, tax farmers, and exploiters of public resources. They formed the lower segment of the upper class, just below the senators, a status memorialized in the theaters and arenas throughout the Empire, where the first rows were reserved for the senators, the next several for the knights.¹ Contrary to the assumption of some nineteenth-century historians, however, this Roman “Equestrian Order” had no historical connection with medieval knighthood.

Scholarly controversy still clouds the emergence of the medieval knight.² Records for the critical period are scarce, and semantic problems—the relationship between late-Roman terms for certain kinds of soldiers and Latin terms used in the early Middle Ages—compound the difficulty. Terms used for social classes in the time of Charlemagne and those of the eleventh century are equally ambiguous. The prejudices of early modern historians also inhibited understanding. In the nineteenth century, when feudal society was regarded as backward, barbaric, and chaotic, a school of German scholars headed by Heinrich Brunner attempted to prove that feudalism had originated not in ancient German tribal custom but in eighth-century France. Brunner traced its beginnings to the adoption by Charles Martel of the Muslims’ cavalry arm and tactics. To support his new cavalry corps, Charles seized church lands and granted them as “benefices” to the mounted soldiers, thereby inventing the fief. These first knights became, according to Brunner, the ancestors of the medieval nobility.³

Brunner’s theory was elaborated and refined by two twentieth-century historians, French medievalist Marc Bloch and American Lynn White, Jr. Bloch, writing in the 1930s, proposed that the nobility of the early Middle Ages, both the Roman senatorial class and the Germanic chiefs, had disappeared by the eighth century; what took its place was a new class distinguished not by birth but by power derived from the king’s service. Pedigrees of the medieval nobility could be traced back only to the “crucial turning-point of the year 800,” shortly before which the class had its origins in the professional warrior of the time, with his horse, armor, shield, lance, and sword. “As the logical consequence of the adoption, [in] about the tenth century, of the stirrup, the short spear of former days, brandished at arm’s length like a javelin, was abandoned and replaced by the long and heavy lance…” Added to stirrup and lance were helmet and chain mail. These improvements made the warrior’s equipment far more expensive, affordable only by a rich man or a rich man’s vassal. Therefore the Carolingian kings bestowed lands—benefices—to support and equip their fighting men, who formed a new aristocracy.⁴

In the 1960s Lynn White embellished the theories of Brunner and Bloch, making the stirrup the “keystone” of “Brunner’s magnificent structure of hypotheses.” White moved the arrival of the stirrup in western Europe back to the first part of the eighth century and attributed its adoption to “Charles Martel’s genius.” “Feudal institutions, the knightly class, and chivalric culture” were born fr...