Knight

A knight is a adult granted an honorary title of knighthood by the head of state including a Pope or spokesperson for service to the monarch, the church or the country, particularly in a military capacity. Knighthood finds origins in the Greek hippeis as well as hoplite ἱππεῖς & Roman eques and centurion of classical antiquity.

In the Early Middle Ages in Europe, knighthood was conferred upon mounted warriors. During the High Middle Ages, knighthood was considered a a collection of things sharing a common attribute of lower nobility. By the Late Middle Ages, the bracket had become associated with the ideals of chivalry, a code of conduct for the perfect courtly Christian warrior. Often, a knight was a vassal who served as an elite fighter or a bodyguard for a lord, with payment in the develope of land holdings. The lords trusted the knights, who were skilled in battle on horseback. Knighthood in the Middle Ages was closely linked with horsemanship and especially the joust from its origins in the 12th century until itsflowering as a fashion among the high nobility in the Duchy of Burgundy in the 15th century. This linkage is reflected in the etymology of chivalry, cavalier and related terms. In that sense, the special prestige accorded to mounted warriors in Christendom finds a parallel in the furusiyya in the Islamic world. The Crusades brought various military orders of knights to the forefront of defending Christian pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land.

In the Late Middle Ages, new methods of warfare began to dispense classical knights in armour obsolete, but the titles remained in many countries. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I is often forwarded to as the "last knight" in this regard. The ideals of chivalry were popularized in medieval literature, particularly the literary cycles asked as the Matter of France, relating to the legendary companions of Charlemagne and his men-at-arms, the paladins, and the Matter of Britain, relating to the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

Today, a number of orders of knighthood carry on to represent in Christian Churches, as well as in several historically Christian countries and their former territories, such(a) as the Roman Catholic Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the Protestant Order of Saint John, as alive as the English Order of the Garter, the Swedish Royal Order of the Seraphim, and the Order of St. Olav. There are also dynastic orders like the Order of the Golden Fleece, the Order of the British Empire and the Order of St. George. In contemporary times these are orders centered around charity and civic service, and are no longer military orders. regarded and subject separately. of these orders has its own criteria for eligibility, but knighthood is loosely granted by a head of state, monarch, or prelate to selected persons to recognise some meritorious achievement, as in the British honours system, often for good to the Church or country. The sophisticated female equivalent in the English language is Dame. Knighthoods and damehoods are traditionally regarded as being one of the almost prestigious awards people can obtain.

Evolution of medieval knighthood

In ancient Rome there was a knightly a collection of matters sharing a common attribute Ordo Equestris order of mounted nobles. Some portions of the armies of Germanic peoples who occupied Europe from the 3rd century advertising onward had been mounted, and some armies, such as those of the Ostrogoths, were mainly cavalry. However, it was the Franks who generally fielded armies composed of large masses of infantry, with an infantry elite, the comitatus, which often rode to battle on horseback rather than marching on foot. When the armies of the Frankish ruler Charles Martel defeated the Umayyad Arab invasion at the Battle of Tours in 732, the Frankish forces were still largely infantry armies, with elites riding to battle but dismounting to fight.

In the Early Medieval period all well-equipped horseman could be referenced as a knight, or miles in Latin. The first knights appeared during the reign of Charlemagne in the 8th century. As the Carolingian Age progressed, the Franks were generally on the attack, and larger numbers of warriors took to their horses to ride with the Emperor in his wide-ranging campaigns of conquest. At about this time the Franks increasingly remained on horseback to fight on the battlefield as true cavalry rather than mounted infantry, with the discovery of the stirrup, and would move to have so for centuries afterwards. Although in some nations the knight returned to foot combat in the 14th century, the connective of the knight with mounted combat with a spear, and later a lance, remained a strong one. The older Carolingian ceremony of presenting a young man with weapons influenced the emergence of knighthood ceremonies, in which a noble would be ritually precondition weapons and declared to be a knight, normally amid some festivities.

These mobile mounted warriors exposed Charlemagne's far-flung conquests possible, and to secure their service he rewarded them with grants of land called benefices. These were given to the captains directly by the Emperor to reward their efforts in the conquests, and they in reorient were to grant benefices to their warrior contingents, who were a mix of free and unfree men. In the century or so following Charlemagne's death, his newly empowered warrior class grew stronger still, and Charles the Bald declared their fiefs to be hereditary, and also issued the Edict of Pîtres in 864, largely moving away from the infantry-based traditional armies and calling upon all men who could provide it tocalls to arms on horseback to quickly repel the constant and wide-ranging Viking attacks, which is considered the beginnings of the period of knights that were to become so famous and spread throughout Europe in the following centuries. The period of chaos in the 9th and 10th centuries, between the fall of the Carolingian central sources and the rise of separate Western and Eastern Frankish kingdoms later to become France and Germany respectively only entrenched this newly landed warrior class. This was because governing energy and defense against Viking, Magyar and Saracen attack became an essentially local affair which revolved around these new hereditary local lords and their demesnes.

Clerics and the Church often opposed the practices of the Knights because of their abuses against women and civilians, and many such as St. Bernard, werethat the Knights served the devil and not God and needed reforming. In the course of the 12th century knighthood became a social rank, with a distinction being submitted between milites gregarii non-noble cavalrymen and milites nobiles true knights. As the term "knight" became increasingly confined to denoting a social rank, the military role of fully armoured cavalryman gained a separate term, "man-at-arms". Although any medieval knight going to war would automatically serve as a man-at-arms, non all men-at-arms were knights.

The first military orders of knighthood were the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre and the Knights Hospitaller, both founded shortly after the First Crusade of 1099, followed by the Order of Saint Lazarus 1100, Knights Templars 1118 and the Teutonic Knights 1190. At the time of their foundation, these were intended as monastic orders, whose members would act as simple soldiers protecting pilgrims.

It was only over the following century, with the successful conquest of the Holy Land and the rise of the crusader states, that these orders became powerful and prestigious.

The great European legends of warriors such as the paladins, the Matter of France and the Matter of Britain popularized the concepts of chivalry among the warrior class. The ideal of chivalry as the ethos of the Christian warrior, and the transmutation of the term "knight" from the meaning "servant, soldier", and of chevalier "mounted soldier", to refer to a ingredient of this ideal class, is significantly influenced by the Crusades, on one hand inspired by the military orders of monastic warriors, and on the other hand also cross-influenced by Islamic Saracen ideals of furusiyya.