Free The Knight in History by Frances Gies Page A

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