leader for service to the Monarch or country, especially in a military capacity. Historically,

in Europe, knighthood has been conferred upon mounted warriors. During the High Middle Ages,

knighthood was considered a class of lower nobility. By the Late Middle Ages, the rank

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 a fighter for a lord, with payment

in the form of land holdings. The lords trusted the knights, who were skilled in battle on

horseback. Since the early modern period, the title of knight is purely honorific, usually

bestowed by a monarch, as in the British honours system, often for non-military service to

the country. Historically, the ideals of chivalry were

popularized in medieval literature, especially the Matter of Britain and Matter of France,

the former based on Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, written in the

1130s. Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, written in 1485, was important in defining

the ideal of chivalry which is essential to the modern concept of the knight as an elite

warrior sworn to uphold the values of faith, loyalty, courage, and honour. During the Renaissance,

the genre of chivalric romance became popular in literature, growing ever more idealistic

and eventually giving rise to a new form of realism in literature popularised by Miguel

de Cervantes' Don Quixote. This novel explored the ideals of knighthood and their incongruity

with the reality of Cervantes' world. In the late medieval period, new methods of warfare

began to render classical knights in armour obsolete, but the titles remained in many

nations. Some orders of knighthood, such as the Knights

Templar, have become the subject of legend; others have disappeared into obscurity. Today,

a number of orders of knighthood continue to exist in several countries, such as the

English Order of the Garter, the Swedish Royal Order of the Seraphim, and the Royal Norwegian

Order of St. Olav. Each of these orders has its own criteria for eligibility, but knighthood

is generally granted by a head of state to selected persons to recognise some meritorious

achievement. Knighthood in the Middle Ages was closely

linked with horsemanship from its origins in the 12th century until its final flowering

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. The special prestige

given to mounted warriors finds a parallel in the furusiyya in the Muslim world, and

the Greek hippeus and the Roman eques of Classical Antiquity.

Etymology The word knight, from Old English cniht, is

a cognate of the German word Knecht. This meaning, of unknown origin, is common among

West Germanic languages. Anglo-Saxon cniht had no particular connection to horsemanship,

referring to any servant. A rādcniht was a servant delivering messages or patrolling

coastlines on horseback. Old English cnihthād had the meaning of adolescence by 1300.

A narrowing of the generic meaning \"servant\" to \"military follower of a king or other superior\"

is visible by 1100. The specific military sense of a knight being a mounted warrior

in the heavy cavalry emerges only in the Hundred Years' War. The verb \"to knight\" appears around

1300, and from the same time, the word \"knighthood\" shifted from \"adolescence\" to \"rank or dignity

of a knight\". In this respect English differs from most

other European languages, where the equivalent word emphasizes the status and prosperity

of war horse ownership. Linguistically, the association of horse ownership with social

status extends back at least as far as ancient Greece, where many aristocratic names incorporated

the Greek word for horse, like Hipparchus and Xanthippe; the character Pheidippides

in Aristophanes' Clouds has his grandfather's name with hipp- inserted to sound more aristocratic.

Similarly, the Greek ἱππεύς is commonly translated \"knight\"; at least in its sense

of the highest of the four Athenian social classes, those who could afford to maintain

a warhorse in the state service. An Equestrian was a member of the second highest

social class in the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. This class is often translated

as \"knight\"; the medieval knight, however, was called miles in Latin,. Both Greek hippos

and Latin equus are derived from the Proto-Indo-European word root ekwo- meaning \"horse\".

In the later Roman Empire the classical Latin word for horse, equus, was replaced in common

parlance by vulgar Latin caballus, sometimes thought to derive from Gaulish caballos. From

caballus arose terms in the various Romance languages cognate to the English cavalier:

Old Italian cavaliere, Italian cavallo, Spanish caballero, French chevalier, Portuguese cavaleiro,

Romanian cavaler. The Germanic languages feature terms cognate to the English rider: German

Ritter, and Dutch and Scandinavian ridder. These words are cognates derived from Germanic

rīdan \"to ride\", derived from the Proto-Indo-European root reidh-.

Origins of medieval knighthood

In Ancient Rome there was a knightly class Ordo Equestris from which European knighthood

may have been derived. Knighthood as known in Europe was characterized

by the combination of two elements, feudalism and service as a mounted warrior. Both arose

under the reign of the Frankish emperor Charlemagne, from which the knighthood of the Middle Ages

can be seen to have had its genesis.

Some portions of the armies of Germanic peoples who occupied Europe from the 3rd century CE,

had always been mounted, and some armies, such as those of the Ostrogoths, comprised

mainly cavalry. However it was the Franks who came to dominate Western and Central Europe

after the fall of Rome, and they 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. Riding to battle had two key advantages: it reduced fatigue, particularly

when the elite soldiers wore armour; and it gave the soldiers more mobility to react to

the raids of the enemy, particularly the Muslim invasions which reached Europe in 711. So

it was that the armies of the Frankish ruler and warlord Charles Martel, which defeated

the Umayyad Arab invasion at the Battle of Tours in 732, were still largely infantry

armies, the elites riding to battle but dismounting to fight, providing a hard core for the levy

of the infantry warbands. As the 8th century progressed into the Carolingian

Age, 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 as mounted infantry, and would continue to do so for centuries thereafter.

Although in some nations the knight returned to foot combat in the 14th century, the association

of the knight with mounted combat with a spear, and later a lance, remained a strong one.

These mobile mounted warriors made 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 turn 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.

The period of chaos in the 9th and 10th centuries, between the fall of the Carolingian central

authority and the rise of separate Western and Eastern Frankish kingdoms, only entrenched

this newly landed warrior class. This was because governing power, and defence against

Viking, Magyar and Saracen attack, became an essentially local affair which revolved

around these new hereditary local lords and their demesnes.

In the Early Medieval period any well-equipped horseman could be described as a 'knight,'

or miles in Latin. In the course of the 12th century knighthood became a social rank with

a distinction being made between 'milites gregarii' and milites nobiles. 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, not all men-at-arms were knights.

The first military orders of knighthood were of Knights Hospitaller and of the Holy Sepulchre,

both founded at the First Crusade of 1099, followed by the Knights Templar and the Order

of Saint Lazarus. 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 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 member of this ideal class,

is significantly influenced by the Crusades, on one hand inspired by the military orders

of monastic warriors, as seen retrospectively from the point of view of the beginning Late

Middle Ages, and on the other hand influenced by Islamic ideals of furusiyya.

Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor is often referred to as the last true knight. He was

the last Holy Roman emperor to lead his troops onto the battlefield.

Chivalric code

Knights were expected, above all, to fight bravely and to display military professionalism

and courtesy. When knights were taken as prisoners of war, they were customarily held for ransom

in somewhat comfortable surroundings. This same standard of conduct did not apply to

non-knights who were often slaughtered after capture, and who were viewed during battle

as mere impediments to knights' getting to other knights to fight them.

Chivalry developed as an early standard of professional ethics for knights, who were

relatively affluent horse owners and were expected to provide military services in exchange

for landed property. Early notions of chivalry entailed loyalty to one's liege lord and bravery

in battle, similar to the values of the Heroic Age. During the Middle Ages, this grew from

simple military professionalism into a social code including the values of gentility, nobility

and treating others reasonably. In The Song of Roland, Roland is portrayed as the ideal

knight, demonstrating unwavering loyalty, military prowess and social fellowship. In

Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, chivalry had become a blend of religious duties, love

and military service. Ramon Llull's Book of the Order of Chivalry demonstrates that by

the end of the 13th century, chivalry entailed a litany of very specific duties, including

riding warhorses, jousting, attending tournaments, holding Round Tables and hunting, as well

as aspiring to the more æthereal virtues of \"faith, hope, charity, justice, strength,

moderation and loyalty.\" Knights of the late medieval era were expected

by society to maintain all these skills and many more, as outlined in Baldassare Castiglione's

The Book of the Courtier, though the book's protagonist, Count Ludovico, states the \"first

and true profession\" of the ideal courtier \"must be that of arms.\" Chivalry, derived

from the French word chevalier, simultaneously denoted skilled horsemanship and military

service, and these remained the primary occupations of knighthood throughout the Middle Ages.

Chivalry and religion were mutually influenced during the period of the Crusades. The early

Crusades helped to clarify the moral code of chivalry as it related to religion. As

a result, Christian armies began to devote their efforts to sacred purposes. As time

passed, clergy instituted religious vows which required knights to use their weapons chiefly

for the protection of the weak and defenseless, especially women and orphans, and of churches.

With the rise of Renaissance humanism and moral relativism, the knight–and chivalry

along with him–lost much of his relevance to society, and the idealism of chivalric

romance was fundamentally rejected in Niccolò Machiavelli's Il Principe and more directly

derided in Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. The medieval literary genre of chivalric romance

had been the high-water mark of idealism and romanticism in literature, but in the 16th

century Machiavelli instructed aspiring political rulers to be ruthlessly pragmatic and to apply

the principle that the ends justify the means, directly counter to the high-flown idealism

of late medieval chivalry. Later, the high-flown values of chivalric romance were heavily satirized

in Cervantes's Don Quixote, which portrayed the charmingly idealistic protagonist as a

lovable but hopelessly delusional imbecile. Medieval and Renaissance literature

Knights and the ideals of knighthood featured largely in medieval and Renaissance literature,

and have secured a permanent place in literary romance. While chivalric romances abound,

particularly notable literary portrayals of knighthood include The Song of Roland, Geoffrey

Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, and Miguel de Cervantes'

Don Quixote, as well as Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and other Arthurian tales.

The ideal courtier—the chivalrous knight—of Baldassarre Castiglione's The Book of the

Courtier became a model of the ideal virtues of nobility. Castiglione's tale took the form

of a discussion among the nobility of the court of the Duke of Urbino, in which the

characters determine that the ideal knight should be renowned not only for his bravery

and prowess in battle, but also as a skilled dancer, athlete, singer and orator, and he

should also be well-read in the Humanities and classical Greek and Latin literature.

Later Renaissance literature, such as Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, rejected the code

of chivalry as unrealistic idealism. The rise of Christian humanism in Renaissance literature

demonstrated a marked departure from the chivalric romance of late medieval literature, and the

chivalric ideal ceased to influence literature over successive centuries until it saw some

pockets of revival in post-Victorian literature.

Heraldry and other attributes

One of the greatest distinguishing marks of the knightly class was the flying of coloured

banners, to display power and to distinguish knights in battle and in tournaments.

Knights are generally armigerous, and indeed they played an essential role in the development

of heraldry. As heavier armour, including enlarged shields and enclosed helmets, developed

in the Middle Ages, the need for marks of identification arose, and with coloured shields

and surcoats, coat armory was born. Armorial rolls were created to record the knights of

various regions or those who participated in various tournaments.

Additionally, knights adopted certain forms of regalia which became closely associated

with the status of knighthood. At the Battle of Crécy, Edward III of England sent his

son, Edward, the Black Prince, to lead the charge into battle and when pressed to send