Was ist ein Ritter?

What is a knight sounds a bit like a superfluous question because I'm sure most of you have a very clear idea of ​​what a knight is, those medieval guys in armor who knew how to fight well and liked to ride horses, so there's good. Yeah, okay, video finished, like and subscribe and see you next time at Burger, why? And depending on the pop culture cliché used, he appears either as the noble warrior or as the stuffer with skin who has nothing. other than, well, just hitting it, but what's behind the idea of ​​a gentleman behind the concept? what role and social functions they assumed, where they came from and where the hell they really went, but first of all, very little by little, the word knight is derived from a Germanic root, namely, to ride a horse, but in German usage, in the sense of warrior on horseback, it only began to be used in the 12th century as a loanword from Middle Dutch.

Of course, there were knights before that. also and the corresponding names of the knights in the respective Romance languages ​​show us the direction in which we should look. We have to look for the origins of European chivalry Chevalier Caballero caballieri from late Latin kavallarios Since when did the first knights exist? Knights that we find in the time of the Roman Republic. Only at the beginning of the Roman Empire was a standing army of professional soldiers established in Rome. Before Augustus, conscripts were drafted for military service, so equipment had to be provided and paid for by them. themselves or their families, the type and magnitude of the equipment, which naturally cost something, depended on the family's possessions;

Poorer families provided few or only lightly armed and equipped foot fighters, while wealthier families could provide better equipped fighters. Along these social boundaries and differences in material wealth, different kinds of taxes arise in Roman tax law, one of which is so-called equity. Therefore, citizens of the Republic can from a financial point of view. equip a mounted fighter and are therefore required to do so by the state, since a fighter's income was directly related to his personal wealth, the rank of x brought with it corresponding prestige and a high social status that was in the threshold. Socially consolidated during the Roman Empire and destined to last for the rest of antiquity, the concept of knight was born.

Thus, equitas is usually translated directly as knight, although literally speaking tabla it should actually be called a rider, but with equites as in equites. knight the social component and social status are already included is knight because, depending on the context, the most appropriate translation is horsemen in armor from late antiquity. For a long time, these equivites appeared in the form of lightly roasted cavalry and only carried. on the corresponding role in battle through contact with his heavily armored cavalry. In their eastern neighbors, the Romans themselves very slowly began to create their own heavy cavalry, and from the beginning of the century actions increasingly appeared as so-called kataphragde. or glibanari, the cavalry models of the European Middle Ages, inspired by the originally Persian cavalry, adopting equipment and fighting techniques from their opponents was, by the way, a specialty of the Romans and that is why the Roman cavalry sword used by Sparta It can be traced back to Celtic models, possibly imported by Celtic cavalry troops recruited by Rome from the so-called Latin culture in the 1st century BC.

C., like the Katha that the knights of the Middle Ages Sparta requested, as a long horseman's sword, should also be the inspiration for the weapon that we still associate today with knights and the Middle Ages, that is, the so-called knight's sword . Now that we have finally reached the so-called Middle Ages, the idea of ​​the heavily armed elite fighter arises. The kingdoms of northern Europe and also the Frankish king continue to live here on horseback and from the year 800 onwards Emperor Charles the Great would like to have people like that in his army. After all, he sees himself and his newly founded empire in a direct line. tradition to the Western Roman Empire and would therefore like to be on equal footing with it and with it.

However, in order to present it to the Eastern Roman Emperor at Bytanz, Charles already has enough trouble getting his infantry to stop fighting with By the way, it is a very effective weapon, but for a would-be emperor it may not necessarily be the pinnacle of representation and Frankish cavalry at this time is more comparable to a type of mounted infantry than to heavily armed cavalry. , which did not prevent Charles from acting as if contemporary depictions of Carolingian horsemen in armor did not derive directly from the early medieval idea of ​​later Roman cataphracts and were more a part of Frankish self-portrait than that of the Roman emperor as a representation. of armored horsemen who actually existed in the early Frankish Empire itself, but the knight as a social class was revived in the European Middle Ages as a warrior caste, became an integral part of feudalism in the so-called feudal system, where land and The government was divided in a hierarchical system from top to bottom.

The neighboring levels of this pyramid are linked to each other by the word. In case of war, they are obliged to provide their lords with trained and equipped fighters, but, of course, almost no one had the same. ability to maintain these fighters as a permanent military force and therefore these knights become part of the separate economic unit of feudalism of the lower landed nobility, usually enfeoffed by the respective sovereign or even by the family, equipped with sufficient land ownership to be able to meet economic requirements. For training and equipment, they form the smallest economic unit of the feudal system and its military backbone.

The increasing importance of cavalry in the feudal ship for many small people, although not of rural origin, but increasingly of the lack of ministerial freedom. They had enormous opportunities to rise to the lower level or ministerial nobility, especially the latter, in addition to service with the weapon, they also had to be trained in administrative tasks and courtly manners in order to behave properly in business. court Not only combat training, but also cultural education were part of the long-term training to become a knight. In addition to courtly manners, it also included dance and sometimes music and poetry, at least as far as the ideal idea was concerned, that is, as a knight.

Gentleman in training, of course, it was still very important where you received your training and what aspects of the training were given special emphasis and the quality in which they were delivered, which in turn of course depended greatly on what type of networks were the families of the knights. The respective knights in era B and the reputation they had, because that also greatly influenced whether other courts or lordships were interested in receiving a young man for training. The so-called Middle Ages covers a period of around 1,000 years. And the general summary under the name of an era tends to hide the fact that, of course, there was also a huge social impact in these 1,000 years.

Political and economic developments and changes also occurred, and our gentlemen are not immune to this. And economic influence in the early Middle Ages fluctuated further and further away from small-scale feudal systems and became increasingly concentrated between the great landowning princes, the king or emperor, and the cities that were booming as commercial centers of the frontalism of the time. of the Roman central administration, represented a highly functional social model and, according to the initial situation, enormously progressive. It had gradually become obsolete, although its basic features continued to exist well into the modern era, but it was massively reshaped by economics.

This development deprived many knights of their rights. The lordships increasingly lost their livelihood, those who could not keep up with the changes, for example moving to the cities or opening other new economic areas in addition to their lordships, or becoming. The imperial knights directly subordinated to the king or the emperor were soon left behind, apart from the fact that the main economic events were increasingly moved to the cities and away from court life, many knights became increasingly impoverished and brutalized and began to worked as mercenaries or hired themselves in a more or less criminal manner, the boundaries are sometimes blurred and range from personal enrichment to the collection of cells in the name of the sovereign, to the looting of foreign property under the guise of federal law and simple bandit conduct.

Those who suffered were the common people, who, as easy prey, were often the target of such actions, which were carried out quite cruelly. It is not difficult to imagine that such approaches cast a very bad light on chivalric aristocrats and this apparent decline of chivalric virtues. He increasingly complained and the court inferiority of the time, in response to these events, drew a highly idealizing and romantic counter-image of the rough and uneducated robber baron; The term, by the way, is a modern neologism and not a medieval one. A word only marginally in this branch of poetry of mine, the focus is on Christian virtues and the ethical and moral compass that should ideally be the standard for a gentleman's actions, particularly charity and service to the weakest.

In the 12th century, a phenomenon spread that is still absolutely part of our modern image of the medieval knight: the great exhibition tournaments in which knights competed against each other. in sports competitions. You probably know the movie Knights. of Passion and as much as we can agree that this film is a nice little tribute to these knightly tournaments that should not be taken too seriously, but it captures some aspects quite well. In fact, these sporting events have produced real stars. For the most part, they came not so much from classical chivalry but from the high nobility and financial elites with the corresponding aristocratic background.

As mentioned, the social phenomenon of knights had already been on a downward trend for some time and knights as a society. economic and military unity It was no longer, as mentioned above, that the military backbone of society professional mercenaries cost many times less than the constant maintenance of a knight's property and therefore many knights could barely cover the costs. necessary equipment and personnel costs. For those knights who could still afford it, these tournaments often represented the last hope of counteracting the increasingly inevitable decline in their social status. Many knights invested all their remaining wealth in them.

On the public platform of tournaments to draw attention to oneself and one's virtues and abilities, the hope in question was perhaps to find an employer who would hire him and thus provide him with economic and social security, a search that unfortunately was not always crowned. . with success and this sad gentleman actor who dies motionless under a tree at the beginning of Knight of the Passion in poverty is not very far from the reality of the life of some of these gentlemen whose only prospect of a secure livelihood and the maintenance of their social status was the tournament fight is over stand why did he die The knight now has a lot to say about what to this day seems a shadow of the answer to this question, but the knights' assumption has become superfluous due to Military innovations appear as a reason for either the English longbow, the crossbow, or the crossbow.

To clarify this misconception, we must make a clear distinction between, on the one hand, the knight as a social and economic unit of the feudal system and, on the other. On the other hand, the beginning of a heavily armed British warrior and the end of the knight through highly powerful firearms is a certain equation that is no longer the case at the end of the Middle Ages, especially considering the fact that cavalry as a social status does not lose its relevance, but heavy armor is well made and can withstand even arrows, bolts or heavy bullets fired accordingly.

Plate armor continued to be used throughout the 16th century, until the Thirty Years' War and even into the First. In World War II we still found heavy armor to protect us from bullets and hail of shrapnel. It is absolutely true that the image of the invincible knight has been present again and again since the 19th century War. It was marred by devastating failures, such as the oft-cited Battle of Asamkur or the war against the Swiss Confederation. Both Leopold III ofHabsburgs near Sempach as Charles the Bold of Burgundbein de Sede and Nieto succumbed to the Swiss infantrymen.

The reason for this is not the permeability of the armor to fine bolts or bullets, but rather the sometimes only moderate effectiveness of heavy cavalry against well-trained and highly disciplined infantry with specialized weapons in knight's shashlik - one of the reasons why the Roman army only Its own cataphrasis began too late. For a long time, Persian catafacts were perceived as only really effective in providing armored horsemen in the fight against besieged Roman infantrymen. However, heavy cavalry continued to exist for a long time. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, but the knight as such disappeared from the scene and not because he was a soldier he has become superfluous but because his economic base had been lost.

As I mentioned before, the different strata of the feudal system were linked by the word. This obligation, which arose from these oaths made to each other, was increasingly replaced by a new form of obligation from the second half of the Early Middle Ages, namely money, the third disappearing in the form of vassals What are they. forced to be loyal by an oath, but not as a military unit, since knight is a class title from feudal times. In their place are the so-called noble servants who take on the role of knights on the battlefields and more and more afterwards. displace them and replace the knights with some kind of mercenary creature.

Due to the shift from natural electoral economics to monetary economics, this was ultimately the most mutually attractive way to pay or be paid for military service in cash rather than by living. With their lives threatened by various competitions and having to pay for their own equipment, there were many people from the cavalry who worked as so-called noble servants. Our current image of knights derives largely from the romantic decadence of this idealization of chivalry. the noble warrior As we have just found out in tournaments or in mindelyrics, this is in itself a phenomenon in a time when many of today's knights already had difficulty maintaining their social rank or ensuring their economic survival.

This ideal image of one that emerges from Knight's art is a social projection of desires that ultimately seems to have fallen in time centuries before the Relative Don Quixote. In contrast, we also like to find that stupid and grossly bad bit of violence that again was only capable. to represent a very small and very true part of the historical reality of chivalry. So if we ask what is a gentleman, then we can only answer by deviating from the questions where and when and if someone were to ask me now, as Adam did back then. , who shot a gentleman then he would immediately give an exaggerated answer that it was capitalism and it would be more correct to say early or proto-capitalism, well, up to that point today's gentleman does, in addition to knowing a little. more on the topic, I was able to ask you some new questions today, so that's good because that's how the story usually works, the main thing is that you ask and the more you ask, the more you know about something, the more questions of this type arise over time , so don't be discouraged if today I have shown you a clear and unambiguous picture of the elderly medieval knight, that is usually a good sign and if you have questions like that, write them in the comments and we will try to answer it exactly in one of our next videos and don't forget to like and subscribe, so you will always receive the response immediately when it arrives.

Until then, best regards and see you next time. capital history