The Knight in HistoryThe Knight in History

"Describes the rise, the long noonday, and the decline of knighthood, and the influence of the medieval knight throughout history. Frances Gies brings her gifts for research and historical analysis together to explore this institution which has been the object of much attention, speculation, and myth-making, and, most important, has been a crucial element in the shaping of history. She achieves this through descriptions of knightly types, such as the Crusaders of 1095 and the Knights Templars of the thirteenth century, and through portraits of individual men--the famous knight-errant William Marshal, the troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel, the Breton hero Bertrand du Guesclin, and Sir John Fastolf, to whom war was a profitable business. For six centuries the medieval knight dominated the battlefields and stirred the imagination of the Western world. Born out of the chaos of the early Middle Ages, the armored, mounted warrior revolutionized warfare and became the keystone of the new political structure of feudalism. Alarmed by his excesses, the Church first attempted to tame him, then enlisted him in its own enterprises, above all the First Crusade of 1095. The Church's efforts to Christianize the knight gave him a status sought even by kings and princes, and he was celebrated by the troubadours, trouvères and minnesingers--themselves knights--and by their successors, including the fabricators of the legend of King Arthur and the Round Table. Not a direct victim of the invention of firearms--to which he was less vulnerable than most soldiers--the knight nevertheless suffered from the succession of military, economic, and political changes that marked the waning of the Middle Ages, and in the end was anachronistically stranded in the age of gunpowder and the national state. However, his memory proved durable. In a long "Indian summer," which stretched into modern times, knighthood was revived and recalled with affectionate myopia--its faults forgotten, its virtues exaggerated. In The Knight in History, Gies achieves a fascinating and comprehensive picture of knighthood since its beginnings."--Jacket.