tury, when the benefice began to evolve into the different form of support
contemporaries came to call by names derived from the Latinized Frankish
word feus,“property,” including the later Latin feudum,the Old French fee
or fié,the Middle French fief,and the Middle English fee.The fief did not
finally assume its classic form until nearly the end of the second phase in
the history of knighthood, around 1150.
The second century of the protoknighthood phase, from ca. 840 to ca.
950/1000, saw the rapid rise of the caballarii to the position of being the
only effective form of soldier at the disposal of the nobles of Great Francia
and the shifting of the great majority from the royal armies to those of the
regional and local governors: the dukes, marquises, and counts. The period
was marked by the partition of Great Francia among the grandsons and
great-grandsons of Charlemagne, by civil wars among the kings of the suc-
cessor states and their officers the governors, and by the invasion of Great
Francia, first by Vikings from the north and then by Magyars from the east.
In these wars, the easily mobilized, highly mobile, and economically de-
pendent caballarii come to form the main component of the armies of all
of the Frankish leaders. After the final partitions of the empire in 888, they
supported the efforts of the regional governors of the four successor states
to convert themselves into hereditary princes only nominally dependent on
royal authority. Indeed, from 850 to 1250, the strength of most rulers of
Latin Christendom depended largely on the number of armored horsemen
they had in their service, and in Latin the ordinary word for soldier, miles,
was increasingly restricted to them.Preclassic Knighthood (ca. 950/1100–1150/1200)
The second major phase in the history of knighthood was characterized by
six developments: the perfecting of the knight’s equipment and tactics; a
great increase in the number of knights in Great Francia; the exportation
of knighthood to most other parts of Latin Christendom; the conversion of
the knightage (or body of knights) into an international military corps with
distinctive customs (including a rite of initiation), code, and ethos; the con-
version of the old ignoble knightage into a social stratum between the no-
bles and the peasants; and the emergence above that stratum of a new no-
ble knightage that would eventually absorb the upper layers of the old one.
These developments—which marked the transition from protoknighthood
to classic knighthood—took place in three distinct subphases, whose dates
varied significantly from one region to another. Throughout the phase a so-
cial gulf still continued to exist between the new noble knights and the ig-
noble professional knights, most of whom continued to be landless vassals
maintained in noble households as servants or even as serfs, and others of
whom now served as lordless mercenaries.266 Knights