hope of being knighted themselves, and thus these titles remained socially
ambiguous until the end of the protoclassic phase. In the dialects of Ger-
many, the usual terms for the assistants of knights were cognates of knabe
that meant “boy” and “male servant.” Those who were training for knight-
hood, however, came to be distinguished by the titles edelknabe and
edelkneht,meaning “noble youth.” In some regions the title junchêrre
(young lord) came to be preferred, and this ultimately prevailed as the equiv-
alent of the English squire, in the sense of “undubbed noble landlord.”
Other developments of the late preclassic subphase contributed to the
elevation of knighthood. The new concept of the miles Christi promoted in
the First Crusade was given an institutional embodiment in the first mili-
tary religious orders, those of the Poor Knights of Christ of the Temple of
Solomon and of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. In both
orders, the dominant class of members came to be restricted to men who
were at once knights and monks, thus combining the two forms of “solider
of Christ” and creating a new model that would soon be imitated both in
other orders and, on a more modest scale, by noble knights generally.Protoclassic Knighthood (1150/1200–1250/1300)
In the protoclassic phase (1150–1300), the disparate developments of the
previous subphase came together, and a new type of knighthood, derived
from the preclassic noble type, but absorbing characteristics of the ignoble
or professional type, emerged at the end. This development was accompa-
nied and effectively made possible by (1) the social fusion of the preclassic
lordly nobility with the upper strata of the preclassic ignoble knightage,
which involved the assumption of the attributes of nobility by the richer ig-
noble (and in Germany servile) knights, just as the nobles had earlier as-
sumed the attributes of knighthood; (2) the identification of the resultant
classic nobility with the “order” or “estate” of fighters in the new func-
tional paradigm that gradually came to dominate all social thought; (3) the
attachment of the ethos, ideals, and mythologies developed separately by
knightly warriors, noble rulers, courtly prelates, courtly poets, and cru-
sader monks during the immediately preceding subphase to the status of
knight as the embodiment of the noble identity and function (at once elite
warrior, lord, courtier, officer of state, devout Catholic, and crusader), and
to chevalerie in the sense of “knightliness” or “chivalry”; and (4) the grad-
ual disappearance of the original ignoble professional knightage, whose
landless members—the true heirs of the Frankish caballarii—were replaced
by soldiers of comparable function but inferior title and social rank.
Chevalerie and its equivalents (including cnihthadand ritterschaft) finally
replaced the words equivalent to vassalage as the names for the qualities
and ethos of a noble warrior. As noble landlords, knights were increasingly272 Knights