confined geographically to what may be called Great Francia—the Frank-
ish empire and its successor states—and after about 900 were only com-
mon in the northern half of one of those states, the Kingdom of West Fran-
cia or France.
From ca. 740 to ca. 840, the earliest caballarii were probably raised
as part of the expanded and reorganized royal army of the new Arnulfing-
Carolingian dynasty under its last mayor and first king, Pepin I. They were
maintained first by the king, then by the regional governors, and finally by
the greater noble magnates who held no such office, as personal vassi(vas-
sals): free clients of a new type invented in the same period, who promised
to serve their patron, or seignior, in return for his protection and support.
The seignior provided his ordinary vassals not only with food and housing
within his palace or villa-complex, but also with the armor, weapons, and
horses that were the tools of their trade, and presumably with the training
and practice they needed to be effective. Some particularly valued pro-
toknights were eventually supported outside their seignior’s household by
a beneficium(benefice)—a fragment of the seignior’s agricultural estate
whose produce and peasant labor were assigned to each such protoknight
while both the vassal and the seignior lived. Such grants, however, were
probably rare on this level of the social hierarchy before the eleventh cen-
Knights 265A medieval manuscript illumination depicting knights battling. (Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis)