though they normally included men from all three of the orders of society
(clerics, lay nobles, and simples), by the end of the twelfth century they
were all dominated by that class of their lay members who were also
knights and who by about 1250 (when knighthood was restricted to men
of knightly or noble birth) were nobles as well. Secular bodies of soldiers
similarly dominated by knights were founded at about the same time as the
earliest religious orders, but seem to have been unknown outside Spain and
northern Italy before about 1325, and flourished primarily between that
date and about 1525.
Although all such bodies are now commonly called “orders,” most
did not use that title, and many were not even bodies corporate. Therefore,
the more accurate name is “secular military associations.” Most were ef-
fectively restricted to laymen, and were thus “lay military associations,”
but others included a dependent class of secular priests as well. All such
bodies may also be sorted into nonnoble, seminoble, and strictly noble
types, according to the dominant class of lay members, and each of these
into various subtypes. The term orderis reserved for certain of the more
elaborate noble subtypes, by which the title was actually used. The qualifi-
cation “of knighthood” is reserved for the small minority that actually re-
stricted their principal class of membership to dubbed knights.
Unlike the religious orders on which they were partly modeled, the
secular associations were extremely diverse because they drew upon a vari-
ety of models other than the religious or monastic order of knighthood both
for their forms and attributes and for their goals and activities. The most
important of these additional models were the fictional orders or military
brotherhoods of both the Arthurian and (later) the Greek tradition (espe-
cially the companies of the Round Table, the Grail-Keepers, the Frank
Palace, and the Argonauts); the professional guild or confraternity; the mil-
itary brotherhood formed to share the prizes and losses of war; the military
and political league established with growing frequency by the princes and
barons of many regions of France, Germany, and Italy to counter political
pressures felt by their members and promote collective advancement; and
finally the bodies of retainers or clients who were increasingly maintained
by kings and princes from the later fourteenth century onward to secure the
loyalty and service of the more prominent members of their own nobility
and of the lesser princes and barons of their region. Most of these emerged
only during the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and there-
fore could not have influenced the earliest form of the religious orders.
Any particular association might include the characteristics of two or
more of these six models, but there was actually no single characteristic or
set of characteristics that can be attributed to all of them. Given this diver-
sity, it is impossible to generalize about the secular associations in any
Orders of Knighthood, Secular 385