MLARTC_FM.part 1.qxp

(Chris Devlin) #1

took it upon themselves to promote the fellow feeling and exclusiveness of
members of the old knightly nobility by insisting upon ever more stringent
genealogical and practical qualifications for membership and by promoting
the ideal of tournament-worthiness as the best indicator of noble status.
They were also associated with the steadily growing variety of forms of
combat that were included in tournaments in the fifteenth century and per-
sisted well into the sixteenth. Those of the political-military type differed
only in the details of their constitutions from the fraternal and curial soci-
eties founded to serve the same ends. Among the most important were the
Company of the Buckle, founded in Franconia ca. 1392, and the Company
of St. George’s Shield, founded in Swabia in 1406. All served to organize
and bind together members of the middle to lower nobility of an extensive
region, most of whom were probably already related to one another by
blood or marriage, and therefore had similar sets of rivals and enemies.
There were also many nonnoble military confraternities, typically
made up of ignoble soldiers of some particular type, such as crossbowmen,
archers, halberdiers, or bombardiers. The soldiers in these confraternities
were always professionals, and the confraternities were for them what the
guilds were for members of other trades and professions—including the ar-
morers, who made armor and weapons forged of metal; the bowyers, who
made bows; and the fletchers, who made arrows. At the end of the period
under consideration, two strictly military but seminoble confraternities, the
Confraternity of St. George (1493) and the Distinguished and Laudable
Company of St. George (1503), were founded by the emperor Frederick III
and his son the emperor Maximilian I as lay auxiliaries to a new religious
order established by the former to defend Latin Europe from the Turks: the
Knightly Order of St. George (1469).
In fact, by the later fourteenth century, confraternities dedicated to
appropriate patron saints probably united the members of virtually every
group associated with warfare. The guilds of knights and soldiers, normally
organized on a local basis, were usually dedicated to a saint who had been
a soldier and could be seen as a knight; the most important were St. George
of Lydda, St. Maurice of the Theban Legion, and St. Michael the archangel,
captain of the hosts of Heaven. Guilds of bowyers and fletchers, by con-
trast, were commonly dedicated to St. Sebastian, who had been martyred
by being shot through with arrows.
A handful of societies did not fit into any of the categories just de-
scribed, being in effect hybrids of the older religious order with the lay con-
fraternity of knights. These may be described as semireligious orders of
knighthood, since they were made up of a body of monks and a body of
knights who, though living in community with the monks, remained laymen
and were even permitted to marry. There seem to be only two examples of


Orders of Knighthood, Secular 391
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