The purpose of this paper is to examine the phenomenon of chivalry in the Middle Ages, with special reference to the military religious orders.
Out of old Germanic customs of miliary initiation, crossed with Saracen influences from Persia, Syria, and Spain, as well as Christian ideas of devotion and sacrament, flowered the imperfect but generous reality of chivalry in the Middle Ages in Europe.
A knight was a person of aristocratic birth--i.e., of titled and landowning family--who had formally received into the order of knighthood. Not all "gentle" men (men distinguished by their "gens" or ancestry) were eligible to knighthood or title; younger sons, except of royal blood, were normally confined to modest properties that precluded the expensive appurtenances of chivalry; such men remained squires unless they carved out new lands and titles of their own.
The youth who aimed at knighthood submitted to long and arduous discipline. At seven or eight he entered as a page, at twelve or fourteen as a squire, into the service of a lord; waited on him at table, in the bedchamber, on the manor, in joust or battle; fortified his own flesh and spirit with dangerous exercises and sports; learned by imitation and trial to handle the weapons of feudal war. When his apprenticeship was finished he was received into the knightly order by a ritual of sacramental awe. The candidate began with a bath as a symbol of spiritual, perhaps as a guarantee of physical, purification; therefore he could be called a "knight of the bath," as distinguished from those "knights of the sword" who had received their honors on some battlefield as immediate reward for bravery. He was clothed in white tunic, red robe and black coat, representing respectively the hoped-for purity of his morals, the blood he might shed for honor or God, and the death he must be prepared to meet unflinchingly. For a day he fasted; he passed a night at church in prayer, confesse...