Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

tus of caballarius/miles. Between about 1070 and 1140, princes like the
duke of Normandy adopted seals for authenticating documents in the manner
of the royal chancery, and all of these seals bore an effigy of the owner
on horseback in the armor characteristic of a knight. Lesser noblemen in
both France and England (who still lacked seals) began instead to assume
the title miles/chevaler after their name, in the same fashion as some of
their ignoble brethren, and possibly to treat the established rite of adobement,
or “dubbing”—in which young noblemen had traditionally been
vested with the arms and armor of a noble warrior as a rite of initiation
into adulthood—as being instead a rite of initiation into knighthood. As a
result, by the end of the subphase (around 1100) two distinct types of
knighthood had come into existence: the traditional, ignoble, professional
type, for whose occupants it was the highest and most important of their
statuses; and the new, noble type, for whose occupants it was still only a
relatively minor status, overshadowed by those of noble, territorial lord,
and seignior. Only the former, however, was generalized even in the more
advanced regions of Latin Christendom.
The prestige of knighthood in general finally increased at the end of
the subphase when the designation miles Christi (soldier/servant of Christ),
which had traditionally been used in a metaphorical way to designate
monks, was extended to the knights who formed the core of the Christian
armies in the First Crusade (1095–1099). This proclamation by Pope Urban
II not only converted those who participated into holy warriors, but
removed the stigma traditionally attached in Christian doctrine to all soldiers,
whose profession required them to perform acts that were inherently
sinful, so that they were required to do a major penance whenever they
killed, even in a just war. Now that the killing of the enemies of God was
to be regarded as a meritorious act, which by implication made all justifiable
killing acceptable, all honest knights could thenceforth hold their
heads up among Christians. This development, along with others of the
same period, encouraged knights to be considerably more pious than they
had been, and eventually made both piety and loyalty to the Catholic faith
into characteristics of the ideal knight.
The late subphase of this period (1100–1150/1200) saw the full emergence
of noble knighthood. Nevertheless, the great majority of knights remained
landless and ignoble, and the knightage as a whole was not yet
united by a common “chivalrous” ideology or a common set of rites and
insignia. Adobement (dubbing), though now universally regarded as an act
of initiation into knighthood, remained restricted to the nobility. The classic
elements of chivalry did begin to emerge in this subphase, but they remained
separate from one another and not formally associated with
knighthood as such. The princes of Great Francia and adjacent regions did
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