Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

276 Knights
which time the tournament had probably become the principal locus for the
new chivalric ideology and mythology. By that time, both the team-fought
or melee tournament proper and the mounted duels called jousts that constituted
an ever more important alternative to it had also come under the
supervision of a new class of specialists called heralds, who had begun as
tournament criers and advanced to become experts in the system of armorial
or heraldic emblems all knights now set on their shields, flags, and seals.
A more austerely Christian ideal of chivalry (articulated in the later
romances of the Arthurian Grail cycle) came to be embodied in the same
period in the many new military religious orders. These orders, modeled
more or less closely on those of the Templars and Hospitallers of St. John,
were founded earlier to carry on the crusade against the enemies of Christ
and his Church on every frontier of Latin Christendom, including southern
Spain and the Baltic coast. The knights of these orders at first combined
only the strictly military ideals of preclassic knighthood with the religious
ideals of monasticism, and only in the fourteenth century began to identify
with the courtly aspects of lay chivalric culture. On the other hand, those
secular knights who were both ignoble and landless generally ignored both
the religious and the courtly elements of the new code and adhered at most
to the military ideals of the old preclassic vassalic knight.
In the later decades of the thirteenth century, the processes of the earlier
subphase were completed and generalized in all parts of Latin Christendom
save those on the eastern and northern borders, added since 950.
The secular ideals of chivalry were finally set forth in a formal way near the
beginning of the subphase in the first vernacular treatises on chivalry, the
Roman des Eles (French; Romance of the Wings) and the Livre de Chevalerie
(French; Book of Knighthood), and less formally in the first chivalric
biography, the Vie de Guillaume li Marechal (French; Life of William the
Marshal). What was to be the most influential of all treatises was composed
toward the end of the subphase, in 1270: El libre del orde de cavaleria
(Spanish; Book of the order of knighthood) by the Catalan knight, encyclopedist,
and missionary Ramon Llull. A familiarity with the Arthurian
legend, and the acceptance of the chivalric ideals presented in the legend
and in similar contemporary treatises, also spread gradually among nobles
of all ranks after 1225, and by the end of the phase was virtually universal,
if only superficially adhered to.
At the beginning of this phase, most knights adopted the fully developed
form of great helm that enclosed the whole head, and some form of
this helmet was to be characteristic of knightly armor to about 1550. By
the same time, knights had come to employ a somewhat smaller version of
their traditional shield, with the rounded top cut off to produce the nearly
triangular shape of the classic heraldic shield. This shield now bore the