Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

392 Orders of Knighthood, Secular
this type: the Castilian Order of Santiago, founded in 1170 on the general
model of the Order of the Temple, and the Bavarian Company of the Cloister
of Ettal, founded by the emperor Ludwig IV in the 1330s and apparently
dissolved shortly after his death in 1347. The latter, however, probably
served as an inspiration for the more conventional princely-confraternal order
of the Grail-Templars.
The curial orders were the most important military and noble societies
restricted to laymen in the history of Latin Christendom, the only ones to
survive the Reformation, and the only ones to exist in any numbers today.
The first society of the curial class as a whole to be founded was a
princely confraternal order, the Hungarian Society of St. George, established
in 1325 by King Károly I. It was given most of the features typical of the contemporary
confraternity and lacked only a formal presidential office to make
it a true monarchical order as well. As it was the first order designed to bind
lay knights or nobles to a royal or princely patron and put chivalry into the
service of the state, it cannot be surprising that the Society of St. George was
endowed with a number of features peculiar to it, in addition to the lack of
a monarchical presidency. Several other orders of this type were founded by
or under the influence of princes, the most notable of which were the Order
of St. Catherine in the Dauphiny of Viennois (1330/40), the Company of St.
George of the Grail-Templars in the Duchy of Austria (1337), the Order of
the Hound in the Duchy of Bar (1422), the Company of Our Lady (of the
Swan) in the Electoral Marquisate of Brandenburg (in its earliest form,
1440), and the Order of the Crescent in the Duchy of Anjou (1448). The last,
in particular, differed from the existing monarchical orders outside Germany
exclusively in lacking a monarchical presidency.
Although they too were confraternities, the earliest true monarchical
orders drew their inspiration from the religious orders of knights and the
lay orders depicted in the Arthurian cycle of romances. Indeed, only because
the form of the religious order was inappropriate for their purposes
and the fictional orders lacked any clearly described statutes, the founders
of the earliest orders adopted the confraternal structures familiar to them
from their own time and easily adaptable to their purposes. In fact, the inventor
of the fully realized monarchical order, Alfonso XI of Castile and
Leon, took from the confraternal model little more than the idea of an annual
meeting, and his Order of the Band, proclaimed in 1330, was essentially
a wholly lay equivalent of the military religious orders in which his
kingdom abounded.
Edward III of England, who founded the second such order, may well
have intended to follow Alfonso’s example in his initial plan to revive the
Round Table Company announced in 1344 on the return of his cousin
Henry “of Grosmont,” count of Lancaster, from a long sojourn at the