Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

Clovis, one of the earliest Frankish leaders, established in 481 a Germanic
kingdom on the discarded civilization of Roman Gaul, where an
evangelizing church had already impressed its influence. Clovis, for piously
political reasons, became a Christian without learning to turn the other
cheek. He first extended his rule over the Ripuarian Franks. Before his
death in 511 he had, through treachery, murder, and brutal conquest, enforced
his rule on surrounding Teutonic peoples—Alemanni, Burgundians,
and Visigoths. His military campaigns, because they won converts for
Christianity, went forward with the blessings of the Church.
Clovis’s Frankish state was an unstable predecessor of Charlemagne’s
resplendent realm, which flourished three centuries later as the Carolingian
Empire. Between the times of these two Frankish rulers, the embryo of medieval
knighthood and chivalry began slowly to evolve. But there would
have been neither knighthood nor chivalry had not the system of feudalism
emerged from the Frankish historical experience.
A typical early German institution was the Gefolgschaft, or comitatus
in its Latin form, in which a distinguished war leader gathered about him a
select group of young men from his tribe to engage in warfare for glory and
booty. We learn from the Germania of the Roman historian Tacitus that
young German warriors, already invested with the shield and spear according
to custom, swore a sacred oath that they would protect their chief in battle
and try to emulate his bravest deeds but never exceed them, for it would
have been a violation of their oath ever to outshine their veteran leader. This
was as much a practical matter as one of loyalty: it was from the leader that
the warriors would receive a share of the war booty, which might include a
horse, weapons, and other gifts looted from the enemy as plunder. If their
leader should die in battle and they returned home unscathed, or if they
abandoned their weapons and fled the field, they became outcasts and faced
a life of scorn. Some ended their shame by their own hand.
The strong bond that existed between a war chief and his loyal followers
became a fixed element in the military structure of the Merovingian
dynasty that began with Clovis and ended in the mid-eighth century. During
this time, the military leaders and their young warriors became the
lords and vassals of a feudal system in which the war booty of old became
grants of conquered lands divided into fiefs, for which the endowed warrior
pledged his loyalty and his military service.
To visualize this precursor of knighthood and chivalry, one should
know that a medieval vassal was not a menial or serf, as modern usage
sometimes implies. The word vassal is Celtic in origin and in time came to
mean a loyal soldier or knight. Nor did the nobility, including lords and
vassals, make up a substantial part of medieval society. The privileged class
comprised no more than 10 percent of the entire population, often much
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