Chivalry's Rebrand: Charlemagne's Horsemen to the Ten Commandments Hoax

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The word chivalry comes from the French chevalerie, horse soldiery, and at first described nothing nobler than a man rich enough to fight on a warhorse, a line running back to Charlemagne's heavy cavalry. The early warrior code prized hardiness, bloody strokes in battle, loyalty, and largesse, lavish giving that bought followers. The troubadour Bertran de Born said he would rather hold a scrap of land in honor than an empire in disgrace. In the 1170s Henry the Young King and his armed entourage roamed northern France on tournaments and display, and clerics and poets such as Raoul de Houdenc answered with conduct literature: the Ordene de Chevalerie, Ramon Llull's Book of the Order of Chivalry, and Geoffroi de Charny's Book of Chivalry.

These texts gave the sword's two edges spiritual meaning and produced warrior, religious, and courtly love versions of the ideal, embodied by Gawain, Galahad, and Lancelot. The Peace and Truce of God limited when knights could fight, and Odo of Cluny justified the sword when pointed at enemies of the faith. Courtly love drew on Marian devotion and on Ibn Hazm's Ring of the Dove from Córdoba. At Crécy and Poitiers longbowmen cut down charging French nobles, mercenary free companies ignored the rules, and chivalry retreated into courtesy books and etiquette. Its afterlife runs through Victorian revivals, Douglas MacArthur's 1962 West Point farewell, suffragette critiques, and the modern chivalry thesis in criminal justice research.

• Sismondi noted that medieval writers always placed true chivalry in an earlier generation.
• The popular Ten Commandments of Chivalry were compiled by French historian Léon Gautier in 1884.
• Historian Richard Kaeuper argues that chivalry failed to bring order and that knights often preyed on merchants.
• Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages described chivalric manners as an illusion of a heroic past.
• Ernest Belfort Bax argued in 1913 that chivalry harmed men, citing women and children first on the Titanic.