Chivalry’s polished code was invented after the crusades
Between about 1170 and 1220, French society forged an informal code later called chivalry, wrapping knighthood in Christian manners and romance. The word began as horse soldiery—chevalerie—yet by the late Middle Ages it meant an ethos of the Christian warrior and courtly lover more than a payroll of cavalry.
Roots reach the Carolingian idealisation of the mounted fighter: bravery, training, and service among Charlemagne’s horsemen in Francia. Old French chevalerie first meant simply men on horses; chevalier labelled an aristocrat able to fight mounted. Only later, as romance literature spread, did the concrete fee-for-a-warhorse morph into a moral script for knights and gentlemen across courts that wanted polished violence.
Three medieval texts often summarise the package: the anonymous Ordene de chevalerie, in which Hugh II of Tiberias, captured by Saladin, wins release by agreeing to show him the rites of Christian knighthood; the book on the order of knighthood by Ramon Llull of Mallorca, who lived from 1232 to 1315; and Geoffroi de Charny's treatise, which puts prowess at the heart of knightly quality.
A well-known list of chivalry's ten commandments, published by the French literary historian Léon Gautier in 1884, demands obedience to the Church, defence of the weak, love of homeland, honesty and generosity. It is not medieval at all: Gautier distilled it himself from his reading of twelfth- and thirteenth-century romances. The historian Sismondi went further, calling the system an almost wholly poetic invention and warning readers not to confuse it with feudalism, the period's lived reality.
Before the code, nobles followed an unwritten habitus built around the preudomme, the wise and honest man. Its strands included loyalty, forbearance, hardiness in battle, generosity and honour, and restraint among warriors already shows in Hugh de Lusignan's agreement of the 1020s. Cowardice in battle was the surest way to lose honour; Bertran de Born said he would rather hold a scrap of land honourably than a vast empire in disgrace. Researchers keep finding that the supposed age of chivalry always lies further back, even to Rome.
Source: Chivalry
