Knightly orders began as armed monks guarding pilgrims and ended as medals
The first knightly orders were brotherhoods of soldier-monks sworn to poverty, obedience and chastity, escorting pilgrims to the Holy Land. Over centuries kings borrowed the idea to bind nobles to their courts, and eventually many orders shrank to a badge on a ribbon. The Germans even coined a word, ordenshunger, for collecting them.
An order of chivalry is a fellowship of knights, usually founded during or inspired by the Christian military orders of the Crusades, roughly 1099 to 1291. The founding ideal was the monk and the knight in one person, dedicated to a Christian purpose. Groups such as the Knights Templar and the Order of St. John lived communally, cared for the sick, protected pilgrims and fought the perceived enemies of Christendom. The Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem traces its foundation to 1090. These bodies only became orders in canon law once the pope approved their binding rules.
From the mid-14th century European royal houses created courtly orders of their own. They gave monarchs a loyal body of nobles independent of the church while dressing court life in knightly virtue. Charles I of Hungary founded the Order of Saint George in 1325, often seen as the start of this monarchical phase, and James II of Aragon set up the Order of Montesa in 1317. The glittering Burgundian court's Order of the Golden Fleece, founded in 1430, became the model princely order.
Classifying them has kept scholars busy. The Italian writer Francesco Sansovino, in 1566, split knights into knights of the collar in dynastic orders, knights of the cross in religious orders and knights of the spur dubbed by a ruler. The Canadian heraldist D'Arcy Boulton later distinguished monarchical from confraternal orders, and a common timeline runs from military-monastic orders through monarchical ones to purely honorific orders from about 1580.
Many orders dissolved for lack of members or political reasons; the Templars were suppressed in 1312 and never revived, while Nazi Germany abolished others that returned after the war. Some shifted to nursing and charity, as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta has, the one surviving sovereign order and an international entity in its own right. Others live on as state honours: Elizabeth II kept appointing members to the Order of the British Empire, and republican France still names knights of the Legion of Honour.
Source: Order of chivalry
