Dungeons and Dragons paladins descend from Charlemagne's legendary twelve peers
Before paladins were holy warriors and healers in fantasy games, they were Charlemagne's twelve greatest knights, led by Roland, in medieval French epics. The word itself goes back further still, to Rome's Palatine Hill and the palace officials who lived beside the emperor.
In ancient Rome a palatinus was one of the emperor's closest retainers, living in the imperial residence. The Merovingian Frankish kings kept a high official called the comes palatinus, or count palatine, who first helped with judicial duties and later handled many of them himself. Some counts palatine were posted to distant provinces, and their districts became palatinates. By the High Middle Ages great lords, such as the Counts Palatine of Champagne, used the title to rank themselves above ordinary counts, and the Count Palatine of the Rhine was confirmed as an imperial elector in the Golden Bull of 1356.
The legendary paladins took shape in the 12th-century chansons de geste known as the Matter of France, which played a role much like the Round Table stories. Names shift from poem to poem, but there are always twelve, a number echoing the Apostles, and Roland and his friend Oliver are always among them. Their finest hour is The Song of Roland, which recounts their last stand against Saracen forces at Roncevaux Pass, betrayed by Ganelon. The legend drew on real wars between the Franks and the Emirate of Córdoba.
Italian Renaissance poets Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto sent the knights, with Roland renamed Orlando, on wilder adventures, adding sorcerers and converted Saracens. Ariosto's Orlando Furioso fed a flood of Baroque opera, including Handel's Orlando of 1733 and works by Vivaldi and Lully, and later Haydn's Orlando paladino.
Outside fiction, the label came to mean a ruler's trusted inner circle: an 1871 magazine called Bismarck, Moltke and Roon the German emperor's three paladins, and Wolseley and Roberts were Queen Victoria's. The modern fantasy version dates from 1975, when a paladin class appeared in a Dungeons and Dragons supplement, reportedly modelled on the hero of Three Hearts and Three Lions, a 1962 fantasy novel that itself borrowed from the Matter of France. Video games followed with The Bard's Tale in 1985.
Source: Paladin
