“Yes, modern peasants have shredded it,” the women say. “There are no more noble knights who are ready to throw the whole world at women's feet, to fight for the sake of a beautiful lady of the heart with a dozen giants and to love her wholeheartedly” … But if a modern woman met a real knight on her way, believe me, she would be terrified of this meeting … The image of a strong, beautiful and virtuous knight, selflessly devoted to his beloved, created by the female imagination and supported by romantic stories, has nothing to do with reality …
The knight's armor weighed unreasonably much, and the knight in them could not independently climb on a horse
The myth takes its roots from tournament armor, which really became more and more heavier over time, as safety requirements increased. But they were not used anywhere except for the tournament.
Combat armor was relatively light (around twenty kilograms). And they made it possible to comfortably wear them for quite a long time (up to a couple of days, of course, provided that such elements as a helmet, mittens / gloves and shins were removed if possible).
& quot; Prince of Wales in Armor & quot;. Anthony Van Dyck. 1637
Since the armor had a competent system of attachment and weight distribution, a trained person practically did not experience any inconvenience when handling them and could not only climb in and out of a horse without the help of a page, but also calmly conduct a maneuverable foot battle.
By the way, when testing combat armor before buying, the knight often tried rather bold things in it: for example, he walked with a wheel or danced with a lady. And what - in battle, then anything can happen.
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Also groundless is the myth that a knight who fell from the saddle could not get up himself. I got up, like a sweetheart, if I did not lose consciousness from damage. The exception is, again, tournaments, where the knight was really sealed in armor from head to toe, but in the tournament it was not necessary to get up quickly after the fall, since the fall of one of the knights from the horse, as a rule, was the final point of the fight.
However, the rules differed from tournament to tournament, sometimes they swung their swords until they were completely passed out.
"Knights fought to the death and died in hundreds" vs "Knights were invulnerable in armor"
Opposite in form and identical in content, nonsense, stemming from two different branches of knightly romances - "combat" and "glamorous".
Essentially, as noted above, good armor was worth more than the peasant saw in his life; probably if it hadn't worked, the devil with two would have forked out. The lethality of the tournament battle decreased over time, until it began to tend to zero.
Field battles are more interesting. For a long time (until about the fifteenth century), it was very difficult to kill a knight in high-quality armor. Hence the popularity of not fantasy swords, but all sorts of clubs, morgensterns, clubs, spears, halberds and the like: instead of unproductive cutting through armor, stun the wearer with brute force.
The “jammed fish” was sold on the market, more precisely, for the ransom, not that it was worth its weight in gold, but in comparable orders. Therefore, for the last warrior to transfer the wounded enemy to the overlord in order to earn money (since the commoner himself could not receive a ransom from the knight) meant a chance for a good life.
It should be noted that it was a shame for a knight to surrender not to a knight, but to an ordinary peasant. Not that it was forbidden, just surrendering later became a general laughing stock: friends - they will forget, enemies - will scoff, and noble ladies will turn away. All of this could have been avoided … by knighting the captive non-knight.
However, the knights were not in a hurry to surrender to the peasants, but usually tried to wait for the appearance of someone more or less noble in appearance, and only then shout out a desire to surrender (if the past face control turned out to be a non-knight, then he was initiated into knights). So it was a great success for a commoner to take the knight prisoner, but the lucky ones who were lucky were still there.
Through this overwhelming majority of the combat losses of knighthood passed in the categories of wounded and captured, and the main cause of death was not the enemy's blade, but the subsequent gangrene (because before the concept of antiseptics in medicine there were literally a couple of hundred years left; that same Lion Heart, some ten days agony - that's all).
On the other hand, some wars (which were especially famous for religiously involved, like the Albigensian, and based on overripe mutual hatred, as, for example, constantly happened between the British and the French) were fought on a completely different planet, not only from considerations of chivalry, but also from completely monetary gain …
In such cases it was SUDDENLY found that if the captives and the stunned were finished off, then the knights should be very “meminisse mori”. Well, with the gradual spread of first powerful bows and crossbows that successfully pierced armor (the Battle of Poitiers is still considered a model example among historians), and then firearms, the survival of the knights really began to approach that, which, in turn, led to the end of the whole topic.
It is worth noting that the Swiss battles that appeared in the late Middle Ages did not take prisoners in principle (this was directly prohibited by the charter), which led to a wild butthert of noble dons, when the militia of the Confederate-Democratic state from the dirty peasant unauthorizedly cut out the color of the nation. But this is a completely different story and a completely different time.
The sword is a weapon worthy of a knight
A publicized cliché whose roots are lost through the centuries, namely in the history of the Celts who worshiped weapons. Their Roman-Greek neighbors considered the spear to be their main feature. The sword and its varieties are not even a fetish of the Middle Ages, but to a greater extent of the Ancient world.
The ancestors of the EU democrats a couple of thousand years ago ran through the forests and fields with these very “picks” at the ready and loved to chop off each other's heads. For in those harsh times, not even every Saxon or Frankish leader could afford armor, and it was easier to flee from legionnaires chained in iron wherever they were safe.
The arms and legs of all enemies are almost naked - I don't want to chop them off. But just in chopping off, the glorious “picker” with a heavy blade has no equal. The same was preserved in the Early Middle Ages. Thresh Scandinavian sagas are full of references to legless and armless.
It must be understood that, along with many others, metallurgy is a science that has received real development only in modern times. A long and flat sheet of metal in ancient times could be either soft or fragile, or not quite both, but astronomically expensive.
So beloved by professionals in the arms business, "Damascus steel" was obtained by folding a once forged sheet in half and re-forging - the process was repeated several times, which actually carried huge labor costs in production and the corresponding cost of the finished product.
There is nothing to say about damask steel, alloying and alloying in closed crucibles without an exact technological process in terms of efficiency is comparable to shamanic dances (which does not negate the excellent quality of successful products).
Hence the legends about the ancient swords, which the owner's great-great-great-grandfather fought with, or even some cthulhu at all - the sword was not the most effective, but the most expensive and ponte weapon. They were not so much hacked as they shook at all sorts of feasts.
The sword perfectly cuts the unarmored rabble, which makes up the detachments of spearmen and other privates. They can do great swordsmanship, and in general, it is with a sword that it is easiest to show superiority in speed and skill. A good sword is even quite effective against "economy class" armor (the so-called "eisenpantzer", which German users deservedly renamed as "Scheisenpantzer").
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of swords work a little worse than a crowbar against an opponent in Milanese armor, as they weigh less. The logical way out is to make the sword heavier, so we first get the claymore, with which the brave highlanders were chopped for more than one hundred years, and then the racial zweichender (two-handed, aka espadon), with which dirty bearded landsknechts are armed, - they are equally well cut through like a wall of spears of the Swiss battle as well as full armor of noble knights.
A certain gloomy medieval hacker thought of reducing the area of contact instead of increasing the force of the blow - this is how the flamberg, a sword with a wave-like blade, was born. It cost a little more than all the uniforms, but it pierced the armor well, almost did not get stuck in them, and when pulled out, it made a surgical nightmare due to cutting the edges of the wound into thin slices, like saw teeth, which guaranteed death either immediately from blood loss or later from gangrene …
Soon the Flamberg was cursed by the church as an inhumane weapon, even by the standards of those times, and being captured with such a contraption led to immediate execution.
Alternatively, clubs, clubs, maces, morgensterns, six-fighters, war hammers and flails are just a little more inconvenient for slaughter (it is not so convenient to block, parry, and do other fencing tricks), but they work qualitatively differently against armor: instead of meaningless cutting iron, inflict shock damage through the uniform directly into the body. "The corpse looks like a living", as they say.
And picks, chases and other battle axes and battle axes generally originated from a tool for chopping wood, that is, they were originally designed to concentrate the maximum impact on the minimum surface. This made the marauders very sad, since the armor with holes went to the hucksters at a discount. In addition, all of the above is technologically a piece of metal, no matter what quality, just stuffed onto a wooden handle.
And if the gap on the sword for repair required the presence of a blacksmith and a forge (at least a marching one), then there was no need to worry about the safety of the mace during the campaign, which made it an obligatory second weapon for every crusader.
In general, the historical significance of the sword is the subject of constant disputes between various historians, reenactors and fantasy readers who have joined them. It is characteristic that somewhere in the very well observed and studied 17+ century, after the disappearance of armor on the battlefield (for the reasons described in the previous paragraph), the officers' swords quickly changed to extremely lightweight swords (the cavalrymen, however, remained with sabers, because at a gallop it is better to chop than to pierce - there is less chance that the weapon will get stuck in the corpse).
As a result, it is easy to see that on the armor there is a mace, without them - a sword, without money - a spear (unlike everything described above, it never went out of fashion at all), and a sword is a hybrid of the first and the second without the slightest attention to the third, if count the Polish konchar or French estok - one and a half meter cavalry sword.
Well, as a result, this incomprehensible weapon of dubious utility has a much greater distribution in literature and culture than in history.
The knights were creepy scum
The knights were not cleaner or dirtier than other people in Europe at that time. Another thing is that, by the standards of the enlightened twenty-first century, everyone was then “terrible filthy people”.
Shit for oneself, however, was not accepted. Medieval clothing and armor made it as easy as possible to handle small and large needs. At that time, there were no pants in their classical sense, but they wore the so-called chausses, which are cloth stockings that were tied to the lower belt, and in the fifteenth century they became stitched and had a braguet - a valve in the front (so as not to complicate the procedure).
The function of protecting the loins from the surrounding air was performed by the medieval pantsu called "bre", which have a distant great-grandson, now known as "families". They often had long legs (if you can call it that), which were tucked into the highways. So as not to blow. Even being dressed in armor, it is a matter of a minute to relieve yourself, since the armor was always open from below.
But we are distracted. The bottom line is that the knights, although they were dirty, understood that such things as defecation and urination in the shade entailed very unpleasant consequences for the skin and general health.
And the opinion about the stench of the knights came from several other reasons - put on a thick under-armor sweater and actively wave a long three to four kilogram crowbar for half an hour under the hot Palestinian sun. Do you smell what it smells like?
The knights did not wash their clothes for a long time
This myth is true, but only partially. The fact is that in the Middle Ages, only outerwear was not washed. The lower one, which consisted of a kamizu (shirt) and bre (family panties), was washed as often as possible. In addition, in the knightly environment, the institution of vows was popular - a kind of sacred oaths that a knight, since he had given, he was obliged to keep the agreed period and nothing else.
Of course, the knights by no means made fundamental vows with rare exceptions, most often they swore for a certain time or before a certain event to wear some pretentious nickname, not shave, not cut nails, not wash the body, not drink wine, in short, to embarrass themselves in every possible way, but not at all.
The knights had an iron discipline
We all remember from a history textbook that chivalry did not have clear-cut statutes and there was no single organization that would follow them. But there was the concept of equality and suzerainty. Equality initially meant that all knights are equal among themselves, and only the most worthy of equals rules them.
Suzerainty was a hierarchy of subordination, known to us from school: "the vassal of my vassal is not my vassal." The first and second introduced into the ordinary life of chivalry such a cheerful debate on what, who and how should do, that sometimes the camp turned into a noble booth.
The knight personified the ideal of the medieval understanding of masculinity, that is, he walked “like a cock like a cock,” “played with a muscle in front of women,” flared out his nostrils, and again “played with a muscle” in front of men. Such a knight could in no way allow himself to be overshadowed by those who were at least half a millimeter below him in rank, he always wanted to be the very, most why he was often inflamed at the threat of his illusions.
For this reason, the gatherings of feudal lords, who have large armies under their command to determine who will lead this whole horde of proud men in iron, turned into competitions in which the sword sometimes became an argument and there were real victims, which caused the political success of the enterprise to suffer (not all good generals are good swordsmen, and vice versa).
One of the reasons, by the way, why many knights preferred to pray to the Virgin Mary - she is not a man, it is not flawed to kneel in front of the lady, while some “iron-faced” ones felt uncomfortable before God himself. It is also worth adding that orders of knighthood were created to solve problems with discipline.
Knights wandered and fought alone
Let's not talk about a squire (one or more), without whom a knight is like a modern CEO without a secretary.
A normal knight was supplied complete with the so-called "knight's spear". Where did he enter, squires, pages and from a couple of three to several dozen cavalry and footmen, archers and soldiers, with a mounted sergeant at the head.
The number was based on the financial capabilities of the knight, since the chief dressed, armed and paid them money from his own pocket.
The image of a wandering lone knight was very much loved by the authors of knightly novels (including medieval ones). The reasons are probably the same as the "spears" - commoners were not considered people and "alone" actually meant that the noble knight was not accompanied by any of the nobles, and even the squire was not an Esquire, but a stinker. Fortunately, the situation when a knight traveling "alone" suddenly orders his servant something is by no means rare.
And the public in those days still had the opportunity to clearly see that the hero of a knightly novel differs from an ordinary knight in the same way as Indiana Jones differs from the average archaeologist.
Today, the image from knightly novels for the layman is almost the only source of information, but the cultural and historical nuances have been lost, which is why this myth appeared.
Of course, lone knights without a "spear" and generally without anything except armor and a horse are quite a real historical figure in certain periods in a certain area. But they usually preferred, if wandering, then having gathered in a gang, sometimes quite rather large, because to deal with the main source of food while traveling alone is somehow completely “out of the box”.
The dominance of knights and the army of thousands of knights
The number of knights in relation to the rest of the population was negligible ("Avanta", for example, gives the number of 2750 knights for all of France and England combined, as of the thirteenth century).
The many thousands of armies of those same knights are present only in the sick imagination of people who have seen enough of the "Lord of the Rings". Even in such a great battle of that time as the battle of Agincourt, with the number of the French army in more than ten thousand "frog pads", the number of knights did not pull even for fifteen hundred noble persons. And this is still according to bold estimates.
And even though their army was minuscule, the knights were aces in the deck, the most powerful branch of the army was armored heavy cavalry, together with sergeants, which formed the basis of any medieval army.
Much more numerous infantry - "common" bollards, both close combat and riflemen - were an auxiliary force in the field battle, but it turned out to be very useful in the assault on then ubiquitous castles.
But the blow of the overclocked wedge of knightly cavalry was the most terrible form of destruction until the invention of firearms and the tactics of infantrymen to keep a solid formation with exposed pikes.
Despite the fact that the phalanx was invented by the ancient Greeks and improved by a little less ancient Romans, in the Dark Ages the undisciplined barbarians successfully forgot it (in fact, the wall of shields in a more or less acceptable form was preserved only among those peoples of Europe who have a horse squad so and could not completely take out the foot militias from the battlefield - in Russia, in Scandinavia, etc.).
Pikemen's tactics were restored only among the Scots by the fourteenth century. At the same time, the cunning Czechs used an even more frontal option - to put mobile walls from carts loaded with all sorts of rubbish, equipped with loopholes for firing and chained up. The cavalry raid was forced to shove the Wagenburg with its carcasses in order to get to the vile rabble.
A large number of battles are known where only the common people died. No, the knights also cut themselves, but it was not always customary for these to kill each other (it was a bad tone, however, to gut a fellow, a noble don), more and more tried to either stun the enemy or take prisoner. The mob all the more tried not to kill the knights.
The prisoners, as mentioned earlier, were not taken only in completely irreconcilable holivars, in the case of popular uprisings, and, in particular, the Swiss, who did not have their knights and were generally not too rich to feed the prisoners (Swiss legislative [!] the enshrined custom of not taking prisoners was the reason for mutual mutual hatred with the knights, and then with other elite types of troops of the late Middle Ages).
Another factor holding back the growth in the number of knights was the extremely low number of horses strong and tough enough for knightly pleasures. Unlike a piece of iron, which could be picked up from a corpse or inherited, a horse had to be raised by himself or bought for serious money.
At the same time, she did not serve for long (try to drag the iron man on the hump and run at a gallop with him), she was easily wounded, and was not suitable for any other business. It was no accident that the knights usually traveled on ordinary horses, and the war horse rested under a blanket.
The last, but far from the least important factor is social. Closer to the twelfth-thirteenth century, the noble dons realized their elitism and stopped letting anyone into their ranks. Yes, and free land in Europe was not enough for everyone, but attempts to take it away from its neighbors rarely ended in success.
True, in Spain a special type of “rogue noblemen” was widespread - hidalgo, who, apart from a sense of their own importance, had absolutely nothing at all. Somewhat later, the release of their "licensed copies" - the gentry - was also organized in Poland.
A serf who has become a knight will receive freedom
Overall, this is indeed true. But only not under the First Reich (Heiliges Remishes Reich, nicknamed by Napoleon “non-Holy non-Roman and non-Empire”), there he continued to remain a serf, even receiving the coveted prefix “von”, coat of arms and other noble attributes, legally considered serfs of his suzerain, and joining a special strange estate called Ministeriales - this is roughly the Mamlux sultans and emirs of Egypt and Syria, who legally remained slaves, even becoming full monarchs.
Gunpowder put an end to chivalry
A very widespread myth that was spread even by grandfather Engels himself (those who wish can read, for example, the articles "Army" and "Infantry" from the fifth volume of the collected works). Like the rest, it has nothing to do with reality.
The first "bell" rang for the knights during the Hundred Years War, when the conscription army of the English yeomen was quite successfully stuffing the French elite with arrows.
The second - the Hussite wars, when the cavalry, which gained a running start, was slowed down by a strike from peasant carts (by the way, it was in them that firearms were first widely used).
Finally, knighthood as the most powerful striking force was put to an end by the Swiss lads, who mastered the construction of pikemen, which quickly spread throughout Europe. It was from this time that the armies began to resort to the services of various mercenaries - from the already mentioned Swiss to the Landsknechts.
Hand-held firearms of that time (gaknitsa and pishchal) differed from the crossbow for the better only in the cheapness of production and ease of use, but not in penetrating power - expensive samples of armor could penetrate only along the normal and from a distance of several tens of steps - and also noticeably lost in accuracy.
First night's right
Knights and other feudal lords had an interesting tradition. If any of his vassals had a wedding, he could unchecked to have a bride on his wedding night. There are many theories - whether this was done just for the sake of the process, or for some practical reasons.
One of the most reliable is the theory according to which, since the feudal lord was usually the strongest and smartest, or came from a noble family, respectively, was the carrier of the best genes, and thus diluted with noble blood “countless ranks of cattle”, which prevented him complete degeneration.
Vasily Polenov "The Right of the Master"
However, it was precisely the noble families that degenerated, since over time they all became rather close relatives to each other. The common people, however, had their own traditions against degeneration, like, for example, taking girls as wives from another village, but not from their own.
According to another theory, the origins of the "right of the first night" are still in primitive society, in which there was a belief that virgin blood brings evil and disease. Therefore, the girls were deprived of their virginity by a specially trained person who can resist the evil of such blood - a priest or a shaman.
Since the church pastor, despite his desire, was unable to do such a thing, there were only knights who, if anything, do not mind jinxing them, but over time this custom turned into a privilege.
The first night right was often used in the early Middle Ages. In the XII-XIII centuries, it was found, but less often: it was usually replaced by a money ransom. In XV-XVI, the Right of the First Night became almost an anachronism, although some still used it. And even in the 18th century, there were isolated cases, although almost everywhere it was prohibited. But corruption is now also prohibited, so believe, girls, believe …