Greetings and welcome back to the Swedish history series.
Today I thought to talk a bit about the origins of the knights or the origins of the nobility.
This is from a Swedish perspective, but it looked similar enough in the other European countries.
So to understand the origins of the knights, we have to understand how the medieval combat scene looked at the beginning of the Middle Ages.
Basically, the gold standard of violence, of warfare, of combat was a knight.
And everyone knows what I mean when I say knight.
We see before us a man in armor on a big horse and he is equipped with a lance, a sword, a shield, etc.
Now, of course, this was quite expensive to field.
Not everyone had access to a horse because horses were expensive.
Not everyone had access to an armor because armor was expensive.
So what the king did, the Swedish king, he said to the richest farmers who could afford to become a killing machine.
He said, you know what, you don't need to pay any taxes if you promise to fight for me as knights, because the king needed and wanted knights to both maintain his own order in the kingdom and also to compete with rival powers.
So primarily against Denmark in Sweden's case, we needed knights to be able to compete with Danish knights, simply put.
Now of course there were other means to defeat knights in guerrilla warfare.
When Swedes did rebellions, which we will get to in coming episodes, they used crossbows and avoided pitched battles.
But when it came to pitched battles in Europe at the time, during the Middle Ages, you needed to have heavy cavalry knights in your army.
Then of course this didn't work as well against other powers, primarily the Mongols who didn't fight in accord with European codes of chivalry at all.
They used light cavalry and hit and run tactics.
But usually the knights were the terror of the battlefields.
Then there were some exceptions.
Of course, the most famous one is the Battle of Aging Court where some English longbowmen defeated the creme de la Creme of the French cavalry, the French knights, a most humiliating defeat for the French, but a victory still celebrated greatly in England today.
It is worth pointing out that fighting from horseback was hardly anything new for Europeans, and fighting Mongol-like enemies wasn't anything new either, considering the terrors of the Hunnic invasion under Attila a few centuries earlier.
Since we are on the topic of knights, it might be a good idea to briefly elaborate on the concept of chivalry.
The knightly virtues of the Middle Ages came to evolve into chivalry, which basically means that you're supposed to be kind and humble despite being the pinnacle of violence.
Because if you're the pinnacle of violence without being moderated by any higher ideals, it might lead to oppression and ungodly behavior.
So chivalry can only be achieved when you are strong and have the capacity for ultimate violence.
If you do not have this, chivalry means absolutely nothing.
So basically, the need for heavy cavalry, the need for the knight in the armies made, these wealthy farmers or landholders, in Sweden's case, they made them the first nobility, because they could afford to be knights, therefore they didn't need to pay any taxes.
Now of course as the Middle Ages draw to its end and the gunpowder age came to be you saw the perhaps greatest shift in how societies were built.
Previously, during the Middle Ages, each knight, each lord, each feudal lord had greater autonomy over his particular land, whereas when the gunpowder came into the scene, castles became less powerful, because cannons can reduce castles to rubble quite effectively and also a knight was less effective when you had gunpowder.
And at that time, when countries and nations, the central power, so the king, could start equipping more soldiers with gunpowder, knights lost their edge on the battlefield.
And that's also when the kings could start centralizing their power more and more so.
It went from being more autonomous out in the various parts of the country to more power going to the king.
And in Sweden's case, it was certainly true, and in some other cases France, for example the local lords, The local dukes, etc., they had very much power as compared to the king, but this started to shift in the beginning of the early modern era.
And as the early modern era progressed, the knights started to lose more and more influence, and eventually they lost their privileges as well.
Which is, of course, natural considering the fact that they didn't serve as the ultimate killing machines any longer.
So, anyway, that was the short version of the origin of the knights.
