A knight should be all this, and also proud and fierce to his enemies, and kind to his friends. The most likely image to spring to mind at the mention of the word 'chivalry' today, is one of the perfect gentleman, an impeccably mannered individual who displays gentle and courteous behavior, especially towards women. Combing our way through history in search of beginnings of this social code, we may trace it back to the Middle Ages. This was an era which nurtured the ascendancy of a mail-clad cavalry, at first a simple military force, yet later evolved into a powerful fraternity espousing the principles of honorable and gallant behavior.
Many historians consider knighthood and chivalry to mean one and the same thing.
Originally, however, the chevalier was simply a horseman equipped with lance and sword for battle, a barbaric descendant of the Germanic Goths who raided and invaded the Roman Empire from the third to the fifth centuries. As time progressed, the knights image grew in sophistication, and by the end of the eleventh century knighthood had come to denote a person of noble birth, often possessing property, whose responsibility it was to uphold certain religious, moral and social systems. No one can assign a precise date to the birth of chivalry, but it is generally agreed that it was at its height between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, falling into decadence and decline during the fourteenth, ultimately to become a subject of unbridled farce in the fifteenth century. Chivalry's importance to the evolution of Western civilization is sharply divided by critics. Some have called it 'the most glorious institution that man himself ever devised', and 'the splendid institution which threw its luster over so many ages of gloom and anarchy'.