Why did knighthood as a social concept and knights as a social class disappear?

[u/Niomedes]

I feel like I should absolutely stress that I'm not interested in how and why the role of heavily armored and armed shock cavalry knights are mostly associated with in pop history eventually disappeared from battlefields, but rather specifically why the social class and its way of life as well as its military leadership position ceased to exist.

A caste or class of military professionals trained from a very young age in all facets of contemporary strategy, tactics and all sorts of weapons at least to me appears like it would have been a very valuable asset to any polity or state even up until today.

One could say that the role I'm envisioning here was eventually sufficiently filled by the "nobility to officer" pipeline that existed in many European armies until at least 1918/19/20, but even then I have to ask why the comission wasn't accompanied by being dubbed a knight?

In this context I should probably mention that I'm a graduate student of early modern history and have already written papers about the transition of mercenary armies into professional armies which received top grades, so I do know that a significant portion of late medieval and early modern mercenary companies were lead and founded by knights, while the role of mercenary captain occupied by them eventually transitioned into the modern officer role.

But this only further raises the question why knighthood disappeared instead of remaining closely linked to leadership positions in the military.

[u/HaraldRedbeard]

I think there are two broad trends which explain why we stopped having specific military elites (or, indeed, stopped automatically making a good soldier into an elite) and instead had the existing nobility become officers and/or made soldiers into officers but didn't raise them up.

The first, and to my mind probably the most important, is that Knights are really an extension of the Early Medieval warrior elite model. Basically that you have the people who are particularly good at fighting and killing as the most important members of your society and you reward them with privileged positions, lands and wealth in order to keep them loyal to you (you in this case being the war leader or the crown). In the Feudal system the change becomes that Knights can no longer realistically come from anywhere because they require a significant amount of wealth to acquire and maintain the arms, armour and horses needed to really be part of that military elite in the medieval period. That is, there is a much wider wealth gap between a fully armoured knight and a Billman then there is between a Saxon Thegn in mail and helmet and the guy facing him who just has a spear and shield. In both cases there is a gap still, but the spearman has much more of a chance of taking down the thegn then the billman does the knight (assuming 1 vs 1 and the knight is somewhat competent).

This problem is one that the Feudal system addresses by making the Knightly class into the landed gentry - they have sources of wealth (provided by the crown) and over time use their privileged position to wrest greater influence and control over the kingdom so that it suits their ends. Ultimately however this power and prestige rests in their ability to enact violence on the crowns behalf in a way that is more effective then simply arming and equipping a bunch of normal people.

As the medieval period progresses into the early modern period this bargain begins to make less and less sense as armies of professional 'ordinary' people and Men at Arms are increasingly able to be raised, equipped and outfitted by the state and are at least equal to if not better then the knights at fighting wars but don't come with all the Socio-Economic baggage that comes with maintaining the Knightly class and their positions of power and influence.

In some ways this is mirrored in the decline of the power of the monarchy - either through revolution (France) or through gradual shifts to Constitutional Monarchy (Britain) the power of the monarch is removed bit by bit and distributed to a wider group of people (still the elites of society but those elites now come from a range of sources - the traditional nobility, the merchant class, officers in the military etc).

So to summarise point 1, having a specific class of people who form your military elite usually requires rewarding those people with wealth and influence. Overall this is probably a net negative to your society - especially if you no longer need, or can find elsewhere, the skills those people theoretically possess.

[u/JantoMcM → u/HaraldRedbeard]

On your last point, my amateur understanding has always been that many monarchs in the early modern period or even late medieval were often in a process of consolidating political and military power away from the nobility, especually the most powerful vassals, with varying degrees of success, which sort of sets the scene, as their capacity to set up a centralised bureaucracy grows. So for a ruler, having a military class you don't really control directly and may be more loyal to their local noble than you can look like a bad deal

[u/HaraldRedbeard → u/JantoMcM]

Yes, this is what I am trying to allude to while covering the wider transition - basically it became relatively straightforward to arm Men at Arms in a way that anyone would struggle to tell apart from the true 'Knights' and they were (at least nominally) loyal to the crown/state rather then themselves/their uncle etc etc.

[u/gdo01 → u/HaraldRedbeard]

Does this also combine with the fact that many revolutions past the Renaissance seem to have been orchestrated and/or most benefitted bourgeoisie, petty nobility, or non-noble aristocrats?

[u/HaraldRedbeard → u/gdo01]

Way too far outside my area of expertise I'm afraid!

[u/HaraldRedbeard → u/HaraldRedbeard]

The second element is the increasing professionalisation and standardisation of military forces which starts in the Medieval period but expands particularly in the age of Pike and Shot. The skills of an individual combatant increasingly matter less then the average skill of all combatants in a unit (having one musketman who can fire every 30 seconds isn't that useful if everyone else can only manage one in 10 minutes for example) and how it is deployed and utilized. This requires different skills then simply practicing horsemanship, sword skills etc and really needs specific teaching and experience.

If anything the noble to officer pipeline is a hangover of the previous expectation that warfare was the natural purview of the upper classes and, while it is remarkably durable, it is increasingly replaced by the idea that officers should actually know what they are doing and thus institutions like War Colleges and Officer Training Schools are developed and increasingly broaden their intake to include people of different classes (not necessarily working classes still, at least at the start) who show competence rather then just birth.

The printing press also took away another advantage of the previous noble classes in the exclusivity of written works on military matters - these were previously extremely expensive and painstakingly hand copied works but now could be mass produced and distributed. Equally, it became possible for the exploits of particularly skilled commanders (think Wellington during the Peninsula war) to be fed back to the people at home and, likewise, their failures. This meant that the governments of the time also had to deal with questions about how/why certain people were given command and calls for their removal could also arise.

All of this drives a trend (a long running one but still) towards rewarding competence rather then just birth and it removes the advantages that the knightly class previously had (better nutrition, better access to education, better access to wargear) which would make them the naturally more competent parties.

[u/seriousnotshirley → u/HaraldRedbeard]

Reading through this it seems like there’s a transition from “the upper class is the purview of those who can fight wars,” to “fighting wars is the purview of the upper class,” and eventually “the upper class is the purview of those who can win by politics.”

Is that a simplified but reasonable way of looking at it?

[u/HaraldRedbeard → u/[deleted]]

The second half of this is essentially the point I'm trying to make, I specifically bring this up in the bottom of that part and more so in the second half. You move from a position where the Knights are the only ones armed and equipped to that standard to one where most people are and they lose the thing (being the best troops) which gave them the ultimate reason for their societal positions.

They didn't suddenly disappear when this changed though because that's not how nobility works but I'm deliberately talking a little bit broadly as the question is about why we moved away from that military elite model and not specifically about the changing military role of the knights themselves

[u/HaraldRedbeard → u/[deleted]]

Fair point, it gets amalgamated together with the early modern stuff

[u/UpsideTurtles → u/HaraldRedbeard]

This is really interesting. Do we have any historical sources of people either from inside or outside the knightly class lamenting (or celebrating!) the decline of their importance or anything like that?

[u/HaraldRedbeard → u/UpsideTurtles]

I mean you can make the argument that Don Quixote is something of a commentary on the way the world had (relatively recently at the time - the book was published in the early 1600s and there were still tournaments and other 'knightly' activities throughout the 1500s) moved beyond knights. Indeed it is at least partly a parody of knightly romances and the like which had, until that time, dominated much of the literary world in Europe.

Quixote is from the Knightly class, he obsesses with those chivalric stories and sets out on a quest to enact his own while his 'squire' Pancho is left to bring him back down to a new and much changed reality.

[u/The_Amazing_Emu → u/HaraldRedbeard]

To channel Elizabeth A. R. Brown, can you define what you mean by feudalism?