The Golden One - Swedish History - The Origins of the Knights

00:00:00.000 Music

00:00:24.920 Greetings and welcome back to the Swedish history series. Today I thought to talk a bit about the

00:00:50.360 origins of the knights or the origins of the nobility. This is from a Swedish perspective

00:00:56.900 but it looked similar enough in the other European countries. So to understand the origins

00:01:05.080 of the knights we have to understand how the medieval combat scene looked at the beginning of

00:01:13.040 the middle ages. Basically the gold standard of violence of warfare of combat was a knight and

00:01:21.900 everyone knows what I mean when I say knight. We see before us a man in armor on a big horse and he is

00:01:30.240 equipped with a lance, a sword, a shield etc. Now of course this was quite expensive to field. Not

00:01:37.340 everyone had access to a horse because horses were expensive. Not everyone had access to an armor

00:01:43.980 because armor was expensive. So what the king did, the Swedish king, he said to the richest farmers who

00:01:51.300 could afford to become a killing machine. He said you know what you don't need to pay any taxes if you

00:01:57.440 promise to fight for me as knights because the king needed and wanted knights to both maintain

00:02:05.360 his own order in the kingdom and also to compete with rival powers. So primarily against Denmark in

00:02:13.040 Sweden's case we needed knights to be able to compete with Danish knights simply put. Now of course there 0.66

00:02:20.500 were other means to defeat knights in guerrilla warfare. When Swedes did rebellions which we will get

00:02:28.200 to in coming episodes they used crossbows and avoided pitched battles. But when it came to pitched

00:02:35.960 battles in Europe at the time during the middle ages you needed to have heavy cavalry knights in your

00:02:44.120 army. Then of course this didn't work as well against other powers primarily the mongols who didn't fight 1.00

00:02:51.640 in accord with european codes of chivalry at all. They used light cavalry and hit and run tactics.

00:03:00.040 But usually the knights were the terror of the battlefields. Then there were some exceptions. Of course

00:03:07.720 the most famous one is the battle of aging court where some english longbowmen defeated the

00:03:17.000 crème de la crème of the french cavalry, the french knights. A most humiliating defeat for the french but a

00:03:24.440 victory still celebrated greatly in England today. It is worth pointing out that fighting from horseback was

00:03:31.320 hardly anything new for europeans and fighting mongol-like enemies wasn't anything new either considering the 1.00

00:03:38.520 terrors of the Hunnic invasion under Attila a few centuries earlier.

00:03:43.240 Since we are on the topic of knights it might be a good idea to briefly elaborate on the concept of

00:03:49.400 chivalry. The knightly virtues of the middle ages came to evolve into chivalry which basically means

00:03:56.600 that you're supposed to be kind and humble despite being the pinnacle of violence. Because if you're the

00:04:04.520 pinnacle of violence without being moderated by any higher ideals it might lead to oppression and

00:04:11.720 ungodly behavior. So chivalry can only be achieved when you are strong and have the capacity for

00:04:17.880 ultimate violence. If you do not have this, chivalry means absolutely nothing.

00:04:25.720 So basically the need for heavy cavalry, the need for the knight in the armies made these wealthy farmers

00:04:45.240 or land holders in sweden's case. They made them the first nobility because they could afford to be knights.

00:04:53.000 Therefore they didn't need to pay any taxes. Now of course as the middle ages draw to its end and the

00:05:01.240 gunpowder age came to be you saw the perhaps greatest shift in how societies were built. Previously during the middle ages

00:05:09.880 each knight, each lord, each feudal lord had greater autonomy over his particular land. Whereas

00:05:18.760 when the gunpowder came into the scene, castles became less powerful because cannons can reduce

00:05:26.200 castles to rubble quite effectively. And also a knight was less effective when you had gunpowder and at that

00:05:34.120 time when countries and nations central power so the king could start equipping more soldiers with gunpowder

00:05:43.000 knights lost their edge on the battlefield. And that's also when the kings could start centralizing

00:05:50.040 their power more and more. So it went from being more autonomous out in the various parts of the country

00:05:56.920 to more power going to the king. And in sweden's case it was certainly true. And in some other cases,

00:06:03.640 France for example, the local lords, the local dukes etc, they had very much power as compared to

00:06:11.720 the king. But this started to shift in the beginning of the early modern era. And as the early modern era

00:06:18.520 progressed the knights started to lose more and more influence and eventually they lost their privileges

00:06:24.840 as well. Which is of course natural considering the fact that they didn't serve as the ultimate

00:06:30.520 killing machines any longer. So anyway, that was the short version of the origin of the knights.

00:06:37.960 the knights. Thank you for watching.

The Golden One - September 04, 2019

Swedish History - The Origins of the Knights

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