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Chivalric orders are societies and fellowships of knights[1] founded in imitation of the Christian military orders of the Crusades. After the crusades, the memory of these crusading military orders became idealised and romanticised.
Modern historiography tends to take the fall of Acre in 1291 as the final end of the age of the crusades. In contemporary understanding, many further crusades against the Turks were planned and partly executed throughout the 14th century and well into the 15th century.
The late medieval chivalric orders understood themselves as reflecting an ongoing military effort against Islam, even though such an effort, with the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the Fall of Constantinople in the 1450s, was without realistic hope of success. During the 15th century, orders of chivalry became a mere courtly fashion that could be created ad-hoc, some of them purely honorific, consisting of nothing but the badge. These institutions in turn gave rise to the modern-day orders of merit.[2]
Heraldist D'Arcy Boulton (1987) classifies chivalric orders in the followings manner:
Based on Boulton, this article distinguishes:
Confraternal orders are orders of chivalry with the presidency attached to a nobleman:
Fraternal orders are orders of chivalry that were formed off a vow & for a certain enterprise:
Votive orders are orders of chivalry, temporarily formed on the basis of a vow. These were courtly chivalric games rather than actual pledges as in the case of the fraternal orders. Three are known from their statutes:
Cliental pseudo-orders are not orders of chivalry and were princes's retinues fashionably termed orders. They are without statutes or restricted memberships:
Honorific orders were honorific insignia consisting of nothing but the badge:
Together with the monarchical chivalric orders (see above) these honorific orders are the prime ancestors of the modern-day orders of knighthood (see below) which are orders of merit in character.
The distinction between these orders and decorations is somewhat vague, except that these honorific orders still implied a membership in a group. Decorations have no such limitations, and are awarded purely to recognize the merit or accomplishments of the recipient. Both orders and decorations often come in multiple classes.[7]
Most orders created since the late 17th century were no longer societies and fellowships of knighthood are sometimes referred to as orders of knighthood. As a consequence of being not an order of chivalry but orders of merit or decorations, some republican honours have thus avoided the traditional structure found in medieval orders of chivalry and created new ones instead, e.g. the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Decoration for Services to the Republic of Austria, or the Legion of Merit of the United States.
The Most Honourable Order of the Bath was established as a military order by Letters Patent of George I on 18 May 1725, when the Dean of Westminster was made Dean of the Order in perpetuity and King Henry VII's Chapel designated as the Chapel of the Order.
[15][14] Exactly what makes one order legitimate and another self-styled or false is a matter of debate with some arguing that any monarch (reigning or not) or even the descendants of such can create an order while others assert that only a government with actual internationally recognized authority has such power (regardless of whether that government is republican or monarchial in nature).[13] François Velde wrote an "order of knighthood is legitimate if it is defined as legal, recognized and acknowledged as such by a sovereign authority. Within its borders, a sovereign state does as it pleases. Most, if not all, modern states have honorific orders and decorations of some kind, and those are sometimes called orders of knighthood."[12] The answer to the question of whether an order is legitimate or not varies from nation to nation,[11]
Felipe VI of Spain, Bhumibol Adulyadej, Portugal, World War I, Boletín Oficial del Estado
Kinshasa, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia, Cobalt
Martin Luther, Anglicanism, Bible, Lutheranism, Protestantism
Quran, Arabic language, God, Muhammad, Shia Islam
Byzantine Empire, Ottoman Empire, Middle Ages, East–West Schism, Crusader states
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Royal Victorian Order, United Kingdom
Rennes, Rome, Nantes, Saint-Malo, Chivalric order
World War II, Order of the Gold Lion of the House of Nassau, Duchy of Nassau, House Order of the Wendish Crown, Hamburg
Order of Saint Michael, Henry III of France, Holy Spirit, Kingdom of France, French Revolution
Prince, Poland, Pour le Mérite, Berlin, Jerusalem