Word Finder - knights

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A young servant or follower; a trained military attendant in service of a lord.

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A minor nobleman with an honourable military rank who had served as a page and squire.

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(by extension) An armored and mounted warrior of the Middle Ages.

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King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table

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(modern) A person on whom a knighthood has been conferred by a monarch.

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A brave, chivalrous and honorable man devoted to a noble cause or love interest.

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A chess piece, often in the shape of a horse's head, that is moved two squares in one direction and one at right angles to that direction in a single move, leaping over any intervening pieces.

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A playing card bearing the figure of a knight; the knave or jack.

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Any of various nymphalid butterflies of the genus Ypthima.

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(modern) A generic name for various mushrooms belonging to the fungal order gilled mushrooms; scientific name Tricholoma.

You know, Count, such knights as you are only found in Madame de Souza's novels.

In 1309 it was conquered by the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem at the instigation of the pope and the Genoese, and converted into a great fortress for the protection of the southern seas against the Turks.

The scene of the third act represented a palace in which many candles were burning and pictures of knights with short beards hung on the walls.

These fortifications are all the work of the Knights of St John.

But the piratical acts of these traders, in which the knights themselves sometimes joined, and the strategic position of the island between Constantinople and the Levant, necessitated its reduction by the Ottoman sultans.

Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Treviso, Venice entered into a compact to defend their liberties; and when he came again in 1163 with a brilliant staff of German knights, the imperial cities refused to join his standards.

It was to see my native village in the light of the Middle Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me.

There are several fine public buildings, as the governor's palace, the new opera-house, the public library and museum of Maltese antiquities, and the auberges or lodges of the Knights of Malta (especially the Auberge de Castile) which are now used for military offices, club-rooms, and other purposes.

These must be heard in the county courts before two visiting justices and four knights of the shire.

The knights, who as farmers of the taxes had suffered heavy losses during the disturbances in Syria, were greatly embittered against Gabinius, and, when he appeared in the senate to give an account of his governorship, he was brought to trial on three counts, all involving a capital offence.

When feudal possessions, instead of being purely personal, were vested in the families of the holder after the death of Charlemagne, Tournai was specially assigned to Baldwin of the Iron Arm by [[Charles (disambiguation)|Charles Knights Jousting With Cronells On Tt-Tfir Lances]].

After the Norman Conquest the thegns appear to have been merged in the class of knights.

Twelve knights in each county are to make a thorough inquiry into all evil customs connected with the forests, and these are to be utterly abolished.

The esquires, knights, lesser barons, even the remote descendants of peers, that is, the noblesse of other countries, in England remained gentlemen, but not noblemen - simple commoners, that is, without legal advantage over their fellowcommoners who had no jus imaginum to boast of.

He thought of going on the crusade to Barbary; but instead, in July 1390, went to serve with the Teutonic knights in Lithuania.

Besides many hundreds of princes, dukes, marquesses, counts, barons and viscounts, there are a large number of persons of patrician rank, persons with a right to the designation nobile or signor-i, and certain hereditary knights or cavalieri.

Florus actually dared to scourge and crucify Jews who belonged to the Roman order of knights.

In 1305 it came into the hands of the knights of Wartenberg, who held it for two hundred years.

Witowt, however, convinced himself that the German knights were far more dangerous than his Lithuanian rival; he accepted pacific overtures from Jagiello and became his ally.

Nevertheless, subsequent attempts on the part of Poland to subordinate Lithuania drove Witowt for the third time into the arms of the Order, and by the treaty of Salin in 1398, Witowt, who now styled himself Supremus Dux Lithuaniae, even went so far as to cede his ancestral province of Samogitia to the knights, and to form an alliance with them for the conquest and partition of Pskov and Great Novgorod.

The result was a whole series of wars with the Teutonic Order, which now acknowledged Swidrygiello, another brother of Jagiello, as grand-duke of Lithuania; and though Swidrygiello was defeated and driven out by Witowt, the Order retained possession of Samogitia, and their barbarous methods of "converting" the wretched inhabitants finally induced Witowt to rescue his fellow-countrymen at any cost from the tender mercies of the knights.

As the sentence is about to be carried into execution Lancelot and his kinsmen come to her rescue, but in the fight that ensues many of Arthur's knights, including three of Gawain's brothers, are slain.

Chretien de Troyes' treatment of him is contradictory; in the Erec, his earliest extant poem, Lancelot's name appears as third on the list of the knights of Arthur's court.

Among the fifteen knights selected by Arthur to accompany him to Chastel Orguellous he only ranks ninth.

Like the knights of other orders, the Teutonic knights lived a semi-monastic life under the Augustinian rule; and in the same way they admitted priests and half-brothers (servientes) into their ranks.

Besides the knightly Order founded by Christian, there was already another still farther east, which had served as Christian's model, the Knights of the Sword of Livonia.

The pope gave to those who joined in the work of the Order the privileges of Crusaders; and the knights, supported by numerous donations and large accessions to their ranks, rapidly increased their territories.

The defeat which the Polish king Ladislaus inflicted upon the knights at Tannenberg in 1410 was crushing.

The League naturally sympathized with Poland, not only because Poland was the enemy of the knights, but also because under Poland it hoped to enjoy the practical liberty which Polish anarchy already seemed to offer.

The intrigues of the French envoy in corrupting the knights of the order of St John were completely successful.

Thanks to French intrigues, the Knights of Malta offered the tamest defence of their capital.

His own violations of the treaties of Luneville and Amiens were overlooked; and in particular men forgot that the weakening of the Knights of St John by the recent confiscation of their lands in France and Spain, and the protracted delay of Russia and Prussia to guarantee their tenure of power in Malta, furnished England with good reasons for keeping her hold on that island.

To all these various forces must be added the knights and native levies of the great orders, whose masters were practically independent sovereigns like the princes of Antioch and Tripoli; 3 and with these the total levy of the kingdom may be reckoned at some 25,000 men.

But the strength of the kingdom lay less perhaps in the army than in the magnificent fortresses which the nobility, and especially the two orders, had built; and the most visible relic of the crusades to-day is the towering ruins of a fortress like Krak (Kerak) des Chevaliers, the fortress of the Knights of St John in the principality of Tripoli.

For the history of the orders see the articles on the Templars; ST John Of Jerusalem, Knights Of; Knights, and the Teutonic Order.

Burgesses could buy and possess property in towns, which knights were forbidden to acquire; and though they could not intermarry with the feudal classes, it was easy and regular for a burgess to thrive to knighthood.

Thus was begun the Second Crusade, 1 under auspices still more favourable than those which attended the beginning of the First, seeing that kings now took the place of knights, while the new crusaders would no longer be penetrating into the wilds, but would find a friendly basis of operations ready to their hands in Frankish Syria.

The crusaders of northern Germany never went to the Holy Land at all; they were allowed the crusaders' privileges for attacking the Wends to the east of the Elbe - a fact which at once attests the cleavage between northern and southern Germany (intensified of late years by the war of investitures), and anticipates the age of the Teutonic knights and their long Crusade on the Baltic. The crusaders of the Low Countries and of England took the sea route, and attacked and captured Lisbon on their way, thus helping to found the kingdom of Portugal, and achieving the one real success which was gained by the Second Crusade.

On the 1 The Crusades in their course established a number of new states or kingdoms. The First Crusade established the kingdom of Jerusalem (I too); the Third, the kingdom of Cyprus (1195); the Fourth, the Latin empire of Constantinople (1204); while the long Crusade of the Teutonic knights on the coast of the Baltic led to the rise of a new state east of the Vistula.

To arrest his progress, a Crusade, preached by Boniface IX., led by John the Fearless of Burgundy, and joined chiefly by French knights, was directed down the valley of the Danube into the Balkans; but the old faults stigmatized by de Mezieres, divisio and pro Aria voluntas, were the ruin of the crusading army, and at the battle of Nicopolis it was signally defeated.

Henry V., whose father had fought with the Teutonic knights on the Baltic, dreamed of a voyage to Jerusalem.

It was Thomas who organized the Toulouse campaign of 1159; even in the field he made himself conspicuous by commanding a company of knights, directing the work of devastation, and superintending the conduct of the war after the king had withdrawn his presence from the camp. When there was war with France upon the Norman border, the chancellor acted as Henry's representative; and on one occasion engaged in single combat and unhorsed a French knight of reputation.

At either corner of the Propylaea entrance were equestrian statues dedicated by the Athenian knights; the bases with inscriptions have lately been recovered.

In his letters to his friend Mathilde Wesendonck, it appears that while he was composing Tristan he already had the inspiration of working out the identification of Kundry, the messenger of the Grail, with the temptress who, under the spell of Klingsor, seduces the knights of the Grail; and he had, moreover, thought out the impressively obscure suggestion that she was Herodias, condemned like the wandering Jew to live till the Saviour's second coming.

Vespasian could be liberal to impoverished senators and knights, to cities and towns desolated by natural calamity, and especially to men of letters and of the professor class, several of whom he pensioned with salaries of as much as £boo a year.

The tradition of Carnac is that there was once a convent of the Templars or Red Cross Knights on the spot; but this, it seems, is not supported by history.

The first onslaught of the Knights of the Cross did indeed rout the weak irregulars placed in the van of the Turkish army, but their mad pursuit was checked by the steady ranks of the Janissaries, by whom they were completely defeated (1396).

Mahommed now endeavoured to strike a blow at Rhodes, the stronghold of the Knights of St John, preparatory to carrying out his long-cherished plan of conquering Italy.

At the outset of the reign Bayezid's brother, Prince Jem, made a serious attempt to claim the throne; he was defeated, and eventually took refuge with the knights of Rhodes, whom Bayezid bribed to keep him in safe custody.

In the 14th century it was garrisoned by the knights of Montesa, and in 1420 it reverted to the Crown.