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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nixeu" data-source="post: 9491794" data-attributes="member: 7047775">Okay, I can't be asked to dig through everything here to see if this had been pointed out, but at least part of the very premise of this thread is unfounded. The questing knight errant archetype doesn't seem to have been based on the Crusades. I can't find any scholarly research saying as much. If anyone can show me some, I'd love to see it.But, more than likely, the whole thing actually springs from how the authors of that time tried to frame the past as being just like their present. They thought that chivery and knightly honor had always existed throughout time, just as it existed in their time (or so they liked to think), in that same form. This anachronism is much more apparent in the Matter of Rome than the Matter of Britain (Arthurian tales) or the Matter of France (Roland's crew). They literally had Alexander the Great running a feudal kingdom and Aeneas dressing up in courtly wear from their time period.That said...the same is actually true of Arthurian tales. Britain wasn't a feudal nation in 500 AD, during the Saxon invasions. Feudalism and knights didn't exist yet. Yes, the tales of the most famous group of fictional knights were born purely because people couldn't fathom that past civilizations were any different from their own idealized version of theirs. So they just overlaid their culture over the existing folklore. That's is probably also why their adventures make no sense for knights to be going in, and why the knight-errant archetype was born in the first place. So, if that's your concern, you can lay that to rest.On a similar note, that's also where the focus on the piety of the knights is coming from. It's not a Crusades thing, it's them engaging in borderline historical revisionism again, instilling their social ideals into their "historical fiction". The Christians did this pretty much every time they appropriated the myths of another culture. Which is certainly problematic, but not in ways that poison the whole Paladin class.Mind you, I don't know what was going through Gygax's head when he made up the Paladin, and it's entirely possible some parts of the Crusades got stuck in there. And the aesthetics are a whole other concern. But when it comes to the mythological and medieval literary foundation? Again, so far as I'm aware, it's not inspired by the Crusades or the horrors associated with them. Maybe some of the same arrogant attitudes, but that's, again, a different conversation.Edit: To better tie this back into the topic, I'll add that I rather hope this puts the whole thing in a different light, historically speaking. Or at least makes it clear that the connection between the Quest for the Grail and the Crusades is a lot less clear-cut than it seems. It seems to just be an assumption that holy warriors with a cause are crusaders, which is an...interesting assumption, even just looking at European mythology and folklore. Or heck, even the huge body of Christian literature that predates the Crusades with similar themes, like the legends which surround the various Catholic saints.</blockquote>

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