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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7301662" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, beyond college coursework under Dr. Richard Gerberding, decades of reading books of medieval history as an outgrowth of my love of DMing in a sort of feedback loop.Ok, stop.  If this is going to evolve into a serious scholarly discussion and I'm going to have to start breaking out the footnotes and citations, lets start with the fact that 'medieval' is a post-hoc description of the period by people who were deliberately trying to justify a break with the dominate culture.  You are in a sense correct that I should have distinguished between early medieval conceptions when the Feudal system was the dominate mode of society, and late medieval complexity in what is called 'The High Middle Ages' when the increase in available coin (owing to revolutions in the technology for mining silver) had begun to allow for economies that were only quasi-feudal.   In addition to that, I also agree that there was always a great deal of hypocrisy and divergence from the chivalric idea and the feudalism as it was justified socially, and the actual practice thereof.   In practice, many household knights even in the early middle ages were mercenaries and indeed it could be argued that the entire feudal hierarchy was ultimately motivated by vested self-interest and greed.   But the feudal ideal - what they actually wrote about themselves - was that they were motivated by fealty to their lord and that in its conception that fealty was motivated by mutual love and respect.  So any of those knights, even if they were really just there for the room and board, would have been appalled and angered and considered himself dishonored and disrespected if you where to strip him of the veneer of nobility and claim he was no more than a common mercenary who fought and killed for money rather than feudal obligation to protect those beneath him and fealty to his lord and liege.  Those would have been fighting words, quite literally.The commoner - the villain to use the feudal language - who took pay in return for his service was deemed to be the lowest social class.  Not only was his trade in blood and violence, but his motive was greed.   At least officially, the nobility always maintained the pretense that they were very different, even if in practice not so much.I'm quite aware of that, but the connotations of the two words within the society that they are very different.  A ritter to a Swede conjures up a very different image than the word knight does to a modern American.First of all, the 30 years war starts in 1648, a good 200 years after what is now called 'the middle ages' had collapsed.   And the Swiss Guard as such didn't come into being until the late 15th century.   And sure, by that point many mercenaries had good reputations, but again the growth in respect accorded to mercenaries grows linearly with the ability of the noble class to actually pay for mercenaries and divest themselves of the comparatively complex web of personal loyalties that governed the feudal system.   Sure, by say Agincourt in 1415, the English at least were primarily mercenary army.   But I'm not sure I'd use the 15th century as typical of the Middle Ages, as by then all the sorts of features that defined it - short of coin, highly distributed political power, government by private contract at every level, manorial economies, subinfeudation, dominance of heavy cavalry in warfare, and so forth were already in abatement and had been for 200 years.</blockquote>

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