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The Medieval Knight: The Noble Warriors of the Golden Age of Chivalry
'Knighthood lies above eternity; it doesn t live off fame, but rather deeds.' Knights were the ultimate warriors in European warfare for a period of almost 500 years. From the mid eleventh century to the early 1500s, these highly trained, elite fighters dominated European battlefields with the power of the charge, a shock tactic that few enemies could withstand. But knights were more than just fighting through the chivalric code, they were expected to be able to play music, write verse, be arbiters of the law, and practice courtly love as well as support their lord and protect the people. Arranged thematically, The Medieval Knight examines every aspect of knighthood, including training, fighting techniques, arms and armour, the various knightly orders, and the decline of the knights' dominance on the battlefield. Cold-blooded killer or noble protector and romantic lover Dragon slayer or terrorizer of poor folk The knightly ideal remains a part of European culture to this day, a symbol of high ideals and noble conduct. The Medieval Knight explores the reality of what it meant to be a heavily-armed and armoured fighting man in an era when military prowess was the ultimate good. Illustrated with more than 200 photographs, maps and artworks, The Medieval Knight is an expertly written account of the elite fighting men who have long captured the popular imagination.
224 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2018
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September 17, 2026
A modern-day reincarnation of the early twelfth-century Byzantine princess Anna Comnena, medieval historian Phyllis Jestice has penned an approachable survey of her specialty we intend here to review, namely, The Medieval Knight: The Noble Warriors of the Golden Age of Chivalry (Amber Books, 2018). Evidently pitched rather to the broad public than to an academic audience, it is filled on almost every page with glossy illustrations and unencumbered by scholarly apparatus (other than a glossary). In general, Jestice shows herself more adept at military history and analysis of battles than at probing the spiritual aspects of chivalry. But for all that, this recensionist finds Jestice’s overview worthwhile as an entryway into areas he would not otherwise delve much into, and it reads quickly anyway.
As our theme for the review to follow, we wish to meditate on how chivalry reflects a civilization ordered by a Christian conception versus what has come to the fore in modern times, viz., nationalism. In so far as one can speak of a religious inspiration behind Western society, it ceased to exist at least four centuries ago (cf. Michael J. Buckley, SJ’s At the Origins of Modern Atheism, Yale University Press, 1987, our review here). All the wheedling talk one hears these days of a supposed civilizational suicide to be countered by a turn to authoritarianism amounts, of course, to nothing but empty bombast and posturing. For, as is massively apparent to any discriminating observer, those who promote it most loudly (prominently, Stephen Miller, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio) do not in the least undertake a serious attempt in their public conduct to live by the religious code they nominally espouse or even to abide by secular norms of constitutionalism and the rule of law. We shall seek to get to the root of the seeming paradox in our companion review of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (see here).
1) Origins of the knightly ideal in the Carolingian age
The most primitive stratum of the institution can be discerned in the epic of Beowulf, completed around the year 800 though doubtless incorporating elements of oral culture from centuries before (see our review, here). There, one encounters roving bands of well-equipped warriors who fight on behalf of great kings. As Jestice points out,
The earliest element that went into the creation of the knight was the professional fighting man. Kings and great lords from the dawn of the Middle Ages maintained some household troops—men who ordinarily served as the core of military levies. These household retainers were usually professional fighters; they had no other regular occupation such as farming. They would have originated from a range of social classes, including the younger sons of nobles, but were also lower-class men who were taken from their labor in the fields and trained. [p. 8]
By training year-round, these men honed their combat skills and effectiveness as team players. The two elements she wishes to emphasize are thus, professionalism and the quality of their gear, advantages that distinguish them from part-time warriors who might be mobilized in times of threat. The period was, after all, perilously dangerous, what with incursions of Vikings from the north and Magyars from the east. In the course of contending with such formidable foes, the necessity of being able to deploy heavy cavalry was impressed upon the leaders of German forces after suffering a series of devastating defeats. But by the Battle of Lechfeld in the year 955, Otto I could win such a decisive victory as to dispel the Magyar menace for good. In consequence, horsemanship became the sine qua non of the knight.
2) Heyday during the high Middle Ages
A steady economic expansion which would characterize medieval civilization for centuries got underway during the tenth century. As a result, the ruling classes in France and Germany became quite wealthy and could invest their resources in maintaining a retinue of knights, who required increasingly expensive outfitting—swords, chain mail, warhorses. At first, these retainers did not necessarily enjoy a high social status (the very word ‘knight’ derives from that for ‘servant’ [Knecht in modern German]). Their position gradually improved, however, since in order to guarantee an economic base of support, they would be given hereditary fiefs.
Let us reproduce an extended quotation about how effective massed Frankish cavalry were:
A new, distinctive fighting method was developing in the second half of the eleventh century, and perhaps had already been employed in the Normans’ wars of conquest in southern Italy. This was a cavalry charge employing a heavier spear—a lance—that was now wedged tightly under the knight’s arm and held parallel with the ground. By holding the lance in this ‘couched’ position, the knight could focus his whole body weight, as well as that of this horse, behind the point of the lance. The first literary work to describe a cavalry engagement taking place with crouched lances is the Song of Roland, written in c. 1100. The author does not treat it as a novelty, so it is likely the technique had been around for at least a generation. The shock of a single knight and his horse charging in this way would have been overwhelming, able to break through an enemy line much like a modern tank. The Byzantine historian Anna Comnena, who observed Norman knights both in their attacks on her father’s empire and during the First Crusade, commented that a mounted ‘Celt’ (as she called the westerners) in his heavy armor would be able to bore through the walls of Babylon. Awesome as such a charge might be, though, what made this new fighting technique truly devastating was that knights would charge in teams, working together in repeated thrusts intended to shred infantry resistance. For centuries, it was a rare force of footmen that could stand up to a charge of knights with couched lances. By the beginning of the twelfth century, rulers had come to rely on the knightly charge as the game-changer in battle. [p. 23]
The rise of gunpowder did not matter as decisively as commonly thought, at least until the end of the sixteenth century. Early muskets and canons were not all that powerful and took a long time to reload. It was only the emergence of new tactics during the later centuries of the Middle Ages, centered around tightly massed infantry armed with pikes that proved all but invulnerable to cavalry charge, that rendered knights superfluous.
3) The chivalric code
Other features we tend to associate with knightly life, including minstrelsy and courtly love, arose from a juxtaposition of the older chansons de geste and the amorous songs of the troubadours originating from Provence. An early focus on deeds of valor would be refined by a more elevated code, having to do with courteous treatment of captured enemies, honor displayed towards women and respect for piety and those who belong to religious orders. The theoretical ideal of chivalry (regardless of how well it may have been realized in practice) is unfolded by the French poet Chrétien de Troyes (fl. 1165-1180) in his cycle of Arthurian romances.
In seeking to assess to what extent the ideal held in reality, Jestice stresses the expense of going on an expedition to the Holy Land and suggests that a religious motivation to relieve the Christian population from Muslim oppression must have been the foremost factor (against older scholarship which assumes that religion was mainly a pretext for Crusaders who sought fame and fortune). Another place where one can see the ideal prevail, despite its impracticality, is in the willingness by commanders to allow an engagement between armies to be decided by single combat, which occurred with increasing frequency over the fourteenth century—even though the outcome might go against military necessity.
Jestice summarizes as follows:
The life of most knights was a balancing act. A knight would have tried to show his prowess, but remained conscious that he should apply his strength and skill to worthy goals. He should have high courage but also be able to control his impulses. The honor he showed ladies should be cautious and never go too far. He should show generosity and magnanimity towards enemies, but should also have the wisdom not to behave in a foolhardy way that would endanger his comrades or the cause for which he was fighting. The rules for proper conduct that chivalry imposed guarded Europe from chaos; they also provided the knight—and the society around him—with ideals to cherish. [p. 65]
From here on, Jestice gets diverted into extended digressions on a number of miscellaneous topics, say, training and fighting techniques [pp. 67-97], especially tournaments as training for war [p. 89] and the institution of the melée [p. 90], or mock warfare between two teams of knights; armor and weapons [pp. 99-121]; the ups and downs of the knightly orders [pp. 159-186]; and, lastly, the drawing to a close of the era of the medieval knight [pp. 210-214].
Perhaps her best showing is in the sections in which she discusses the military history of the cavalry charge, from its early implementation at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 [pp. 129-132] (couched lances do not appear to have been in use by then, which accounts for why the battle proved to be such a drawn-out affair) to the charge in the twelfth century [p. 132-133], where, for instance, a well-timed deployment of it was instrumental to king Richard the Lionheart’s equivocal defeat of Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf in 1191 during the Third Crusade; and on to the golden age of the charge during the thirteenth century [pp. 134-137]. Failure to execute a sufficiently effective charge led to the Crusaders’ crushing loss to Saladin at the Battle of Hattin in 1187 [pp. 142-145].
4) A disambiguating warning
Let us strive to encapsulate as succinctly as possible the blatant contrast between the essentially religious ideal of historic chivalry and the essentially anti-religious and worldly ideal of modern nationalism, given over as it is to vainglory and a barbarous cruelty.
Gentleness is the defining property of the knight, who learns from Jesus’ teaching,
Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn [μάθετε] from me, for I am meek and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls (Jeremiah 6:16). Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light. (Matthew 11:28-30)
Lethality, on the other hand, is the defining property of the warrior, who listens to Pete Hegseth’s exhortation and blasphemous sermonizing. As a boy, the latter dreamt rapturously of one day getting to slay people in the name of God. As time wore on and he grew up, he realized that what matters above all else to him is killing people simpliciter, whether or not in God’s name. Therefore, he cast around for a god whom to worship who would license him to kill and thereby fulfill his deepest desire (who could not possibly be the Lord God YHWH whom everyone knows, vide Exodus 20:13—you shall not kill [:לא תרצה]). When our peerless Commander-in-Chief Donald J. Trump acceded to high office the second time around, Hegseth saw his opportunity at last and seized it.
After carefully laying his plans by abolishing the group established by President Biden to vet targets for civilians before striking them, Hegseth scored his first major success around dawn on February 28, 2026, when 175 Iranian schoolgirls perished at one site in southern Iran and a further 21 at another under attack by Tomahawk cruise missiles launched by the US Navy at the Secretary of Defense’s orders. One must suppose the symbolism of bombing a schoolhouse deliberate; these poor children died because they went there seeking knowledge. Jesus says, ‘let the little children alone, and do not stop them from coming to me, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs’ (Matthew 19:14). In salvation-historical terms, these martyred schoolgirls in twenty-first-century Iran are destined to play a role with respect to the Second Coming analogous to that played by the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem with respect to the First Coming, whom king Herod massacred in an effort to eliminate Jesus (Matthew 2:16-18).
Some subsequent feats of which Hegseth proudly boasts include, inter alia, a nighttime air raid in which a 2000-lb bomb was dropped on a townhouse in a residential district, instantly killing the young married couple and their toddler who lived there; and a missile attack in broad daylight on a wedding, causing several deaths and injuring 67. Why do these hapless civilians pose such an imminent military threat that their annihilation is deemed imperative by the President, the Secretary of Defense and the top brass of the US armed forces? In not merely a symbolic sense (though it is this, too) but also in a real sense, it is love itself, as reflected in marriage, procreation and the rearing of children, that figures as a force for good that runs counter to everything for which America under the religious right stands. As for how the Republicans gained control over what is beyond doubt the greatest nation on earth, see Luke 4:5-7,
Then leading him to a height, the devil showed Jesus in a moment of time all the kingdoms of the world and said to him, ‘I will give you all this power and their splendor, for it has been handed over to me, for me to give it to anyone I choose. Do homage, then, to me, and it shall all be yours’.
In the constitutional regime that (in theory) prevails in America, the concept of civilian control of the military is paramount. According to Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution, the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, now understood to encompass the Air Force and Coast Guard under wartime, and may consult with civilian heads of executive departments in the Cabinet. The US Department of Defense was established on August 10, 1949 under amendments to the National Security Act of 1947. The current status of constitutional law is specified by the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, in which Congress expressly upholds civilian control of US armed forces and directs that the operational chain of command pass from the President through the Secretary of Defense to the Unified Combatant Commanders and thence (at the President’s discretion) through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (cf. 10 U.S.C. §§113, 162, 7013, 8013, 9013).
In other words, Mr. Pete Hegseth bears direct responsibility for all official actions of the US armed forces under his command, which comprises decision on use of force and determination of rules of engagement.
At the press conference he gave at the Pentagon afterwards, Hegseth positively beamed with ebullience over the enormity of his crime. When our Supreme Leader was later put the direct query by a journalist, whether, as Commander-in-Chief, he accepted responsibility for the slaughter of Iranian civilians at the hands of the US Navy, Trump immediately shot back, ‘I don’t know anything about it’. For once, unwittingly (like the high priest Caiaphas in the gospel of John the Evangelist, John 18:14), the president of the greatest nation on earth spoke the level truth—verily indeed, Donald J. Trump knows nothing about being honest or assuming responsibility for his deeds! Neither, what is evident, does Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
For has our Secretary of Defense repented (vide Mark 1:15, the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent [μετανοεῖτε], and believe the gospel [εὐαγγελίῳ])? Has he resigned his office, visibly and publicly? Does he wander the streets of Washington, DC, in sackcloth and ashes, striking his breast in remorse? Were Hegseth a knight who, whether in the heat of a momentary passion or as an unfortunate result of a culpable misjudgment transgressed the Mosaic Law, he would certainly have done so by now. Biblically speaking, these would be the sole acceptable responses. Thus, the very last thing one could call our epitome of the lethal warrior, the Honorable Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, is chivalrous.
Be on your guard, stay awake, because you never know when the time will come. It is like a man traveling abroad: he has gone from his home, and left his servants in charge, each with his own work to do; and he has told the doorkeeper to stay awake. So stay awake, because you do not know when the master of the house is coming, evening, midnight, cockcrow or dawn; if he comes unexpectedly, he must not find you asleep. And what I am saying to you I say to all: Stay awake [γρηγορεῖτε]! (Mark 13:33-37)
The Decalogue
As our theme for the review to follow, we wish to meditate on how chivalry reflects a civilization ordered by a Christian conception versus what has come to the fore in modern times, viz., nationalism. In so far as one can speak of a religious inspiration behind Western society, it ceased to exist at least four centuries ago (cf. Michael J. Buckley, SJ’s At the Origins of Modern Atheism, Yale University Press, 1987, our review here). All the wheedling talk one hears these days of a supposed civilizational suicide to be countered by a turn to authoritarianism amounts, of course, to nothing but empty bombast and posturing. For, as is massively apparent to any discriminating observer, those who promote it most loudly (prominently, Stephen Miller, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio) do not in the least undertake a serious attempt in their public conduct to live by the religious code they nominally espouse or even to abide by secular norms of constitutionalism and the rule of law. We shall seek to get to the root of the seeming paradox in our companion review of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (see here).
1) Origins of the knightly ideal in the Carolingian age
The most primitive stratum of the institution can be discerned in the epic of Beowulf, completed around the year 800 though doubtless incorporating elements of oral culture from centuries before (see our review, here). There, one encounters roving bands of well-equipped warriors who fight on behalf of great kings. As Jestice points out,
The earliest element that went into the creation of the knight was the professional fighting man. Kings and great lords from the dawn of the Middle Ages maintained some household troops—men who ordinarily served as the core of military levies. These household retainers were usually professional fighters; they had no other regular occupation such as farming. They would have originated from a range of social classes, including the younger sons of nobles, but were also lower-class men who were taken from their labor in the fields and trained. [p. 8]
By training year-round, these men honed their combat skills and effectiveness as team players. The two elements she wishes to emphasize are thus, professionalism and the quality of their gear, advantages that distinguish them from part-time warriors who might be mobilized in times of threat. The period was, after all, perilously dangerous, what with incursions of Vikings from the north and Magyars from the east. In the course of contending with such formidable foes, the necessity of being able to deploy heavy cavalry was impressed upon the leaders of German forces after suffering a series of devastating defeats. But by the Battle of Lechfeld in the year 955, Otto I could win such a decisive victory as to dispel the Magyar menace for good. In consequence, horsemanship became the sine qua non of the knight.
2) Heyday during the high Middle Ages
A steady economic expansion which would characterize medieval civilization for centuries got underway during the tenth century. As a result, the ruling classes in France and Germany became quite wealthy and could invest their resources in maintaining a retinue of knights, who required increasingly expensive outfitting—swords, chain mail, warhorses. At first, these retainers did not necessarily enjoy a high social status (the very word ‘knight’ derives from that for ‘servant’ [Knecht in modern German]). Their position gradually improved, however, since in order to guarantee an economic base of support, they would be given hereditary fiefs.
Let us reproduce an extended quotation about how effective massed Frankish cavalry were:
A new, distinctive fighting method was developing in the second half of the eleventh century, and perhaps had already been employed in the Normans’ wars of conquest in southern Italy. This was a cavalry charge employing a heavier spear—a lance—that was now wedged tightly under the knight’s arm and held parallel with the ground. By holding the lance in this ‘couched’ position, the knight could focus his whole body weight, as well as that of this horse, behind the point of the lance. The first literary work to describe a cavalry engagement taking place with crouched lances is the Song of Roland, written in c. 1100. The author does not treat it as a novelty, so it is likely the technique had been around for at least a generation. The shock of a single knight and his horse charging in this way would have been overwhelming, able to break through an enemy line much like a modern tank. The Byzantine historian Anna Comnena, who observed Norman knights both in their attacks on her father’s empire and during the First Crusade, commented that a mounted ‘Celt’ (as she called the westerners) in his heavy armor would be able to bore through the walls of Babylon. Awesome as such a charge might be, though, what made this new fighting technique truly devastating was that knights would charge in teams, working together in repeated thrusts intended to shred infantry resistance. For centuries, it was a rare force of footmen that could stand up to a charge of knights with couched lances. By the beginning of the twelfth century, rulers had come to rely on the knightly charge as the game-changer in battle. [p. 23]
The rise of gunpowder did not matter as decisively as commonly thought, at least until the end of the sixteenth century. Early muskets and canons were not all that powerful and took a long time to reload. It was only the emergence of new tactics during the later centuries of the Middle Ages, centered around tightly massed infantry armed with pikes that proved all but invulnerable to cavalry charge, that rendered knights superfluous.
3) The chivalric code
Other features we tend to associate with knightly life, including minstrelsy and courtly love, arose from a juxtaposition of the older chansons de geste and the amorous songs of the troubadours originating from Provence. An early focus on deeds of valor would be refined by a more elevated code, having to do with courteous treatment of captured enemies, honor displayed towards women and respect for piety and those who belong to religious orders. The theoretical ideal of chivalry (regardless of how well it may have been realized in practice) is unfolded by the French poet Chrétien de Troyes (fl. 1165-1180) in his cycle of Arthurian romances.
In seeking to assess to what extent the ideal held in reality, Jestice stresses the expense of going on an expedition to the Holy Land and suggests that a religious motivation to relieve the Christian population from Muslim oppression must have been the foremost factor (against older scholarship which assumes that religion was mainly a pretext for Crusaders who sought fame and fortune). Another place where one can see the ideal prevail, despite its impracticality, is in the willingness by commanders to allow an engagement between armies to be decided by single combat, which occurred with increasing frequency over the fourteenth century—even though the outcome might go against military necessity.
Jestice summarizes as follows:
The life of most knights was a balancing act. A knight would have tried to show his prowess, but remained conscious that he should apply his strength and skill to worthy goals. He should have high courage but also be able to control his impulses. The honor he showed ladies should be cautious and never go too far. He should show generosity and magnanimity towards enemies, but should also have the wisdom not to behave in a foolhardy way that would endanger his comrades or the cause for which he was fighting. The rules for proper conduct that chivalry imposed guarded Europe from chaos; they also provided the knight—and the society around him—with ideals to cherish. [p. 65]
From here on, Jestice gets diverted into extended digressions on a number of miscellaneous topics, say, training and fighting techniques [pp. 67-97], especially tournaments as training for war [p. 89] and the institution of the melée [p. 90], or mock warfare between two teams of knights; armor and weapons [pp. 99-121]; the ups and downs of the knightly orders [pp. 159-186]; and, lastly, the drawing to a close of the era of the medieval knight [pp. 210-214].
Perhaps her best showing is in the sections in which she discusses the military history of the cavalry charge, from its early implementation at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 [pp. 129-132] (couched lances do not appear to have been in use by then, which accounts for why the battle proved to be such a drawn-out affair) to the charge in the twelfth century [p. 132-133], where, for instance, a well-timed deployment of it was instrumental to king Richard the Lionheart’s equivocal defeat of Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf in 1191 during the Third Crusade; and on to the golden age of the charge during the thirteenth century [pp. 134-137]. Failure to execute a sufficiently effective charge led to the Crusaders’ crushing loss to Saladin at the Battle of Hattin in 1187 [pp. 142-145].
4) A disambiguating warning
Let us strive to encapsulate as succinctly as possible the blatant contrast between the essentially religious ideal of historic chivalry and the essentially anti-religious and worldly ideal of modern nationalism, given over as it is to vainglory and a barbarous cruelty.
Gentleness is the defining property of the knight, who learns from Jesus’ teaching,
Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn [μάθετε] from me, for I am meek and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls (Jeremiah 6:16). Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light. (Matthew 11:28-30)
Lethality, on the other hand, is the defining property of the warrior, who listens to Pete Hegseth’s exhortation and blasphemous sermonizing. As a boy, the latter dreamt rapturously of one day getting to slay people in the name of God. As time wore on and he grew up, he realized that what matters above all else to him is killing people simpliciter, whether or not in God’s name. Therefore, he cast around for a god whom to worship who would license him to kill and thereby fulfill his deepest desire (who could not possibly be the Lord God YHWH whom everyone knows, vide Exodus 20:13—you shall not kill [:לא תרצה]). When our peerless Commander-in-Chief Donald J. Trump acceded to high office the second time around, Hegseth saw his opportunity at last and seized it.
After carefully laying his plans by abolishing the group established by President Biden to vet targets for civilians before striking them, Hegseth scored his first major success around dawn on February 28, 2026, when 175 Iranian schoolgirls perished at one site in southern Iran and a further 21 at another under attack by Tomahawk cruise missiles launched by the US Navy at the Secretary of Defense’s orders. One must suppose the symbolism of bombing a schoolhouse deliberate; these poor children died because they went there seeking knowledge. Jesus says, ‘let the little children alone, and do not stop them from coming to me, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs’ (Matthew 19:14). In salvation-historical terms, these martyred schoolgirls in twenty-first-century Iran are destined to play a role with respect to the Second Coming analogous to that played by the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem with respect to the First Coming, whom king Herod massacred in an effort to eliminate Jesus (Matthew 2:16-18).
Some subsequent feats of which Hegseth proudly boasts include, inter alia, a nighttime air raid in which a 2000-lb bomb was dropped on a townhouse in a residential district, instantly killing the young married couple and their toddler who lived there; and a missile attack in broad daylight on a wedding, causing several deaths and injuring 67. Why do these hapless civilians pose such an imminent military threat that their annihilation is deemed imperative by the President, the Secretary of Defense and the top brass of the US armed forces? In not merely a symbolic sense (though it is this, too) but also in a real sense, it is love itself, as reflected in marriage, procreation and the rearing of children, that figures as a force for good that runs counter to everything for which America under the religious right stands. As for how the Republicans gained control over what is beyond doubt the greatest nation on earth, see Luke 4:5-7,
Then leading him to a height, the devil showed Jesus in a moment of time all the kingdoms of the world and said to him, ‘I will give you all this power and their splendor, for it has been handed over to me, for me to give it to anyone I choose. Do homage, then, to me, and it shall all be yours’.
In the constitutional regime that (in theory) prevails in America, the concept of civilian control of the military is paramount. According to Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution, the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, now understood to encompass the Air Force and Coast Guard under wartime, and may consult with civilian heads of executive departments in the Cabinet. The US Department of Defense was established on August 10, 1949 under amendments to the National Security Act of 1947. The current status of constitutional law is specified by the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, in which Congress expressly upholds civilian control of US armed forces and directs that the operational chain of command pass from the President through the Secretary of Defense to the Unified Combatant Commanders and thence (at the President’s discretion) through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (cf. 10 U.S.C. §§113, 162, 7013, 8013, 9013).
In other words, Mr. Pete Hegseth bears direct responsibility for all official actions of the US armed forces under his command, which comprises decision on use of force and determination of rules of engagement.
At the press conference he gave at the Pentagon afterwards, Hegseth positively beamed with ebullience over the enormity of his crime. When our Supreme Leader was later put the direct query by a journalist, whether, as Commander-in-Chief, he accepted responsibility for the slaughter of Iranian civilians at the hands of the US Navy, Trump immediately shot back, ‘I don’t know anything about it’. For once, unwittingly (like the high priest Caiaphas in the gospel of John the Evangelist, John 18:14), the president of the greatest nation on earth spoke the level truth—verily indeed, Donald J. Trump knows nothing about being honest or assuming responsibility for his deeds! Neither, what is evident, does Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
For has our Secretary of Defense repented (vide Mark 1:15, the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent [μετανοεῖτε], and believe the gospel [εὐαγγελίῳ])? Has he resigned his office, visibly and publicly? Does he wander the streets of Washington, DC, in sackcloth and ashes, striking his breast in remorse? Were Hegseth a knight who, whether in the heat of a momentary passion or as an unfortunate result of a culpable misjudgment transgressed the Mosaic Law, he would certainly have done so by now. Biblically speaking, these would be the sole acceptable responses. Thus, the very last thing one could call our epitome of the lethal warrior, the Honorable Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, is chivalrous.
Be on your guard, stay awake, because you never know when the time will come. It is like a man traveling abroad: he has gone from his home, and left his servants in charge, each with his own work to do; and he has told the doorkeeper to stay awake. So stay awake, because you do not know when the master of the house is coming, evening, midnight, cockcrow or dawn; if he comes unexpectedly, he must not find you asleep. And what I am saying to you I say to all: Stay awake [γρηγορεῖτε]! (Mark 13:33-37)
The Decalogue
September 8, 2022
I'm a medieval author who wants to get my books as period accurate as possible. This is probably the best book on medieval knights that I've read in a long time. It was so informative. The other knight books that I've read have been 69% history, 28% myth (like the "Songs of Deeds" and their tales, or "A Matter of Britain, France," etc and their tales) and 3% actually on the life and training of knights. But this book covered everything from training, weaponry, the Chivalric code, fighting techniques, life of knights, etc. Yes, it also had some history and myths to it, but it didn't dominate the entire book. Like I said, this was a book about....knights.
And it was so easy to read! Everything is broken down into different sections and written in a fantastic writing style that keeps the reader engaged. My mind tends to wander, but this one held my attention.
I highly recommend this book as a beginner book for all research needs about knights and I will be referring back to it many times again!
And it was so easy to read! Everything is broken down into different sections and written in a fantastic writing style that keeps the reader engaged. My mind tends to wander, but this one held my attention.
I highly recommend this book as a beginner book for all research needs about knights and I will be referring back to it many times again!
May 18, 2020
I don't normally review nonfiction books, but I wanted to say this one was delightful! It was a perfect blend between depictions and description. I didn't feel overwhelmed in what I was reading. It was very informative, and I learned quite a lot. I would definitely recommend for anyone researching medieval knights!
June 11, 2023
A great read, very well-done, well-written, nicely illustrated. Without bias or "modern" reinterpretation or rewriting of history or condemning it as seems to be the fancy now sadly. Nor hostile to to the Religious foundation of Knighthood. Scholarly yet can be read easily. I am very happy I own a copy.
August 28, 2026
This is a fantastic book on the medieval knight! Packed with an abundance of gorgeous photographs and key concepts! This is a must for every student and establishdd medievalist! Covers everything from armor to literature to history to chivalric ideals, you name it, its in here!
December 14, 2018
Well illustrated, mostly interesting overview of the medieval knight, his origins, weapons, armor and decline. The chapter on the charge got a bit tedious. Still worthwhile all in all.
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