Today in our class we were talking about terminology, and I made the point that some of the terms associated with military service in the middle ages migrated upwards. A word started by designating a person or a position that was fairly humble, and eventually the name or term came to mean something pretty important. The chevalier was somebody on horseback originally, and eventually chevalier indicated a nobleman who supposedly had many courtly virtues. Originally the knight in English usage was a servant boy, but after centuries of linguistic struggle the knight had evolved into something very like the noble chevalier. The squire carried around someone else’s shield, until one day he was promoted to respectable land owner and justice of the peace.
And after class I thought of another example of this, the use in Germany and perhaps other parts of the mediaeval empire of the term “ministerialis, ” another word meaning servant or henchmen, to mean...something like chevalier. There was another German term, derived from local roots and not from Latin, that also meant chevalier. It was the word Ritter, which like the French word originally meant “rider.” Usually, however, the Ritter claimed noble blood and independence, while the ministerialis came from a family which had a long association with a much more important one. Some people consider them to be unfree, though I have to wonder about the label, given the career of the most famous ministerialis, Markward of Anweiler, whose picture heads up this post. He was the trusted right hand man of the German Emperor Henry VI and a dangerous enemy of Pope Innocent III. He was almost as good as a king, and inconvenient enough to be called “another Saladin.” Some servant!
For a little more about Markward, see an old post of mine.
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