Chivalry Was Marketing

The code of chivalry — honor, courage, protecting the innocent — sounds noble. It was also mostly propaganda. Knights were the medieval equivalent of a private military contractor, and their primary job was violence for profit. Chivalry was the PR campaign that made it palatable.

Knights fought for the highest bidder — their own lord, a foreign king, a wealthy bishop, sometimes rival sides of the same war in different decades. The Hundred Years' War turned freelance knights into full-time mercenaries. When peace broke out briefly in 1360, these men had no skills other than violence — and they simply kept pillaging, this time for themselves.