Chronicle of Rimini records a high
court held by Pandolfo Malatesta in the May of 1324, when he and his
two sons, with two of his near relatives and certain strangers from
Florence, Bologna, and Perugia, received this honour. At Siena, in
like manner, in the year 1284, 'thirteen of the house of Salimbeni
were knighted with great pomp.'

[1] The passages used in the text are chiefly drawn from
Muratori's fifty-third Dissertation.

It was not on the battlefield that the Italians sought this honour.
They regarded knighthood as a part of their signorial parade.
Therefore Republics, in whom perhaps, according to strict feudal
notions, there was no fount of honour, presumed to appoint
procurators for the special purpose of making knights. Florence,
Siena, and Arezzo, after this fashion gave the golden spurs to men
who were enrolled in the arts of trade or commerce. The usage was
severely criticised by Germans who visited Italy in the Imperial
train. Otto Frisingensis, writing the deeds of Frederick Barbarossa,
speaks with bitterness thereof: 'To the end that they may not lack
means of subduing their neighbours, they think it no shame to gird
as knights young men of low birth, or even handicraftsmen in
despised mechanic arts, the which folk other nations banish like the
plague from honourable and liberal pursuits.' Such knights, amid the
chivalry of Europe, were not held in much esteem; nor is it easy to
see what the cities, which had formally excluded nobles from their
government, thought to gain by aping institutions which had their
true value only in a feudal society. We must suppose that the
Italians were not firmly set enough in their own type to resist an
enthusiasm which inflamed all Christendom. At the same time they
were too Italian to comprehend the spirit of the thing they
borrowed. The knights thus made already contained within themselves
the germ of those Condottieri who reduced the service of arms to a
commercial speculation. But they lent splendour to the Commonwealth,
as may be seen in the grave line of mounted warriors, steel-clad,
with open visors, who guard the commune of Siena in Ambrogio
Lorenzetti's fresco. Giovanni Villani, in a passage of his Chronicle
which deals with the fair state of Florence just before the outbreak
of the Black and White parties, says the city at that epoch numbered
'three hundred Cavalieri di Corredo, with many clubs of knights and
squires, who morning and evening went