What are the orders of chivalry?

Answer 1

Chivalric orders are societies and fellowships of knights[1] that have been created by European monarchs in imitation of the military orders of the Crusades. After the crusades, the memory of these crusading military orders became idealised and romanticised, resulting in the late medieval notion of chivalry, and is reflected in the Arthurian romances of the time.

Modern historiography tends to take the fall of Acre in 1291 as the final end of the age of the crusades. But in contemporary understanding, many further crusades against the Turks were planned and partly executed throughout the 14th century and well into the 15th century. The late medieval chivalric orders thus very much understood themselves as reflecting an ongoing military effort against Islam, even though such an effort with the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the fall of Constantinople in the 1450s was without realistic hope of success. During the 15th century, orders of chivalry became more and more a mere courtly fashion and could be created ad-hoc, some of them purely honorific, consisting of nothing but the badge. These institutions in turn gave rise to the modern-day orders of merit.