Although much of the information about the early beginnings of knighthood is rooted in conjecture, a plausible thesis would make knighthood coincide with the rise of the cavalry in Europe, during the first half of the eighth century. It coincides with the times when the Christians in the encounters with the Saracens soon discovered that their infantry were no match for those who fought on horseback. Such armies had much greater mobility, and the center of gravity in the Christian military strategy shifted accordingly. Throughout the first hundred years after this new horseback “militia” had been introduced, all free men could join it, on condition that they were able to provide a horse and equip it at their own expense. Only people of some means could afford this luxury, and the wealthier class was that of the landowners. Service in the cavalry, therefore, implied the possessing of some property, preferably in the form of land. A revolutionary innovation took place simultaneously in the system of land ownership, changing from an allodial, i.e., absolute ownership, to a feudal system. That is why the horseback military service came to be linked with the feudal method of land tenure. It accounts for the historical development of knighthood being so closely related to the history of the feudal system. The history of feudal land ownership is hardly pertinent here, and it will suffice here to state that the tenants-in-chief and their subalterns in the feudal system formed the cavalry of the army; they were the horsemen, chevaliers, or knights. That is how the original form of knighthood became so intimately associated with the tenure of land, and how the knights were known as feudal knights. While the knights were initially landed gentry, gradually—and already a considerable time before the Crusades—a different type of knight appeared, namely, that of the horseman without land. Equally so, knighthood began to constitute a distinct social class. No longer was feudal tenure the background of knighthood but rather personal valor. The development was the consequence of the custom of primogeniture as it existed in the Frankish form of the feudal system. Two types of feudal succession were known on the European continent. Where the Longobard feudal law held sway, as was the case in Italy, at the death of the feudatory incumbent, the land was divided among his male heirs. In many cases the original fief was cut into ever smaller portions during successive generations. This gentry were still landholders, even though their financial position, due to the divisions and subdivisions of the ancestral property, might not be much better economically than that of the peasants who actually worked the land.