The high point in the age of chivalry came during the Crusades, those religious wars waged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by the Christians of Western Europe against the Mohammedans for the recovery of the Holy Land. An interaction came about between the Crusades and chivalry. The spirit of chivalry was largely responsible for making possible these campaigns for a religious ideal. Thereby, the Crusades provided a powerful impetus in the development of knighthood, for it was during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that chivalry attained its highest peak both in quality and quantity. The Crusades did not create a new type of knighthood, but they gave the knights a chance to show their mettle. When the landless soldiers of the Cross distinguished themselves in battle just as well or perhaps even better than the feudal knights, it was reasonable that they should claim their reward. If they fought as well as those who owed knighthood to their feudal status, why should they not claim the honors and benefits of knighthood? In that way the Crusades gave the horsemen large scale opportunity to become knights through personal valor. However, the _conditio sine qua non_ for becoming a knight at this time was still the old law that the candidates should be of noble birth, that is to say, that they could trace their descent from the ancient feudal families. In the century following the Crusades the decline of knighthood set in, and it is generally admitted that by 1500 the age of chivalry had passed. Then it was that its tradition and spirit were kept alive in the orders of knighthood. DEVELOPMENT OF THE ORDERS OF KNIGHTHOOD The first orders of knighthood were radically of a religious nature inasmuch as they pursued a religious purpose and were organized like other religious communities. The order of knighthood was composed of a body of knights, united by some common objective as the care of the sick or the defense of the Catholic faith, and who were pledged with the vows of obedience, poverty and chastity, led a community life under a chosen head and professed a common rule approved by the ecclesiastical authorities. The birthplace of all orders of knighthood was the Holy Land and they appeared during the period of the Crusades. True, some historians attempt to date the origin of the military orders as far back in antiquity as possible, for instance, to Charlemagne and his paladins or to Constantine the Great and his mother, Saint Helena. The claims of such ancestry fanatics to the contrary notwithstanding, it can safely be said that no military order of knighthood, either regular or secular, came into existence before the first Crusade, as the Bollandist Papebrock said in 1738: “Fallunt aut volentes falluntur adulatores studio placendi abrepti, quicumque militarium religionum principia ante XII saeculum requirunt” (_AA. SS. Boll._, Apr., III, 155).