The chivalric nations of Europe attached as much consequence to orders which existed only in their own fervid imagination as to those whose lineage was certain. To Constantine the Great was ascribed the honor of inventing the first military order of knighthood. The great captains of his court were said to have been associated under the title of the order of the Constantinian Angelic Knights of Saint George, that Saint being in Greece, as well as in England, the patron of military men. The grand-mastership resided in the Imperial family. After the fall of the Eastern empire, the order passed into Italy; and the knights of that country imagined the existence of papal bulls, which permitted the grand masters to sit at the same table with the Popes, to coin money, and to confer titles of honor, whether in nobility or learning, and exercise every prerogative of independent princes. But it would be in vain to enquire after the names of any of these mensal companions of the Pope; and no cabinet of curiosities contains any coins which they struck in attestation of their power. The memory of Charles Martel's great victory over the Moors was preserved in the middle ages of France, by the belief that the conqueror had established an order of knighthood called the Order of the Gennet; and lists of cavaliers were drawn out, and statutes imagined, attesting only the love of the French for chivalric distinctions. The Spaniards delighted to imagine that their early victories over the Moors were commemorated by an order called the Order of the Oak in Navarre, and founded on occasion of the Holy Cross, adored by an infinite number of angels, appearing to a Gothic chief who led the Christians. [Sidenote: The Round Table.] But of all these imaginary orders none is so interesting as that of the Round Table, instituted by Uther Pendragon, King of Great Britain, and which reached its perfection of martial glory in the reign of his son Arthur. While our ancient historians exaggerated into heroism the patriotic efforts of the last of the British kings, the minstrels who sang in the baronial halls superadded the charms of chivalric circumstance. Since the time of Adam, God hath not made a man more perfect than Arthur, was the favourite opinion; and when his remains were discovered in the Abbey of Glastonbury, in the year 1189, the people from their idea that prowess always corresponded with size of limb fancied that his bones were of gigantic frame.[373]