You’re talking about “gentleman” vs “cavalryman”; knights were supposed to be both. Now, were all of them part of the specific groups the still-unprovided cites from Byzantium would talk about? Evidently not, and without that cite we can’t figure out which specific units were referenced; thinking that the SEALs are some mean sonsabitches (with all due respect to their mothers, all of whom are very decent ladies) does not equal thinking that all sailors are mean sonsabitches.
I think you have answered your own question. Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur was published in 1485, some 400 years before the Victorian era. Come to that Geoffrey of Monmouth was writing about King Arthur and his knights in glowing terms back in the 12th century:
No doubt this was based on stories that were much older still.
I would also like to see a cite for appleciders’ claim that European knights (crusaders, I take it) were much better soldiers than the elite Muslim or Byzantine warriors of their time, though.
I suspect any cite is going to boil down to a matter of opinion, academic or not. It is not one I share, by the way. IMHO the correct response is that knights were very good at certain things and not so good at others.
A mounted, armored knight on a trained warhorse ( usually a grain-fed and pampered stallion ) was a tremendous shock and close-combat machine. They could shrug off a fair bit of damage and deliver a truly devastating blow. If they could come to grips with an opponent. Put a knight up against, say, a lightly armored Mongol cavalryman on his little grass-fed pony ( usually a mare trained to be utterly passive ) in a close combat fight and the heavier-armored knight on his larger, heavier ( and possibly faster in a short sprint ) mount that was trained to fight with him and the knight was going to win most encounters.
Which is why medieval Mongol horsemen tried to evade direct frontal combat with knights under such circumstances. When forced into it, they tended to take heavy losses. However they still tended to win shattering victories over medieval European armies, because most of the time they were very good at avoiding combat on the knight’s terms.
Quite similarly for medieval Turkish armies that were the predominant military Muslim military arm in the medieval Levant. They weren’t the perfect disciplined war machine that the Mongol imperial army was at its height, so they never had anything like that Mongol record of dominance. But they actually won their fair share of battlefield victories against the Crusaders. It was just a matter of which side leveraged their particular advantages and disadvantages to the best effect.
Certainly. I specified fat and lazy as a combo package. The dude who is too fat to fit into his armor, needs help to climb any stairs, and has fat hanging off his body is “fat”, and would be looked down upon, since what he was doing was both neglecting his duty as a knight, and technically straying close to actual sinful behavior in the religious sense.
The big bruiser with massive muscles and a healthy layer of fat over it, maybe with an increasing gut as he got older? Pinnacle of health and gloriously rich, picture of an ideal man.
The ideal woman was healthy, plump and shapely, with those being actual positive descriptors and not euphemisms. Think round, rosy cheeks, a womanly shape and soft arms. The idea was to look as if you had enough to eat, and the health to enjoy it. Skinny people looked either poor or sickly.
Contrast this with actually being fat, where the entire body becomes a shapeless lump. Although, to be fair, most women were expected to loose whatever shape they had pretty soon after thirty, what with repeat pregnancies taking their toll. Beauty in women was mostly restricted to young girls, in the popular mind.
It’s our modern definition of “fat” that are out of whack. There is a not-very-subtle difference between “having fat on your body” and “being fat”, and the medieval eye knew the difference.
To be sure, there are cultures where “the fatter the better”, but this has never really been the case in Europe, to my knowledge.