Royalty and celestial knighthood in Arthurian romance (12th and 13th centuries)

Even idealised by the fiction, the Arthurian royalty is integrating in the political though of the 12th and 13th centuries, a system which has in John of Salisbury one of the most important theoreticians. Designated by God Himself, a public person, guardian of law, the Arthurian king is the reference point of the world. Only the celestial knighthood gets free from the system of values ruled by the Sovereign. Assimilating some characteristics of a contemporary representation, i.e. that of Templars (subordinated directly to the pope and not to the king), the celestial knight transcends the royal model: he is setting up a different system of values in which the rise of an individual consciousness can be beheld.