Ordene de chevalerie

— Sire, he said, it is a reminder to the knight of him who dubbed him and ordained him, but I will not give it you, for I am here in your prison, and I should commit no wickedness, whatever is said or done to me; for this reason, I do not wish to strike you.

[4] It is one of the earliest and most influential surviving didactic texts devoted to chivalry and it achieved a wide reception both in France and elsewhere.

[5] In the poem, Prince Hugh II of Tiberias (Hue de Tabarie) is captured in a skirmish by Saladin, king of Egypt.

During his captivity he instructs Saladin in the order of chivalry and leads him through the stages of becoming a knight, although he refuses to give him the accolade.

In 1178 or 1179, Hugh of Tiberias, who was also prince of Galilee, was captured in a skirmish by the troops of Saladin on the banks of the Litani River not far from Beaufort Castle.

This event seems to have been merged with the legend that Lord Humphrey II of Toron, a vassal of Hugh, so impressed Saladin as a warrior that the latter asked to be knighted by him.

[3] The poem (or its prose version) survives in whole or in part in ten medieval manuscripts,[8] a further five modern ones[9] and has been printed at least five times.

[12] Georges Bataille wrote his doctoral thesis on the poem in 1922, but it was never deposited in the École nationale des chartes.

[22] The Dutch prose work D'ystorie van Saladine printed by Arend de Keysere around 1480 merely contains the character of Hugh of Tiberias but is otherwise unrelated to the Ordene.