Chivalry also meant that a knight should fix his thoughts on God, and be a holy man as well as a fighting man. Until the Knights Templar there was rarely any connection between the two; soldiers were often brutish, and got blood on their hands; in contrast, monks (at least in theory) lived Godly lives and kept their hands clean of blood. But the Knights Templar brought the two together: a fighting man who had also made his vows to God. Could this be where the idea of chivalry in the Arthurian romances came from?
– A Brief History of Secret Societies: An Unbiased History of Our Desire for Secret Knowledge (1997), p. 281