Order of the Golden Spur

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Order of the Golden Spur counts among its recipients Titian, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Nicolo Paganini, and Giacomo Casanova. It is the second highest of all papal orders of knighthood. And on the 23rd of April 2019, when Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg died, its last living member was gone. The order is now considered dormant. How does a distinction once associated with the glory of the Church and the deeds of soldiers and artists fall into a state where no one alive can claim it? That question runs through the entire life of this institution, from its origins in a medieval imperial title to the moment a Luxembourg grand duke closed the book.

• 2. Imperial Roots

  ›

  On the 15th of August 1357, in Prague, Charles IV of the Holy Roman Empire conferred the title Count Palatine of the Lateran Palace on one Fenzio di Albertino di Prato. That act is regarded as the earliest thread connecting the Golden Spur to a chivalric institution. During the Renaissance, the order became bound up with the count palatinate, an inheritable patent of nobility. Emperor Frederick III named Baldo Bartolini, a professor of civil law at the University of Perugia, a count palatinate in 1469. Bartolini was entitled, in turn, to confer university degrees. The historian of universities Paul F. Grendler noted that Bartolini also received the Knighthood of the Golden Spur, a title that sometimes accompanied the office of count palatinate in the Renaissance.

  After the Sack of Rome in 1527, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, conferred the order widely. The surviving diplomas from that period granted hereditary nobility to recipients. One of those recipients was the painter Titian, honored in 1533 after completing an equestrian portrait of Charles himself. When Charles died in 1558, the order passed out of imperial hands, and its refounding in papal hands is attributed to Pope Pius IV in 1559.

• 3. Artists and Adventurers

  ›

  In 1777, Mozart sat for a portrait wearing the star-encircled cross of the order on his coat. He had received the honor at the age of fourteen, making him one of the youngest known recipients in the order's history. The engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi used his knighthood practically: the order permitted him to sign his etchings Cav. G.B. Piranesi, a mark of distinction attached to every plate that left his studio.

  Casanova received the cross too, and his reaction was complicated. He wrote that the order was so disparaged that people irritated him greatly when they asked about the details of his cross. He admitted he would have been pleased to answer instead with the name of a more celebrated decoration. Yet he wore it habitually, on its scarlet riband, regardless. The formal criteria for the award at this stage were broad: it went to those in the pontifical government, artists, and others whom the pope thought deserving of reward, with no condition required beyond professing the Catholic faith.

  The composer Christoph Willibald Gluck also held the decoration, as did the tenor Anton Raaff, who received his from Pope Pius VI. Nicolo Paganini joined the list in the nineteenth century, adding the Golden Spur to a career already defined by its excess and spectacle.

• 4. Scandal and Reform

  ›

  By the middle of the eighteenth century the order's reputation had frayed badly enough for Casanova to remark on it, but the nineteenth century brought outright scandal. Members of the Curia, prelates, and papal nuncios had acquired the privilege of nominating recipients, and the decoration was given out liberally upon payment of a small fee. Forged letters patent began circulating in Paris, falsely claiming to confer the title formerly linked with the honorary designation Count Palatine of the Sacred Palace of the Lateran.

  Honoré Daumier captured the social mockery in 1842, when he included a figure he labeled Knight of the Golden Spur in his lithograph series Bohemians of Paris. The satirical caption describes a self-described former Colonel of the Papal Guard and aide-de-camp to the Prince of Monaco, waiting for a distinguished government post while willing to settle for a tobacconist's shop or a position inspecting street sweeping.

  Pope Gregory XVI moved decisively in 1841. In the Papal Brief Quod Hominum Mentes, he reformed the order and renamed it the Order of Saint Sylvester and the Golden Militia. He withdrew all existing faculties, banned the use of the title or decoration by any knight created through means other than a Papal Brief, capped the order at 150 Commanders and 300 knights for the Papal States, and appointed the Cardinal of Apostolic Briefs as Chancellor, with the specific duty of keeping a register of each knight's name, grade, and date of admission.

• 5. A Papal Restoration

  ›

  On the 7th of February 1905, Pope Pius X issued the motu proprio Multum ad excitandos. The occasion was the golden jubilee of the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception. In that document, Pius X divided the single reformed order into two: one took the name Order of St. Sylvester, and the other reclaimed the older name, Order of the Golden Spur. The restored Order of the Golden Spur was placed under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  The 1905 reorganization also reshaped the order's insignia. The badge became an eight-pointed enameled gold cross with a small white medallion at its center. One face of that medallion bore the word Maria surrounded by a golden circle; the other carried the year MDCCCCV and the phrase Pius X Restituit. A small golden spur hung from the bottom of the cross. The decoration was suspended from a red ribbon with white borders, and a silver star worn on the left breast completed the set. The earlier gold livery collar, worn by members in the order's early days, was not resumed, though it remained a symbol and still appears in ecclesiastical heraldry surrounding the shield of a recipient's coat of arms.

• 6. The Last Knight

  ›

  In its modern form the order carries only one class: Knight. Membership is restricted to one hundred knights throughout the world, and the honor is conferred by a Motu Proprio of the Pope. It no longer confers nobility, as it did before 1841, and noble birth plays no part in the selection.

  The roster of twentieth-century recipients placed the order alongside some of the most contested political figures of the era. Benito Mussolini and Miklós Horthy, Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary from 1920 to 1944, both held the decoration. So did Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, who served as regent from 1934 to 1941, as well as Sukarno, the first President of Indonesia, and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran. Hussein bin Talal, King of Jordan from 1952 to 1999, was also among the named recipients.

  Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg, born in 1921, was the order's final living member. When he died on the 23rd of April 2019, the order had no one left to hold it. The institution that Pope Pius X called back to life in 1905 now waits, technically dormant, its scarlet-and-white ribbon folded away.