Order of the Ship
secular order of knighthood
The Order of the Ship (French Ordre de la Nef) was a secular order of knighthood in the Kingdom of Naples founded and dedicated to the Holy Trinity by King Charles III of the House of Durazzo on 1 December 1381 and no longer active by 1386.
History
Charles III was crowned King of Naples in the Castel Nuovo in Naples on 25 November. During the festivities that followed, he inducted seven or eight knights into a new order of his own creation at a ceremony in the great chapel of the Castel Nuovo on 1 December. In this he was probably imitating the founding of the Order of the Knot by King Louis I twenty years earlier on 25 May 1352, the same day as his coronation. Although there were present in Naples men who would have remembered the founding of the Order of the Knot, but it is unlikely that Charles sought to revive the Order of the Knot, defunct since Louis's death in 1362, since Louis's heirs were Charles's rivals for the throne.
The only contemporary evidence for the structure and history of the order are two copies of its statutes, both composed in Middle French. The original master copy of the statutes, the Livre de estatus et chapistrez, which was also in French and was to be kept in the order's chapel, is lost. It was probably richly illustrated in imitation of that of the Order of the Knot. The statutes themselves are modelled on those of the Order of the Knot and the Hungarian Order of Saint George, of which Charles was a member. The two manuscripts are MS French 83 in the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania and MS L III 29 of the Biblioteca nazionale universitaria in Turin.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4789680. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1381, 1386, 1352 and 1362.
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This entry incorporates text from “Order of the Ship” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.