Jedi knight (Empire)

A Jedi knight was a Force-sensitive individual who had been adopted into a Jedi clan and graduated from their training to become a full-fledged Jedi. Jedi knights had once been known for pledging themselves to serve the people, but by the time of the Sith rebellion, each knight was instead pledged to an individual lord or Jedi lord (Empire) in the service of the Empire. Only Jedi knights were legally permitted to carry a lightsaber, unlike their lord's fellow retainers, the Jedi guardians. Knights would be sent onto battlefields to war on their lord's behalf.

It was a cultural standard of the Empire that Jedi knights would die in the service of their lords. A knight who survived while their lord died was seen as defying the Empire, natural order, and honor. Prior to the rebellion, the human male who would later be known as the Ronin had been a Jedi knight pledged to a particular lord. He was loyal to both his lord and the guardians who had been adopted alongside him. In the Ronin's personal recollection to the Traveler, themself a former Jedi knight, the Ronin said that his rebellion began when he had not killed someone his lord had told him to kill. In researching the Ronin, the Jedi lord Hanrai came to believe the Ronin had been on a battlefield with his lord, with the expectation that he would die in his lord's place; because he left his lord to die while he and his guardians survived, the group became a destabilizing threat to their society.

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