The Military Orders

Religious Congregations of Knights.

One of the most distinctive developments of the period following the First Crusade (begun in 1095) was the creation of "military orders," religious congregations of knights whose initial purpose was to protect pilgrims and maintain control of the "Crusader Kingdoms" established by the French in the Holy Land. Clearly the military religious orders began with the justification of Christian warfare during the First Crusade. The act of killing the enemies of Christ was not seen as a sin but rather as necessary and meritorious. Thus, if a Christian soldier died in such a war, it brought him the status of martyrdom. Also, the Crusades themselves had taken on the character of a special pilgrimage, and, like pilgrims, a participant in a Crusade could be granted an indulgence, or remission from temporal penances associated with his sins. As the size of pilgrim groups to the Holy Land increased, the church felt somewhat obliged to provide for their protection. While the First Crusade had temporarily eliminated the threat of Muslim control of the Holy Land, the area itself remained relatively unprotected since most knights returned home once the military campaigns ended. The population of Christian settlers in the Crusader Kingdoms around the city of Jerusalem and along the Palestinian coast of the Mediterranean was rather small and unable to provide pilgrims with adequate protection. A group of knights led by Hugh de Payens decided to make a vocation out of protecting pilgrims who were on their way to visit the holy places. They formed a religious group that resided in the city of Jerusalem and became known as the "Templars."

Soldier-Monks.

Hugh envisioned the Templars as an army of soldier-monks whose martial duties contained a decidedly spiritual element. In a sense, they embodied the highest ideals of Christian knighthood. These Templars took vows of obedience and chastity, and they followed the spiritual lives of the canons that resided at the church of the Holy Sepulchre. They were called "Templars" or "Knights of the Temple" because they lived in an area of Jerusalem believed to be near the old Temple of Solomon. Their movement seems to have evolved out of the spirituality connected to Crusade ideology. The journey of a crusader to Jerusalem was justified as a penitential process, an ascetical exercise of self-denial, prayer, mortification, and fasting. All of these idealized crusader elements were incorporated into the Templar spirituality. When the plan for the group was first approved in 1128, they were not considered monks but fell into the category of "lay religious." For a time this seems to have appeased critics who were in staunch support of church directives against monks bearing arms. Templars wore their hair short, donned white robes, and avoided women. Sometime after 1132, the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux was asked to write a treatise supporting the Templars. It may not have been so much a direct approval of their movement as an exposition on monastic life as the highest form of knighthood, or possibly an attempt to help reform the knighthood of Bernard's time. He wrote:

Thus in a wondrous and unique manner they appear gentler than lambs, yet fiercer than lions. I do not know if it would be more appropriate to refer to them as monks or as soldiers, unless it would perhaps be better to recognize them as being both. … What can we say of this except that this had been done by the Lord, and it is marvelous in our eyes. These are the picked troops of God, whom he has recruited from all ends of the earth …

The Templar Rule.

A rule was eventually composed for the Templar lifestyle which contained elements of the Benedictine Rule along with particular aspects of Cistercian spirituality and practice. The rule and the order were approved in 1139 by Pope Innocent II in his bull Omne Datum Optimum. The Templars were not under the control of local bishops but answered directly to the pope. About the time of the Second Crusade (1146), the Templars came to be seen as religious knights whose commitment to protecting the holy places was permanent. There were several levels to the order, which consisted of knights of noble birth, sergeants who were not nobles, chaplains who were clerics and not allowed to take up arms, and, in addition to all these, their servants. Only the knights took permanent vows. They continued to operate in the Holy Land until the fall of Acre (the main port of entry to Palestine) in 1291, but were eventually suppressed by Pope Clement V in 1312. The Templars also participated in campaigns in Spain and the Baltic area of Europe. While they became famous for their almsgiving, along the way the knights began to lose sight of some of their founding principles. After a century in the Holy Land, they had succeeded in amassing great wealth and had significant involvement with banking. Their massive fortifications functioned as depositories as they transported wealth to and from the East and brokered loans. Indeed, their wealth may have been their undoing. Despite the Templars' attempt to merge with the Hospitallers after the end of the Crusades, their assets were seized by the French king Philip the Fair and their leaders executed as heretics.

The Hospitallers.

The Hospitallers (also known as the Knights of St. John) originated as a brotherhood that served poor or sick pilgrims in the city of Jerusalem. About 25 years before the First Crusade, they began their work in a Benedictine monastery, St. Mary of the Latins, near the Holy Sepulchre. The hospice was staffed both by the Hospitaller brothers and by monks. All those who worked there followed the Benedictine lifestyle. Following the First Crusade, the Hospitallers were given additional lands in the Levant (an area on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, located between western Greece and western Egypt) along the pilgrim routes on which to establish daughter houses. They also had establishments in the port cities of Italy and southern France, from which pilgrims would normally depart. In 1113 the Hospitallers were given a charter from Pope Paschal II establishing them as a unique order to be supervised by their own master and (like the Templars) answerable only to the pope. Initially they were a charitable order, not a military group, dedicated to the care of pilgrims and almsgiving, but in 1123 they added a military element due to the shortage of Christian knights in the Holy Land. They continued to protect and serve pilgrims as well as to provide military assistance to the local nobility against the Muslims. By the 1130s they had begun to construct and defend fortified castles throughout the Holy Land. Soon their order began to resemble the Templars with divisions of service for clerics, knights, sergeants, and laborers in the houses. And like the Templars they were considered lay religious and took vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty following whenever possible the daily monastic routine. The order also admitted women, who had separate accommodations. In 1141 they moved their headquarters to a castle called Krak des Chevaliers, situated on a high plateau in what is now Syria, and after 1187 they were forced to withdraw from Jerusalem. With the fall of Acre and the final destruction of the Latin Kingdoms in the Holy Land, they established themselves on Cyprus, and in 1309, after taking Rhodes from the Greeks, made a new headquarters there. The order still functions today as a charitable organization.

Other Chivalric Orders.

By the middle of the twelfth century other chivalric orders had begun to appear in Spain with the intention of assisting with the Reconquista, the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Moors. Orders like Calatrava and Alcantara took their lead from the Templars. The Calatrava group began in 1158 when local monks allied themselves with knights to fight the Almohads, a Muslim dynasty that replaced the short-lived Almoravids. Eventually the knights of Calatrava went on to form their own order, but in 1164 they were attached to the Cistercians (a reform monastic movement that had begun in 1098) by Pope Alexander III. By the fourteenth century the order was responsible for protecting some 350 towns in the area of Castile. Following the reconquest, the order became more of a political entity. Alcantara began functioning in 1156 to defend the towns of León. They received papal approval in 1177 and began to follow the Rule of Benedict. Eventually they became allied with the Calatrava knights in driving out the Muslims. The Knights of the Teutonic Order and the Order of Santiago functioned more on military and hospitality levels, although they strove to maintain the highest standards of Christian knighthood. Their groups were also composed of warriors, clerics, and brothers. The Teutonic Knights began in 1198 during the time of the Third Crusade and eventually returned to Germany in the thirteenth century to function in the campaigns against the pagans on the borderlands of Prussia, while the Order of Santiago was formed in the late twelfth century to protect pilgrims traveling to the shrine of St. James at Compostela. The Santiago knights ruled almost as lords protecting territories throughout reconquered parts of Spain. The order survived through the end of the Reconquista.

sources

Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Bernard of Clairvaux, "In Praise of the New Knighthood," in The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux. Cistercian Fathers Series, 19, IV, 8. Trans. Conrad Greenia (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1977): 140–141.

Alan Forey, Military Orders and the Crusades (Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1994).

Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Knights of St. John in Jerusalem and Cyprus (London, England: Macmillan, 1967).

Desmond Seward, The Monks of War: The Military Religious Orders (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972).

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