Military monastic orders came into being after the First Crusade. Hugh de Payns and a small group of knights elected themselves the guards of pilgrims visiting Jerusalem and the River Jordan c.1119 and were given quarters in the al-Aqsa mosque or temple of Solomon, from which they drew the name Knights of the Temple or Templars. In 1129 at the Council of Troyes they were recognized by the papacy and given a Rule partly written by the greatest crusader preacher of the day, St Bernard of Clairvaux. His Latin version taught them how to live as monks in poverty, chastity, and obedience, while French additions dealt with military organization and tactics. The Templars quickly became an invaluable part of crusading armies. Their Master saved the French Second Crusaders from destruction in Anatolia in 1147 by instructing them in how to conduct a fighting march. The order also became rapidly enormously wealthy by virtue of pious donations. Alfonso I, king of Aragon, even tried to will it a third of his kingdom.
The Templars were probably intended to complement the Order of St John of the Hospital or Hospitallers who, since the 1080s, had been part of the monastery of Santa Maria Latina, where they ran a hospital dedicated to St John the Baptist. The Hospitallers were accepted as an independent order c.1113, although not militarized until later, probably in the 1130s. Both orders created a network of western commanderies, which sustained their military and charitable activities in the Latin East. In 1193, following the Third Crusade, German knights made up the Teutonic Order. The Teutonic Knights were formed around a hospital at Acre, but in 1198 they adopted military functions modelled on the Templars. Two smaller orders followed similar paths: St Lazarus, a hospitaller order caring for lepers since the 1130s, and St Thomas of Acre, a house of regular canons founded c.1190, both became militarized in the 1220s. The international financial base of the orders enabled them to construct and maintain expensive castles beyond the means of secular lords. Krak des Chevaliers (Hospitaller), Atlit (Templar), and Montfort or Starkenberg (Teutonic) are just three of the grandest in the Holy Land.
New monastic orders were created in other crusading zones. In Iberia there were the orders of Calatrava (1158) and Santa María de Espaũa in Castile (1270s) ; Santiago (1170) and Alcántara (c.1176) in León; Mountjoy (c.1173), Alcalá (1174), and San Jorge de Alfama (c.1200) in Aragon; and Avis (c.1176) in Portugal. In eastern Europe the orders of the Swordbrethren (1202) and of Dobrin (c.1228) were absorbed by the Teutonic Knights in the 1230s. Finally there were short-lived anti-heretical orders such as the Militia of the Faith of Jesus Christ and the Order of the Faith and Peace in Languedoc from the 1220s, and the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Bologna and Florence from 1261.
When driven from the mainland in 1291, the Teutonic Knights established a sovereign state in Prussia, from which they orchestrated crusades against Lithuania. Their domination of the region was ended by their defeat at Tannenberg in 1410. The Templars, who had become successful bankers, were destroyed by the greed of the French King Philip IV who arrested them in 1307 and charged them with heresy, obscenity, and satanism. Pope Clement V was sceptical but nevertheless ordered their arrest elsewhere. He finally decided that they were too defamed to continue and at the Council of Vienne in 1312 he suppressed the order and transferred its possessions to the Hospitallers. The latter retired to Cyprus and then Rhodes, where they constructed a sophisticated fortress and conducted fierce attacks upon the Ottoman Turks. Expelled by Suleiman ‘the Magnificent’ in 1523, they withdrew to Malta, which they famously defended in 1565. They held the island until 1798, but were no longer of military significance by the time Napoleon expelled them while on his Egyptian expedition. They retain a headquarters in Rome, the view through the keyhole on the main gate which frames St Peter's being a well-known tourist attraction.
Bibliography
- Barber, Malcolm, The New Knighthood (Cambridge, 1994).
- Christiansen, Eric, The Northern Crusades: The Baltic and the Catholic Frontier 1100-1525 (London, 1980).
- Forey, Alan, The Military Orders: From the Twelfth to the Early Fourteenth Centuries (Basingstoke, 1992).
- Riley-Smith, Jonathan, Atlas of the Crusades (London, 1991)
— Malcolm Barber/Hugh Bicheno
