Templars and Hospitallers as Professed Religious in the Holy Land (review)

Jonathan Riley-Smith, Dixie Professor Emeritus of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, can reasonably be described as the most eminent, and almost certainly the most prolific, historian of the crusades now active in the field. He began his career a half-century ago with a PhD thesis at Cambridge on the history of the Hospitaller order, which appeared as The Knights of St. John in Jerusalem and Cyprus (London, 1967), the first of more than a dozen books.

In Templars and Hospitallers Riley-Smith returns once again to the history of the two oldest and best-known medieval military orders, whose members combined the functions of monks and knights. His earlier studies of these organizations concentrated on their constitutions and their military roles in defense of the crusader states established in the Holy Land shortly after the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. In this book, however, Riley-Smith concentrates instead on their roles as religious orders.

Historians of the crusades usually treat the two military orders as if they were virtually identical. Riley-Smith, however, stresses that they were unlike each other in numerous ways. The Hospitallers originated sometime during the closing decades of the eleventh century. As their name suggests, they began as a nursing order whose members provided the best medical care available in the Holy Land. They staffed the hospital of St. John, the principal hospital of Jerusalem, as well as the Hospital of St. Mary of the Germans. Hospitallers also operated hospitals at Acre and elsewhere in the Levant, plus a few small ones in Western Europe. They cared not only for Christian patients but also for Jews and Muslims, whose dietary requirements they took pains to respect. The Hospitallers even provided a decent burial without charge for those who died while under their care. At some point early in the twelfth century—here, too, no precise date can be established, but the process seems to have started by the 1120s—the Hospitallers began to recruit not only nurses but also knights, at first to defend Christian pilgrims traveling in the Holy Land and subsequently in support of other military campaigns to defend the Latin States. They thus became a dual-purpose order, some of whose members ran hospitals and tended the sick, while others fought in battles. In addition, the Hospitallers also included in their ranks a significant number of women's convents, although Hospitaller nuns were seldom dispatched to the Holy Land.

The Templars, in contrast, were exclusively a military order. The knights predominated among their members, supported by considerable numbers of sergeants and some chaplains. Small numbers of women lived in a few convents affiliated with the Templars, although the knights never formally recognized them as members of the order. Unlike the Hospitallers, whose organizational structure evolved over time, the constitution of the Templars scarcely changed at all during the 200 years of the order's existence.

Riley-Smith maintains that the Hospitallers and Templars constituted the earliest religious orders, in the strict sense of that term, to appear in the medieval church, although one might argue that the Cistercians have a stronger claim than he acknowledges to that title.

Riley-Smith's Templars and Hospitallers, although brief, is yet one more of his significant contributions to the history of the crusades and the medieval military orders. It is a book that no one interested in these topics can afford to ignore.