Templars and Hospitallers as Professed Religious in the Holy Land

Prologue

prologue Military Orders are orders of the Roman Catholic Church, the brothers (and occasionally sisters) of which are professed religious, subject to the usual obligations of, and constraints in, canon law, except that some of them had the right and duty to bear arms. Priests are forbidden by canon law to use force and these orders were—one of them still is—unusual in that they were run by their unordained brothers.1 Many flourished in the central Middle Ages, engaged in warfare not only in the eastern Mediterranean region but also along the shores of the Baltic and in the Iberian Peninsula. They ranged from international corporations, such as the Temple and the much smaller St Lazarus, to regional ones, such as the Iberian Orders of Calatrava, Aviz, Santiago, Alcántara, Christ and Montesa, the German Brothers of the Sword and Knights of Dobrzyn, and the tiny English Order of St Thomas. Only two, the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem (now known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta) and the Order of St Mary of the Germans (the Teutonic Order), survive today as orders of the Church, although they are no longer military in practice. The priests of the Teutonic Order run parishes, and the members of the Order of Malta care for the sick poor.2 Military Orders are to be distinguished from Secular and Christian Orders of Chivalry. Secular Orders of Chivalry are subject not to the Church and canon law (except in so far as their members are baptized Christians) but to the sovereignty of their princely founders 1 and their constitutional or dynastic successors. They acquire legitimization , therefore, not through the recognition of them as religious orders by the Church, but through the acts of secular Founts of Honours. Their knights are not such through profession but by virtue of the action of a sovereign power or its successor, and although it was common for some private devotional obligations to be imposed on them their role was, and is, honorific. As one of their most recent historians has written , “The only goal common to [these orders] was the promotion and reward of loyal service.”3 Christian Orders of Chivalry evolved out of the Iberian Military Orders, the secularization of which by the Spanish and Portuguese kings was underway from the fifteenth century.4 In a few cases, however , the secularization was only partial because elements from the past were retained for a significant period of time. The resulting hybrids were no longer orders of the Church, since they had become confraternities legitimized by secular Founts of Honours, but their membership continued, unlike Secular Orders of Chivalry, to entail public, as opposed to private, obligations relating to the defence of Christendom or the Faith. Their knights—particularly those of Santiago and Christ— continued to serve in North Africa or in Mediterranean galley fleets or in the Portuguese empire.5 They were the models for other Christian Orders of Chivalry—in Italy, France, Germany, Holland, and Britain— that were established between the sixteenth century and the end of the nineteenth.6 — This book is concerned with the members of the two earliest and most famous Military Orders and with their service in Palestine and Syria in the central Middle Ages.7 Much has been written about them— indeed it could be said that they have never been as popular with researchers as they are today—but historians have tended to concentrate on them as military phenomena, international institutions, economic powerhouses, and landowners.8 Very little attention has been paid to their primary role as religious orders.9 They make no appearance in Cottineau’s great inventory of monastic and religious houses,10 al2 Templars and Hospitallers though they were added, at Neville Hadcock’s insistence, to Dom David Knowles’s gazetteer of medieval English religious communities.11 A striking example of unconscious neglect was a recent PhD dissertation on the veneration of St John the Baptist in England, which was outstanding, but which did not recognize the significance of the many commanderies of the Hospitallers of St John. The Hospital and the Temple were endowed with estates throughout Europe, where their leading representatives were often major figures in the kingdoms in which they resided. They were used extensively by the papacy in the promotion of crusades and the collection of crusade taxes. Their more articulate contemporaries, who subjected them to quite severe criticism12...