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4: TWO VERY DIFFERENT ORDERS
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Chapter Four TWO VERY DIFFERENT ORDERS In a memorandum written in 1305 James of Molay, the last grand master of the Temple, asserted that “the Hospitallers were founded to care for the sick, and beyond that they bear arms . . . whereas the Templars were founded specifically for military service.”1 The Templars , in other words, were single minded. The Hospitallers were ambivalent . The Templars were committed to poverty as individuals, expressed in the image on their seal of two riders sharing a horse.2 The Hospitallers were committed to the service of the poor themselves. The Templars fought out of love, because the need to defend Christians and the Holy Places demanded it. The Hospitallers fought out of love as an extension of their care of the poor. The admission rites of both orders made use of the unusual phrase “serf and slave.” Serfs and slaves were unfree, serfs conditionally and slaves unconditionally, and their lords had rights of ownership over them. But whereas a Templar postulant was asked if he was prepared to live as a “serf and slave” of his order,3 the Hospitaller promised to be “serf and slave” of his lords the sick.4 So the Templars were owned by their order, the Hospitallers by their patients. Growing in one case out of a company of secular knights and in the other from a breakaway group of Cassinese monks, the Temple and the Hospital helped create a new type of order, run by fratres conversi , in which the old distinctions between choir-monks and lay 61 servitors were modified and in which, almost uniquely, the priests were never dominant.5 The orders shared, of course, the duty of the service of prayer. Beyond that, the function of the Templars was to fight. That was what they had been founded by secular knights to do and it is not surprising that a strong military tone was pervasive. The Hospital had been established, on the other hand, to nurse and bury the poor. The promises every Hospitaller made contained no reference to warfare. If he fought, it was as an extension of his service to the poor. The maintenance of the great hospitals in Jerusalem and then in Acre, involving so many men and women and such great resources, meant that the Hospitallers could never have been as single minded as the Templars, even had they wanted to be; and once the direction their order would take had been settled around 1180 their ethos was always going to be less war-oriented. At least as well endowed as the Templars, they had to divert much of their income to meet the needs of their hospitals and the costs entailed in employing so many servants, which explains why they garrisoned fewer large castles. In terms of membership the Temple, which was open to everyone from the richest noble to the poorest free peasant, was probably more representative of European society than the Hospital, the membership of which may have been drawn from a narrower base. The Temple admitted many more sergeants than did the Hospital, but because of the greater stress on military affairs and perhaps also through fear of being swamped by the sergeantry, the status of the Templar knights was elevated to a remarkable degree. The Hospital, in which there was a noticeably more relaxed attitude to caste, also had an important class of sisters. The constitution of the Temple hardly developed over two centuries . The prerogatives of the grand masters and their convents counted for everything. The legislative powers of the chapters-general were limited, and there does not seem to have been any sustained attempt to seek western representation at them. On the other hand, some representatives of the western provinces came to the chapters-general of the Hospital, the statutes of which mattered a great deal and seem to have been widely circulated. 62 Templars and Hospitallers [3.238.118.192] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:33 GMT) Having no practical function other than the defence of Christendom and still reflecting in many ways the governance of an eleventhcentury Benedictine abbey, the Temple’s institutional immaturity can be explained partly by the fact that effective warfare required unambiguous military leadership. But a consequence was that it never seems to have been locked into the conventional patterns of Church life that could have provided it with models for development. The nature of the Hospital’s mission, the commitment to nursing as well as...