Los Monjes guerreros en los Reinos Hispánicos: Las Órdenes Militares en la Península ibérica durante la Edad Media (review)

The massive explosion during recent decades of studies on the military-religious orders has naturally involved, where the orders left very rich archives and have always been given some attention in national histories. The resulting bibliography is enormous. It includes one major general synthesis (by Carlos de Ayala Martinez, 2003, 866 pages) and another major study (by Philippe Josserand, 2004, 905 pages); the latter is largely limited to Castile between 1252 and 1369. Rodríguez-Picavea’s work somewhat doubles that of Ayala Martinez, but it is not so dense and is somewhat less rigorously analytical. Crucially, the author includes international orders of the Hospital and the Temple that played an important part in the story but that were largely omitted from Ayala Martinez’s work. Rodríguez-Picavea encompasses Aragon and Portugal in reasonable detail and also gives a brief picture of the orders after 1500. The Hispanic orders emerged in the early centuries of the reconquistas and repoblación; these were developments in which the orders played a leading part and that participation led to their being well favored with lands, privileges, and exemptions. There followed a period in which the Crowns attempted to recover possessions and advantages that they had alienated and to revoke privileges that they had extended, while in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the kings sought to control the orders’ enormous wealth and power by securing their masterships for royal princes or favorites. Eventually, in the time of the Catholic kings, the Crowns simply brought the national orders under their own direct control through the so-called incorporation of the maestrazgos.

The main Hispanic orders such as Santiago, Alcántara, Calatrava, and Montesa—together with the various Portuguese orders—differed from each other, the Templars, and the Hospitallers. On the suppression of the Temple by the pope in 1312, its lands in Catalunya-Aragon and to some extent in Castile passed to the Hospital, but in Portugal they went to the new Order of Christ and in Valencia to the new order of Montesa. The orders’ written rules and practices varied considerably; Santiago, in particular, permitted married members who took a vow of marital chastity. In general, professed members of the orders were bound by vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience; their nonpriest members were laici religiosi, but they were not monks, despite Rodríguez-Picavea’s title. This is more than a question of definition, and it would be preferable not to give a misleading impression by describing the orders’ members as monks.

This book presents a balanced survey that is sufficiently lengthy to take into account many recent studies and to provide much useful detail. Although the approach is, inevitably, largely thematic, the book is so arranged as to maintain a sense of chronological progression. Topics such as the orders’ religious character and the late-medieval preoccupation with nobility are given attention; the female members of the orders receive brief treatment, but their important roles are scarcely explained. Culture and architecture are discussed, but there is nothing on the architecture of the commanderies. The approach allows for comparisons between the various orders; and the book shows the Castilian historiography of the subject moving away from Castile-centered concerns, especially by discussing the orders in other kingdoms and by giving at least some space both to the crusading movement outside Spain and, at least briefly, to the Teutonic Knights and other non-Hispanic orders. The adjective feudal with its semi-Marxist connotations is being replaced by the concept of the sensorial, as the older overemphasis on landed possessions, rents, and finances is replaced with more sophisticated analyses. The notes are placed at the end of the book, and the bibliography is select, with just 31 pages; whereas Josserand’s book has 164...