Military Orders
Introduction
The Brothers the Sword. The Teutonic Knights. The Order of St. John the Baptist. The Knights Templar. The Leper Knights. Exotic-sounding names for creations that were unique to the Crusading movement, though several of them long outlived the Crusades that gave them birth.
The Military Orders were monastic orders dedicated to the defense of the Holy Land and of pilgrims to it; they were monks who were knights, soldiers for Christ. Many such orders sprang up, some never even pretending to be concerned with the Holy Land, but the Templars and the Hospitallers played a significant role in the history of Outremêr and are worth a closer look. They came to form a virtual state-within-a-state, and were the most feared and hated of all the Franks for the Muslims.
In order to understand the major orders, however, we need to back up a bit and examine how the whole notion of monks who fight originated and came to be not only justified by actively supported by Church and laymen alike. We can then look at the orders themselves. I will detail their structure and practices, but won't say much about their history—that will be integrated into the other lectures. I will talk a bit about some of the other orders, mainly to demonstrate that every order had its own particular development. I'll then go a bit outside the limits of this course and talk about the later years of the Hospitallers and will conclude with the famous Trial of the Templars and their rather spectucular end. There's a good deal of nonsense written on that last topic, some of which has found its way onto the Net.