A New Kind of Religious Life
Medieval society expected two different things from two different kinds of men. Monks prayed and avoided bloodshed, while knights fought. The military orders joined the two. Their members took religious vows, such as obedience, poverty and chastity, lived under a rule, and were also trained to fight, usually to defend Christian pilgrims, territory or hospitals in the age of the Crusades.
The idea was not obvious or uncontroversial when it first appeared. Many churchmen were uneasy about clergy-like figures shedding blood, and the orders needed strong defenders to win acceptance. The best-known defender was Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote in praise of the new knighthood in the early twelfth century. Later in the century the orders grew into rich, international organizations with houses, farms and castles spread across Europe and the Near East.
The words in the title point to a real tension. Medieval chivalry was a code of the secular aristocracy, while the orders followed a monastic discipline. Members saw their fighting as a form of service to the church, and they were not supposed to seek fame or private glory. In practice, the orders were large institutions with money, politics and ambitions of their own, and individual members were of course not all saints.
The Templars
The Order of the Temple, the Knights Templar, began in Jerusalem around 1119 as a small band of knights who offered protection to pilgrims on the roads. They took their name from their lodgings on the Temple Mount. The church recognized the group and gave it a rule in 1129, and from there it gained gifts of land and money across Europe.
Templar houses, known as preceptories, supplied recruits, horses and income to the east. The order became known for its discipline in battle and also for its financial services: because it held property across Europe and the Levant, it could safekeep valuables and transfer funds, which kings and pilgrims found useful. Historians continue to discuss how banking-like these activities were, so the safe description is that they offered early forms of deposit and transfer, not a bank in the modern sense.
The end came in France. After the loss of the last mainland Christian strongholds in the Holy Land in 1291, the order’s purpose seemed weaker. In 1307 King Philip IV had many French Templars arrested and accused them of heresy and other offenses, and the long Templar trial that followed is one of the best-known legal dramas of the period. Pope Clement V dissolved the order in 1312, and its leader, Jacques de Molay, was executed in 1314. Many historians think the king’s motives included his need for money, and they regard many of the charges as unproven, though the matter is still debated. Property was transferred elsewhere, in many places to the Hospitallers, and many individual knights were absorbed into other houses or pensioned.
The Hospitallers
The Order of St John, the Knights Hospitaller, grew out of a hospital in Jerusalem that cared for sick and poor pilgrims, probably before the First Crusade. It received papal recognition in the early twelfth century. The care of the sick remained central, but over the decades the order also took on military duties and built or held great fortresses in the crusader states.
When the mainland Latin possessions collapsed, the Hospitallers moved first to Cyprus. In the early fourteenth century they took the island of Rhodes, which they governed and defended for more than two centuries as a small naval state. The Ottomans forced them out of Rhodes in 1522. A few years later they received Malta, and the order is often called the Knights of Malta from that period. They were a naval power against Mediterranean corsairs and the Ottoman fleet, and they remained in Malta until Napoleon seized the island in 1798.
The order survived the loss of its island, and several modern orders that trace their descent from it, Catholic and Protestant, work mainly in medical and charitable service. Unlike the Templars, then, the Hospitallers adapted by shifting from land warfare to sea defense, and later to purely humanitarian work.
The Teutonic Knights
The Teutonic Knights began as a hospital community during the siege of Acre at the end of the twelfth century and became a full military order soon afterward. After the Holy Land lost most of its crusader territory, the order found a new field in the Baltic. In the early thirteenth century it was invited into the region of Prussia, and over the following decades it conquered and settled land along the Baltic coast, building castles and founding towns. The campaigns against the pagan Prussians and Lithuanians were framed as crusades.
The order became a territorial state with its own government, and in time its neighbors, Poland and Lithuania, saw it as a rival. A combined Polish and Lithuanian army defeated the Teutonic forces at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, which weakened the order’s position, and it never fully recovered its strength. In 1525 the Grand Master converted to Lutheranism and turned the Prussian lands into a secular duchy. The order itself continued in parts of the Holy Roman Empire, and it still exists today as a religious order with charitable aims.
Other Orders and Common Features
The three famous orders were not alone. In the Iberian Peninsula, orders such as Calatrava and Santiago developed in the twelfth century to defend and settle land taken from Muslim rulers during the Reconquista, and in the Baltic the Livonian Brothers of the Sword operated before merging with the Teutonic Order. Each fit its own regional conflict.
The orders shared several features. Members were usually divided into knight-brothers, sergeants who served as lighter cavalry or in other roles, and chaplains who performed religious services. Each had a Grand Master, local commanders, and a chapter that governed. Because they answered directly to the pope in most matters, rather than to local bishops or kings, they enjoyed unusual independence, and this independence helped them grow but also made rulers suspicious.
Endings and Lessons
Looking at the three together shows three paths. One order was dissolved by the pope under royal pressure, one was driven from its island but turned to charity and survives, and one built a state, lost it in the Reformation, and survives in a small form. The common thread is that their original purpose, defending the Holy Land, disappeared, and each had to either find a new purpose or fade. Their story is partly one of faith, partly of institutional survival, and partly of the old tension between the sword and the church.