The High Medieval Era · 1120-1291 · Latin East, Iberia
Military-Religious Orders (Templars, Hospitallers)
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About This Movement
In the decades after the First Crusade, two kinds of institution fused into something the church had never authorized before. The Hospitallers began as a hospital in Jerusalem caring for pilgrims — they called the sick 'our lords the sick' — and only later took on a military role. The Templars began as a small band of knights guarding the pilgrim roads, took monastic vows, and were given a rule at the Council of Troyes in 1129. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote their defence, In Praise of the New Knighthood, arguing that a man who killed in this cause was not a homicide but, in his coinage, a malicide — a killer of evil. Both orders grew enormously rich, ran castles, estates and banking networks from the Latin East across Europe, and lost their reason for existing when Acre fell in 1291. The Templars were arrested in France in 1307, made to confess under torture, and suppressed in 1312.
Sources
- The Rule of the Templars (trans. J. M. Upton-Ward, Boydell, 1992) (primary) — Primitive Rule, hierarchical statutes, penances - the fused monastic-military life in regulated detail, down to horses and mess discipline.
- Bernard of Clairvaux, In Praise of the New Knighthood (De laude novae militiae) (trans. Greenia, Cistercian Fathers 19) (primary) — The apologia for the fused monastic-military life; the era's theology of holy violence stated plainly.
- Malcolm Barber & Keith Bate, The Templars: Selected Sources (Manchester Medieval Sources, 2002) (primary) — Foundation documents, papal bulls, charters, letters from the East, and trial documents. The trial testimony was extracted under torture (1307-12) and should be read as coerced, not free confession.
- The Hospitallers' Rule and statutes (trans. E. J. King, The Rule, Statutes and Customs of the Hospitallers, 1934) (primary) — The order's own legislation, with its 'lords the sick' care obligation - the charitable half of the fusion. This is an older translation.
- Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (CUP, 1994) (secondary) — Standard history, foundation to suppression.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 4 (McGuire) + ch. 11 'Christendom and Islam' (Nirenberg) (reference) — No single chapter is dedicated to the military orders specifically; coverage is split across these two chapters.