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368 Orders of Knighthood, Religious
Orders of Knighthood, Religious
Despite many legends indicating a greater antiquity, the first religious orders
of knighthood (or military religious orders) were created in the aftermath
of the First Crusade, which culminated in the Latin Christian conquest
of Jerusalem and the whole Levantine coast in 1099. The earliest
orders, indeed, were all founded and based in the city of Jerusalem itself,
which became the capital of the new kingdom of that name.
The first body of men to which the term military religious order may
justly be applied was formed around 1120 of a small group of lay knights
led by Hugues de Payens, a nobleman from Champagne in France who was
apparently related both to the ruler of that principality and to the future St.
Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux. Hugues and his followers took the usual
monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but with the permission
of the patriarch of Jerusalem, undertook the unusual task of defending the
pilgrims then flocking to the newly reconquered Holy City. The king of
Jerusalem, Baudouin II, gave the monk-knights a residence in his own
palace, the former al-Aksa Mosque, and as the Crusaders mistook this
building for the Temple of Solomon, they soon came to be known as the
“Knights of the Temple” or “Templars.” By 1129 they had taken on the
additional duty of contributing to the defense of the Holy Land itself and
lacked only a distinctive rule to make them a true military religious order.
There is no reason to suppose (as some historians have since 1818)
that the first Christian order of knighthood was inspired by the similar Islamic
institution of the ribat, but an understanding of its origins does require
an examination of the contemporary state both of knighthood and of
monasticism. As knights, the Templars belonged to an international category
of professional warriors whose profession had traditionally suffered
in the context of Christian society by the absolute moral prohibition of
homicide imposed by the leaders of the Church. This prohibition had been
effectively mitigated in the context of just wars since at least the eighth century,
however, and had just been modified still further by the terms of the
papal proclamation of the crusade in 1095: a proclamation that implicitly
made homicide not only licit but actually praiseworthy if committed by a
man bound by the vows and living the quasi-religious life of a crusader, in
the context of a consecrated war against the enemies of Christ and his
Church. This new doctrine, expounded and elaborated by various authorities
in the first decades of the twelfth century, who were seeking to give
knighthood in general a moral dimension it had previously lacked, allowed
knightly crusaders to claim for themselves in a literal sense the old title
miles Christi (Latin; soldier of Christ), long claimed in a purely metaphorical
sense by the monks. Coincidentally, knightly status had also just begun
to be seen by members of the old lordly nobility as the contemporary em-