Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

370 Orders of Knighthood, Religious
who restored serious manual labor and apostolic simplicity to the monastic
life, and introduced for the first time the incorporation of “lay brothers,”
who were not required to take full monastic vows, but nevertheless
lived within the monastery and carried out many useful tasks for the salvation
of their souls. Not surprisingly, the Cistercian rule and ethos—and
possibly even their plain white habit—served as models for many of the
military orders.
Among the other rules established in this period, the one that had the
most influence on those of the military orders was the semimonastic rule
actually written about 1100, but attributed to St. Augustine of Hippo, designed
to provide a holy and communal life suitable for people who (unlike
monks and nuns) had to perform some function in the secular world. It was
adopted independently in the same period by numerous bodies of previously
secular priests attached to collegiate churches such as cathedrals
(who came to be known as “Augustinian Canons” or simply “Canons Regular”),
and also by the attendants of many “hospitals,” which were not
merely institutions for the sick, but hostels for pilgrims and other travelers.
Some hospitallers (as their attendants were called) were also priests, but the
majority were either clerics in minor orders or simple laymen, so the Augustinian
Rule, like that of the Cistercians, was capable of organizing people
of different conditions in the same community.
Given the prestige of monastic status and monastic rules in the twelfth
century, it was almost inevitable that the body of knights who undertook
to protect the pilgrims to Jerusalem in 1118 should seek a form of monastic
rule tailored to their own peculiar religious function. Given the fact that
their leader was a Champenois nobleman, it follows that he should seek
this rule from the nobly born Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux in Champagne,
who was in any case the effective leader of the Cistercians from 1115 to his
death in 1153 and the most influential spiritual leader in Latin Christendom
in the second quarter of the twelfth century. Bernard probably helped
to compose the new rule the knights received from the Council of Troyes
in 1129 (a rule that bore a general resemblance to that of his own order).
He certainly wrote for them the tract “In Praise of the New Knighthood”
(De laude novae militiae), which justified the foundation of a religious order
dedicated to military activities that only a short time earlier would have
been unthinkable for monks. The new order took the formal name the
“Order of the Poor Knights of Christ of the Temple of Solomon,” or the
“Knights of Christ” for short, but its members continued to be called Templars.
The idea of a religious order made up largely of men who were at
once monks and knights immediately struck a chord in the hearts of many
contemporaries, from the pope on down. The new order was soon showered
with privileges and properties scattered all over Latin Europe, making