Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

376 Orders of Knighthood, Religious
man sultan. In 1530 they were granted Malta in its place, and as the
Knights of Malta carried on the original crusade until Napoleon Bonaparte
finally dispossessed them in 1798.
The two orders that had retired to Europe, by contrast, ceased to play
any active role in the crusade, and the Temple, after some years of interfering
in the politics of Cyprus, was officially suppressed by a papal decree
of 1312, responding to charges from King Philippe IV of France that the
knights had engaged in impious and blasphemous activities. Philippe had
in fact had these charges fabricated because he feared the presence in his
kingdom of a powerful military order without a clear external goal and
coveted their estates and income. In fact the pope gave their estates
throughout Latin Christendom to the Hospitallers, who still needed (and
deserved) their income. The decision to suppress the Templars had, however,
been received coldly in both Portugal and Aragon, where a fear of attack
from Muslim North Africa remained quite serious down to about
1350. In each of those kingdoms, therefore, the local province of the Temple
was erected by the king into an independent order: the Order of the
Knights of Christ in the former (established in 1317), and the Order of Our
Lady of Montesa in the latter (founded in 1319).
All of the surviving Iberian orders continued to exist for some centuries
after 1319, and all played an active part in the defense of the peninsula
led by Alfonso XI of Castile from 1325 to his death in 1350. So successful
was this campaign, however, that the orders thenceforth had few
opportunities to fight the Moors and devoted most of their energies to their
traditional pastime of quarreling both within and among themselves and
interfering in secular politics. In the later fourteenth century their members,
like the members of most other religious orders, became increasingly
worldly in outlook and behavior, and the monastic discipline under which
they were supposed to live rested ever more lightly on their shoulders. This
led the Iberian kings to seek new ways to control the orders based in their
domains. Before the conquest of Granada in 1492, the principal device the
kings employed for this purpose was securing the election of one of their
sons or brothers as master, but once the Reconquest had been completed
they controlled the orders by annexing the masterships to their own
crowns: at first in fact, and finally, through a papal bull of 1523, in law.
Since all of the Iberian kingdoms except Portugal had been joined in a personal
union since 1416, this meant that the indigenous orders were thenceforth
annexed either to the crown of Spain (Calatrava, Alcántara, Santiago,
Alfama, Montesa) or to that of Portugal (Avis, Christ, São Thiago).
A few other military orders were founded at much later dates, especially
to fight the new crusade that had to be mounted against the Ottoman
Turks in the Balkans from 1359. The most important, of these at least, was