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380 Orders of Knighthood, Religious
In the day-to-day business of the order, the master governed with the
assistance of the great officers of the order, who resided with him in the order’s
convent and were charged with the oversight of the various administrative
departments into which the central government was divided. These
departments and their heads represented a mixture of those found in all religious
houses and those maintained by secular kings and princes. In the Order
of the Hospital of St. John, for example—the most widespread and best
documented of the orders—the officers in question included the prior of St.
John and the “conventual bailiffs.” At first these were only five in number,
but in 1301 it was decided that each bailiff should be given, in addition to
his duties in the convent, the government of one of the seven langues
(tongues) into which the regional administration of the order had just been
organized. This required raising the admiral and the turcopolier (the officer
who commanded the auxiliary forces) to the rank of bailiff and produced
the following set of officers (in descending order of precedence): the grand
commander (finances, tongue of Provence), the marshal (military matters,
tongue of Auvergne), the hospitaller (medical services, tongue of France),
the drapier or (from 1539) conservator (clothing and material supplies,
tongue of Aragon), the admiral (navy, tongue of Italy), and the turcopolier
(auxiliary forces, tongue of England). To these were added in 1428 the office
of grand bailiff (fortifications, tongue of Germany) and in 1462 that of
chancellor (chancery, foreign affairs, tongue of Castile and Portugal).
The master carried out the ordinary business of most orders with the
assistance of the great officers’ equivalent to the conventual bailiffs of St.
John and their staffs. At regular intervals, however (about once a year in
the great orders of the Levant, and at the three great feasts of Easter, Pentecost,
and Christmas in the Spanish Order of Calatrava), the master was
obliged to convene a meeting of the full Chapter General, which in addition
to the order’s great officers normally included many of the administrators
of the order’s outlying possessions. The normal purpose of such
meetings was to consider the general situation of the order, to debate any
major changes in policy or strategy, to hear and judge accusations of dereliction
of duty and deviation from the Rule made against any of its members,
and to assign punishments to those found guilty. The members of
most orders were also obliged to submit any disputes that had arisen
among themselves to the binding arbitration of the Chapter General.
Regional and local administration varied in detail from order to order,
but once again the Hospital of St. John may reasonably serve as an example,
especially if contrasted to the usages of the Temple. The seven or eight
tongues of the hospital, governed by the conventual bailiffs (only four of
whom were required to be in residence at the convent at any one time), had
as their immediate dependencies from one to seven regional priories, or in