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384 Orders of Knighthood, Secular
their service whenever he needed it and for as long as he needed it, without
considerations of remuneration. In all of these respects, the military orders
compared very favorably to the motley bodies of often recalcitrant, illtrained,
and unruly vassals (all of whom had first to be summoned and
then to be paid) who made up a large part of the forces available to most
contemporary princes before the middle of the fifteenth century.
Either complete success or total failure had reduced most of the orders
to the condition of uselessness by the end of the fourteenth century, however,
and it was inevitable that kings would begin to look upon them as
sources of income and favors to noble clients rather than as military aid.
The decline in the value nobles placed on monastic ideals further led to a
drastic decline in monastic discipline among the brother knights of most
orders and a widespread abandonment of the communal life that was finally
recognized by changes in the rules. The complete reorganization of
national armies effected in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries removed
even the potential utility of most of the surviving orders as military units,
and all but the two naval orders were quickly reduced to a condition not
essentially different from that of the secular monarchical orders many
princes had founded since 1325.
D’A. Jonathan D. Boulton
See also Chivalry; Europe; Knights; Orders of Knighthood, Secular;
Religion and Spiritual Development: Ancient Mediterranean and
Medieval West
References
Barber, Malcolm. 1994. The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of
the Temple. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Forey, Alan. 1992. The Military Orders from the Twelfth to the Early
Fourteenth Centuries. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. 1967. The Knights of St John in Jerusalem and
Cyprus, 1050–1310. London and New York: St. Martin’s.
———, ed. 1991. The Atlas of the Crusades. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Sire, H. J. A. 1994. The Knights of Malta. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Orders of Knighthood, Secular
Order (of knighthood) has been loosely applied since the later fourteenth
century to all forms of military, knightly, or more generally noble body
bearing some resemblance (often of the most superficial kind) to the military
religious orders, or religious orders of knighthood, founded from
about 1130 onward to serve as the corps d’elite of the armies of the various
regional crusades. The latter were made up of men who were bound by
the religious or monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Al-