Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

cieties. One order—that of the Ship—actually promised to provide fullscale
tombs for all of its companions.
The direct influence of the religious orders on the monarchical orders
was more diffuse. Although by 1312, when the Order of the Temple was
suppressed, the crusading movement had seen its best days, the Teutonic
Knights still campaigned annually against the heathen Lithuanians, and the
Knights of the Hospital of St. John still carried on an active war against the
Muslims from their new base in Rhodes. In addition, many princes and nobles
continued to dream of reconquering the Holy Land or driving the Turks
back into inner Asia. This dream was reflected in the statutes of a number
of the monarchical orders of the period. For example, the Order of the
Sword, founded by Pierre I of Cyprus in 1359, had been intended to secure
a force from Europe to retake the lost kingdoms of Jerusalem and Armenia,
while Pierre’s erstwhile chancellor, Philippe de Mézières, attempted to create
a new form of order to accomplish the same end, the Order of the Passion
of Our Lord. It was modeled more directly on the surviving religious orders,
but was to be made up of laymen and led jointly by the kings of England
and France. Among the other fourteenth-century foundations, the Orders of
the Star of France, of the Knot and the Ship of peninsular Sicily, and of St.
George of Aragon all included statutes that paid lip service to the crusading
ideal. Although the Crusade of Nicopolis (which ended in disaster in 1396)
was the last major campaign of its type actually launched, the goal of leading
a crusade died slowly. Among the fifteenth-century orders, those of the
Dragon of Hungary, the Golden Fleece of the Burgundian domain, the Ermine
of Sicily, and St. Michael of France were all endowed with statutes
concerned with crusading activities, though none of them can be taken too
seriously. None of the orders other than the Sword was ever involved in anything
like a real crusade against the enemies of Christendom.
More important borrowings from the religious orders of knighthood
in the period before 1520 included the formal title “order” increasingly
adopted by the monarchical orders and universal by the end of the period,
the assignment of the title “brother knight” to those otherwise known as
“companions” in most orders, and the assignment to the members of many
of the orders of a mantle opening down the front like a cope and charged
on the left breast with a badge. The mantle had been a distinctive mark of
knightly status in a military order since the twelfth century, and its eventual
adoption by all of the orders that survived to 1520 was the clearest
sign that the founders or sovereigns of these orders identified with the traditions
of the crusading orders before 1578.
Before the latter date, however, the founder of only one monarchical
order (that of St. George of Aragon) chose to emulate both the form and
the material of the badges worn by the religious knights: a cross of a dis-
Orders of Knighthood, Secular 397