Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

wise counsel, attacked the Turkish front in a spirited charge but were massacred
by a vengeful sultan, except for twenty-five of the wealthiest nobles,
who were held for exorbitant ransoms. In 1444 the last medieval crusade,
undertaken by knights from Poland and Hungary with the support of a
Burgundian naval force, reached Varna on the shores of the Black Sea,
where it was scattered in defeat.
Nevertheless, the spirit of the crusades endured through a unique
blending of monasticism and chivalry in the military orders of the Templars
and the Hospitallers. The first of these, taking their name from their quarters
near the Temple of Solomon, were the Knights Templars. Like Western
monks, they took the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience,
but they also pledged themselves to the code of chivalry and dedicated
themselves to fighting in the defense of pilgrims. Eventually, their knightly
zeal succumbed to ventures in trade and banking, which made the order enviably
wealthy. In 1312, the French king Philip IV (called the Fair), in order
to seize the Templars’ riches, collaborated with Pope Clement V to destroy
the order on grounds of sacrilege and Satanism.
The Hospitallers, whose full title was The Sovereign Military Order of
the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, also took the three monastic vows,
but they carried out their chivalric duties in caring for sick pilgrims and
crusaders. They fared better than the Templars. At the failure of the earlier
crusades, the order went to the island of Rhodes where, in 1312, they received
the confiscated property of the disbanded Templars. They came to
be called the Knights of Rhodes, and with their naval force, they kept the
eastern Mediterranean free of Muslim corsairs until, in 1522, they were
driven out by the Ottoman Turks; they later found a home on Malta. In
1961, Pope John XXIII recognized the Knights of Malta as both a religious
community and an order of chivalry.
The chivalric age also left many enduring monuments. During the crusading
movement, the eastern Mediterranean coast became studded with
defiant stone castles that French knights had built to safeguard the Holy
Land against Islam. The massive walls and towers left on the Levant a lasting
imprint of medieval France.
The age of chivalry was one of contrasts and contradictions. Jakob
Burckhardt, the renowned scholar of the Italian Renaissance, visualized
medieval consciousness as something that “lay half dreaming or half awake
beneath a common veil . . . woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession,
through which the world and history were seen clad in strange
hues” (Burckhardt 1944, 81). His perception somewhat clarifies how the
carnage of knightly battle could be so oddly tempered by the romantic
respite of courtly love. Born of chivalric ideals, it evolved into a body of
rules defining the proper conduct of noble lovers.
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