MLARTC_FM.part 1.qxp

(Chris Devlin) #1
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 inter-
fering 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, how-
ever, been received coldly in both Portugal and Aragon, where a fear of at-
tack from Muslim North Africa remained quite serious down to about


  1. In each of those kingdoms, therefore, the local province of the Tem-
    ple 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 cen-
    turies after 1319, and all played an active part in the defense of the penin-
    sula led by Alfonso XI of Castile from 1325 to his death in 1350. So suc-
    cessful 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 per-
    sonal union since 1416, this meant that the indigenous orders were thence-
    forth 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, espe-
    cially 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


376 Orders of Knighthood, Religious

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