some places grand priories, including two or more priories; the government
of these was entrusted to appointive officers called priors and grand priors
respectively. In exceptional cases units of this level bore the title “castel-
lany” or “(grand) bailiwick,” and their governors were called “castellan”
or “(grand) bailiff.” The tongue of Aragon, for example, included the pri-
ories of Aragon, Navarre, and Catalonia, while that of Germany included
the priories of Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary and the grand bailiwick of
Brandenburg. The Templars, by contrast (whose chief officer bore the title
grand master), preferred to call their regional governors masters rather
than priors.
These regional units, in their turn, consisted of about a dozen to about
sixty local units, called “commanderies” in the Hospital and “preceptories”
in the Temple, governed by commanders or preceptors. These units had
originally been much smaller and more numerous, but were generally con-
solidated to the point where they were roughly the size of a manor, and
could justify having a brother knight assigned to their administration. The
majority of Hospital commanderies came in fact to be reserved to knights,
but a few were reserved to brother chaplains and brother sergeants.
As most of the higher administrative positions in the order were also
restricted to members of the order’s knightly class, there came to be in ef-
fect five distinct grades of brother knight under the master: those of (1) or-
dinary brother knight, (2) commander, (3) prior (or castellan or bailiff), (4)
grand prior, and (5) conventual bailiff. The conventual bailiffs came to be
distinguished symbolically by a larger than normal version of the order’s
cross, and thus they came to be known—at first informally but eventually
in a formal way—as “bailiffs of the grand cross” or simply “grand
crosses.” All of these grades, of course, reflected real differences of author-
ity within the order, and though honorable, were never merely honorific.
Within the grade of (ordinary) brother knight, however, a purely honorific
distinction began to emerge in the fourteenth century between those whose
noble ancestry was sufficient to qualify them for membership according to
the current rules of their own langue, so that they could be described as
“knights of justice,” and those who required some sort of dispensation or
act of grace to be admitted under those rules, who formed the inferior cat-
egory of “knights of grace.” Other orders developed similar hierarchies or
grades and a similar obsession with the purity and antiquity of their mem-
bers’ nobility.
Finally, most orders possessed a large number of buildings, including
those of the principal convent, of other lesser convents, and of the seats of
provincial and local administrators. Although the oldest orders were at first
based in buildings within the city walls of Jerusalem or Acre, these orders
later emulated all of the other orders in setting their principal convent
Orders of Knighthood, Religious 381