trary to the statutes and actively opposed by the higher authorities of the
Church, and they did not achieve a position of numerical preponderance
within the order until after the conquest of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187.
Furthermore, they were not formally distinguished from the other lay
brethren until the adoption in 1204 through 1206 (under the mastership of
Prince Afonso de Portugal) of the Statutes of Margat, which gave the newly
recognized class of brother knights the dominant place in the order’s gov-
ernment. Thus, while the Order of the Hospital of St. John may have been
the first monastic order to include a body of professed knights, it did not
become a primarily military order until about the time of the Third Cru-
sade and did not become an officially military order until between 1204
and 1206—almost a century after it became an independent order.
By 1150 at the latest, it is clear that both the Temple and the Hospi-
tal of St. John were important international orders and that they included
significant numbers of men (at first mainly knights) dedicated to an essen-
tially military way of life. Also, these men were full members of the re-
spective orders, bound by the same vows of poverty, chastity, and obedi-
ence to their superiors as their nonmilitary brethren and members of other
orders following a monastic or “religious” life. In addition, they were ei-
ther wholly (in the case of the former) or partly (in the case of the latter)
dedicated to the war against the enemies of Christ and his Church in the
Holy Land. They thus presented two distinct models for other men with
similar ideals who wished to contribute to the crusade, either in the Holy
Land itself or on other frontiers of Christendom where Muslims or pagans
could be seen either as threatening Christians or as occupying lands that
could be subjected to Christian rule and evangelization.
Four additional military orders were actually founded in the Holy
Land before the end of the century, to incorporate groups of knights who
for one reason or another did not fit comfortably in any of the established
orders. The rather obscure Order of the Hospital of St. Lazarus of
Jerusalem had its origins in a hospital for lepers, served by Augustinian
Canons. It is first mentioned in 1142, and it probably acquired its first
knights—all of whom were themselves infected with leprosy—from the two
older orders. It may, therefore, have played some part in the Second Cru-
sade (organized by Bernard of Clairvaux himself, and fought from 1146 to
1148), but the first references to its participation in warfare date from the
1240s, so it may not have been militarized much before that.
The other two orders were apparently established (or rather converted
into military orders) to serve different linguistic communities—the first
three orders being dominated by Francophones—and were both based in
the city of Acre, to which the king of Jerusalem had been forced to with-
draw after the (permanent) loss of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. That of372 Orders of Knighthood, Religious