sions annexed to Calatrava. The Order of St. George of Alfama (San Jorge
de Alfama) was founded by King Pere II of Aragon in 1201, probably to
provide a safer alternative to the Templars, who were already too strong in
his kingdom, and it survived for several centuries as a purely Aragonese or-
der. A tenth order—the Order of Our Lady of Mercy (Nuestra Señora de
Merced)—was added in 1233, but its members, called Mercedarians, were
more concerned with ransoming captives than with fighting the Moors,
and it was definitively demilitarized in 1317. An eleventh, St. Mary of
Spain (Santa María de España), was founded by Alfonso X of Castile after
1253, but it had a short life, as it was annexed to Santiago to compensate
the latter for a terrible defeat it suffered in 1280.
As both the Temple and the Hospital of St. John had extensive hold-
ings in Iberia, that peninsula was thenceforth to have the highest concen-
tration of military orders of any region in Latin Christendom. All of these
orders played an active role in the reconquest of Spain from the Moors, and
so successful were they that by 1253 the only remaining Moorish state in
Iberia was the diminutive Emirate (or later Kingdom) of Granada in the
mountains of the far south, which survived with essentially the same
boundaries down to 1492. The role of the orders for the next century or so
was therefore reduced largely to defending the Christian realms against
counteroffensives from the Moors of North Africa.
In the years between the Third and Fourth Crusades to the Holy Land
(1192–1204), a third front in the ongoing crusade had been opened on the
frontier between the Christian Germans and the still pagan Balts—the Prus-
sians, Lithuanians, and Latvians—and their neighbors the Finnic Estoni-
ans, stretched out along the shores of the Baltic Sea. The crusade against
the Balts was first undertaken in the far north by the new German order
officially called the Knighthood of Christ of Livonia, but more commonly
known as the Order of the Brethren of the Sword. A missionary German
bishop founded this order for that purpose in 1202. By 1230 it had suc-
ceeded in conquering most of what was called Livonia, corresponding to
what is now southern Estonia and most of Latvia. In or shortly before 1228
(when it received its papal confirmation), a Polish bishop founded the Or-
der of Dobrzyn on the same model to conquer the pagan Prussians at the
western end of the region, but this order had a much more limited success.
In the meantime, however, Duke Konrad of Mazovia had offered to the
Teutonic Order the district of Culmerland if they sent a force to fight the
Prussians, and the emperor Frederick II had in 1226 confirmed this offer
and promised to make the high master of the Teutonic Knights, Hermann
von Salza, and his successors princes of the empire in respect of any lands
their order might conquer in Prussia. The Teutonic Order was still based in
Acre, but it had already been given a territory to defend in eastern Hungary374 Orders of Knighthood, Religious