the Knightly Order of St. George, founded by the emperor Frederick III in
1469 and maintained at least to the death of his son the emperor Maxi-
milian in 1519. Perhaps the most peculiar was the Order of St. Maurice,
founded in 1434 by Amé VIII, duke of Savoy, and maintained until his
election as antipope under the name Felix V in 1439, for it was made up
of knights who lived in the fashion of Carthusian hermits rather than as
crusaders. It was “revived” by Duke Emmanuel Philibert in 1572 in order
to serve as a basis for the annexation of the long-useless Order of St.
Lazarus to the throne of Savoy. The French branch of the latter order re-
sisted the papal act of consolidation, but it was eventually annexed in 1608
to the new French Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, similarly founded
for the purpose in the previous year. Various minor orders had already
been annexed to the Order of the Hospital, which for a time in the six-
teenth century was the only order still actively engaged in the crusade, but
a new Order of St. Stephen was founded in 1561 by the first grand duke
of Tuscany, Cosimo de’ Medici, to carry on a similar form of naval war-
fare in the western Mediterranean. Orders based in countries that accepted
the Reformation, including the English Order of St. Thomas, were simply
suppressed.
The religious orders of knighthood all differed from one another in a
variety of minor ways, and were all jealous of their identity, ethos, and tra-
ditions. Nevertheless, most of them had a great deal in common. All but
the smallest and least successful were organized as multihouse monastic or-
ders on the general model of the Cistercians, and all but the two Iberian
Orders of St. James had fully monastic rules that were based, directly or in-
directly, upon either the Rule of St. Benedict or the so-called Rule of St.
Augustine. Over the years, the original rule of most of the orders came to
be supplemented by a growing number of statutes and customs, both writ-
ten and unwritten, and by the later thirteenth century the statutes, broadly
conceived, were hundreds of very specific ordinances, regulating almost
every aspect of their organization, communal life, and corporate activities.
Like many other comparable bodies in the period, the military orders
also came to have several distinct classes of membership, often as well as
one or more classes of people merely associated with the order. By 1200 the
dominant class in every order had come to be made up of “brother
knights,” who were already drawn largely from the noble order and the
landed upper stratum of the knightly order of society, and after 1250 were
drawn entirely from the new knightly nobility that had resulted from the
fusion of those social categories. The number of brother knights varied
widely from order to order, and fluctuated wildly, depending on casualties,
within those that bore the brunt of battles, but the greater orders, such as
the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights, normally included sev-
Orders of Knighthood, Religious 377