MLARTC_FM.part 1.qxp

(Chris Devlin) #1

tallers of St. John wore a habit and mantle of black, like many Augustin-
ian orders of canons, and a military surcoat of red.
The mantle was normally charged on the left breast with the cross that
distinguished all crusaders, but these crosses tended to be made of cloth of
a more or less distinctive color (e.g., red among the Templars) and of an in-
creasingly distinctive shape. The classic shapes were not generally achieved
before the later fourteenth or even the fifteenth century, however, and the
eight-pointed crosses of the Hospitallers of St. John were rarely rectilinear
before their transfer from Rhodes to Malta in 1530. The rectilinear “Mal-
tese” version of their white cross was soon adopted by the Knights of St.
Lazarus (in green) and the Knights of St. Stephen (in red), and after 1693
became the normal form for the cross assigned to newer orders of lay
knights, but nothing like it was used by any other order before 1530, and
its common modern assignment to the Templars is without foundation. In
fact, the red cross of the Templars seems to have been either quite plain,
like that of their Portuguese continuators the Knights of Christ, or slightly
splayed at the ends, like the black cross of their northern brethren the Teu-
tonic Knights, later adopted (with its white field included as edging) as the
cross of the German armed forces.
As was usual in monastic orders, the supreme government of every
military order was vested in a single chief officer, but that officer was not
called by the usual title of abbas(Latin; abbot), but by the distinctive (and
often military) title ofmagister (master), modified in the Temple and Teu-
tonic Order (and in the late fifteenth century in that of the Hospital) by the
adjective magnus (grand) (represented in German by hoch[high]). The
master, or grand master, was elected for life from among the brother
knights of the order by a complex process that varied from one order to
another, but increasingly tended to involve only those knights who held
some administrative office in the order. Once elected, the master was
charged with the general administration of the order, which usually in-
cluded the appointment and supervision of all subordinate officials; the re-
ception of candidates for admission as brothers, or confratres; the mainte-
nance of discipline among the members of the various classes; and the
oversight of the order’s finances. He also led the forces of the order on
campaign, and both convoked and presided over the meetings of the order’s
officers, normally referred to as Capitula Generalia(Chapters General). In
the early days of most orders, the master lived in community with the or-
dinary knights of the order, but as the orders became richer and their
houses more and more dispersed, their masters (like bishops generally and
the abbots of many orders) tended to live apart and to adopt a lifestyle sim-
ilar to that of the great barons or secular princes with whom they spent
much of their time.


Orders of Knighthood, Religious 379
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