War and Game

By ANTHONY LUTTRELL

At the beginning of the fourteenth century the formal status of the professed members of a military order of the Latin Church had changed little since these organizations had originated in the twelfth century, despite the progressive codification of canon law and the passing of new statutes and other legislation within individual orders. It had become less likely that brethren would be motivated by spiritual enthusiasms or by the prospect of action directly concerned with the recovery of Jerusalem, but most military religious still took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, while all were supposed to live according to their order’s constitution. Each order had a rule which had been approved by the papacy, whose capacity to intervene in an order’s affairs, or even to dissolve it, was demonstrated dramatically when Clement V suppressed the Temple in 1312. Except in Prussia and Livonia, brethren were less likely to confront an infidel enemy and more apt to be seeking a relatively secure if often undistinguished position in local society; it was also increasingly improbable that they would experience a common liturgical life within a sizeable community of religious. The various military religious orders differed considerably from one another, but in general they received knights, sergeants, priests, and sisters, all devoted primarily to the prosecution of an armed struggle against the infidel.

Their members were not technically permitted to take crusade vows, though naturally they participated in crusades fought against the infidel. By 1312 there was a growing distinction between the permanent holy war of the military orders, whose members were not supposed—except in certain specific situations—to fight fellow Christians, and the papally-proclaimed crusade, an occasional event directed against Latin and other Christians more often than against the infidel. The psychological impact of the Templar affair must have been profound, but there was little immediate indication of any decline in recruitment to the other military orders. These orders’ very function had been the subject of widespread criticism and debate, with proposals for their union in a single order or even for the confiscation of all their lands. Furthermore, in 1310 the pope instigated a searching investigation into the gravest complaints against the Teutonic Order’s Livonian activities. In 1309 that order moved its principal convent or headquarters from Venice to Marienburg in Prussia, while in 1306 the Hospitallers initiated their conquest of Rhodes. This piratical invasion, probably not completed until 1309, preceded the attack on the Temple in 1307 and went far to preserve the Hospital from any similar assault.

Though directed largely against Christian Greek schismatics, it gave the Hospitallers a variety of patently justifiable anti-infidel functions and an independence they had not enjoyed on Cyprus. The resulting prestige was cunningly exploited by the master, Foulques of Villaret, who visited the West and raised a papal–Hospitaller crusade which sailed from Italy in 1310 under the master’s command and made conquests against the Turks on the Anatolian mainland. After 1312 the Hospital was occupied throughout the West in an extended process of securing and absorbing the Templars’ enormous landed inheritance which the pope had transferred to it. The Hospital also faced a major financial crisis provoked by its expensive Rhodian campaign and by the extravagances of Foulques of Villaret which led to his deposition in 1317 and to the damaging internal disputes which ensued. The Iberian monarchs were extremely reluctant to accept the fusion of Templar and Hospitaller wealth and strength, arguing persistently that the Temple had been endowed to sustain a peninsular rather than a Mediterranean reconquest; in Castile much Templar property was usurped by the nobility while new national military orders were created in Valencia and Portugal.

Pope Clement V failed to save the Temple, but he did keep most of its goods out of secular hands while defending the principle that lay powers should not judge or interfere in the affairs of military religious orders. The interests of individual orders frequently diverged from papal concerns, but from 1312 to 1378 the Avignon popes encouraged, chided, and sometimes threatened them, acting as a court of appeal for the brethren, settling internal disputes and repeatedly intervening throughout Latin Christendom to protect their interests and privileges. A number of minor orders, such as the English order of Saint Thomas which had a small establishment on Cyprus, abandoned any military pretensions during the fourteenth century. In north-eastern Europe the popes sought to balance the activities of the Teutonic Order, which were difficult to control at such a distance, against the interests of others who were also seeking to convert or persuade pagan Lithuanians and Livonians into Christianity; the brethren were often able to evade the pope’s commands as they quarrelled with the Franciscans, the archbishop of Riga, the king of Poland, and other lay rulers. In 1319 Pope John XXII resolved the constitutional quarrel within the Hospital through the choice of the efficient Hélion of Villeneuve as its new master. From Avignon successive popes pressed for action and reform as Rhodes was developed into a prominent anti-Turkish bulwark. The Avignon popes enormously expanded their curia’s interventions in all manner of ecclesiastical matters and occasionally they sought to influence appointments within the military orders, especially in Italy where they used a number of Hospitallers as rectors to govern the papal provinces. Yet popes were cautiously restrained with respect to the Hospital and the Teutonic Order, and only in 1377 did Gregory XI, who had earlier instituted a universal inquest into the Hospital’s western resources, provide a long-standing papal protégé, Juan Fernández de Heredia, as master of Rhodes. The situation worsened thereafter for all but the Teutonic Order, as popes increasingly interfered in magistral or other elections and temporarily or even permanently alienated the orders’ lands through papal provisions or by way of grants made to favourites, kinsmen, or others.