Colin Barr

Book Review: The Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics

focuses on two military orders in particular—the Templars and the Hospitallers— constitutes a very welcome reprieve for the serious reader interested in more sober history. Jonathan Riley-Smith has been studying the military orders for a half-century or so and, although this work is merely some 70 pages in length, it is rich in detail and distilled learning. This can be appreciated when one considers that the end notes alone constitute about one-third of the length of the main text itself (running from p. 71 to p. 104). The work consists of four chapters which examine in turn the establishment of the two military orders in question, the organization of their communities, their modes of governance and their fates after the Crusades. Throughout, Riley-Smith is keen to show that the Templars and Hospitallers had different personalities and, indeed, differed in their respective goals, the latter having a more varied brief. He is also keen to stress one of their little-observed legacies—that of setting down structures which would later be emulated to an extent by mendicant orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans. The novelty of the military ideal in the case of the Templars was not to every churchman’s taste; indeed, in the 12th century, Abbot Isaac of l’Étoile was to castigate them not just as a nova militia but a monstrum novum and detailed how, having religiously killed those who do not know Christ, they proclaimed their own fallen as martyrs (p. 18). For the Hospitallers, their first obligation was ideally supposed to be the care of the poor which was to take precedence over military action; thus, for example, knights were to dismount from their war-horses if it was found by surgeons that an insufficient number were available to transport the injured in the aftermath of a battle. A surprisingly modern-sounding care for non-Christians by the Hospitallers, perhaps a unique feature within Christendom, may have extended to catering for the particular dietary regulations of Muslim and Jewish patients—chicken could be substituted for pork and would be cooked in a separate kitchen. It was the Hospitallers’ broader religious mission of service to the poor and sick which situated it far more centrally within the Christian mainstream, Riley-Smith argues, and enabled it to survive the early 14th-century crisis which largely swept the Templars from history. He also notes how the differing character of both also affected their respective fates: one adapted to change and the other did not. It is surely no accident that in 1309, when the Templars were being aggressively investigated for all manner of alleged crimes, the Hospitallers moved their headquarters to Rhodes. Indeed, the capacity of the Hospitaller order to evolve both in their religious mission and their organizational structure while the Templars stagnated, also ensured their survival. This, in itself, is a sobering lesson that has a much wider application than in the religious worlds of the Central Middle Ages.