A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  Occasional Hospitaller participation in campaigns away from Rhodes continued but eventually the island itself came under direct attack. Smyrna was lost to Tamerlane in 1402 and the Morea was evacuated very soon after. A bridgehead providing direct confrontation with the Turks on land was a political necessity, and in 1407 or 1408 Smyrna was replaced with a mainland castle at Bodrum opposite Cos; this brought prestige, indulgences, and tax exemptions which probably made the newly built fortress a profitable investment rather than a strategic advantage. The great new hospital begun at Rhodes in 1440, which much impressed pilgrims, was another successful propaganda initiative. There was a series of truces with occasional ruptures and hostilities. Invasions from Mamluk Egypt were successfully resisted between 1440 and 1444, but not until 1480 was there a full-scale Ottoman assault; the master Pierre d’Aubusson, later created a cardinal, led an epic defence of the city with skill and determination. After that, massive gunpowder fortifications were built to counter ever heavier Turkish cannon, and the Ottomans were cleverly kept in check through the Hospital’s possession after 1482 of the sultan’s brother Jem. Though increasingly isolated as the Ottomans advanced further into the Balkans, Rhodes flourished as a secure bulwark for Latin trade and piracy in the Levant. Especially important was the Hospitallers’ own lucrative ‘corso’. In essence a profitable form of publicly licensed quasi-private piracy, the corso was justified as a type of holy warfare which irritated Mamluks, Ottomans, and Venetians alike. Dependent on trade with the Turkish mainland and with a very limited naval force, the Hospital was restricted to small-scale operations but it did inflict a major defeat on the Mamluk fleet in 1510. After the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, Rhodes’s position across Turkish communications with Egypt led to another heroic siege during which the Venetians on Crete and the other Latin powers sent little significant aid. The Hospitallers, having failed to mobilize an anti-Ottoman coalition, finally capitulated and sailed away from Rhodes in January 1523.

  The Structure of the Military Orders

  All military orders required revenues. These they derived principally from farming and stock-raising on their estates either by direct cultivation and herding or through leasings; jurisdictions, justice, seigneurial rights, urban rents, sales of pensions, capital investments, papal indulgences, commerce, and other activities supplemented these incomes. The Teutonic brethren outside Germany lived off their Prussian and Livonian states, but in general the houses of the military orders differed from those of other religious in that their brethren had not only to support themselves but also to produce a cash surplus to maintain their central convent and their brethren in active service. The orders traditionally organized their possessions into priories or provinces each composed of many commanderies, also known as preceptories, domus, encomiendas, and so on. The commanders managed their houses or increasingly rented them out, and they paid dues or responsions to their prior or provincial, or sometimes to a receiver, and these officials transferred a total sum to the conventual treasury; often the incomes of certain houses were reserved for priors and masters. After 1319 the order of Montesa used a system based not on resident communities paying responsions but on allotting the incomes of individual houses, which mostly consisted of tenths and income taxes, to a variety of officials for different purposes; thus certain monies went to the master and other incomes to the defence of the Muslim frontier. Similarly the three Castilian orders and the Teutonic Order allotted the revenues from particular areas or commanderies directly to their masters, who had their own mensa or private purse. The Hospitaller master received much of the revenues of the island of Rhodes or, after 1530, of Malta.

  Despite extensive systems of local accounting and visitation, the orders’ ruling bodies had only imprecise and incomplete notions of their total incomes and manpower and of what proportion of those resources could be mobilized by their central command. Their statistics were inevitably approximate and incomplete. In some cases there were very few knights, some of them too old to fight; elsewhere there were few or no sergeants, and sometimes there was a preponderance of priests. In the year 1374/5 the Hospital’s western priories produced about 46,000 florins for the Rhodian receiver; in about 1478 the convent on Rhodes was receiving 80,500 florins of Rhodes from the West and 11,550 in the East for a total of 92,000 florins of Rhodes; most of this went to support allegedly as many as 450 brethren and a number of paid troops at Rhodes and Bodrum, with 7,000 florins of Rhodes allotted to the medical hospital. In 1519 the Hospital was said to be dependent on the corso to provide 47,000 ducats a year. As already mentioned, the number of Hospitallers in the East during the fifteenth century fluctuated between about 250 and 450, most of them knights, while in Prussia alone there were some 700 Teutonic brethren in 1379, 400 in 1450, 160 in 1513, and fifty-five in 1525; a dramatic fall partly due to much loss of territory, particularly after 1466. The Prussian incomes continued to rise until 1410; they then declined, but remained stable from about 1435 to 1450. About 540 Hospitaller knights and sergeants defended Malta in 1565, and in 1631 the entire order counted 1,755 knights, 148 chaplains, and 155 sergeants, totalling 2,058 of which the three French provinces provided 995 or almost half; 226 brethren were then on Malta. The Hispanic orders had large memberships and incomes; Calatrava alone had an income of 61,000 ducats in about 1500, roughly one-twelfth of the Castilian crown’s ordinary annual income, and just over half the order’s total income went to the master. However, little of such wealth was utilized for military purposes. In modern times the Hospital’s economy far outweighed those of the other orders. By 1776 Malta’s cotton crop was bringing more money into the island than the order; the highest annual export figure was 2,816,610 scudi in 1787/8. The master received some 200,000 scudi a year from the island, while the income of the conventual treasury stood at 1,315,000 scudi, mostly from abroad, and individual brethren were estimated to import almost 1,000,000 scudi a year for their own personal expenditures. The Hospital’s metropolis in Valletta was dependent for funds on its colonies, the western priories.

  The commanderies did more than produce men and money. They were important as centres of recruitment and training, as retirement homes, as residences for the orders’ many priests, and as points of vital contact with the public. All brethren were fully professed religious and one of their functions was prayer, the spiritual value of which was important even if it could not be measured and which certainly brought in wealth through donations and funds for commemorative masses. The women members apart, many brethren were priests who might in certain areas and houses constitute a clear majority of the membership and who could rule and manage commanderies. Even where an order was not the local seigneur, it might possess hospices, hospitals and cemeteries, parishes and schools, and many dependent churches and chapels. The orders built and maintained churches and other buildings which, as the centuries passed, tended to become increasingly grand and sumptuous. They had their own liturgies, patron saints, paintings, and relics, which helped to maintain their esprit de corps and to attract public support. The Teutonic Order employed special lectors to read aloud in the vernacular to the brethren, some of whom were illiterate, during meals. Some orders had their own saints, and in the sixteenth century the Hospital at least was publicizing, and in some cases inventing, a range of saintly brethren. The orders naturally maintained extensive administrative archives which also facilitated the writing of their own histories, itself a useful propaganda activity.

  In most cases, the orders had always contained a military component, some of the fighting brethren being sergeants of comparatively humble social origin rather than knights. Though there was great regional variation, in the fourteenth century many knights were in fact of bourgeois, gentry, or petty noble origin even if there were always high aristocratic exceptions. As the profound economic crisis of the fourteenth century reduced the real value of the orders’ incomes the competition for their wealth increased. In the Hospital at least it became common for commanders to hold two or more
houses simultaneously and it was natural for the élite to define the conditions of entry so as to exclude competition, a process which in any case followed a general trend in western society. The rules concerning entry to the orders were gradually applied more strictly and evidence of nobility was required for knights; by 1427 the Catalan Hospitallers were demanding an inquiry with sworn witnesses and written certificates. In the Teutonic and other orders formal proofs of nobility started well before 1500 by which time they were becoming standard, and everywhere aristocratic interest was reinforcing its position against the bourgeoisie and the gentry; in Castile the proofs were used to avoid the ‘taint’ of Jewish blood. Except in the Teutonic Order which largely avoided personal seals and burial monuments before the late fifteenth century, professions of poverty and regulations limiting personal property were being infringed by growing practices of private foundations, personal tombs, seals with individual arms, and other manifestations of a concern with family and social origin.

  The attack on the Temple intensified the debate about the orders, criticism of which figured in many crusading treatises of the post-1291 decades. Some writers favoured a single united order, many argued for national solutions, and others proposed that Jerusalem should be governed as an order-state by a new military order. The Christian victims of the Teutonic Order repeatedly protested against its practices, but otherwise there was surprisingly little theoretical discussion of the orders as such. Writing before 1389, Philip of Mézières, a former chancellor of Cyprus and a doctrinaire crusading fanatic who was full of praise for the Teutonic brethren, criticized the Hospitallers for their decay, but his remark that they served at Rhodes only to secure a good western benefice ignored the mechanism of their promotion system. Philip of Mézières’s own scheme for a new order, finally revised in 1396, was still couched in terms of a noble brotherhood destined to recover Jerusalem and to defend it with a monarchical military order-state whose brethren were all to remain in the East while reliable secular administrators would manage their western properties and incomes. He proposed that, as in Santiago, the knights should be permitted to marry and constrained to conjugal chastity. Curiously, widows of deceased brethren being received into Santiago had to indicate whether they wished to remarry.

  There were many proposals, internal and external, for piecemeal reform of abuses within individual orders and repeated legislation over such matters as liturgical practice, payment of dues, non-residence on commanderies, and failure to serve in convent, but few men of spiritual or intellectual calibre were attracted to the late-medieval military orders, none of which underwent a sustained fundamental reform movement such as those experienced by the Franciscans or the Augustinians. From the fourteenth century the rigidity of the brethren’s vows was steadily being eroded, though less extensively in the Hospital and the Teutonic Order. Values and discipline tended to decline as the evasion of armed service, private rooms, the expansion of personal property, opportunities for financial advantage, and other exemptions from austere discipline all reduced the moral content of brethren’s curriculum; the renting of commanderies and the sale of pensions to laymen reflected a growing emphasis on material and money matters, as also, in the Teutonic Order for example, did entry payments and the establishment of life-rents to be enjoyed by individual brethren. Increasingly reception into an order could offer access to a sinecure within a privileged aristocratic corporation providing a comfortable benefice for life. In 1449 the local nobility protested to the Teutonic commander of Altenbiesen ‘why does one need the order any more if it is not to be a hospice and abode for the nobility?’

  The Early-Modern Military Orders: Towards National Control

  Between 1487 and 1499 the Castilian military orders were in effect nationalized by the crown; in 1523 the Hospital was expelled from Rhodes; and in 1525 the Prussian branch of the Teutonic Order was secularized. The German brethren had operated ruthlessly in comparatively brutal circumstances. Their extensive territorial possessions and incomes, together with their famous organization and communications, made them incomparably more efficient than the Hospital, yet the conversion of the Lithuanians, the decay of the Reisen after 1410, the diplomatic combinations which opposed the order, and the expense of mercenaries all militated against prosperity. The very efficiency of the Ordensstaat worked to undermine it in various ways. The richer elements in Prussian society, largely excluded from membership and from government, increasingly resisted the order, which no longer needed their military service and which attempted to replace them with a peasantry from which it could draw rents and taxes to sustain its armies. In 1410 the order raised a large army for the Tannenberg campaign, and even after losing possibly 300 brethren there it was able to hold out at Marienburg under the autocratic Heinrich von Plauen, who was then elected master but was deposed in 1413. Thereafter persistent warfare depopulated and destroyed villages; there was some recovery between 1437 and 1454 but the number of brethren in Prussia had deliberately to be kept low. Some Teutonic brethren did occasionally fight the Turks, as between 1429 and 1434, but nothing of lasting significance came from repeated proposals by the Emperor Sigismund and others that the order should establish a new role by opposing the infidel on the Ottoman Balkan frontiers, in effect as a land-based complement to the Hospital; in 1418 there was even a project to move the order to Rhodes or Cyprus. In Prussia a league of nobles, formed in 1440, brought civil war and Polish intervention; by 1454 the Teutonic brethren were fighting their own subjects. When the Poles were able to purchase Marienburg from the order’s mercenaries in 1457 the convent moved to Königsberg, and by the peace of 1466 the brethren lost further territories and supposedly bound themselves to give military service to the Polish crown. The order never did find a satisfactory solution to its Polish problem. It had too obviously been oppressing fellow Christians and it could scarcely claim to be defending Europe.

  The mission of settlement and conversion in the Baltic region offered little future. Within the order there were repeated quarrels between the Prussian, German, and Livonian masters and among informal clans of brethren originating in Franconia, the Rhineland, and elsewhere; in Livonia by about 1450 almost all brethren came either from Westphalia, about 60 per cent, or from the Rhineland, about 30 per cent. There was vague talk of Zungen or tongues and there was some agreement on the sharing of offices, but the Zungen were really little more than recruitment areas and did not function, as the langues at Rhodes did, to establish seniority or to settle conflicts over the distribution of offices and incomes. The brethren themselves quite blatantly became more exclusively aristocratic and corrupt, and in Prussia they constituted a powerful oligarchy able after 1466 to determine a master’s policies. Their development virtually into an estate of their own proved dangerous, facilitating the eventual secularization of the order-state. The Hospitallers’ state was very much smaller but it could be defended with much less expense; their order was more flexible and its wider options allowed it to maintain a military role long after the Teutonic Order had almost entirely abandoned any true holy war. In 1523 Martin Luther published a booklet entitled An die Herrn Deutschs Ordens, and in 1525 the last Prussian master, Albrecht of Brandenburg-Ansbach, simply converted to Lutheranism, doing homage to the Polish king and ruling Prussia as a hereditary secular duchy. Of the fifty-five brethren left in Prussia very few remained Catholic. The Ordensstaat in Prussia had become political rather than religious, devoted merely to the survival of its own self-perpetuating foreign oligarchy, lacking any firm moral base and unable to compete with neighbouring secular states. The Teutonic Order lost its Hochmeister and its central territorial core, but the German branch survived as, until 1561, did the Livonian. The Reformation also struck the Hospital whose priories were dissolved or secularized by Protestant rulers: in Sweden in 1527, Norway in 1532, Denmark in 1536, and England in 1540.

  The progressive nationalization of the Iberian orders began well before the Reconquista ended in 1492. After the conquest of Granada th
e Castilian crown was in a strong position and anxious to end the anarchic disputes over the masterships. Between 1489 and 1494 King Fernando received the administration of the three Castilian orders. The brethren scarcely resisted as a royal council was set up to a control them, but chapters, elections, and an element of commandery life continued; Calatrava, Montesa, and Avis retained their affiliation to the Cistercian order. In 1523 Pope Adrian VI formally incorporated the three Castilian orders in perpetuity, assuring the crown their masterships and their enormous magistral incomes, which were estimated at 110,000 ducats a year, or roughly half the orders’ total receipts; the crown’s share was assigned to the Fugger bankers in 1525. Montesa in its turn was incorporated into the crown of Aragon in 1587. Control of the Portuguese orders, which all refused involvement overseas, also passed to the crown which used some of their commanderies to reward personal service in infidel Africa and Asia. The three orders abandoned their military character but some brethren did campaign as individuals; thus at least twenty-eight were killed or captured at Alcazar in the Morocco crusade of 1578.

  Across the years other papal bulls progressively freed the Hispanic brethren from restrictions concerning marriage, property, fasting, residence, and prayer. As the crown farmed out their commanderies, many brethren became rentiers who valued their membership for motives of honour, nobility, and career. The creation of a permanent royal army deprived the orders of their special value as standing military forces and they became largely a source of royal patronage, brethren being admitted even while in childhood. In 1536 Charles V began to dismember the orders’ properties to finance his defence of Christianity, selling 14 of the 51 commanderies of Calatrava, 13 of the 98 of Santiago and 3 of the 38 of Alcántara in order to raise some 1,700,000 ducats. The crown could sell the orders’ habits; these memberships gave prestige not wealth, but a commandery, with its rents, brought an income. The administration of the orders’ latifundia by commanders who were often absentee and who made no investment in their commanderies proved economically inefficient, indeed parasitic.