A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  Almost everywhere the habit of Malta with its eight-starred cross conferred the highest degree of nobility. In Italy, with its political fragmentation, the Hospital helped to preserve a pan-Italian caste of nobles who shared a background of birth and manners and a common educational experience in the Maltese convent. These men knew each other as members of an extended multinational club, access to which they limited through the device of family control of the commandery in jus patronatus and by an ever more rigid system of proofs of nobility. The gradual shift from horse to galley, the general proletarianization of the arts of war, and the emergence of non-aristocratic service bureaucracies at court all tended to marginalize the older nobility whose honour and chivalric ideals had been displayed through the outdated sword. While lively debates redefined and modified concepts of nobility, the European aristocracy not only utilized the military orders to define and defend its own status, seeking to exclude newer nobilities or patriciates from entry into the orders and thus from their commanderies and benefices. In the Teutonic Order and the Hospital this noble corporatism functioned in the priories and provinces outside their order-states, but on Malta, as earlier in Prussia and Rhodes, the closed oligarchic caste, which originated outside the order-state, largely refused entry to the indigenous Maltese élite lest it develop into a disruptive dynastic element within the order’s government.

  Hospitallers enjoyed considerable prestige in the West and many of them had close and influential family and political contacts with rulers and courts in their home provinces. Papal jurisdiction was no mere theoretical bond; indeed support, and sometimes damaging interference, from Rome continued to influence Hospitaller policy. Eighteenth-century accusations of high-living, immorality, and inactivity were not always unjustified but they were strikingly similar to criticisms repeatedly heard in the fourteenth century and indeed earlier. Despite its real institutional defects, the Hospital did not embody a decayed medieval ideal being lived out in a state of terminal anachronism. The number of brethren actually rose from 1,715 in 1635 to 2,240 in 1740. The early-modern nobility was often well educated, and the Hospital attracted entrants with a remarkable and vigorous range of thoroughly up-to-date military, diplomatic, scientific, and artistic interests and talents, men who were well-read and active throughout western Europe and as far afield as Russia and the Americas. The library in Valletta reflected the breadth of this culture which was both practical and theoretical. An early example was the humanist Sabba di Castiglione, who collected classical sculptures while stationed on Rhodes, was sent as ambassador to Rome, and retired to his commandery in Faenza where he founded a school for poor children.

  As in all the orders, the Hospitallers’ vows were being interpreted more loosely and the common liturgical life of the commandery had increasingly been abandoned. Commanders were often absentee, farming out their commandery as a predominantly economic unit; they could build up considerable personal wealth and leave part of it outside the order on their death. Hospitaller representatives attended the great reforming council at Trent where, however, the issue for them was not their own internal reform but the successful defence of the exemptions of the brethren and, above all, of their non-professed dependants from episcopal jurisdiction. Yet there were strong devotional concerns among Hospitallers which developed, especially in seventeenth-century France, in collaboration with the Jesuits and other modern movements unleashed at Trent. Some Hospitallers were actively engaged in charity, welfare, and missions, in the redemption of Christian captives in Muslim hands, and in contemporary pious and spiritual works; they sought paths by which the non-priestly religious could pursue a Hospitaller vocation that was both sanctified and military. All this overlapped with the maintenance of the knightly function on Malta, where there was a symbiotic exchange between priory and convent which ensured that Malta was in close touch with contemporary thought.

  The corollary of this interchange was that the arrival of the enlightenment, and even of freemasonry, among the knightbrethren on Malta increased disaffection with the ancienrégime. Masters frequently quarrelled with bishops, papal inquisitors, and representatives of the Maltese people and clergy. The three French provinces, with their often well-managed estates and forests, produced about half the order’s foreign incomes and ensured the French a major share in office. As its military function evaporated and its incomes dwindled, the order dabbled in somewhat desperate schemes such as those involving Russian, British, and American alliances, the foundation of an Ethiopian company, the creation of a Polish priory, the purchase of estates in Canada, and the acquisition of Corsica; the Hospital purchased three Caribbean islands in 1651 but had to sell them in 1665. In 1792 the National Assembly confiscated the Hospitallers’ goods throughout France, with potentially disastrous financial consequences; in 1798 Napoleon met little resistance and drove the vacillating German master, Ferdinand von Hompesch, and his brethren from a supposedly impregnable Malta. Roughly 200 of the 330 brethren on the island were French and, despite the background of demoralization and unpreparedness, many of the French were ready to resist. Firm leadership and better tactics might have saved Malta, but defeatist and alarmist groups worked for surrender. The few Spanish Hospitallers refused to fight. There had recently been indications of popular discontent with the order; some Maltese troops failed to fight, there was panic and confusion in Valletta and isolated incidents of mutiny and sabotage. A group of Maltese nobles pressed for negotiations and the master seems, mistakenly perhaps, to have feared an uprising of the order-state’s populace.

  France and Spain, the order’s greatest supporters, had turned against it, and aid was available only from the two non-Catholic powers of Russia and Britain. It was scarcely in the French interest to remove the Hospital and lose control of the island to an enemy, as in fact occurred. The French had benefited commercially from the Hospitallers’ policing of the central Mediterranean and from the use of Malta’s port, but some French brethren were too royalist and some revolutionaries in Paris too dogmatic. The confiscations of 1792, which soon extended to Switzerland, Italy, and elsewhere, were probably decisive. The order was effectively protecting the Mediterranean, and even after 1798 it might have found a function in the armed conflict waged in North Africa for several decades by the European powers and even by the United States of America. Yet for many observers a sometimes arrogant society of aristocratic religious had come to appear largely irrelevant in an age of revolution, not so much because Malta was ungovernable or indefensible but because the underlying basis of the order-state, its enjoyment of extensive lands and privileges in the West, was no longer acceptable.

  The Modern Period: The Decline of the Military Function

  The Teutonic Order actually maintained a minimal military function after the fall of Malta in 1798. It had lost Prussia in 1525 but it kept properties and incomes in many Catholic, and even some Protestant, parts of Germany proper. After 1525 the German master’s headquarters was at Mergentheim in Franconia where for several centuries a combined Hoch- und Deutschmeister ruled over a petty baroque court with the status of a German prince. Meanwhile Livonia, where the order still controlled many towns and fortresses, turned largely Lutheran, but the Catholic brethren fought on, particularly in opposition to the Orthodox Russians but also against resistance from the Livonian populace. In 1558 Ivan the Terrible launched renewed Russian invasions of Livonia and the brethren lost Fellin two years later. Then in 1561 the last Livonian master, Gotthard Ketteler, also turned Protestant and secularized the order-state; parts of Livonia went to Poland and the ex-master became hereditary secular duke of Curland and Semigallen. By 1577 the whole Teutonic Order was reduced to 171 brethren.

  Mergentheim was no Ordensstaat but it enjoyed the independence of a German principality under masters, notably Maximilian of Habsburg from 1595, who were often members of the Austrian ruling house. The Teutonic Order maintained the old machineries of chapters general and strict proofs of nobility. There was much discussion of territ
orial claims, even in Prussia, and compromises with the Protestants who had taken many commanderies; great emphasis was laid on ancient tradition and German aristocracy. Shamed perhaps by the example of noble German colleagues who were active on Malta, the Teutonic knights repeatedly advanced schemes to defend a fortress or even to move the whole order and to fight the infidel on the Hungarian frontier, as they had occasionally done in the fifteenth century. Some brethren invoked the old medieval tradition of the Baumburg ‘tree castle’ of Torun where the brethren supposedly crossed the Vistula and, having no buildings of their own, fortified themselves against the pagan Prussians in a great tree; yet, when from 1595 Maximilian of Habsburg succeeded in sending a few individuals against the Turks, they were really serving as members of the imperial court rather than of a military order. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Teutonic knights required thirty-two quarterings of nobility and maintained the vow of celibacy. After 1606 all Teutonic knight-brethren were supposed to perform a three-year period of military service, but in reality they could devote themselves to the management of the commanderies, to administration in the Mergentheim bureaucracy, or to a career in a standing army. From 1648 Lutherans and Calvinists had equal rights in what became a uniquely triconfessional order.

  In 1658 there was a scheme for joint action with Venice and Malta, and another in 1662 for a Teutonic galley fleet on the Danube. In 1664 the master, Johann Kaspar von Ampringen, led a contingent against the Turks in Hungary and in 1668 he took a small and unsuccessful expedition to fight them in Crete. Some brethren fulfilled their exercitium militare in garrison towns on the Ottoman border, and a few lost their lives in the Turkish wars. From 1696 the master financed a regiment in which the brethren, who were paid both from their commanderies and as Austrian officers, served as a unit of the imperial army; in 1740 they fought in the Austro-Prussian war, but as representatives of a German princely state and not as members of a religious order. The Teutonic brethren’s military activities had become a very minor matter. In 1699 there were only ninety-four knights and fifty-eight priests; in the 192 years between 1618 and 1809, of 717 known knight-brethren, 184 of them from Franconia, at least 362 or about half were at some point serving army officers, eighty-nine of whom became generals. The order survived at Mergentheim until 1809 and then transferred its existence to Austrian territory at Vienna. Though to a lesser extent than Santo Stefano and the Spanish orders, it too had been absorbed into an essentially secular army, but its German base, with resources and manpower outside Austria, had ensured it a certain degree of independence.

  The Spanish orders became much less active militarily. In 1625 the three orders still totalled 1,452 brethren, 949 or nearly two-thirds of whom belonged to Santiago. Between 1637 and 1645 Felipe IV, faced with a French war, repeatedly convoked the brethren to fulfil their military obligations, but the nobility had abandoned its warlike habits and the crown, having granted memberships to totally unsuitable candidates, met widespread evasions, protests, and excuses. In 1640, 1,543 combatants assembled to form a battalion of the military orders including Montesa, but only 169, or 11 per cent, of them were professed knights; the rest of the brethren were too young, too old, too ill, or unwilling to fight in defence of their own country. They sent substitutes at their own expense, paid fines, or simply evaded conscription. In the end, the battalion was sent to fight rebel Catalans within the Spanish borders. Thereafter the duty to serve was largely commuted into a payment. The service of the orders’ battalion was not really that of a group of corporate religious; rather, as with the Teutonic knights who fought against the Christian enemies of the house of Austria, it was an obligation to defend its secular ruler’s domains. In 1775 the three regiments maintained by Alcántara, Santiago, and Montesa provided a miserly 468 men for the siege of Algiers. The Castilian orders survived as an important source of income and patronage, which provided a livelihood for a number of royal servants and which served, as elsewhere, to define a noble caste in institutional form, the Royal Council of the Orders continuing to defend a certain monopoly of birth and honour through the system of rigorous entry proofs. The Spanish orders became archaic; their structure no longer corresponded to any useful function. The Portuguese orders were extinguished between 1820 and 1834, and the property of all three Castilian orders was eventually confiscated in 1835.

  The contribution of the military orders to the holy war between 1312 and 1798 depended on the quality and efficiency of their performance rather than on the quantity of their brethren. For example, they provided only a few of the 208 Christian galleys at Lepanto in 1571. Yet the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II wrote in about 1409: ‘Let no one assume by looking at their few galleys stationed at Rhodes that the strength of the Hospitallers is weak and feeble; when they wish to do so, a great number of them can assemble from all over the world where they are scattered.’ There were naturally those who were reluctant to serve. When in 1411 six Hospitallers of the priory of Venice met at Treviso to choose four names from which their prior was to select one to be sent to Rhodes, Angelo Rossi sought to excuse himself on the multiple grounds that he had already served the prior for ten years in Rome, that he was involved in a lengthy lawsuit which would harm the order should it be lost on account of his absence, that his brother had a large family which needed his protection, and that he himself was too poor to go. If the orders’ participation in occasional crusading expeditions and in the Spanish Reconquista was limited in scope, and if the successes of the Teutonic Order, important as they were in colonizing and Christianizing the German East, eventually evaporated, the defence of Rhodes and Malta, and their resistance to the Turks, were major achievements. National interests had always tended to override crusading ideals, and in the more modern world the military orders survived only where they could secure and maintain a territorial base of their own as curious semi-secular theocracies, and when they could find the military justifications which permitted them to retain the estates elsewhere which ultimately supported them. Towards the end that was the case only for the Hospital and, to a very minor extent, for the Teutonic Order.

  After the sixteenth century the Hospital alone maintained a positive military strategy determined by its own ruling body, though Santo Stefano showed how a regional order could, with intelligent and firm direction, successfully exploit crusading tradition and aristocratic sensibilities for military and naval ends. Only the Hospital could claim that it underwent no essential change between 1312 and 1798. The other orders made minor or indirect contributions to the activities of the local rulers who controlled them. For the rest they were mostly concerned with their own survival as aristocratic corporations which continued to exist largely for their own sake. Purely national orders, and some national priories or other local sections of multinational orders, were absorbed and overwhelmed by the lay state, though the Teutonic brethren and the Spanish and Portuguese orders continued to make limited contributions through their participation in national armies and fleets. The Hospitaller solution, a naval one based on an island order-state, proved the most successful, but it still depended on its western priories. That had been clear in 1413, when the brethren threatened to abandon Rhodes unless they received financial support and changed their minds only upon the fortunate arrival of the English responsions, and it was again evident following the terminal confiscations which began in 1792.

  The military orders were part of an ancien régime condemned to extinction and their military existence disappeared with it. Though Malta in particular still had some attraction to the warlike, the orders were scarcely channelling the aggressive instincts of a military class into a religious form of warfare. Except very marginally within the Habsburg empire, the confiscations and suppressions imposed after 1792 by the revolution and by Napoleon virtually brought an end to the orders as military bodies. The orders’ priests and their female convents sometimes survived and there were countless schemes for restorations and revivals, sometimes merely as aristocratic fraternit
ies, sometimes in bogus form or as masonic and esoteric groups pretending to a Templar succession. The military orders had done something to maintain a corporate ideal of Christian holy warfare, and the Hospital was well ahead of its time in its activities both as a supranational police force drawn from different states and as a cosmopolitan medical organization. After 1798 the orders lived on in non-military ways through their buildings and works of art, through their archives and chronicles, and above all through their welfare and medical activities.

  14

  Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

  ELIZABETH SIBERRY

  AFTER the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, the immediate threat of a Turkish invasion of central Europe had passed. It was therefore possible to take a more relaxed view of the Muslim East. The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689– 1762), wife of a British ambassador to the Ottoman court at Constantinople, which described details of Turkish life, proved popular when published in 1763, and there was a club known as the Divan Club, reserved for those such as the elegant Sir Francis Dashwood (1708–81), who had been to the Ottoman Empire. A portrait at Sir Francis’s home, West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire, depicts him in oriental coat and turban, with the inscription, El Faquir Dashwood Pasha. The fashion for orientalism is exemplified by Mozart’s opera Il Seraglio (1782) and the popularity of translations of the Arabian Nights. It even extended to garden design. Thus the eighteenth-century gardens at Painshill in Surrey featured a Turkish tent.

  Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign in 1798 stimulated further interest in the East. His forces included engineers and scholars whose researches were published and there was soon a regular stream of topographers, artists, and writers who visited the famous sites mentioned in the Bible and recorded their impressions in their various mediums. The list is extensive, but examples are the French poets Alphonse de Lamartine and Gérard de Nerval; the English novelist, Anthony Trollope, who negotiated a treaty with Egypt on behalf of his employers the Post Office in 1858; and the artists David Roberts, Edward Lear, and Jean-Léon Gérôme. The interest in Muslim culture, history, and religion was reflected in a series of monographs and, from the 1820s onwards, in the foundation of a number of learned orientalist societies. As the nineteenth century progressed, travel became easier and safer and the flow of visitors armed with guidebooks increased; the era of the package tour had arrived.