Ecclesiastical Knights: The Military Orders in Castile, 1150-1330

280 Pages·2015·3.052 MB·English

by  Sam Conedera SJ

Ecclesiastical
Knights
fordham series in medieval studies
Mary C. Erler and Franklin T. Harkins, series editors
Ecclesiastical
Knights
The Military Orders in Castile,
1150–1330
Sam Zeno Conedera, SJ
Fordham University Press
New York 2015
Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available online at catalog.loc.gov.
Printed in the United States of America
17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
Parentibus meis
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Contents
Preface / ix
List of Abbreviations / xi
Introduction: Warrior Monks? / 1
1 Foundations / 19
2 Interior Castle: The Orders’ Religious Observance / 51
3 Ad extra: The Orders’ Mission in the World / 84
4 Brothers in Arms: The Orders’ Relations with One Another / 112
Conclusion / 141
Notes / 145
Bibliography / 229
Index / 255
Color plates follow page 140
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Preface
One day, while I was doing research for this book, my eyes fell upon these
lines from Maurice Keen’s classic work on chivalry:
In the crusading context, the military orders—the Temple, the Hospital
and the Teutonic and Spanish orders—came to be just that, the strong
right arm of the militant church. Their organisation, as reflected in their
rules of life, represented a real fusion of ecclesiastical (as opposed to sim-
ply Christian) and martial ideals.1
The passage put an idea in my head, an idea that has taken some time to
work out. What follows is the fruit of my labors.
Ecclesiastical Knights is a spirituality study. The military orders, which
emerged on the frontiers of Europe in the twelfth century, have long fas-
cinated general readers and professional historians alike. Some of this fas-
cination is tied up with occult mythology, the manifestations of which are
legion in print and film. Worthier of attention, though, is the seemingly
incongruous combination of monastic devotion and the practice of warfare
into a single form of religious life. Defining, categorizing, and explaining
this way of life is a major problem for the historiography of the military or-
ders, one that Riley-Smith has called “the elephant in the room.”2 I propose
a new name and a new conceptual model for understanding the Iberian
military orders, one that better captures how they combined the exercise
of arms and the monastic tradition into a single way of life. I hope that
this model helps move the scholarly discussion beyond the label “warrior
monks.” But a name or a model alone serves little to illuminate the spiritual-
ity of the military orders, which was lived in flesh and blood and the heat of
the day. I undertake a detailed study of the military-religious vocation as it
was lived out in the Orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcántara in León-
Castile during the first century and a half of their existence.
I would like to thank the people who have helped bring this project to
fruition, beginning with Teo Ruiz, Patrick Geary, Kevin Terraciano, and
John Dagenais, my professors at UCLA. Carlos de Ayala Martínez and
Francisco García Serrano provided invaluable assistance and advice while I S
was in Madrid, and Helen J. Nicholson’s painstaking attention to numerous N
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