A History of the Crusades (50 page)

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.

In Spain, the Muslim frontier had by 1312 been pushed into the deepest south and activity against the Moors became sporadic. The military orders continued to settle and exploit their extensive properties, but the Hispanic monarchs were anxious to control, or even recover, lands, jurisdictions, and privileges they had earlier granted away to the orders. The Aragonese crown secured both Templar and Hospitaller lands in Valencia to found the new order of Montesa to defend the Muslim frontier in Murcia, and in 1317 it was agreed that the rulers of the Aragonese Hospital should do homage to the king in person before exercising their administration. The king, who was already able to prevent men and money leaving for Rhodes, thus acquired an element of control over appointments and so could deploy part of the Hospital’s incomes and manpower for his own purposes; the importance of that became strikingly evident during the great rebellions of 1347 to 1348, when all the orders stood by the king, and again after 1356 in the wars with Castile. Royal attempts to develop the minute order of San Jorge de Alfama, which was established on the Catalan coast, had little success; in 1378 the master and his sister were seized from Alfama by African pirates, and in 1400 the order was incorporated into that of Montesa. Two years later King Martí proposed that all the Aragonese orders, including the Hospital, be converted into
maestrats
or masterships under royal control and serve at sea against the infidel Africans; in 1451 Alfonso V of Aragon considered establishing Montesa, which lacked any genuine military function, on the island of Malta.

The Castilian orders of Santiago, Alcántara, and Calatrava maintained their original activity in the settlement and defence of their extensive Andalusian latifundia against the Moors, though the frontier had moved southwards away from much of their lands. Well into the fifteenth century they were still repopulating frontier villages abandoned by their Muslim farmers;
indeed such new foundations continued elsewhere, in fourteenth-century Hospitaller Languedoc for instance. The Castilian orders had other functions; Alcántara, for example, guarded the Portuguese frontier in Extremadura. In 1331 the pope rejected a belated request advanced by Alfonso XI for the creation of a new order from the lands of the Castilian Temple, and that refusal seemed justified when all the Hispanic orders participated in the Christian victory at the River Salado in 1340 which led to the capture of Algeciras in 1344. Soon after, however, the reconquest of the stubborn mountainous enclave of Granada became comparatively dormant, as Castile entered a prolonged period of civil war which further implicated all the orders in family intrigues and in bitter political conflicts and divisions. As with Montesa, it was only occasionally that the Castilian orders employed their resources against the infidel. In 1361 the three Castilian masters and the prior of the Hospital fought in a royal army which won a victory against the Moors but was then defeated outside Guadix, where the master of Calatrava was taken prisoner.

In Castile the orders faced an almost stationary frontier situation; of the 110 years from 1350 to 1460, all but twenty-five were years of official truce, interrupted only by minor skirmishings. In about 1389 the masters of Calatrava and Alcántara led a razzia to the gates of Granada, sacked the suburbs, and launched a challenge to the Muslim king. When in 1394 the master of Alcántara, Martín Yáñez de la Barbuda, broke the truce and met his death in a reckless incursion inspired by a heightened sense of devotion to holy warfare, the king, having attempted to stop him, actually apologized to the Moors. The
Reconquista
in Castile was revived by the regent Fernando who took Antequera in 1410 with the help of the orders. These continued to garrison castles and campaign on the frontier where their masters frequently commanded royal armies, but often they were acting in a personal capacity as royal captains and were using troops who were not brethren of any order. However Calatrava, for example, took part in six border raids between 1455 and 1457 and its master captured Archidona in 1462. Brethren of all orders fought in the serious and bitter
campaigns which finally ended with the conquest of Granada in 1492; the masters of Santiago and Calatrava were both killed at Loja in 1482 and the master of Montesa at Beza in 1488, for example. The orders furnished money, grain, and troops. Of some 10,000 horse assembled in Granada in 1491, Santiago provided 962 horse along with 1,915 foot, Alcántara 266 horse, and the Hospital sixty-two; Calatrava’s contingent was not reported but had in 1489 been 400.

The Castilian orders formed national corporations led by great magnates who campaigned for the crown in the Moorish crusade as well as in national and civil wars but who mostly did so with little concern for the religious aspect, their troops and resources often being integrated into national armies and serving at the royal initiative. Across Castile the three major orders, and to a lesser extent the Hospital, derived enormous incomes from great flocks of sheep and from their transhumance routes. Just as the Hospital became the largest single landholder in Aragon, so Alcántara held almost half of Extremadura and Santiago much of Castilla la Nueva. This wealth helped to support members drawn from the petty nobility who had little interest in holy war, though many knight-brethren were keen and competent fighting men. The orders functioned within a kingdom and, however extensive their power and independence, there was no chance of their creating an autonomous order-state such as that on Rhodes or in Prussia; instead their wealth and influence made it vital for the crown to control them. Kings could interfere in elections and persuade popes to provide to offices or to grant dispensations for the election of masters who were under age or of illegitimate birth; on occasion monarchs refused to accept homage from elected masters, compelled others to abdicate, or even murdered them. Despite repeated resistance and much litigation, kings and great nobles repeatedly secured masterships for their favourites and especially their sons, legitimate or otherwise; thus Fernando de Antequera manœuvred to secure the masterships of Alcántara and Santiago for his sons in 1409, promising to employ their revenues in the Granada war. There were exemplary brethren and there were serious but ineffective attempts at reform. These
received little encouragement from the papacy, which repeatedly facilitated evasion of the rules. Married rulers could not hold masterships but they might be granted the administration of an order, as in 1456 when Pope Calixtus III named Enrique IV administrator and governor of both Santiago and Calatrava. The masters’ political involvements went far to pervert the orders’ proper function, embroiling the brethren in intrigue, schism, and violence in which they often fought one another. The Hospital and the Teutonic Order avoided such troubles by excluding most of the local nobility of their order-states from entry as knight-brethren.

Portugal no longer had an infidel frontier. The Portuguese branch of Santiago elected its own master and had become largely independent, while Avis was a national order as was that of Christ, which was founded with the Temple’s properties in 1319. The Portuguese orders, including the Hospital, fought the Moors at the River Salado in 1340, but for decades they were mainly absorbed in national politics and largely subservient to the crown which, much as in Castile, managed to impose royal princes and others as their masters. As for the Portuguese Hospitallers, in 1375 they had paid no responsions to Rhodes for nine years. In 1385 the regent, an illegitimate son of King Pedro I who had been brought up by the master of Christ and who had become master of Avis, headed the national opposition to Castilian invasion and became king as João I. The orders reverted briefly to holy warfare when the Portuguese reconquest was extended overseas, the master of Christ and the prior of the Hospital fighting in the seizure of Ceuta in Morocco in 1415. Pope Martin V appointed Prince Henrique governor of the Order of Christ in about 1418, and he was able to use its brethren and its wealth to finance his momentous voyages of discovery. In 1443 the pope gave the Order of Christ title to any lands it might in future capture in Morocco, the Atlantic isles, and elsewhere beyond the seas. That order received extensive material and spiritual privileges in the Atlantic islands, along the African coasts, and eventually in Asia, and in 1457 Henrique granted it a twentieth of the incomes of Guinea; its great overseas wealth was later displayed in its spectacular priory with its
numerous cloisters at Tomar. Royal interference in the Portuguese orders, their involvement in secular politics, their internal dissensions, and the frequent appointment of royal princes to control the orders and their incomes continued, but their participation in the papally-sanctioned crusades against infidel Morocco was no more than occasional. The contingents of the three Portuguese orders fought in the unsuccessful attack on Tangier in 1437, and the Portuguese Hospitallers at Arzila in 1471. The three orders and the Portuguese Hospital all rejected papal proposals of 1456 for them to establish military outposts and maintain one third of their brethren in Ceuta, and in 1467 the papal curia even agreed that the Portuguese orders were not obliged to any offensive war, a decision which aroused protests in Portugal.

In the Baltic regions of Prussia and Livonia, which were separated by an endlessly contested strip of territory, the Germans had successfully been pursuing a very different, essentially continental, confrontation. This became less bitter than it had been in the thirteenth century, especially in the more peaceful western parts of Prussia, but was still perpetual, and often freezing and bloody. The Teutonic Order retained some Mediterranean possessions, notably in Sicily and Apulia, in addition to its extensive commanderies and recruiting grounds in Franconia and Thuringia, along the Rhine, and in other German lands. Though reliant on its German holdings for manpower, the order was not constrained within any kingdom as the Iberian orders were. Prussia and Livonia lay outside the empire and were held or protected, in ambiguous and debatable ways, from both emperor and pope. There was bitter dissension over the order’s proper purpose: the brethren in the Baltic called for the headquarters to be moved northwards to end the order’s double burden in Prussia and the East by concentrating on its new function of fighting the Lithuanians, while others wanted to continue the Jerusalem objective. Finally, in 1309, the master, Siegfried von Feuchtwangen, transferred the convent from Venice to Prussia without his brethren’s assent. His successor Karl von Trier was exiled to Germany in 1317, the same year in which the
Hospitaller convent deposed its master. The next master, Werner von Orseln, was elected in Prussia in 1324, and thereafter the masters ruled over a grandiose court from the imposing riverside palace at Marienburg with its brick residence, chapter house, and chapel.

In 1310 the Teutonic Order faced extremely serious accusations of massacring Christians in Livonia, brutally despoiling the secular church, attacking the archbishop of Riga, trading with the heathen, impeding the task of conversion, and driving numerous converts into apostacy. The order was in grave danger of dissolution, and it became involved in tangled diplomacy with the Lithuanians whose clever pretences of conversion to Christianity embarrassed and discredited it. Yet it went on to make real progress, despite armed opposition from the Poles. Much territory was acquired. Danzig and eastern Pomerelia were seized in 1308 and Estonia, to the north of Livonia, was purchased from the Danes in 1346, but the stubborn and effective opposition of the pagan Lithuanians and the order’s need for both booty and conversions demanded frequent campaigns. Under Winrich von Kniprode, master from 1352 to 1382, the Lithuanians were brilliantly defeated with the help of western nobles attracted to the order’s prestigious expeditions or
Reisen
. In his youth John of Boucicaut, later marshal of France, served three times in Prussia and the future Henry IV of England went twice. There were often two Prussian expeditions a year and one in Livonia. They caused much death and destruction, while the brethren suffered losses in sustained warfare of a type and scale unknown on Rhodes or in Spain. Paradoxically, the Germans’ successes contributed to their downfall: in 1386 the powerful Lithuanians allied with the Poles and their formal conversion to Christianity in 1389 undermined the fundamental justification for the Teutonic holy war. By continuing its warfare the order emphasized that its motives were as much political and German as religious and Christian. As a result its enemies eventually combined in their determination to recover their lands, and in 1410 the Poles and a diversity of allies outnumbered and destroyed the Teutonic army at Tannenberg.