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Updated: June 28, 2025
The monks who organized crusades, often bore arms themselves, and tended the holy places connected with incidents in the life of Christ: such orders were the Knights Templars, the Knights Hospitalers of St. John and of Malta, and the Teutonic Knights who subsequently undertook the conversion of the Slavs.
These Teutonic Hospitalers continued their work, in hospital and field, until the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187, and the conqueror, in recognition of their benevolent services, consented that some of them should remain there and continue their work. Out of these lowly beginnings grew one of the most powerful and widespread of the military religious orders.
The Hospitalers, as bestowing their goods to feed the poor and to entertain pilgrims, were freed from the obligation of paying tithe, or of giving heed to interdicts even if these were laid upon the whole country, while it was expressly asserted that no patriarch or prelate should dare to pass any sentence of excommunication against them.
It would be unnecessary, as it would be tedious, to repeat all the details of the crusades, the varying successes and defeats, in all of which the Teutonic Knights took part, both in Syria and in Egypt, fighting side by side with their brethren in arms, the Templars and Hospitalers.
"The English are mad after gentility," says he; "well, all the better for us; their religion for a long time past has been a plain and simple one, and consequently by no means genteel; they'll quit it for ours, which is the perfection of what they admire; with which Templars, Hospitalers, mitred abbots, Gothic abbeys, long-drawn aisles, golden censers, incense, et cetera, are connected; nothing, or next to nothing, of Christ, it is true, but weighed in the balance against gentility, where will Christianity be? why, kicking against the beam ho! ho!"
In 1187 he felt himself in a position to engage the Franks in a decisive conflict. At the battle of Tiberias, Guy, the Latin king, was defeated and taken prisoner. The Knights-Templars and Hospitalers, of whose doings at Jerusalem Benjamin gives us particulars, either shared the fate of the king or were slain in action. Jerusalem fell soon afterwards.
This charitable association, like the earlier monasteries, received generous gifts of land in western Europe and built and controlled many fortified monasteries in the Holy Land itself. After the evacuation of Syria in the thirteenth century, the Hospitalers moved their headquarters to the island of Rhodes, and later to Malta.
Presently the quarrel extended to other portions of the army of the Crusaders, and the different orders of knights and bodies of soldiers espoused, some one side and some the other. The Knights Hospitalers, described in a former chapter, who had now become a numerous and very powerful force, took Richard's side.
The order seems, however, to have been confirmed by Pope Celestine III, the constitution and rules of the Templars and Hospitalers being taken as the model for the new order, Henry de Walpot being the first master. This appears to have happened about 1190, though some authorities maintain that it was not till 1191 or even later.
A noteworthy outcome of the crusading movement was the foundation of several curious orders the Hospitalers, the Templars, and the Teutonic Knights which combined the dominant interests of the time, those of the monk and the soldier. They permitted a man to be both at once; the knight might wear a monkish cowl over his coat of mail.
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