Osprey - General Military - Knight - The Warrior and ... - Brego-weard

Christ. It gave the knight the opportunity to prove his prowess, to suffer the hardships
of his calling in the service and with the blessing ot God. Geoffrey de Charny could
write that:
... the man who makes war against the enemies of religion in order to support and
maintain Christianity and the worship of Our Lord is engaged in a war which is
righteous, holy, certain, and sure, for his earthly body will be honoured in a saintly
fashion and his soul will, in a short space of time, be borne in holiness and without pain
into paradise.
Perhaps the most extreme way in which the knightly class sought to combine piety and
the service of God with their calling as warriors was the development ot the military
orders. After the First Crusade a group of nine knights approached the Patriarch of
Jerusalem offering their services to protect pilgrims on the way to Jerusalem. They
were successful and their numbers grew. They then approached the Church in Europe
seeking its support for their endeavours. At the Council of Troyes in 1128 they
accepted a variation on the monastic rule of the Cistercian monks, becoming a unique
combination of monk and knight. Their success owed much to the theologian Bernard
of Clairvaux, who explained their existence and role to the world in his In Prauie of New
Knighthood. Members ot the Order of the Knights Templar were held up as paragons
of the knightly virtue, and a lesson to the secular knights who squandered their lives
and souls in sinful pride and violence.
The Templars spawned a range ot military orders of similar forms including, most
famously, the Order of St John (the Knights Hospitaller), who had originally formed
to run the hospital of St John in Jerusalem, and the Teutonic Order. As their name
suggests this Order comprised German knights. Whilst active in the Holy Land, they
were also given the privileges over the conquest and possession of pagan Prussia. So
successful was the Order that with their absorption of the Order of the Sword
Brethren and the purchase of Estonia from Denmark they became a sovereign power
in their own right. Likewise, the Hospitallers, after the fall of the Latin kingdoms,
established themselves on the islands of Rhodes and then Malta.
The Templars were equally successful in a different secular enterprise. Houses
were established in Europe in order to collect recruits and, more importantly, revenue,
which was then transferred to the front line, as it were, in the Holy Land. The
administrative network necessary to achieve this became highly efficient, and secular
lords began to use them to store and transfer money. Effectively the Order became an
international bank, holding and loaning money to many of the major European
princes. Indeed their success in this role was a major cause of their downfall. One ot
CHIVALRY: THE KNIGHTLY CODE -