The Templars, the Hospitallers and the Crusades

This stimulating volume of sixteen essays is dedicated to Alan J. Forey, a leading expert in the history of the medieval military religious orders. Divided into four parts, the essays are grouped into sections focusing on the Iberian Peninsula, the Eastern Mediterranean, the trial of the Templars and its aftermath, and the military orders in the late medieval and early modern periods. The volume begins with a touching introduction by the editors, Helen J. Nicholson and Jochen Burgtorf, filled with anecdotes illuminating Forey’s academic career and his kindness to younger scholars, as well as his patience, thoughtfulness and humour. Karl Borchardt’s piece on supplications related to the Iberian military orders in the mid-fourteenth century opens the first section. Readers will find much of interest in the supplications calendared here, but this reviewer’s favourite was a request of one Spanish king to the pope asking that his illegitimate son—a mere eight years old at the time—be made Master of the Order of Santiago. Youth and illegitimacy need not get in the way of high office when you have a powerful father. Elena Bellomo surveys the largely unsuccessful efforts of the Order of Santiago in the mid-thirteenth century to expand into North Africa, France, Italy, the Latin Empire of Constantinople and the Holy Land, while Maria Bonet Donato examines the reasons underpinning the successful establishment of the Hospitallers in Aragon in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the final chapter of the section, Jochen Burgtorf explores how the Templars and Hospitallers perceived their own relationships with the papacy in the twelfth century in light of their papal privileges and correspondence as well as the small amount of historical writing produced by the Order of St John that survives in a fourteenth-century manuscript

Art history · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Medieval History and Crusades