The Cistercian model of organization had hardly been developed before it had already become an essential element of religious corporations in general. Other religious congregations quickly took over the foundational principles of the Cistercians’ innovative structure, and they did so in a variety of different ways. This fact casts a distinctive light on both the flexibility of such rationally formed instruments of organization and on their power of innovation. Only a few examples of the wide range of possibilities can be noted here.
In the forefront of those religious congregations that quickly imitated the Cistercian model was a group that sought in 1142 to diffuse alienating strife among its members by entering into a fraternal relationship of prayer with the Cistercians: the Premonstratensians.1 Under the charismatic leadership of the wandering preacher Norbert of Xanten, introduced above, an alliance in the old tradition expanded after 1120 from the mother monastery at Prémontré. In legal terms, the members of the new alliance were proprietary monasteries of Norbert’s. Its leading houses were Floreffe in Namur and Cappenberg in Westphalia. As the alliance multiplied in the following decades, its monasteries offered themselves, on the basis of their extremely strict way of life according to the Ordo monasterii, as an alternative of the vita canonica to the monastic tradition of the Cistercians.
In the beginning this alliance understood itself, as a whole, almost like an enclosed community, one in which Norbert took on a role almost like a bishop. But after his departure in 1126 to take his position as archbishop of Magdeburg, the group was forced to orient itself in fundamentally new ways. Although as archbishop Norbert continued to look out for his followers in his old congregation, as the accounts of his life emphasize, and although he established a common life for the clerics in his diocese, the disciples he had left behind remained without a leader. They thus faced the fearful possibility that their cluster of monasteries might be dissolved or at least that the affairs of individual monasteries might become subject to the interventions of local bishops.
The Cistercian model stood ready as a way to counterbalance any loss of leadership and to secure a lasting stability by way of statutes, authorities, and organizations—especially the general chapter—that would be valid apart from personal ties. The driving force behind the congregation’s remaking of itself on this model, and in that sense the actual founder of the Order, was Hugh of Fosses, who had so long accompanied Norbert on his preaching tours2 and whom Norbert had established as abbot of Prémontré when faced with the dissolution (dissolutio) of the congregation after his departure for Magdeburg. Shortly thereafter the other monasteries received an abbot and thereby established themselves for the first time as independent corporations. They were able, by means of common statutes that were put in force in 1130, to come together in a new way.3 The programmatic statements recorded in those statutes asserted that there was an indissoluble unity among the abbeys, that the Rule was to be observed by all in a unified manner, and that the same way of life, the same habit, and the same liturgical books were to be common to all.4 When a second body of statutes was drawn up around the middle of the twelfth century, it recorded the same ideals more firmly still: uniformity both in outward customs (uniformitas exterius servata in moribus) and in inward unity of the heart (unitas, que interius servanda est in cordibus) were to reign over all.5
Even before the completion of the first statutes, the circles of Prémontré had already held general chapters that took on tasks like those found among the Cistercians. These chapters were now established in the statutes as a central authority. The statutes now also regulated visitations, which were both to be carried out with paternal care (paterna sollicitudine) among daughter houses and to ensure the observance of a common order. The second redaction of the statutes then established a broader and more expansive practice of visitation, one that was unknown among the Cistercians. It would extend control along lines of filiation—for the first time in the monastic world—by way of building provinces, so-called circaries, in which visitors (circatores) were to relieve the father-abbots of the burdens of supervision.6
From the alliance of monasteries around Norbert of Xanten, the Premonstratensian Order7 had thus emerged as an independent legal body. Pope Innocent II confirmed its existence in 1131 and at the same time gave the new Order official papal protection.
From the beginnings of this process of institutionalization, efforts were made to expand the Premonstratensian ranks by taking over established monasteries as well as by establishing new foundations. Already the first statutes recorded, under the rubric “On constructing new abbeys” (de construendis abbatiis),8 outlined the process: how at least twelve canons were to be provided with necessities like a copy of the Rule, Mass books, and psalters, how they were to be sent out from an abbey to a suitable locale for the founding of a new settlement, and how they were to establish that settlement promptly. In the second half of the twelfth century the Order already encompassed two hundred abbeys.
Alongside a supportive nobility who were also strongly interested in founding women’s communities, it was above all reform-minded bishops who supported male settlements and who sought to integrate those communities into their diocesan organizations. To be sure, an orientation toward pastoral care had to develop first. In the beginning contemporary observers still saw the Premonstratensians as contemplatively oriented hermits,9 but already by 1123, with the founding of the community of Ilbenstadt in the Wetterau, the archbishop of Mainz had made provision for the enjoyment of parochial rights. The foundation of Varlar near Coesfeld received baptismal, burial, and preaching rights from its beginnings in 1129. In a charter issued in 1144 for the Swabian community of Roggenburg, Pope Lucius II explicitly conferred on the Premonstratensians the right to discharge such duties directly rather than through appointed secular clergy. The cathedral chapters of Havelberg, Ratzeburg, and Brandenburg, too, taken over by the Premonstratensians after Norbert’s death, were harnessed for pastoral work within the structures of episcopal organization. The Premonstratensians thus grew slowly, with a force that varied by time and place, into established patterns of pastoral care.
They also changed their stance with regard to their women’s communities rather quickly.10 Around 1146/47 a Benedictine abbot and careful observer of Premonstratensian affairs, Herman of Tournai, described how “Norbert worked to convert not only men but also women followers, so that today in various places belonging to Prémontré more than a thousand of them can be seen serving God in such hard discipline and under permanent silence as was hardly ever the case in the strictest of male communities.”11 Yet his view was already outdated: the double monastery in Prémontré itself had already been disbanded by the end of the 1130s, with the women’s community then relocated to the somewhat distant house of Fontanelles. Other double monasteries suffered similar fates, although there remained strong legal and pastoral ties between men’s and women’s convents. In France especially, aversion toward women’s monasteries grew so strong that between 1154 and 1176 the Premonstratensian general chapter went so far as to prohibit the founding of any more women’s communities. In view of the pressures of a period of remarkably strong growth, the measure was in any case not enforceable, and in the reform statutes of 1236 women were once again quite regularly the subject of legislation, which now also included a distinction between choir nuns (sorores cantantes) and conversae (sorores non cantantes).
Premonstratensian monasteries, like those of the Cistercians, were scattered over all of Latin Christendom, including the Holy Land—though not in a comparably dense network, but rather with a notable concentration in the northern and northeastern regions of modern France, in the region of modern Belgium and the Netherlands, and in the middle and lower Rhine.12 The three primary abbeys of the Order—Floreffe, Cuissy, and Saint Martin in Laon (the last a community that at first, before the founding of Prémontré, had resisted Norbert’s reform)—all lay within the French-speaking region.
The ideal of uniformity (uniformitas) had been embraced in all houses recorded in the Premonstratensian statutes from the middle of the twelfth century. But that ideal, in contrast to inner unity (unitas), proved difficult to enforce strictly in every house.13 In this respect the challenge was not with larger and highly ambitious houses, such as Steinfeld in the Eifel, which later had a large and widespread network of daughter houses, including the renowned monastery of Strahov in Prague. Rather, the challenge centered on the divergence between those houses that felt themselves to belong to Prémontré and those founded from Magdeburg that for the most part belonged to a visitation circuit centered in Saxony. That divergence was never quite overcome, even deep into the later Middle Ages. And even though from the 1140s these communities made repeated attempts to find common ground on such things as the habit or norms governing visitation and attendance at general chapter, there always remained a certain degree of difference. In the peripheral regions, especially, a great divergence from the practices of the center persisted regarding the frequency of attending general chapters. Yet the tolerance of such a range of variation clearly diffused many potential tensions within the Order and thus helped to maintain a careful balance.
Not least because of their great success in missionary and colonizing work east of the Elbe among the Wends,14 within a few years after their appearance among the ranks of the regular canons, the Premonstratensians reached a status similar to that of the Cistercians among the monks.
With a speed similar to the Premonstratensians, the congregation of the canons of Arrouaise15 also adopted the Cistercian model. Founded in Flanders in 1090, the abbey lived according to the Ordo novus, and already in the second quarter of the twelfth century some nineteen foundations belonged to its circle, most established through new foundations, appropriations, or transfers facilitated by founders from among the lesser nobility. Thereafter further foundations were made in England, Scotland, Silesia, and France. By around 1129/32 there is already evidence of a general chapter, charged with supervision of practices of visitation and with making all major decisions regarding matters of supreme judicial authority and legislation. From the end of the twelfth century the abbot of Arrouaise came to occupy a central place, especially given his right to make universal visitation and to confirm all abbatial elections—a remarkable preeminence, one that the Cistercians never granted to the abbot of Cîteaux.
The Englishman Gilbert of Sempringham (ca. 1083/89–1189),16 who during the 1130s had begun in his hometown in England a religious community specially focused on the salvation of women, also made early use of the Cistercian model of organization. The impetus for his move was precisely a rejection by the Cistercian Order, which had refused the supervision of women. In 1147 he tried to step down from his position of charismatic leadership, asking the Cistercian general chapter to supervise his two monasteries. In contrast to Stephen of Obazine and the congregation of Savigny, he was unsuccessful. Thereafter he undertook considerable changes in organizational structure. He transformed his women’s monasteries into double monasteries by adding clerics who were to live according to the Rule of Augustine and by directing the women to live according to the Rule of Saint Benedict.
He also gave to these monasteries statutes that he himself had written, these strongly influenced by the Cistercian Carta caritatis. The construction of the Order they outlined was, however, more strongly centralized. Through overseers both male and female (scrutatores and scrutatrices) who were sent out by the “master” (or prior general), individual houses could be tied in to the strict leadership of the Order. These in turn were limited only by the general chapter, whose participants also included the heads of female religious houses. Around the end of the twelfth century this Order, the only one founded in England, had eleven double monasteries.
After a certain delay on the part of Grand Chartreuse, in 1140/41 the Carthusians,17 whose houses in the beginning shared “no fixed ties of an institutional nature,”18 finally held a general chapter that consisted of the priors of all houses. A second general chapter followed a year later, and another in 1155; thereafter, however, one was held every year. Notably, at the 1155 chapter every individual house as well as each local bishop had to declare readiness to renounce any claims to having special rights. The Carthusians had thereby formed themselves into an order.19 The assembly, as a central organization, occupied a sovereign place, with absolute authority over not only legislation but also visitation, correction, appointments to office, and matters of wealth and economy in all houses. It thus had to fear neither the competing rights of individual charterhouses nor the respective local bishops.
But the general chapter was in turn strongly influenced by the Grand Chartreuse itself, which remained revered as the “mother and nurturer of other houses.”20 Of the eight diffinitors who guided the course of business and crafted the chapter’s legislative measures, four were members of the Grand Chartreuse, along with the prior himself. The result was a relation of five to four. Neither Cîteaux nor Prémontré had known such an exalted position, but they were also not motherhouses of an order that remained, with respect to its size, a governable organization, one that at the end of the thirteenth century numbered only sixty settlements.
An unusual formulation gave the Carthusian general chapter a spiritual foundation for its remarkable power to influence affairs, insofar as it was described as acting in the place of God.21 Even if one could thereby rightly conclude (or at least infer convincingly from the context) that the Carthusian Order never had to be reformed because it was never deformed, the Carthusians not only continually issued corrective legislation but also rapidly and repeatedly expanded and refined their normative frameworks. In the twelfth century alone, by around 1140 extensions (Supplementa) had been written for Guigo’s Consuetudines, and between 1141 and 1151 as well as around 1170 two further statutory texts appeared, to which were appended further Supplementa around the end of the century.22 But as the Carthusians’ extension of these laws did not deprive the older texts of their validity, the scope of their legal corpus was able to grow continually.
In view of such rapid and successful spread of an originally Cistercian principle of organization, it should not be overlooked that after what were very often promising beginnings, many loosely organized reform congregations often stagnated as they moved toward stabilization. This was especially the case among the regular canons, who, except for the Premonstratensians and the Order of Arrouaise, never established transregional orders. A prominent example in this regard is the congregation of regular canons of Springiersbach. It had presumably held a general chapter in the year 1125, even before the Premonstratensians did, but it was hindered from further consolidation and autonomy because of unavoidable entanglements in the tensions of territorial politics between the archbishop of Trier and the Rhineland Count Palatinate—whose “house-monastery” was Springiersbach.23
These examples of quick takeovers, or at least attempted takeovers, must be extended to include an analysis of three special structural developments, each of which brought both the old and the very new together with the Cistercian constitutional elements discussed above. That both old and new were possible reveals yet again the power and adaptability of the Cistercians’ inventions. These possibilities are here explored first with a consideration of the transformation of the old congregation of Cluny into a religious order, second with the consolidation of the church’s military orders, especially the Templars, and third with the establishment of the hospital orders.
To the first point: It was not only the recently founded religious congregations that made use of the new organizational form of an order. The older ones, which were bound together above all by virtue of property rights, also transformed themselves on the Cistercian model over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The process was certainly not the result of any automatic adaptation of corresponding institutions but rather something that unfolded often in the face of great difficulty of assimilation and that resulted in a variety of independent institutional forms.
To note only one significant example of such a transformation in the face of difficulty, the venerable and still powerful congregation of Cluny, the Cluniacensis ecclesia,24 had in the year 1200 reshaped itself into an order in the new sense, the Ordo Cluniacensis, with all of the usual structures. After decades of serious crisis, in that year a general chapter of the Cluniacs gathered together in the Cistercian manner, including all of the heads of the abbeys and priories subject to Cluny. It is clear from today’s perspective that a new Cluny was being built on the foundations of the traditional Cluny,25 a new creation of remarkable durability.
Under the aegis of Abbot Hugh V of Cluny, this assembly drew up a corpus of statutes that gave the congregation a new constitution. It provided for a regularly held general chapter to serve as the highest judicial and legislative authority, though admittedly it would share that authority with the abbot. It also again regulated practices of visitation. The abbot of Cluny did retain his universal right to visitation, but in practice his place was taken by those known as the Camerarii—those who presided over the Order’s provinces, which were now established after the model of the Premonstratensians and covered the entire area of Cluniac expansion. But there was also now provision, in the Cistercian manner, for visitation of the abbey of Cluny itself. Moreover, the abbot of Cluny now recognized the absolute authority of these statutes, insofar as he allowed them to include the statement “We also subject ourselves to the law” (etiam nos legi subjicimus).26 A long series of similar statutory texts followed in the next centuries. The most significant change of the constitution once again concerned practices of visitation. Pope Gregory IX enforced these practices through a reform bull in 1233, which very much against the monks’ will was aimed at improving what was still a quite inefficiently functioning Cluniac organization.27 The Camerarii in the provinces were now replaced by alternating visitors who were elected anew every year by the general chapter, independently from the power of the abbot of Cluny.
But whereas the Cistercians were committed from the beginning to an organization whose leadership was collegial and consensual, the Cluniacs were compelled laboriously to adapt their older, centralized, monarchical constitution to more contemporary forms of organization. The result was a compromise that led to quite distinct structures, in that the general chapter now competed with the abbot of Cluny over the claim to represent the Order and was able to define the limits of judicial and executive authority only at the cost of a certain tension. The Order never truly abandoned the vertical dominion of the head over its members.
To turn to the second point: in a Jerusalem that had been conquered by Christians on the First Crusade, high up on the Temple Mount in the royal palace (which had been transformed into the Al-Aqsa mosque), presumably from 1118 on there lived a group of knights who submitted themselves to the Latin Patriarch of the Holy City and promised to live in a strictly monastic way, serving Christ by offering protection to pilgrims on the way to visit the sites of the gospels. In 1129 these knights, now called Templars28 because of their place of residence, received at a synod in Troyes in France a rule that was issued because of the appeal of their leader Hugh of Payns.
The rule began with the following words:
We turn first to all those who despise following their own will and who are eager to offer knightly service, with a pure heart, to the highest king, and who move themselves, with eager care, to fill out the very noble armor of obedience, and to wear it permanently. And so we admonish you, who have until now lived the life of secular knighthood—the foundation of which was not Jesus Christ, and a way of life you embraced only for the favor of men—that you follow those whom God has chosen from the mass of damnation, and whom he has thereby called through his grace and mercy to the defense of the Holy Church, and that you hasten to join them forever.29
This rule further establishes in seventy-two chapters, drawn for the most part from the Rule of Saint Benedict, both the spiritual forms of the common life—such as the scope of worship and prayer and the demands of silence—and instructions on living together that were both practical and shaped by a monastic spirit, for example, the process of admitting novices, the common meal, modest clothing, care of the sick, and condemnation of consorting with women. Yet there are also regulations concerning a wide range of weapons, horses and their equipment, and squires. Other regulations condemned knightly games and entertainments, including hunting, while also allowing the possession of land and people.30
At first glance what seems like a strange combination of texts was in fact the complex result of an editorial project whose participants included Bernard of Clairvaux.31 The document faced the considerable skepticism not only of Bernard but also of many other office holders in the church. But by the time of the synod, it was already a widespread notion that the old concept of the “knight of Christ” (miles Christi)32 no longer needed to be understood as applying only to monks; their spiritual fight against evil could now be carried over to designate any struggle with arms against both those who disturbed Christian peace and against enemies of the faith. As early as the time of Augustine (354–430), any war that was justified in this sense had been legitimate. In the eleventh century, the bishops of southern France, during the Peace of God movement, had asked loyal knights to put the violent among them in their place; in 1059 Leo IX had called together an army to fight against the Normans in southern Italy with the promise of spiritual reward, and Gregory VII had developed the concept of the milites sancti Petri, the knights of Saint Peter. In this era there even emerged a certain spiritualization of knightly norms of conduct, for example through rituals such as the blessing of swords, already in evidence from 960, that soon cultivated the allure of the idea of crusade.33
Totally new, however, was the complete fusion of the life of the monastery with that of the military camp. That fusion required an articulation grounded in the world beyond, one that offered more than the prologue to the Rule quoted above. Armed combat and killing went beyond the furthest conceivable boundary of any actively led vita religiosa, for example, that of the regular canons. To save a soul and to kill a body before the soul had been saved seemed all the more mutually exclusive. Bernard of Clairvaux sought to legitimize precisely this kind of activity, however, with his work of 1136/37, In Praise of the New Knighthood (De laude novae militiae). Taking as his foil an evil, pompous knighthood that strove only for empty renown, Bernard praised those knights who fought for Christ, and he released them from all guilt: “But the knights may fight with good conscience the fight of the Lord and need never again fear either the sin of slaying an enemy, or the danger to their own lives. For the death that one suffers, or causes, for Christ, carries in itself no guilt, and earns the highest praise.”34
Bernard then turned to panegyric depictions of the way of life of the Knights of the Temple. In characterizing their sense of solidarity, he turned to a well-known passage from Acts 4:32, usually cited to describe monastic communities, about being of “one heart and one soul”; concerning the knights’ engagement in warfare, he emphasized that they armed themselves inwardly with faith and outwardly with armor. Comparative readings of the Old and New Testaments aided him in grounding the whole enterprise in the context of salvation history. With care and prudence, Bernard said, the knights enter combat, just as the Israelites were said to have taken calmly to battle. Just as Christ angrily drove the money changers from the temple, the knights now serve as its new guardians. They are like both lambs and lions, so that one actually does not know just what to call them—monks or knights? Yet it is fitting to call them both. “Such as these,” he concluded, “God has chosen, and he selects them as servants, from the ends of the earth, from among the strongest of Israel, so that they may guard and truly protect the resting place of the true Solomon, the Sepulcher, all of them entrusted with the sword, trained for battle.”
In 1139, shortly after Bernard wrote these lines, Pope Innocent II provided the Templars—or more precisely, as their official designation put it, the “Poor Knighthood of Christ and of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem” (Pauperes commilitones Christi templique Salomonici Hierosalemitanis)—a comprehensive privilege that took them under his protection and confirmed their property. He obligated them to poverty, obedience, and chastity—the evangelical counsels—and to life-long commitment to the Order and gave them the opportunity to adapt their rule to new circumstances by means of a general chapter.35 Documents from subsequent popes followed. These now also called upon ecclesiastical dignitaries to offer donations in support of the Templars. And in fact the properties of the Order grew considerably, both in the Holy Land and in Europe—a growth that, on the one hand, was at first pressingly necessary in order to meet the high cost of transport for supplies (horses, for example) but that, on the other hand, also led to considerable surpluses.36
The organization of the Order was functional, effective, and of remarkable refinement, to a degree that would not be seen again until the advent of the mendicant orders of the thirteenth century.37 A master of the Order served as head, and until at least 1200 he was represented by a seneschal, who in turn was accompanied by a marshal (and his deputy marshals) charged with provision. Each house was led by a commander (Komtur). Collectively the houses (initially those in Europe) organized themselves into provinces, under the leadership of a provincial master. There was a central chapter, with subsidiary provincial chapters. The entire Order organized itself into three groups of members: brothers who fought as knights, brothers who prayed as priests, and brothers who served as laborers.
The Templars’ military accomplishments in the Holy Land, despite a relatively small number of knights, were enormous. Among the armies of the kingdom of Jerusalem the Templars were the elite, serving in campaigns most often as both vanguard and rear guard. They were able to build fortifications at strategically critical points, first among them the fortress of Toron des Chevaliers, halfway between the port city of Jaffa and Jerusalem. But above all they truly shared the fate of the Holy Land, especially on the front lines—from the fateful battle at Hattin against Saladin in 1187 to the 1291 fall of Acre as the last bastion, where the fortress of the Templars held out the longest. Thereafter the Order’s future lay only in Europe, where its military strongpoints had long been. The knights remained most militarily active in the Iberian Peninsula and most economically significant in France, where they were in fact guardians of the French royal treasure. But their wealth, and the greed of the French king Philip IV, led to their annihilation and to Clement V’s dissolution of the Order in 1312.38
Other military orders of this kind emerged alongside the Templars in the Holy Land. What made them distinct was that they placed Christian love of neighbor at the core of their ideals and in that spirit dedicated themselves to charitable works such as caring for the sick and maintaining hospitals. The first among these associations was the Order of Lazarus, formed in Jerusalem around 1110; its members were lepers who both fought as soldiers and cared for their fellow sufferers.39 The second was the Hospitalers,40 who were also at first formed as a charitable community in Jerusalem in the second decade of the twelfth century and who then developed a military branch. The third was the Teutonic Order,41 founded as a military order in Acre in 1198 after many years of serving a hospital in that city. After the loss of Christian control of the Holy Land, in the first decade of the fourteenth century (after a brief interlude in Hungarian Transylvania), the Teutonic Order, with the castle Marienburg at its center, found a new field of activity against the pagan Prussians. From there the Order was able to build up its own territory.42 The Hospitalers, after their retreat from the Holy Land, also developed their own territory on the island of Rhodes, soon to become a bastion against the Ottoman Empire. The interweaving of monasticism and knighthood into a coherent way of life was a success story that lasted for centuries.43
A third structural development was the creation and institutional support of houses that cared for the sick. In the Middle Ages illness could render people helpless to a degree unimaginable today.44 For reasons none could explain, diseases (most often seen as the wrath of God) fell across whole stretches of the landscape. The plague was only one among them. There was also ergotism, known at the time as Saint Anthony’s Fire. Those who suddenly discerned the first signs of leprosy knew they were condemned to be lifelong outcasts. Those who suffered accidents might find themselves crippled, condemned to live as beggars. Illness for most thus meant both involuntary ostracism and poverty. Nothing fostered Christian love of neighbor in a more fundamental way than these kinds of calamities, and the response was a matter of both body and soul, since in the gospel of Matthew Christ had said, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me” (Matt 25:35-36).
In obedience to this command of caritas, love of neighbor, by the early Middle Ages many monasteries (the Cluniacs, as already noted, first among them) had already established the office of an almoner, who was also in charge of a hospice for strangers.45 Yet as the population grew in the twelfth century these arrangements were no longer sufficient, since especially in the thriving cities of the day an exploding population also meant a sharpened separation between the few rich and the broader masses—who lived at or below minimum subsistence levels and who were thus defenseless before every illness. This reality led to an “almost revolutionary re-evaluation of Christian caritas.”46
Laity who were both filled with compassion and concerned about their own salvation carried out the work of charity, founding houses where the sick received care and spiritual consolation as well as last rites and Christian burial. Such work required not only capital, caregivers, and priests but also, above all, a grounding in the institutional structures of the church. The church could appoint the necessary priests, carve out spaces for new institutions, recognize them legally in ways that set them alongside traditional monasteries, and approve the necessary statutes as well as align them with church law in general.47
After the military orders had undertaken considerable hospital-oriented work in the Holy Land, the popes, as well as a number of local bishops, also took on the task of creating a legal framework that would give an appropriate foundation for providing service to the ill.48 In this case that framework could again only be the establishment of an order.
Innocent III emerged as the decisive protagonist.49 In 1198 he first recognized a hospital that a layman named Guido (ca. 1153–1208) had recently founded in Montpellier and dedicated to the Holy Spirit. Innocent exempted that hospital from the power of the local bishop, allowed outside priests to work there, and obligated the local lay community to take a vow similar to that of monks: to serve the poor and sick and to care for them lovingly (caritative). Therefore the hospital and its affiliates, soon to be established, became religious institutions of the church.
Yet the process did not stop there. The establishment of an order also required a well-balanced plan. In 1201 Innocent III gave Guido the church of Santa Maria in Saxia, not far from the Vatican, along with the neighboring and long-established hospital of the English on the Tiber not far from the Castel Sant’Angelo. Before 1204 a new hospital under the patronage of the Holy Ghost had already been established there as a papal foundation. And in that year Innocent III issued a solemn charter of privileges that established statutes for the hospital, placed it under the protection of the Holy See, and granted a number of further rights. But above all the decree established a personal union with the Montpellier hospital of the same name. The core spiritual ideal was to give hospitalitas, hospitality toward those in need, which—as the text said—stood alongside those pious works by whose measure God would one day judge the good and the evil. After Guido’s death in 1208 the purely personal ties between the two communities and their respective affiliates were dissolved, with all of the communities then drawn together into a single order whose center was thenceforth in Rome and whose head, as summus rector, was also leader of the Roman hospital.
With this “Order of the Holy Spirit,” Innocent III had created a papal order, the first ever. The statutes he issued in 1204 were approved as a rule by the 1230s at the latest. In the first decades of the Order’s existence, there were tensions between Montpellier and Rome. But the energetic interventions of Gregory IX later brought these to an end, and by the second half of the thirteenth century the Order was in a position to spread, developing affiliations across wide areas of Europe. Its inner coherence was built on an organizational scheme modeled after the military orders, though their different missions and visions distinguished the two institutions.
The move from a more or less spontaneous practice of hospitalitas to a fully formed hospital order could take an entirely different path, however, albeit with certain structural similarities—as is clear from the example in what would eventually become one of the largest orders of its kind, the Order of Saint Anthony.50 It primarily took care of those who were severely ill from poisoning by ergot, a fungus often encountered in diets dependent on rye. Since contemporaries knew nothing of its cause, they could not protect themselves. Especially in years of heavy rain, the fungus spread over broad regions whose inhabitants fell ill by the thousands, as if by a plague, and for the most part they died in agony. Since victims felt themselves to be burning from within, they spoke of “holy fire.”
At the Benedictine priory of Saint-Didier-de-la-Motte (today Saint Antoine-l’Abbaye), between Grenoble and Valence, a church was believed to guard the bones of the Desert Father Anthony. There, from the eleventh century, great crowds of pilgrims began to gather. Among them were always many who suffered from ergotism and who prayed to the saint for healing as a last hope. Around 1096 some ten laymen organized themselves there into the brotherhood of Saint Anthony in order to help those in need. The number of members grew quickly, with women also joining in order to care for other women.
At the beginning this community remained completely independent of the Benedictine priory, which was still the manorial lord and which also guarded the pilgrims’ goal, the bones of Anthony. The priory merely tolerated the brotherhood, nothing more—and this, not least, was probably the reason that its leaders from the 1120s on were priests, who held a rank equal to that of the priest-monks of the priory.
The community was remarkably successful, since it aimed at spectacular cures by way of sound care, nourishment, and toxin-removing herbs. Already in 1123 the fraternity had been given hospitals in nearby cities. A hospital was also established at the priory itself, and by the end of the century it possessed over one hundred dependencies in Spain, Italy, Germany, and even the Holy Land. Pilgrims on their way from central Europe to Santiago in Galicia made their detours to visit Saint Anthony. Contemporaries no longer spoke of holy fire, but of Anthony’s fire—the place of healing had established the name of the illness.
Yet into the thirteenth century the center of this congregation, which now reached to the borders of Christendom, remained tolerated only as a guest on Benedictine soil. The brotherhood had never been allowed to build even its own church, although by now many of its members were clerics. Only in 1209 were the Benedictines compelled, by the archbishop of Vienne and in the name of the pope, to allow the building of a church. But thereafter the process of institutionalization moved quickly. Statutes were drawn up and approved by papal legates in 1232; in 1245 the entire network of hospitals received the protection of Saint Peter from Pope Innocent IV, who proved himself to be especially generous; and in 1247 came official recognition of an independent order that was to live according to the Rule of Saint Augustine. The struggle over the bones of Saint Anthony, so important symbolically, continued until 1297. But it came to an end in a way that is significant with respect to the era’s institutional history: Pope Boniface VIII released the Benedictine priory from its dependency to its mother monastery of Saint Peter in Montmajour near Arles and elevated the community itself to the status of an abbey. This community was then united to the hospital and all of its dependencies. Thereafter the abbey and its abbot were jurisdictionally the head and the center of the Order.
In the end, the success of this hard-fought establishment lay only in the fact that a religious organization was fulfilling one specialized task within the broad spectrum of the vita religiosa, that of hospitalitas, so perfectly that it became almost indispensable. In a certain analogous way the same was true of the hospitals of the Holy Spirit. A new type of order that can be called a functional order had thus been established in the twelfth century, and there were many more of them. If the phrase from Matthew “I was sick and you visited me” had been taken up by the hospital orders, the phrase “I was in prison and you visited me” became central for another order.
In 1198 John of Matha (1154–1213) and Felix of Valois (1127–1212) established the Trinitarians, an order dedicated to ransoming captive Christians from Muslim hands.51 The Mercedarians, founded in the first third of the thirteenth century by the Catalan Petrus Nolascus (1182/89–1249/56) with the support of King James I of Aragon and Raymond of Peñaforte, pursued the same goal.52 To note another example: around the years 1225/27, the priest Rudolf founded in Worms, with papal support, a community that took in repentant prostitutes and developed it into the far-flung Order of the Reuerinnen or Magdalens.53 Its inspiration was the word of Christ in the gospel of Luke: “Her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven loves little” (Luke 7:47). New research findings, however, show that the founding’s core ideal was out of touch with reality.54 It is far more accurate to say (as it has now been argued) that the papacy, together with the German bishops, saw that by exploiting Rudolf’s charisma they could create a new, independent order, which offered a home exclusively for women—not only for former prostitutes but also for all women who wanted to live a monastic vita religiosa.
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1 See pp. 118–20. On the following, see Stefan Weinfurter, “Norbert von Xanten und die Entstehung des Prämonstratenserordens,” in Barbarossa und die Prämonstratenser (Göppingen: Gesellschaft für staufische Geschichte, 1989), 67–100; see also, for a general outline, Bernard Ardura, Prémontrés: histoire et spiritualité (Saint-Étienne: Publications de la Université de Saint-Etienne, 1995).
2 Kaspar Elm, “Hugo von Fosses. Erster Abt von Prémontré und Organisator des Prämonstratenserordens,” in Studien zum Prämonstratenserorden, ed. Irene Crusius and Helmut Flachenecker (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 35–55.
3 On the law governing the Premonstratensian Order, see Bruno Krings, “Das Ordensrecht der Prämonstratenser vom späten 12. Jahrhundert bis zum Jahr 1227. Der liber consuetudinum und die Dekrete des Generalkapitels,” Analecta Praemonstratensia 69 (1993): 107–242; also Bruno Krings, “Zum Ordensrecht der Prämonstratenser bis zur Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts,” Analecta Praemonstratensia 76 (2000): 9–28; Jörg Oberste, “Règle, coutumes et statuts. Le système normatif des prémontrés aux XIIe–XIIIe siècles,” in Regulae—Consuetudines—Statuta, ed. Cristina Andenna and Gert Melville (Münster: LIT, 2005), 261–76.
4 Les premiers statuts de l’Ordre de Prémontré. Le clm 17174 (XIIe siècle), ed. Raphaël van Waefelghem (Leuven: Smeesters, 1913), 15–74.
5 Les statuts de Prémontré au milieu de XII e siècle, ed. Placide Lefevre and Wilfried Marcel Grauwen (Averbode: Praemonstratensia, 1978), 1–52, here 1.
6 Jörg Oberste, Visitation und Ordensorganisation (Münster: LIT, 1996), 160–251.
7 Gert Melville, “Zur Semantik von ordo im Religiosentum der ersten Hälfte des 12. Jahrhunderts. Lucius II., seine Bulle vom 19. Mai 1144, und der ‘Orden’ der Prämonstratenser,” in Crusius and Flachenecker, Studien zum Prämonstratenserorden, 201–24.
8 Les premiers statuts de l’Ordre de Prémontré, ed. Waefelghem, 33.
9 Libellus de diversis ordinibus et professionibus qui sunt in aecclesia, ed. Giles Constable and Bernard S. Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 56–72.
10 Bruno Krings, “Die Prämonstratenser und ihr weiblicher Zweig,“ in Crusius and Flachenecker, Studien zum Prämonstratenserorden, 75–105.
11 Roger Wilmans, ed., Ex Heermanni Laudunensis libro III, MGH 12:657–59, cited from Krings, “Die Prämonstratenser,” 75–76n2.
12 Norbert Backmund, Monasticon Praemonstratense, 3 vols. (Straubing: Attenkofer, 1949–1956), vol. 1 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983). On one exemplary region of expansion, see Ingrid Ehlers-Kisseler, Die Anfänge der Prämonstratenser im Erzbistum Köln (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997).
13 Jörg Oberste, “Zwischen uniformitas und diversitas. Zentralität als Kernproblem des frühen Prämonstratenserordens (12./13. Jahrhundert),” in Crusius and Flachenecker, Studien zum Prämonstratenserorden, 225–50.
14 Franz Winter, Die Prämonstratenser des zwölften Jahrhunderts und ihre Bedeutung für das nordöstliche Deutschland (Aalen: Scientia, 1865).
15 On the following, see Ludo Milis, L’ordre des chanoines réguliers d’Arrouaise, 2 vols. (Bruges: De Temple, 1969). See also Monumenta Arroasiensia. Textes narratifs et diplomatiques de l’abbaye d’Arrouaise, ed. Ludo Milis and Benoît-Michel Tock (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000).
16 On the following, see Brian J. Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order c. 1130–c. 1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Katharine Sykes, Inventing Sempringham. Gilbert of Sempringham and the Origins of the Role of the Master (Berlin: LIT, 2011).
17 On the following, see Florent Cygler, Das Generalkapitel im hohen Mittelalter (Münster: LIT, 2002), 205–313.
18 Cygler, Das Generalkapitel, 210.
19 Cygler, Das Generalkapitel, 221.
20 Cygler, Das Generalkapitel, 220.
21 Cygler, Das Generalkapitel, 205.
22 With detailed evidence, see Florent Cygler, “Ausformung und Kodifizierung des Ordensrechts vom 12. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert. Strukturelle Beobachtungen zu den Cisterziensern, Prämonstratensern, Kartäusern und Cluniazensern,” in De ordine vitae, ed. Gert Melville (Münster: LIT, 1996), 7–58, here 22.
23 Odilo Engels, “Der Erzbischof von Trier, der rheinische Pfalzgraf und die gescheiterte Verbandsbildung von Springiersbach im 12. Jahrhundert,” in Secundum regulam vivere, ed. Gert Melville (Windberg: Poppe, 1978), 87–104.
24 See pp. 65–67.
25 On the following, see Gert Melville, “Cluny après ‘Cluny.’ Le treizième siècle: un champ de recherches,” Francia 17 (1990): 91–124; Gert Melville, “Die cluniazensische ‘Reformatio tam in capite quam in membris.’ Institutioneller Wandel zwischen Anpassung und Bewahrung,” in Sozialer Wandel im Mittelalter, ed. Jürgen Miethke and Klaus Schreiner (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1994), 249–97.
26 Gaston Charvin, ed., Statuts, chapitres généraux et visites de l’Ordre de Cluny (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1965), 1:42.
27 Franz Neiske, “Das Verhältnis Clunys zum Papsttum,” in Die Cluniazenser in ihrem politisch-sozialen Umfeld, ed. Giles Constable et al. (Münster: LIT, 1998), 279–320.
28 On the following, see Alain Demurger, Die Templer (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2004).
29 “Die Regelfassung von Troyes,” in La Règle du Temple, ed. Henri de Curzon (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1886), 11–12; English trans. by J. M. Upton-Ward, The Rule of the Templars (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1997, 2008), here 19.
30 Christian Vogel, Das Recht der Templer (Berlin: LIT, 2007), 171–235.
31 Franco Cardini, I poveri cavalieri del Cristo (Rimini: Il Cerchio, 1992).
32 André Vauchez, “La notion de Miles Christi dans la spiritualité occidentale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” in Chevalerie et christianisme aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, ed. Martin Aurell and Catalina Girbea (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011), 67–75.
33 Carl Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1935; Reprint Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980); “Militia Christi” e Crociata nei secoli XI–XIII (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1992).
34 De laude novae militiae, SBOp 3:205–39; De laude novae militiae, in Bernhard von Clairvaux, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Gerhard B. Winkler (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1990); In Praise of the New Knighthood, trans. Daniel O’Donovan, CF 19 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2000), here 39. See also Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994; repr. 2012); and Alan Butler, The Knights Templar (New York: Shelter Harbor Press, 2014).
35 Vogel, Das Recht der Templer, 38–40.
36 Vogel, Das Recht der Templer, 332–42.
37 Vogel, Das Recht der Templer, 237–331.
38 Jochen Burgtorf et al., eds., The Debate on the Trial of the Templars: 1307–1314 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
39 Kay Peter Jankrift, Leprose als Streiter Gottes (Münster: LIT, 1997); David Marcombe, Leper Knights: The Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem in England, c. 1150–1544 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2003).
40 Jürgen Sarnowsky, Die Johanniter (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011). The best account in English remains Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Knights of St. John in Jerusalem and Cyprus, c. 1050–1310 (London: Macmillan, 1967).
41 Jürgen Sarnowsky, Der deutsche Orden (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007). A reliable account in English for the Holy Land is Nicholas Morton, The Teutonic Knights in the Holy Land, 1190–1291 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2009). For northern Europe, see Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980).
42 Udo Arnold, “Das Ordensland Preußen,” in Der Deutsche Orden in Europa (Göppingen: Gesellschaft für Staufische Geschichte, 2004), 219–68.
43 For general overviews, see Prier et combattre, ed. Nicole Bériou and Philippe Josserand (Paris: Fayard, 2009).
44 Kay Peter Jankrift, Krankheit und Heilkunde im Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003).
45 Joachim Wollasch, “Eleemosynarius. Eine Skizze,” in Sprache und Recht. Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters, ed. Karl Hauck and Karl A. Kroeschell (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986), 972–95.
46 Cristina Andenna, “Neue Formen der Frömmigkeit und Armutsbewegung,” in Verwandlungen des Stauferreichs—Drei Innovationsregionen im mittelalterlichen Europa, ed. Bernd Schneidmüller et al. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010), 246–63, here 250. Gert Melville, “‘Liebe und tue, was du willst!’ Eine Herausforderung für den mittelalterlichen Menschen,” in Sorge, ed. Gert Melville, Gregor Vogt-Spira, and Mirko Breitenstein (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015), 79–95.
47 Gisela Drossbach, “Das Hospital. Eine kirchenrechtliche Institution? (ca. 1150–ca. 1350),” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonistische Abteilung 87 (2001): 510–22.
48 Anna Esposito and Andreas Rehberg, eds., Gli ordini ospedalieri tra centro e periferia (Rome: Viella, 2007).
49 On the following, see Gisela Drossbach, Christliche caritas als Rechtsinstitut. Hospital und Orden von Santo Spirito in Sassia (1198–1378) (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004).
50 On the following, see Adalbert Mischlewski, Grundzüge der Geschichte des Antoniterordens (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1976); Isabelle Brunet, “Les Institutions charitables de Saint-Antoine. Chef-lieu de l’Ordre Hospitalier des Antonins du XIIe au XVe siècles,” PhD dissertation, Université de Lyon, 1991.
51 Cosimo Damiano Fonseca, “La regola dei Trinitari oltre gli ideali degli ordini religioso-cavallereschi,” in Medioevo, Mezzogiorno, Mediterraneo. Studi in onore di Mario Del Treppo, ed. Gabriella Rossetti and Giovanni Vitolo (Naples: Liguori, 2000), 1:147–59; James Matthew Powell, “Innocent III, the Trinitarians, and the Renewal of the Church, 1198–1200,” in James Matthew Powell, The Crusades, the Kingdom of Sicily, and the Mediterranean (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2007), ix, 245–54.
52 Anne Müller, “Gefangenenloskauf unter der Augustinusregel. Aspekte institutioneller Entwicklung im Mercedarierorden von den Anfängen bis 1317,” in Regula Sancti Augustini. Normative Grundlage differenter Verbände im Mittelalter, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Paring: Augustiner-Chorherren-Verlag, 2002), 477–514. See also James Brodman, Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), as well as his Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009).
53 Guido Cariboni, “Gregorio IX e la nascita delle ‘Sorores penitentes’ di Santa Maria Maddalena ‘in Alemannia,’” Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 25 (1999): 11–44.
54 See Jörg Voigt, Beginen im Spätmittelalter. Frauenfrömmigkeit in Thüringen und im Reich (Cologne: Böhlau, 2012), 44–63.