Rory MacLellan
Though only arising in the aftermath of the First Crusade (1095–99), the military-religious orders soon came to dominate the crusading movement. While not technically crusaders themselves, not having sworn a crusade vow, these groups of soldier-monks would become mainstays of each major crusade expedition to the Eastern Mediterranean. They also saw service in the other main crusade theatres: Iberia, North Africa, and the Baltic. In the guise of the Knights Hospitaller, they could even be argued to have carried on the crusade well into the early modern period, until the order was expelled from Malta by Napoleon in 1798.
The military orders retain an enduring appeal. They are the subject of two regular conferences, one in the UK, the other in Poland, and feature regularly in crusade scholarship and other connected fields. Several military orders are still with us today as religious orders, chivalric orders, or charitable foundations, or a combination thereof, such as the Teutonic Order and several successors to the medieval Hospitallers, including the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the Venerable Order of St John, and the three Johanniterorden.
Fiction is rife with orders of knight-monks, whether the Jedi Knights of Star Wars, or actual Templars in Assassin’s Creed and The Da Vinci Code. But this fame has also led to darker appropriations. The imagery of the Teutonic Knights was adopted by Nazi Germany, particularly in its occupation of Poland and the Baltic, the order’s former stomping ground. As chapters in this volume show, other military orders have also been appropriated, with Fascist Italy making use of the Hospitallers during their occupation of Rhodes, whilst the far-right in both contemporary UK and Brazil is enamoured with the Templars.
But despite the persistent presence of the military orders in fiction, popular history, and academic study, and their political misuse in both the previous centuries and today, their post-medieval legacies have been largely overlooked. This collection is the first dedicated specifically to the modern memory of the military orders, pointing a way forward for scholars of crusade medievalism to bring this important aspect of the crusades further into the field.
The early memorialisation of the orders in Britain, which, along with the US, has been the country addressed most by scholars of crusade medievalism thus far, is dealt with in the first chapter of this volume. It focuses on how the military orders were remembered in four popular historical works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when they first became the subject of antiquarian study. This serves to bridge the gap between the orders’ medieval origins and the following chapters, which deal with the nineteenth through to the twenty-first centuries.
Lizzie Swarbrick uses an art-historical perspective to examine the long history of Templar conspiracy theories at Rosslyn Chapel, from the Freemasons to The Da Vinci Code, and how this has been exploited by the contemporary far-right. She offers a concise and comprehensive debunking of conspiratorial interpretations of the church’s famous ‘Templar’ carvings.
Nigel Hankin’s chapter concludes this initial focus on the legacy of the orders in Britain, discussing the Victorian Venerable Order of St John’s construction of a medieval identity by their collecting of medieval Hospitaller artefacts and occupation of Hospitaller sites. They then used this medieval past to build a historical justification for medical activities like the St John Ambulance, the export of which to colonies abroad saw the Venerable Order become part of the network of empire.
The following three chapters expand the volume’s focus to countries that have seen little attention in English language scholarship on crusade medievalism. Photeine Perra offers the first academic study of the legacy of the orders in modern Greece. This ground-breaking piece focuses on the reception of the Hospitallers in the country, particularly in Rhodes and the Dodecanese. Perra demonstrates how that order’s history there presents a fascinating conundrum. It can neither be fully cast as one of alien invaders, as it can in the Muslim world, nor can the Hospitallers be easily adopted as part of Greece’s own historical identity, as Catholic countries such as Malta have done, because of their confessional and cultural differences. In addition, the Italian occupation of the island (1912–43) and their restoration of many Hospitaller monuments later left the order tainted by association with Fascist Italy. Instead of being adopted as enemies or ancestors, the Hospitallers are largely disregarded by most Rhodiots.
Ignacio García Lascurain Bernstorff takes our focus to the Americas, examining the place of the military orders in nineteenth-century Mexico, where the newly independent country sought three times to create a military order of its own. Meanwhile, several Mexicans continued to emphasise their connections to Spain through their membership of the Spanish military orders.
Finally, Luiz Felipe Anchieta Guerra’s chapter brings the legacy of the military orders right up to the present day, examining how they have been adopted by the Brazilian far-right and in particular supporters of Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro. Through a study of memes and eccentric publicity stunts, he shows how the actual veracity of these medievalisms, or the fact that Brazil lacks a medieval history of its own, does not mean that they should be dismissed out of hand but subjected to serious study.
Together, the chapters point towards several potential avenues for future research: the early formation of the memory of the military orders in the early modern period beyond Britain; the debunking of classic Templar pseudohistories; the collecting habits of the Order of Malta and other surviving military orders; the modern perception of military orders in their former territories; the creation of military orders to solidify new national identities; political crusade medievalism in countries without a medieval or crusade history. These are all valuable lines of inquiry and will help elucidate further not only the military orders and their place in history, but also the wider consequences and importance of the crusade movement in which they played a key role.