5 Taking the Cross and Asserting Freedom Catholic Liberalism, the Military Orders, and the Perception of the Crusades in Mexico in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Ignacio García Lascurain Bernstorff

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200802-6

This study analyzes the presence of members of the Iberian military orders and the depiction of the Crusades in Mexican literature as an aspect of Catholic liberal thought in Mexico in the nineteenth century. By 1840 there were a handful members of these military orders residing in Mexico. They were Classicist intellectuals and politicians, who espoused a moderate Catholic Liberalism in cultural debates, particularly the Knight of Montesa, José Justo Gómez de la Cortina († 1860), who wrote the only known Mexican piece about the Templars and held a public debate on the utility of learning the history of the Crusades in 1844. All these knights also had strong ties to Spain. As far as it is possible to determine from the sparse sources, their membership of these military orders was a remnant of their experiences in Spain.

Mexico and the Military Orders

In 1910, Antonio Rossi, writing the history of his Ligurian hometown Santo Stefano d’Aveto, claimed that the parish’s painting of the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe had been aboard the galley of Giovanni Andrea Doria († 1606), a prominent knight of Santiago, in the Battle of Lepanto on October 17, 1571.1 One of the knight’s descendants, Cardinal Giuseppe Maria Doria Pamphilij († 1816), had bestowed the painting in 1811 on Santo Stefano, one of the oldest fiefs of his family.2 If Lepanto can be regarded under certain definitions as the last great Crusade battle – understood as a multinational endeavor under the guidance of the Papacy, usually against a Muslim opponent – then it is clear that the Crusades and Latin America, where European colonies were still in their infancy in 1571, belong to different historical periods, having few entanglements other than this connection with Lepanto.3

However, the early incorporation of American societies into the West raises the question of the standing and presence of the military orders and of their ‘genetic shibboleth’, the Crusade, in nineteenth-century Mexico. Following the distinction made by Jonathan Riley-Smith, scholarship has shown that both the military-religious orders ‘proper’ – such as the Hospitallers of St. John and the Teutonic Knights – and the so-called Christian chivalric orders (the five Iberian military orders, but also the Tuscan Order of St. Stephen and even the Order of the Golden Fleece) carried the notion of Crusade into the Early Modern Period.4 It is in this tenor that this study explores the memory of the military orders in nineteenth-century Mexico. This chapter shall show that, in the middle of this period, the original Iberian military orders disappeared completely from the country, replaced by a new Mexican order that positioned itself as their heir. At the same time, a diffuse awareness of the Crusades entrenched the earlier military orders in popular memory.

The presence of the military orders in Mexico has seen very little study. In the early twentieth century, amateur historians compiled lists of members of the orders but without citing their sources.5 The scattered nature of the sources remains difficult. There is no single central public archive (either state or ecclesiastical) holding this information.6 Departing from this limited historiography, which underlined the paramount role played by the creation, or at least proposal, of ‘military orders’ inspired by the Spanish orders as an instrument of fostering the creation of a national identity for newly independent Mexico, this present study may shed some light on this largely unexplored field by discussing three understudied sources: the ‘Canto a los Caballeros Guadalupanos’ (1855) of the printer Santiago Pérez, the short essay Los Templarios (1829/1840) by the Knight of Montesa José Justo Gómez de la Cortina († 1860), as well as a letter regarding the departure of a Knight of Malta from Mexico in the early 1840s.

A Difficult Spanish Heritage

The military orders were never prominent in the Early Modern New World. One can still ask, as the Quebecois notary Joseph-Edmond Roy († 1913) did, why such vibrant communities did not ‘come to the American forests’ and ‘add great and beautiful pages to their already glorious history’.7 While geopolitics may explain the complete absence of the Teutonic Knights, the sparse presence of the Order of Malta and even of the Spanish military orders, the latter by then subordinated to the crown, is striking. There were certainly structural problems. The failed proposal for an autonomous Mexican Maestranza (aristocratic militia) in 1790, despite Mexico having a considerable number of nobles in the last decades of the eighteenth century – both born in the New World and in Spain – was one of two major factors which impeded the flourishing and/or establishment of the military orders until the middle of the twentieth century.8 The other factor or, rather, event was the mass expulsion of Spaniards from Mexico ordered in March 1829, after an earlier unsuccessful attempt in December 1827.9 The expulsion forced the members of the aristocracy (from which the ranks of the military orders were recruited) to make a political decision: to go into exile or to definitively end collective forms of organization and action related to the Crown. Between 1827 and 1829 about 7,000 Spaniards left Mexico, mostly sailing first to New Orleans, from where they dispersed to other cities, especially Philadelphia, New York, Marseille, and Bayonne.10 Numerically speaking, the biggest role of the Military Orders before Mexican Independence was probably in the posting of the infantry regiment ‘Órdenes Militares’ to Mexico between 1815 and 1821. This regiment had been created by the four Spanish military orders in response to Spain’s participation in the anti-French War of the First Coalition (1793–97); the regiment was financed by the revenues of the orders’ commanderies.11 With the exception of some officers, the soldiers were not themselves members of the orders.

Still, recent historiography has underlined the lasting heritage of the military orders in Mexico through the creation of Mexican secular orders – especially the Order of Guadalupe, which defined itself as a Catholic ‘military order’.12 If it is true that the Spanish military orders, after their secularization in the sixteenth century, developed into ‘social capital tools’, in the words of Bourdieu, which fulfilled the integration of the élites (new and old) of the Spanish Empire into the Monarchy, it is worth asking whether these Mexican order(s) – only the Order of Guadalupe was actually created before the twentieth century – were really inspired by the old Spanish military orders rather than by other models such as France’s 1802 Legion of Honour or Spain’s Order of Charles III from the 1770s (itself also defined as a military order).13

The Illustrious and Distinguished Order of Our Lady of Guadalupe: Three Attempts at Creating an Autochthonous Military Order

Already in 1812, in the middle of the Mexican War of Independence, the lawyer, general, and independence leader Ignacio López Rayón († 1832) proposed in his Elementos Constitucionales the creation of four Mexican military orders: the Military Order of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Military Order of Hidalgo, the Military Order of the Eagle, and the Military Order of Allende. The number four being a reference to the four Spanish military orders of Santiago, Calatrava, Alcántara, and Montesa. Of these proposed creations, only the Order of Guadalupe was created.14 On February 20, 1822, the junta ruling Mexico prior to the coronation of Emperor Augustin of Mexico († 1824) approved the statues of the National and Distinguished Order of Guadalupe. Members were to be divided into three classes, without distinction between military and civilians (just between ecclesiastics and lay men): Knight Grand Crosses, Numerary Knights, and Super-numerary Knights. The Order was intended to be a purely meritocratic one, recognizing the dedication and merits of individual citizens.15 In both these respects, the Order of Guadalupe reproduced the model of the Order of Charles III, created in 1771, and which had exactly the same grades since it was first reformed in 1778.16 However, whereas the Order of Charles III required that knights have limpieza de sangre going back four generations on each side (but not noble ancestry), the Order of Guadalupe did not require this.17 In this sense, the Order of Guadalupe took the democratic paradigm of the Legion of Honour. Throughout its history, the order’s medal has been an oval in the middle of a cross, with the Virgin of Guadalupe on the front and the inscription ‘Religión, Independencia, Unión’ on the reverse. In the first incarnation of the order, the cross was a rudimentary petal cross, whereas in the second and the third incarnations, it was a cross pattée. Across all three creations, the Order was to be guided by the grand master, together with the grand chancellor, the fiscal (overseeing the internal regulations of the order), and the ‘clavero’, literally the Key-Holder, overseeing the finances. With every new incarnation of the order, the number of members was changed. In March 1823 the order ceased to exist for the first time with the abdication of the emperor and the proclamation of the First Republic.

On November 11, 1853, one of the former Grand Crosses of this first order, General Antonio López de Santa-Anna († 1876), recreated it as the acting President of Mexico. The aforementioned José Justo Gómez de la Cortina was the spiritus rector of the reestablishment, organizing the protocol, some of the important events, and the uniforms.18 The whole project was intended to create a corporation of Christian knights serving the nation, as recorded in his 1829 essay Idea general de la caballería, printed in his Cartilla histórica.

The restored order showed the consolidation of the country in those years, dominated by moderate Liberals striving for a republican system reconciled with the Catholic Church, yet at the same time proud of its roots in the French Revolution.19 Pope Pius IX approved the statutes on April 4, 1854, and almost every head of state of the European countries which had diplomatic relations with the young republic received the Grand Cross of the Order, regardless of their confession, including Emperor Napoleon III, Queen Victoria, Queen Isabella II of Spain, and the Prussian King Frederick William IV. According to the fashionable new organization of the military orders from the 1840s onward, a new division of ranks inspired by the Legion of Honour was introduced: members were now to be Knight Grand Cross, Knight Commander, or Knight. The grand master was the president himself, who used the titles ‘Benémerito de la Patria, General de División, Caballero Gran Cruz de la Real y Distinguida Orden Española de Carlos III, Presidente de la República Mexicana’ reflecting both his military career since the War of Independence (thus Benémerito de la Patria, as were all other officers who signed the Act of Independence) and his conciliatory policy toward Spain.20 Remarkably in this new creation, a bond with other orders and a lineage with the military orders of the crusades were asserted, as shown in two brief sources.

On December 20, 1854, there was a festive thanksgiving commemorating the first anniversary of the reestablishment of the Order. At eight o’clock a stately procession began from the National Palace (the ‘residence of the grand master’) in Mexico City to the Metropolitan Cathedral, located some 300 meters to the north. The procession, which included virtually all senior governmental officials, moved slowly under large canopies, in the midst of honor guards of grenadiers, and with bands playing in the background parallel to gun salutes. Upon arriving at the Cathedral, the knights placed themselves according to their status. At the right of the high altar, directly by the episcopal throne, the president – as grand master – took his place, together with his family. Opposite, to the left of the altar, the organizer of the ceremony, the commissioner of the municipal government of Mexico City José Algara y Gómez († 1867) had placed two balconies: one destined for the Diplomatic Corps and another ‘for the knights of foreign Orders’.21 In the latter were the prominent educator and former minister José María Lacunza († 1869), Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Pope Pius IX (the Pian Order), Juan Manuel de Lasquetty, Commander of the Order of Charles III and scion of a prominent merchant dynasty from Cádiz, the brothers and architects Juan and Ramón Agea, representing the ‘Italian [sic!] Order of Saint Gregory’ and Vicente de Iturrigaray y Jáuregui († 1869), Knight of the Order of Malta. José Justo Gómez was also there, standing at the entrance of the choir. He was also the leader of the ‘Commission of the Foreign Orders’, which acted as an advisory board at this creation of the Order of Guadalupe.22 Both Lacunza and Iturrigaray will play a role in the following pages.

The presence there of both Iturrigaray and Gómez shows that clearly the distinction of Riley-Smith between military and chivalric orders did not apply in the conception of the military orders in Mexico. In the notion ‘Órdenes Militares’ the Mexicans understood this to mean Christian-inspired merit orders concentrating the notables of a particular country, rather than a military-religious institution of members bound by professed vows living under a monastic rule. In the case of the Order of Malta, this judgment was neither completely wrong for the circumstances of the time (as will be shown later) nor even a local peculiarity.23 The Order of Guadalupe was a military order, again following in the steps of the Order of Charles III, simply by self-definition.

A year later, it became clear that the new Mexican order was not just on good terms with other chivalric orders, but that it saw itself as emulating the medieval military orders. The 88-page booklet Calendario nuevo de los Cruzados de la Nacional y Distinguida Orden Guadalupana, promovida y establecida por el libertador de la patria Don Agustín de Iturbide el año de 1822 y restaurada por su alteza serenísima, benemérito de la patria, general presidente Antonio López de Santa-Anna el año de 1853 by Santiago Pérez is divided into three parts: first, a meteorological, civic, and religious calendar (up to p. 28); second, a general introduction to the Order of Guadalupe with its statues, ceremonial, and a list of its members (pp. 29–52); and third, a poem entitled ‘Song to the Guadalupean Knights’ (‘Canto a los Caballeros Guadalupanos’). Already the name of the publication, ‘New calendar of the Crusaders of the National and Distinguished Guadalupean Order, fostered […] in the year 1853’, suggests an ideological range uniting the crusades with the newly self-denominated military order. This is partially true since Cruzados comes from ‘cruzar’ (cfr. Article 5 of the statues), meaning both entering into a military order and taking the cross.

The ‘Song’ makes these links even more explicit. The poem is divided into five parts. It praises the resurrection of the order and invites the knights to commit themselves to it. Whereas the second and the third parts complain about the difficult political and social situation in Mexico, the fourth part recounts the recreation of 1853, before stressing the commitment of the new knights in the last part. The first part situates the Order of Guadalupe in a direct descent from the medieval military orders. The first verses recall the hierarchy of the order and the desolate situation of the country, where, however, hope has begun to grow. As was already done in 1822 in the first establishment of the order, Mexicans are identified with the Aztecs to whom ‘Europe without pride extends its strong hand’.24 After 30 years of chaos, and the ‘dishonor’ of having lost the Mexican-American War (1846–48), the new Knights promise a new era, because

You are the successors, Mexican Knights, of the brave warriors, of the illustrious Crusaders who went to conquer the holy banners which had been usurped by the fierce Saracens in Palestine. Remember Godfrey, the great Pontiff Urban, Francis the king of France and the intrepid Richard. Remember Count Stephen, Emperor Eustace, Robert, Philip, Augustus, Hugh the Great and many others. Remember the Order of Malta, the Teutonic and the Templars, and the pious institution which was Saint Lazarus. All these knights, for Peter, the great hermit, for the holy Religion took the sword. And a thousand good deeds were done strenuously in everyplace they were; everywhere they passed by.

The Knights of Malta, always with joy and pleasure, extended their hands upon every pauper. Those of the Teutonic Order busily aided every kind of sick person who did not have shelter. With religious zeal the Templar Knights guarded the trails of the Holy Land at every hour. And with great love those of Saint Lazarus took care of the lepers without showing any grief.

They were knights of high esteem that were decorated for their heroic deeds. All of them sustained their great sovereigns, following their dispositions with obedient submission.25

Here, the song’s author, Santiago Pérez, shows an awareness of the military orders as entities that fostered national integration and unity, as the Spanish military orders did in the New World. His knowledge of crusade history has some errors, including the mysterious ‘Francis the king of France’. This was most probably from his reading Michaud’s Histoire des Croisades (1812–22), first published in Spanish in 1831, as shown by the emphasis that Pérez places upon French Crusades such as Hugh of Vermandois († 1101), Stephen of Blois († 1102), and Eustace of Hainaut († 1216). In ‘Francis king of France’, Pérez probably referred to Francis I († 1547), whose chivalric and crusade ethos is praised by Michaud, together with Charlemagne.26 Pérez probably also knew the popular compendium La Tierra Santa (1842), which just mentioned the military orders, without specifying their activities.27 His knowledge of them is drawn from the proposal for new military orders made in the writings of José Justo Gómez de la Cortina.

The second iteration of the Order came to an abrupt end when President Santa-Anna, trying to mitigate the consequences of the Revolution of Ayutla, a series of Liberal revolts beginning in February 1855, dissolved the order in October 1855.28 On June 30, 1863, however, the order was recreated yet again by a new junta, shortly before the creation of the Second Mexican Empire. On April 10, 1865, the chosen Emperor, Maximilian von Hapsburg, turned the order from a military order following the model of the Order of Charles III into a merely civic order, definitively ending this chapter of the revival of the military orders in Mexico.29

The ‘Classic’ Military Orders in Nineteenth-Century Mexico – Between Historical Studies and Reality

How did a ‘normal Mexican intellectual’, such as Santiago Pérez, experience the ‘classic’ military orders? We shall begin with a look at the Order of Malta, present at the event of 1854, and at the Spanish military orders, before moving on to a popular text on the Templars.

Apart from their brief possession of the Lesser Antilles between 1651 and 1665 and some individual knights who acted as colonial administrators in New France in the seventeenth century and in Spanish America in the eighteenth century, the Order of Malta had little presence in the Americas. In Mexico, there were just two examples of Hospitaller Knights acting as colonial administrators prior to independence in 1821: the Governor of Yucatán from 1670 to 1672 fra’ Fernando Escobedo († 1688) and Baillif fra’Antonio María de Bucareli y Ursúa († 1779), Viceroy of New Spain from 1771 until his death. In 1946, Leopoldo Martínez Cosio listed in Los Caballeros de las Órdenes Militares en México another 12 Hospitallers living in the territory from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, alas some of them with the dubious remark ‘I do not know whom his parents/ancestors were, as also the date and place of his investiture’ or ‘the sole notice that I have is…’.30

The absence of the Order of Malta, which would continue with almost no interruption until the twentieth century, is to be explained by geopolitics. First, the American continent was too far from the two main fronts of the order’s political activities: the war against the Barbary States and Europe’s royal courts (especially those of the Bourbons and Hapsburgs) – where generations of Hospitallers cultivated a balance between protecting the order’s interests and loyalty to their local monarchs. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Spanish Crown had renewed its steady interventions in the order after almost a century of little interference, appointing all successive priors in Spain from among the scions of the royal family, culminating with the formal incorporation to the Crown of the order in Spain in January 1802, a situation which would last until 1885.31 Second, this closeness to the Spanish Crown became more problematic with the independence of Mexico, particularly after the 1830s, when leading Mexican cultural voices, especially in the Church, decidedly cut ties with Spain.32

Albeit there were a few knights of Malta closely linked to Mexico in the first decades of this new nation. Mirroring the situation in Spain, where a growing number of new Knights of Grace (created since the secularization of the order as an award for services to the Crown) coexisted with a steadily smaller number of members from the pre-1802 annexation, the Mexican knights of Malta were the survivors of the leading élite of the final four decades of the Viceroyalty: mining and trade barons as well politicians, both recently ennobled and not, born in Mexico itself or emigrated at a young age and usually moving between Mexico and Spain repeatedly due to the political instability of the country.33 The investiture was usually performed in Europe. One of the earliest examples is the second Count of La Valenciana, Antonio de Obregón y de la Barrera († 1833), a mining magnate who received royal appointment as a Knight of Grace of the Order of Malta in 1807.34 Another knight, possibly one of the many knights created during the reign of Isabella II of Spain, was the aforementioned Vicente de Iturrigaray, second son of the former Viceroy José de Iturrigaray y Aróstegui († 1815), who left Mexico in 1843 together with his brother José after almost 30 years and was invested as knight of the Order in February 1852.35 Vicente’s portrait, reproduced below, shows this Paris-dwelling Spanish gentleman with strong ties to Mexico wearing his insignia of the Order of Santiago (1851) sewn onto his jacket and a Maltese cross hanging from a chain on his lapel together with an unidentified medal.36 Though he is not recorded in the extensive Índice de pruebas, his investiture might be recorded in an uncertain entry in a list published in 2002 (Figure 5.1).37

Figure 5.1 Portrait of Vicente Iturrigaray, hand-colored salted paper print, 22.5 cm × 16.5 cm [8.85 × 6.49 inch], Paris, ca. 1853, Mayer frères, Mexico City, private collection.

The aforementioned José Justo Gómez de la Cortina was the most productive and prominent representative of the other Spanish orders in the country after independence. As a part of his literary work, he made the greatest contribution to the historical study of the military orders in Mexico in this period.38

Sent together with his brother to Madrid in 1815, he eventually graduated from the Academy of Alcalá and joined the diplomatic service. On May 14, 1828 he was created a Knight of Montesa.39 His appointment to Montesa, and not to the other Orders, appears to be related to his membership in the Real Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País de Valencia, as the medieval order was headquartered in the kingdom of Valencia. In 1832 he returned to Mexico, where he was elected to Congress as a representative, and in 1835 as a governor of the capital. Later, Gómez de la Cortina was Minister of Finance and again governor of Mexico City. In 1848, he ended his political career when he renounced Mexican citizenship in order to hold his inherited title of Count de la Cortina. Alongside his political career he founded the Mexican Geographical Society in 1833 and, two years later, the ‘Language Academy’, as well as serving as editor of the literary paper El Zurriago Literario. He died impoverished in 1860.

During his time in Madrid, he published Cartilla histórica o método para estudiar la historia in 1829.40 From 1840, the work was reprinted many times in Mexico.41 Both in chronology and scope, it stands between Voltaire’s († 1778) Essai sur les mœurs et l’espirit des nations from 1756 and Dana Carleton Munro’s († 1933) Syllabus of Medieval History from 1902.42 The volume is also part of a tradition with the paramount classical lecture of Catholic World History from before the late-nineteenth century, Jacques-Bénigne de Bossuet’s († 1704) Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681), even though Gómez criticized its pedagogical value in an 1844 debate with José María Lacunza.43 With the Cartilla, Gómez wanted to provide a new handbook for understanding the general dynamics and most important events of world history, beginning with an introduction on the nature of history, followed by 13 short essays. In this work, which he dedicated to the directors of his former school, he dubbed the crusades the fifth epoch of mankind. He dealt with the crusades after his account of the great empires of Antiquity and before the notion of chivalry, which Gómez saw as a creation of Carolingian Europe. Directly after chivalry, Gómez discussed Feudal Government and immediately after that, the Templars.

In his essay on the Templars, he quoted Bossuet (‘No se sabe, dice Bossuet’) regarding the prosecution of this order.44 Gómez’s account of this order is not to be seen primarily within the instrumentalization of Templar history, especially in France, since the early nineteenth century.45 Instead, with his perspective, Gómez was a cause rather than a product for the historiographical ‘legend’ of this extinguished military order.46 It was also not a product of Medievalist Romanticism, which had reached Mexico in the early 1840s with the popular play by Fernando Calderón († 1845) ‘Herman o la Vuelta del Cruzado’ (1842).47 Most probably Gómez underlined the importance the Templars, because his own Military Order, Montesa, was created out of their former estates in the Kingdom of Valencia. For a Knight of Montesa it was evident that the Templars were an existential milestone in history.48

Conclusion

The military orders had little physical presence in Mexico in the nineteenth century. The Spanish military orders, an important part of the colonial aristocracy, had vanished almost completely by 1850, together with scarcer ones like the Order of Malta. Nevertheless, the memory of the orders was cultivated in the new country and through the study of the Crusades, as elsewhere in the Western world, there was an awareness of the origins of the military orders.

The ‘meritocratization’ of the military orders, seeing these knights primarily as examples of virtue, helped maintain the memory of the orders in Mexico during Catholic Liberalism’s political dominance from the 1830s to the late 1850s. This was palpable in the many incarnations of the Illustrious and Distinguished Order of Guadalupe, especially of 1853, which was modeled upon the ‘last’ Spanish military order, the Order of Charles III.

Both the reception of the historiography of the crusades and the creation of this Mexican military order involved members of other military-religious orders, particularly José Justo Gómez de la Cortina. Despite Mexico’s independence, there remained an enduring personal link with the old military orders and a transatlantic transfer of ideas.

Notes

  1. According to tradition, the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared in the outskirts of Mexico City in December 1531 to the Aztec convert Juan Diego Cuathlatoatzin († 1548), remaining then as an archeropoietos stamped in his coat. Years later the Archbishop of Mexico produced a copy of the coat for King Philip II, who gave it to Doria, hence the legend recorded by Rossi.
  2. Rossi, La Beata Vergine di Guadalupe e S. Stefano d’Aveto. Note e documenti. Chiavari: Tipografia Artistica Colombo, 1910, p. 70. Rossi’s work is analysed in Stagno: ‘Immacolata india. L’immagine della Vergine di Guadalupe messicana a Genova e in Liguria’, p. 383.
  3. For Lepanto as the ‘last battle of the Crusades’, see Kenneth Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, IV, p. 1099.
  4. Riley-Smith: ‘Towards a History of Military-Religious Orders’, p. 271. On military and mendicant orders, especially the Hospitallers of St. John and the Franciscans, as a living memory of medieval Outremer as late as the Enlightenment, see Allen: ‘Upholding Tradition: Benedict XIV and the Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem at Malta, 1740–1758’, p. 20.
  5. These three works are almost all the historiography that exists regarding the presence of the Military Orders in Mexico: Romero de Terreros y Vinent: ‘Las Órdenes Militares en México’ in Anales del Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía (1912, 16, IV), pp. 199–235; Martínez Cosío, Los Caballeros de las Órdenes Militares en México (Mexico City, 1946); Editorial Santiago and León de la Barra, Órdenes y Honores Pontificios en México (Mexico City: Librería Urbe, 1957).
  6. For example, the Mexican Association of the Order of Malta’s archive only dates from the 1950s.
  7. ‘Pourquoi cette ilustre compagnie, jetée come une sentinelle au milieu de la Méditerrannée, et qui défendit pendant trois cents ans les côtes d’Europe contre les invasions de la barberie, ne serait-elle pas venue dans les fôrets d’Amerique proteger les établissements chrétiens contre les ataques des infidèles? Quelles grandes et belles pages aurait ajoutées à son histoire déja si glorieuse’, in Roy, L’Ordre de Malte en Amérique, p. 23. Roy also proved that the order’s slight presence in New France had completely vanished by 1681 (p. 59).
  8. Liehr, Sozialgeschichte Spanischer Adelskorporationen. Die Maestranzas de Caballería (1670–1808), pp. 78–80. For example, in 1808 there were living 19 members of the Real Maestranza de Ronda in Mexico City, cfr. ad passim, p. 136.
  9. Krebs Wilckens, La Iglesia de América Latina en el siglo XIX, p. 96.
  10. Ruiz de Gordejuela Urquijo, La expulsión de los españoles de México y su destino incierto, p. 120. From New York, a large part of the refugees returned to Europe and settled in Bordeaux, especially merchants from Mexico City with Basque origins, ad passim, pp. 124–25.
  11. ‘Real Consejo de las Ordenes Militares. Hermanamiento Militar’, https://www.ordenesmilitares.es/real-consejo/hermanamiento/ [accessed March 17, 2021].
  12. Cruz Barney, ‘Las Órdenes Militares en los Elementos Constitucionales de Ignacio López Rayón. Derecho premial en el movimiento insurgente de 1810’, pp. 4–5; Borja Martínez, Ilustre y distinguida Orden de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, p. 9, Zárate Toscano, ‘Tradición y modernidad: la Orden Imperial de Guadalupe, su organización y rituales’, p. 193.
  13. Created in 1771, the Real y Muy Distinguida Orden de Carlos III, was aimed to praise, as its motto said, the ‘virtues and merits’ of individual subjects.
  14. In April 1865 Emperor Maximilian of Mexico († 1867) created the Imperial Order of the Mexican Eagle, which ceased to exist just two years later. The current Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle was erected in 1933. Finally, the ‘Miguel Hidalgo Award’ was created in 1975, prescinding of the designation ‘Order’.
  15. The nationalist character of the order was explicitly expressed in its investiture ceremony. The candidate promised (1) to profess the Catholic faith, (2) to defend the independence of the country, its territory and laws, (3) not to collaborate in projects against the nation, (4) to obey the grand master, (5) to take care of the poor and sick members of the order, (6) to regard the other members as brothers.
  16. In 1847 the order was reformed, being then organized into Grand Crosses, Effective Commanders, Commanders, and Knights. On the meritocratic novelty of the Order of Charles III, within the landscape of the military orders in Spain, cfr. Ceballos-Escalera y Gila, La Real y Distinguida Orden Española de Carlos III, p. 28.
  17. On the limpieza de sangre, i.e., the proving of Old Christian ancestry (in contrast to Jewish /Muslim convert origin), cfr. Hering Torres, Rassismus in der Vormoderne.
  18. Borja Martínez, Ilustre y distinguida Orden, pp. 53–55.
  19. Fernández Fernández, ‘El Liberalismo Católico en la prensa mexicana de la primera mitad del siglo XIX’, Historia, 1:396(2014), p. 63.
  20. López de Santa-Anna’s style was ‘Well-esteemed of the Fatherland, Lieutenant General, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal and Distinguished Spanish Order of Charles III, President of the Mexican Republic’. He was appointed as Knight Grand Cross of Charles III on July 15, 1843, cfr. Ceballos-Escalera y Gila, La Real y Distinguida Orden, p. 259.
  21. A considerable number of the diplomats were also members of the order, including the British Chargé d’affaires Percy William Doyle († 1887), Apostolic Delegate Monsignor Luigi Clementi († 1869), and his auditor at the Legation, Monsignor Ernesto Colognesi, who later would become one of the leading figures in Mexico’s uneasy relationship with the Papacy. Article 6 of the order’s statues also considered the invitation of members of foreign orders living in Mexico.
  22. Borja Martínez, Ilustre y distinguida Orden, pp. 63–66. Borja Martínez edited the text of the anonymous Historia de la Orden Mexicana de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Mexico City: Imprenta del Correo de España, 1854). For Juan Argea, s. León de la Barra: Honores Pontificios, p. 84.
  23. Cfr. e.g. Gritzner, Handbuch der Ritter- und Verdienstorden aller Kulturstaaten der Welt innerhalb des XIX. Jahrhunderts, pp. 532–33.
  24. ‘Pues los míseros aztecas/Tras penas y horribles daños […] Pues México se nivela/Con las naciones de rango./ Ya la Europa sin orgullo/ Le tiende su fuerte mano’, p. 54. For the identification of the knights with Aztec warriors, s. Zárate Toscano: La Orden de Guadalupe, p. 211.
  25. ‘Porque vos sois los sucesores/Caballeros mexicanos,/De los valientes guerreros, /De los ínclitos cruzados/ Que fueron a conquistar/ Los pendones sacrosantos,/ Que los fieros sarracenos/ En Palestina usurparon. Recordad a Godofredo,/ Al gran pontífice Urbano,/ A Francisco rey de Francia, / Y al intrépido Ricardo./ Recordad al conde Estéban,/ Al emperador Eustaquio,/ Roberto, Felipe, Augusto/ Hugo el Grande y otros varios:/ Recordad la Orden de Malta,/ La Teutónica y Templarios, Y la institución piadosa/ De la que fue San Lázaro./ Todos estos caballeros/ por Pedro, el grande ermitaño,/ Por la santa religión/ Sus espadas empuñaron. Y mil obras de piedad/ Practicaban afanados/ En donde quiera que estaban,/ Do quiera que iban de paso. Los Caballeros de Malta/ siempre con placer y agrado/ Sobre cualquier desvalido/ Estendían su franca mano:/ Los de la Teutónica Orden/ Auxiliaban afanados, / A toda clase de enfermos/ Que no tuvieran amparo. Todos ellos sostenían/ A sus grandes soberanos,/ Las disposiciones de éstos/ Con sumisión atacando’: Pérez, Calendario nuevo de los Cruzados, pp. 54–55. Also printed in Borja, Orden de Guadalupe, pp. 70–71.
  26. Michaud, Histoire des Croisades, chap. VIII.
  27. Galván Rivera, Mariano: La Tierra Santa (Mexico City, 1842).
  28. Borja, Orden de Guadalupe, p. 79.
  29. Ibid., p. 101.
  30. Leopoldo Martínez Cosío, Los Caballeros de las Órdenes Militares, pp. 333–35. Eight out of the 13 Hospitallers bear these remarks. Lohmann Villena, Los Americanos en las Órdenes Nobiliarias, vol. I, p. LXXVII counts even just seven knights of Malta in Latin America.
  31. Roberto Quirós Rosado, ‘Estratégicos anacronismos. Malta, la Orden de San Juan y la Corona española a fines del Antiguo Régimen (1795–1802)’, p. 129. In July 1847, the order was even transformed by Royal Decree into a mere ‘civil decoration’ with a maximum of 200 members, cfr. Carlos Nieto Sánchez, ‘De la Ínclita Orden de San Juan de Jerusalén a la Asamblea Española: evolución de la Orden de Malta desde el siglo XIX hasta la actualidad’, p. 495.
  32. Sergio Francisco Rosas Salas, ‘Defender la independencia y soberanía de la Iglesia: El perfil del primer episcopado mexicano a través de Francisco Pablo Vázquez y Juan Cayetano Gómez de Portugal’, p. 57; Ricardo Krebs Wilckens, La Iglesia, p. 172 and Zárate Toscano, La Orden de Guadalupe, p. 208.
  33. Nieto Sánchez, De la Ínclita Orden de San Juan de Jerusalén a la Asamblea Española, p. 499.
  34. Carlos Nieto Sánchez and Jaime de Salazar Acha, ‘Caballeros de gracia españoles en la Orden de Malta (1802–1808)’, p. 418.
  35. They left Mexico on May 15, 1829, following the expulsion of the Spaniards on March 19, 1829, cfr. Jesús Ruiz de Gordejuela Urquijo, La expulsion de los españoles de México, p. 310. They settled in Philadelphia. On November 24, 1829, President Vicente Guerrero († 1831) allowed their return to Mexico at the insistence of their mother, cfr. Maria Graciela León Matamoros, ‘El desamparo como argumento: mujeres en defensa de padres, esposos e hijos ante la ley de expulsión de españoles de 1829 en México’, https://doi.org/10.4000/alhim.3160 [accessed March 17, 2021].
  36. He was invested as a Knight of Santiago at Cádiz in 1851, cfr. Vicente Vignau and Francisco Uhagón (eds.), Índice de pruebas de los caballeros que han vestido el hábito de Santiago desde el año 1501 hasta la fecha, p. 176.
  37. Alfonso Pardo y Manuel de Villena and Fernando Suárez de Tangil y de Angulo, Índice de pruebas de los caballeros que han vestido el hábito de San Juan de Jerusalén (Orden de Malta) en el Gran Priorato de Castilla y León desde 1514 hasta la fecha, p. 73 (Iturrigaray with I) and p. 161 (Yturrigaray with Y). Alfonso de Ceballos-Escalera y Gila et al., La Orden de Malta en España (1802–2002), p. 108.
  38. For a bibliography concerning José Justo Góméz de la Cortina, see Francisco Miguel Espino Jiménez, ‘José Justo Gómez de la Cortina y Gómez de la Cortina’, http://dbe.rah.es/biografias/82136/jose-justo-gomez-de-la-cortina-y-gomez-de-la-cortina [accessed February 27, 2021]. His brother, the Marquis of Morante Joaquín Gómez de la Cortina y Gómez de la Cortina († 1868), was invested as a Knight of Santiago on January 28 1848. Regarding the awarded with the Santiago Cross in late Viceregal Mexico, it’s important to take into account that the dynastic change of the Spanish monarchy to the Bourbon line in the early 18th century drastically reduced appointments to this order, dropping to almost a third of that of the last decades of Habsburg rule, cfr. Liehr, Sozialgeschichte Spanischer Adelskorporationen, p. 328.
  39. Vincente Cadenas y Vicent, Caballeros de Montesa que efectuaron sus pruebas de ingreso durante el siglo XIX, p. 119.
  40. Cartilla moral o método para estudiar la Historia (Madrid: Eusebio Aguado, 1829).
  41. The reprint made by Ignacio Cumplido in Mexico City in 1840.
  42. On Munro’s importance for the historiography of the Crusades in North America, cfr. Hans Eberhard Mayer, ‘America and the Crusades’, pp. 39–40.
  43. Juan Antonio Ortega y Medina, ‘Discurso y cartas sobre varias reformas que parece deben hacerse en el método de algunos de nuestros estudios científicos. Polémica epistolar entre José Gómez de la Cortina y José María Lacunza’, p. 138.
  44. Bossuet’s narrative on the Templars is repeated by Gómez: the Templars were established in the crusades, were good and meritorious, then their donations corrupted them. Philip IV of France, more moved by his greed than fearing the mighty and corrupted knights, plotted against the Templars. Then follows an original piece of Gómez’s: he explains the basic structures of the order, the reception ceremony, and the order’s banner.
  45. Philippe Josserand: ‘The Templar Order in Public and Cultural Debate in France during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries’, p. 148.
  46. Kristijan Toomaspoeg, ‘Die Geschichtsschreibung zu den mittelalterlichen geistlichen Ritterorden: status quaestionis’, p. 31.
  47. This play masterfully shows the values of Catholic Liberalism, stressing the personal freedom and merit of the crusader Hernán, together with his fidelity and strong religiosity. In the play he returns from the Second Crusade to marry his beloved lady in a German castle. After the strenuous opposition of her father, the duke, it comes out that Hernán is actually his illegitimate son. Everyone is reconciled and Hernán then returns to the Holy Land.
  48. This remains the case today: ‘Orden de Montesa. Reseñas históricas’, https://www.ordenesmilitares.es/orden-de-montesa/resenas-historicas/1394-2/ [accessed March 1, 2021].

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