A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  In some cases rulers or landowners would invest in agricultural or industrial processes. A good example is provided by the sugar industry that was developed in both Crete and Cyprus. The growing of sugar cane requires plentiful supplies of water, and so almost certainly the industry entailed changes in land use from the usual types of mixed arable farming to the production of this one cash crop. Sugar factories such as those excavated at Kouklia and Episkopi in Cyprus would have been expensive to build and would have needed a large labour force. Owners would therefore have needed substantial capital, and they may have employed slaves to work the factories. Not surprisingly it was only the wealthiest individuals or corporations that could engage in sugar refining: the king at Kouklia; the Hospitallers at Kolossi; the Venetian Cornaro family at Episkopi. The product would have been almost all exported to western Europe, and in the case of the Hospitallers and the Cornaros the profits would have been mostly exported as well: to Rhodes as part of the Cypriot responsions or to Venice to swell the fortune of one of the leading patrician families. This example of an agrarian-cumindustrial enterprise leads naturally to the question of how far the Latin regimes in the eastern Mediterranean prefigured the colonial enterprises of a later epoch. In certain aspects the Cypriot sugar industry anticipates the plantations in the Caribbean, but the parallel is far from complete.

  Everywhere in the Latin East the ruling élite was alien, intruding into societies in which language, social organization, and religion differed from its own. That in itself was unexceptional: the ruling élite in the Ottoman empire was just as intrusive, at least in the European sector, and the Mamluk élite in Egypt was racially distinct from the indigenous inhabitants and kept itself aloof from them. But the Latin regimes varied considerably. In the Venetian possessions the local governors were appointed from Venice by the republic for a fixed term to administer the territory in accordance with the republic’s requirements. At the other end of the spectrum, the kings of Cyprus were answerable to no one and governed their kingdom in their own interests. In a political sense therefore the Venetian ports and islands can be dubbed colonies, while Lusignan Cyprus cannot. The Genoese possessions, which enjoyed greater autonomy than did their Venetian counterparts, and Achaea and Athens under Angevin or Aragonese suzerainty fall somewhere between these extremes.

  But can the Latin East be said to have been colonial in an economic sense? Venice and Genoa both looked to their overseas territories to provide foodstuffs and raw materials: wine, olive oil, grain, dried fruit, alum from Genoese Phocaea, sugar, and later cotton from Crete and Cyprus. The Venetians in particular tried to ensure that their merchants and shipowners traded between Venice itself and their eastern markets, but the Genoese were less regulated, and Genoese ships bearing the produce of the Genoese possessions were under less obligation to unload in their home port. So although the Latin East did send primary products to Europe, it is again only in the case of Venice that the relationship can be considered thoroughly colonial. Otherwise produce was sold in other parts of the Mediterranean world. The more valuable commodities, such as silk from Thebes, mastic from Chios, and sugar, required higher levels of investment, but they never developed to same extent as the monocultures which typified the economies of the Canaries, the Caribbean, or the southern United States in later times. As a result, nowhere in the East found itself totally dependent on just one product and so ran the risk of disaster if the market collapsed. The idea that the local economy was geared to serve the interests of a distant ruling power did not apply. For the Italian maritime republics a sizeable proportion of the wealth came from long-distance trade in luxury goods. So far as the Latin East was concerned, this entailed a share in the profits from what was essentially a transit trade. Constantinople, Famagusta, Ayas in Cilician Armenia, and the Black Sea ports all flourished, at least for a time, as entrepôts in the eastern spice trade and their prosperity depended heavily on the continued presence of western merchants. These merchants collectively wielded considerable economic power, but that did not necessarily enable them to dominate the local political establishment.

  In the rural areas the landlords exploited their rights over the land and the peasantry and creamed off the profits. Many landlords, even in Venetian Crete, lived locally. Others did not, and that meant that the profits from the land could well be taken out of the local economy altogether. Thus for example, at least some of the wealth generated by the sugar plantations and refinery at Episkopi in Cyprus belonging to the Cornaro family would have left the island to enrich the family in Venice. Clearly the Cornaros’ investments prefigured later colonial enterprises, but on the other hand it could be argued that they were behaving no differently from the landholders of an earlier, Byzantine age who had syphoned off the agrarian profits from the provinces of the empire to support themselves and their households in Constantinople.

  In an earlier chapter it has been suggested that in the central Middle Ages Palestine and Syria had been subjected to religious colonization. They were now lost, and to label western society in the Latin East in the late medieval period a colonial society is too sweeping. The rulers, settlers, and merchants were concerned to make enough money to secure their livelihoods. In some respects they anticipated the actions of the planters and colonial administrators of more recent times. But to concentrate attention solely on such features would be to distort reality. Western rule was not so different from what had gone before. The Latins did not set out to change society, and the indigenous population was probably no worse off than previously. The idealism of the crusaders of the twelfth century may not have been so much in evidence, but over and above the urge to make money and conserve their possessions the idea that the Latins were holding the forces of Islam at bay and defending Christendom was never totally eclipsed. The rulers of Cyprus, the Hospitallers on Rhodes, the Venetians in their centuries-long struggle against the Turks all recognized that they had a religious duty to maintain themselves in the face of Muslim assaults, and if their sense of spiritual motivation was mixed with the more mundane requirements of self-defence and the maintenance of their livelihood, they were neither the first nor the last to find themselves in that position.

  13

  The Military Orders

  1312–1798

  ANTHONY LUTTRELL

  The Later Middle Ages: Order-States and National Orders

  AT the beginning of the fourteenth century the formal status of the professed members of a military order of the Latin church had changed little since these organizations had originated in the twelfth century, despite the progressive codification of canon law and the passing of new statutes and other legislation within individual orders. It had become less likely that brethren would be motivated by spiritual enthusiasms or by the prospect of action directly concerned with the recovery of Jerusalem, but most military religious still took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, while all were supposed to live according to their order’s constitution. Each order had a rule which had been approved by the papacy, whose capacity to intervene in an order’s affairs, or even to dissolve it, was demonstrated dramatically when Clement V suppressed the Temple in 1312. Except in Prussia and Livonia, brethren were less likely to confront an infidel enemy and more apt to be seeking a relatively secure if often undistinguished position in local society; it was also increasingly improbable that they would experience a common liturgical life within a sizeable community of religious. The various military religious orders differed considerably from one another, but in general they received knights, sergeants, priests, and sisters, all devoted primarily to the prosecution of an armed struggle against the infidel. Their members were not technically permitted to take crusade vows, though naturally they participated in crusades fought against the infidel. By 1312 there was a growing distinction between the permanent holy war of the military orders, whose members were not supposed—except in certain specific situations—to fight fellow Christians, and the papally-proclaimed crusade, an occasional event dire
cted against Latin and other Christians more often than against the infidel.

  The psychological impact of the Templar affair must have been profound, but there was little immediate indication of any decline in recruitment to the other military orders. These orders’ very function had been the subject of widespread criticism and debate, with proposals for their union in a single order or even for the confiscation of all their lands. Furthermore, in 1310 the pope instigated a searching investigation into the gravest complaints against the Teutonic Order’s Livonian activities. In 1309 that order moved its principal convent or headquarters from Venice to Marienburg in Prussia, while in 1306 the Hospitallers initiated their conquest of Rhodes. This piratical invasion, probably not completed until 1309, preceded the attack on the Temple in 1307 and went far to preserve the Hospital from any similar assault. Though directed largely against Christian Greek schismatics, it gave the Hospitallers a variety of patently justifiable anti-infidel functions and an independence they had not enjoyed on Cyprus. The resulting prestige was cunningly exploited by the master, Foulques of Villaret, who visited the West and raised a papal–Hospitaller crusade which sailed from Italy in 1310 under the master’s command and made conquests against the Turks on the Anatolian mainland. After 1312 the Hospital was occupied throughout the West in an extended process of securing and absorbing the Templars’ enormous landed inheritance which the pope had transferred to it. The Hospital also faced a major financial crisis provoked by its expensive Rhodian campaign and by the extravagances of Foulques of Villaret which led to his deposition in 1317 and to the damaging internal disputes which ensued. The Iberian monarchs were extremely reluctant to accept the fusion of Templar and Hospitaller wealth and strength, arguing persistently that the Temple had been endowed to sustain a peninsular rather than a Mediterranean reconquest; in Castile much Templar property was usurped by the nobility while new national military orders were created in Valencia and Portugal.

  Pope Clement V failed to save the Temple, but he did keep most of its goods out of secular hands while defending the principle that lay powers should not judge or interfere in the affairs of military religious orders. The interests of individual orders frequently diverged from papal concerns, but from 1312 to 1378 the Avignon popes encouraged, chided, and sometimes threatened them, acting as a court of appeal for the brethren, settling internal disputes and repeatedly intervening throughout Latin Christendom to protect their interests and privileges. A number of minor orders, such as the English order of Saint Thomas which had a small establishment on Cyprus, abandoned any military pretensions during the fourteenth century. In north-eastern Europe the popes sought to balance the activities of the Teutonic Order, which were difficult to control at such a distance, against the interests of others who were also seeking to convert or persuade pagan Lithuanians and Livonians into Christianity; the brethren were often able to evade the pope’s commands as they quarrelled with the Franciscans, the archbishop of Riga, the king of Poland, and other lay rulers. In 1319 Pope John XXII resolved the constitutional quarrel within the Hospital through the choice of the efficient Hélion of Villeneuve as its new master. From Avignon successive popes pressed for action and reform as Rhodes was developed into a prominent anti-Turkish bulwark. The Avignon popes enormously expanded their curia’s interventions in all manner of ecclesiastical matters and occasionally they sought to influence appointments within the military orders, especially in Italy where they used a number of Hospitallers as rectors to govern the papal provinces. Yet popes were cautiously restrained with respect to the Hospital and the Teutonic Order, and only in 1377 did Gregory XI, who had earlier instituted a universal inquest into the Hospital’s western resources, provide a long-standing papal protégé, Juan Fernández de Heredia, as master of Rhodes. The situation worsened thereafter for all but the Teutonic Order, as popes increasingly interfered in magistral or other elections and temporarily or even permanently alienated the orders’ lands through papal provisions or by way of grants made to favourites, kinsmen, or others.

  In Spain, the Muslim frontier had by 1312 been pushed into the deepest south and activity against the Moors became sporadic. The military orders continued to settle and exploit their extensive properties, but the Hispanic monarchs were anxious to control, or even recover, lands, jurisdictions, and privileges they had earlier granted away to the orders. The Aragonese crown secured both Templar and Hospitaller lands in Valencia to found the new order of Montesa to defend the Muslim frontier in Murcia, and in 1317 it was agreed that the rulers of the Aragonese Hospital should do homage to the king in person before exercising their administration. The king, who was already able to prevent men and money leaving for Rhodes, thus acquired an element of control over appointments and so could deploy part of the Hospital’s incomes and manpower for his own purposes; the importance of that became strikingly evident during the great rebellions of 1347 to 1348, when all the orders stood by the king, and again after 1356 in the wars with Castile. Royal attempts to develop the minute order of San Jorge de Alfama, which was established on the Catalan coast, had little success; in 1378 the master and his sister were seized from Alfama by African pirates, and in 1400 the order was incorporated into that of Montesa. Two years later King Martí proposed that all the Aragonese orders, including the Hospital, be converted into maestrats or masterships under royal control and serve at sea against the infidel Africans; in 1451 Alfonso V of Aragon considered establishing Montesa, which lacked any genuine military function, on the island of Malta.

  The Castilian orders of Santiago, Alcántara, and Calatrava maintained their original activity in the settlement and defence of their extensive Andalusian latifundia against the Moors, though the frontier had moved southwards away from much of their lands. Well into the fifteenth century they were still repopulating frontier villages abandoned by their Muslim farmers; indeed such new foundations continued elsewhere, in fourteenth-century Hospitaller Languedoc for instance. The Castilian orders had other functions; Alcántara, for example, guarded the Portuguese frontier in Extremadura. In 1331 the pope rejected a belated request advanced by Alfonso XI for the creation of a new order from the lands of the Castilian Temple, and that refusal seemed justified when all the Hispanic orders participated in the Christian victory at the River Salado in 1340 which led to the capture of Algeciras in 1344. Soon after, however, the reconquest of the stubborn mountainous enclave of Granada became comparatively dormant, as Castile entered a prolonged period of civil war which further implicated all the orders in family intrigues and in bitter political conflicts and divisions. As with Montesa, it was only occasionally that the Castilian orders employed their resources against the infidel. In 1361 the three Castilian masters and the prior of the Hospital fought in a royal army which won a victory against the Moors but was then defeated outside Guadix, where the master of Calatrava was taken prisoner.

  In Castile the orders faced an almost stationary frontier situation; of the 110 years from 1350 to 1460, all but twenty-five were years of official truce, interrupted only by minor skirmishings. In about 1389 the masters of Calatrava and Alcántara led a razzia to the gates of Granada, sacked the suburbs, and launched a challenge to the Muslim king. When in 1394 the master of Alcántara, Martín Yáñez de la Barbuda, broke the truce and met his death in a reckless incursion inspired by a heightened sense of devotion to holy warfare, the king, having attempted to stop him, actually apologized to the Moors. The Reconquista in Castile was revived by the regent Fernando who took Antequera in 1410 with the help of the orders. These continued to garrison castles and campaign on the frontier where their masters frequently commanded royal armies, but often they were acting in a personal capacity as royal captains and were using troops who were not brethren of any order. However Calatrava, for example, took part in six border raids between 1455 and 1457 and its master captured Archidona in 1462. Brethren of all orders fought in the serious and bitter campaigns which finally ended with the conquest of Granada in 1492; the masters of Santi
ago and Calatrava were both killed at Loja in 1482 and the master of Montesa at Beza in 1488, for example. The orders furnished money, grain, and troops. Of some 10,000 horse assembled in Granada in 1491, Santiago provided 962 horse along with 1,915 foot, Alcántara 266 horse, and the Hospital sixty-two; Calatrava’s contingent was not reported but had in 1489 been 400.

  The Castilian orders formed national corporations led by great magnates who campaigned for the crown in the Moorish crusade as well as in national and civil wars but who mostly did so with little concern for the religious aspect, their troops and resources often being integrated into national armies and serving at the royal initiative. Across Castile the three major orders, and to a lesser extent the Hospital, derived enormous incomes from great flocks of sheep and from their transhumance routes. Just as the Hospital became the largest single landholder in Aragon, so Alcántara held almost half of Extremadura and Santiago much of Castilla la Nueva. This wealth helped to support members drawn from the petty nobility who had little interest in holy war, though many knight-brethren were keen and competent fighting men. The orders functioned within a kingdom and, however extensive their power and independence, there was no chance of their creating an autonomous order-state such as that on Rhodes or in Prussia; instead their wealth and influence made it vital for the crown to control them. Kings could interfere in elections and persuade popes to provide to offices or to grant dispensations for the election of masters who were under age or of illegitimate birth; on occasion monarchs refused to accept homage from elected masters, compelled others to abdicate, or even murdered them. Despite repeated resistance and much litigation, kings and great nobles repeatedly secured masterships for their favourites and especially their sons, legitimate or otherwise; thus Fernando de Antequera manœuvred to secure the masterships of Alcántara and Santiago for his sons in 1409, promising to employ their revenues in the Granada war. There were exemplary brethren and there were serious but ineffective attempts at reform. These received little encouragement from the papacy, which repeatedly facilitated evasion of the rules. Married rulers could not hold masterships but they might be granted the administration of an order, as in 1456 when Pope Calixtus III named Enrique IV administrator and governor of both Santiago and Calatrava. The masters’ political involvements went far to pervert the orders’ proper function, embroiling the brethren in intrigue, schism, and violence in which they often fought one another. The Hospital and the Teutonic Order avoided such troubles by excluding most of the local nobility of their order-states from entry as knight-brethren.