The immediate cause of such
organizations was the crusades. There were numerous societies of this
character, some of them so far removed from the monastic type as
scarcely to be ranked with monastic institutions. One list mentions two
hundred and seven of these Orders of Knighthood, comprising many
varieties in theory and practice. The most important were three,--the
Knights of the Hospital, or the Knights of St. John; the Knights
Templars; and the Teutonic Knights. The Hospitallers wore black mantles
with white crosses, the Templars white mantles with red crosses, and the
Teutonic Knights white mantles with black crosses. The mantles were in
fact the robe of the monk adorned with a cross. The whole system was
really a marriage of monasticism and chivalry, as Gibbon says: "The
firmest bulwark of Jerusalem was founded in the Knights of the Hospital
and of the Temple, that strange association of monastic and military
life. The flower of the nobility of Europe aspired to wear the cross and
profess the vows of these orders; their spirit and discipline were
immortal."
A passage in the Alexiad quoted in Walter Scott's "Robert of Paris"
reads: "As for the multitude of those who advanced toward the great city
let it be enough to say, that they were as the stars in the heaven or
as the sand of the seashore. They were in the words of Homer, as many as
the leaves and flowers of spring." This figurative description is almost
literally true.
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