Ecclesiastical Knights: The Military Orders of Castile, 1150-1330

Sam Zeno Conedera tries to answer long-pondered questions about the religious based military orders. Firstly, how effective were they in military and government affairs? Secondly, how sincere were they in their religious belief? While there were many such orders, most famously the Templars and the Knights of Rhodes, the author focuses on the Iberian orders only. These “fighting monks,” as they are often known, existed in Spain before the country unified, so we might start by saying that they were the origin of Spain as we know it. As discussed in the book, they provided heavily for Spain’s defense, as well as economy.

In the chapter Interior Castle, we learn that the Iberian order weren’t all combatants; they had levels of knights, sergeants, clerics, and sister. The knights were nobles who took vows, while the sergeants were the more numerous commoners. There were clerics who acted as chaplains, and women members who served in the medical field. Thought history books ignore them, the nuns had greater medical knowledge than the doctors of the era, as attested by their surviving journals. After all, it was the nuns who ran the hospitals and cared for the sick, though the men get the credit (not with killing their patients.) The knight-sergeant arrangement was probably the same as that of the modern officer and enlisted man; the sergeant would lead common fighters, while the knight was involved in the planning, equipping, and overall decision making.

As far as religion goes, it was a kind of synergy, where the combatants and the clergy needed each other in several ways. The nation needed an army for defense, and the monasteries needed the knights to defend their vast property. Since the various Iberian states could easily get into conflict, the Catholic church was something of a unifying factor. If it could keep the Iberian knights from fighting each other, then they’d be less distracted when it came to fighting the Muslims. If they had charters from the Pope in Rome, then it would protect them from being attacked by the French and/or English.

I do remember a similar argument in the book Women of Faith, about Catholic sisters in Chicago, where the author promotes the nuns’ contribution. According to that book, the convents, with their schools and hospitals, provided a service to a land that was not well served by the government. They also provided a place for women who wanted education and work, but didn’t want to get married and by owned by a man. Similarly, a free-born peasant boy, uninterested in farming, and lacking any skill, could join one of the Iberian orders, learn to fight, and would no longer be subservient in the way a tenant farmer was.

The Iberian orders were one of the few options for upward mobility in the days when Spain wasn’t unified. They would eventually go into a decline as the nation consolidated.