INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
• ^ ^ ^ ^ WHAT GREAT DIFFERENCES and dissimilarities of í M all kinds there are between contemplation and med- ^ ^ ^ ^ itation among the pillars of the cloister and the terrible exercise of warfare!'1 Thus wrote Richard de Templo, prior of the augustinian house of the Holy Trinity in London, as he described the ferocity of the battle between the crusaders and the forces of Saladin at Arsuf in September 1191. Richard seems to have compiled his account largely for a monastic audience, and he evidently expected that this audience would readily recognise the stark contrast between these two ways of life. Yet he was probably writing sometime between 1217 and 1222, approximately a century after the formation of the Order of the Temple. During the intervening years the concept of a monastic order whose members fought terrestrial wars on Christ's behalf had apparently been fully absorbed into contemporary life. In the decade that followed the papal recognition of the Temple at the Council of Troyes in January 1129, the Hospitallers added military functions to their charitable activities, while between 1164 and 1176 the Spanish military orders of Calatrava, Alcántara, and Santiago, were created. The Teutonic Knights, who were to become as important as their Templar and Hospitaller predecessors, were also well-established by the 1220s, having developed from a german field hospital during these same campaigns and in 1198 received a Rule based on that of the Templars. If, therefore, the polarisation between monk and warrior remained acute even in the second decade of the thirteenth century, it can be seen that, when Bernard of Clairvaux wrote his treatise In Praise of the New
Knighthood sometime around 1130, he was indeed entering new territory— which fully justified his statement that his subject was that of a new kind of knighthood and one unknown to the ages gone by'.
Itinerarium Peregrinum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, ed. W. Stubbs, Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I, vol. 1, Rolls Series 38 (London, 1864) p. 270.