Download PDF | (Fordham Series in Medieval Studies) Sam Conedera SJ - Ecclesiastical Knights_ The Military Orders in Castile, 1150-1330-Fordham University Press (2015).
280 Pages
Preface
One day, while I was doing research for this book, my eyes fell upon these lines from Maurice Keen’s classic work on chivalry: In the crusading context, the military orders—the Temple, the Hospital and the Teutonic and Spanish orders—came to be just that, the strong right arm of the militant church. Their organisation, as reflected in their rules of life, represented a real fusion of ecclesiastical (as opposed to simply Christian) and martial ideals.1 The passage put an idea in my head, an idea that has taken some time to work out. What follows is the fruit of my labors.
Ecclesiastical Knights is a spirituality study. The military orders, which emerged on the frontiers of Europe in the twelfth century, have long fascinated general readers and professional historians alike. Some of this fascination is tied up with occult mythology, the manifestations of which are legion in print and film. Worthier of attention, though, is the seemingly incongruous combination of monastic devotion and the practice of warfare into a single form of religious life. Defining, categorizing, and explaining this way of life is a major problem for the historiography of the military orders, one that Riley-Smith has called “the elephant in the room.”2 I propose a new name and a new conceptual model for understanding the Iberian military orders, one that better captures how they combined the exercise of arms and the monastic tradition into a single way of life.
I hope that this model helps move the scholarly discussion beyond the label “warrior monks.” But a name or a model alone serves little to illuminate the spirituality of the military orders, which was lived in flesh and blood and the heat of the day. I undertake a detailed study of the military-religious vocation as it was lived out in the Orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcántara in LeónCastile during the first century and a half of their existence.
I would like to thank the people who have helped bring this project to fruition, beginning with Teo Ruiz, Patrick Geary, Kevin Terraciano, and John Dagenais, my professors at UCLA. Carlos de Ayala Martínez and Francisco García Serrano provided invaluable assistance and advice while I was in Madrid, and Helen J. Nicholson’s painstaking attention to numerous drafts has dramatically improved the final product. I am grateful to the patient and dedicated board and staff of Fordham University Press, especially Franklin Harkins, Mary Erler, and William Cerbone.
My fellow Jesuits have provided the necessary permissions, means, and support for the completion of the project, and family, friends, and colleagues have offered encouragement and more than polite interest all the while. A special thanks goes to Santa Clara University and its president Mike Engh, SJ, for the generous production support of this volume. I must recall, finally, the great Robert I. Burns, SJ, to whose scholarship on medieval Iberia I am greatly indebted, and whose departure from this life has been a loss for all who knew him.
This might be a good place to answer a question that is sometimes posed to me about the relationship of my chosen field of study to my state of life. Years ago, I rather abruptly left my doctoral program to enter the Society of Jesus. Some have asked me if studying the military orders led to this decision. I’m not sure what the connection is supposed to be. I can say this much: like the members of the military orders, we Jesuits are not monks.
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