This slim volume is a product of the Robert M. Conway Lectures at the University of Notre Dame, and also of Jonathan Riley-Smith's original intention—derailed by ill health—to write a longer work on the religious life of the Templars. It complements and in many ways sums up Riley-Smith's previous work on these two great military orders.
From the title, one might expect this to be a book dealing solely with the religious life of these orders. It is more comprehensive in scope, however, presenting an institutional outline of their history, mostly in the East, but covering material from the West as well.
Riley-Smith is one of the world's foremost historians of the crusades generally, and he launched his career in 1967 with the still-valuable Knights of St. John in Jerusalem and Cyprus (London: Macmillan), so he has a long record of work with the military orders. A lifetime of careful and brilliant research lies behind this book, and it shows. Riley-Smith exercises a command of the sources and a breadth of vision that are as admirable as they are enviable. If it is not the “first systematic comparison” of these orders, as one of the blurbs claims, it is nonetheless a most welcome addition to the literature. The notes alone are worth the purchase price—they are a superb and concise bibliographic mine of the foundational sources for a study of these two orders, a valuable resource for beginner and practicing historian alike.
The value of the book notwithstanding, specialists in the military orders will find some points here on which to quibble. Riley-Smith argues that a lack of diversification of mission contributed to the Templars' downfall—the Hospital, in his view, was a more conventional religious order, and its retention of a nursing vocation helped to satisfy the imperative for balancing Christian charity and the violence of warfare in the eyes of others (23–24 and 42). This is an intriguing but debatable claim. The Teutonic Knights are not the focus of this volume, but their hospital vocation was, especially in later centuries, rather attenuated and perfunctory, yet this did not lead to their untimely demise. By Riley-Smith's own admission, the Hospitallers' Rhodian hospital was “out-of-the-way” and not very central after 1309 (69). That the Hospitallers immediately erected a tent-hospital on a beach in Italy after their expulsion from Rhodes in 1523 (70), or maintained an extensive hospital on Malta after 1530, does not seem very conclusive—one might just as easily argue that the Hospitallers simply continued to operate hospitals out of nostalgia, or a sense of obligation, or even—assuming that unease with their military vocation was significant, which is debatable—a desire to conceal the centrality of warfare to their own existence. Christianity is not a pacifist religion, and the military function of the Templars was not cited as a shortcoming during their trial. Indeed, when the French crown sought the approval of the theology masters of the University of Paris for the mere idea that the Templars were not eligible for the exemptions due a religious order because they were a “college of knights,” the masters firmly rejected the argument. The suggestion that the Hospital survived because it had a dual mission, and that the Temple failed because it focused single-mindedly on warfare, is intriguing but would require more demonstration than appears here.
The argument that the Templars were entirely devoted to war, to the complete exclusion of more traditionally “religious” activities, is open to question in any case. Riley-Smith cites Jacques de Molay, writing to Pope Clement V around 1305, as noting that the Hospitallers were created for nursing and that their military activity was secondary, while the Templars were created specifically for military service. To Riley-Smith, this means that “the Templars, in other words, were single-minded” (61). But Jacques' full sentence reads, “The Templars, however, were founded expressly for military service and in each of their bailliages they make a general donation to allcomers three times a week as well as a daily donation to the poor of a tenth of their bread” (The Templars: Selected Sources, trans. Malcolm Barber and Keith Bates [Manchester, N.Y.: Manchester University Press, 2002], 236). This does not sound like an order that entirely lost sight of Christian charity in its pursuit of warfare, and in fact the entire passage contains a vigorous representation by Jacques of the importance of almsgiving to both orders. It is possible, of course, to argue that Jacques is being defensive, or perhaps not straightforward, here. But the anonymous “Templar of Tyre,” who was no admirer of Jacques', supports Jacques' contention—he described the Templars as being “good Christians and devout in their masses and in their lives, and especially my lord … William of Beaujeu, who gave great and generous alms to many good people, both privately and openly, as anyone who cares to find out knows” (The ‘Templar of Tyre’: Part III of the ‘Deeds of the Cypriots,’ trans. Paul Crawford [Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003], 180). Inarguably the Templars had less of a split vision than the Hospitallers. But the proposal that singleness of vision significantly contributed to the Templars' downfall seems open to more debate than is admitted. Intriguing, and perhaps more likely, is Riley-Smith's implication that because the Templars began as knights and the Hospitallers as religious (61), the Hospitallers were more comfortable and therefore more successful as a religious order, but this too needs more exploration. Riley-Smith does at one point characterize his own position on the Templars' single-mindedness as “putting it perhaps over-simply” (63), and this seems a fair characterization.
Riley-Smith also argues that the Templars were rather static organizationally, and did not develop constitutionally as compared to the Hospitallers (62). The relative loss of Templar archives makes this comparison difficult to carry off effectively, but Riley-Smith's own discussion of the orders' governance (43–49) seems to undercut this position, and in any case Jochen Burgtorf's The Central Convent of Hospitallers and Templars: History, Organization, and Personnel 1099/1120–1310 (Leiden: Brill, 2008) makes it clear that the Templars did develop over time.
Most controversially, Riley-Smith says that “the common opinion that the Templars were innocent of all the charges levelled against them is now being challenged” (68). The footnote here cites an article by Riley-Smith himself and a book by Barbara Frale. Neither of these has met with universal acceptance, and Riley-Smith and Frale stand virtually alone in making the claim unequivocally (Alain Demurger is, as Riley-Smith notes, “on the fence”). The idea that the Templars were significantly guilty of the charges has been forcefully rejected in an essay by Alan Forey in The Debate on the Trial of the Templars (1307–1314), ed. Jochen Burgtorf, Helen Nicholson, and this reviewer (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2010), though the article probably appeared too late for use here. Other historians of the military orders, such as Malcolm Barber, Helen Nicholson, and Jochen Burgtorf, have generally expressed themselves against any finding of significant guilt. The idea that the Templars were not innocent is far from achieving consensus, and one wishes that Riley-Smith had not presented it quite so confidently here.
However, while one may disagree with Riley-Smith on this or that point, one cannot treat his opinions lightly; the massive and sympathetic erudition that he brings to bear on his subject ensures that. This is a valuable book—perhaps even because of the disagreements and discussions it may provoke—and belongs in the library of every crusade and military-order historian.
