ABSTRACT
The emergence of the military orders was intimately connected to crusading thought and practices. The Templars and their imitators were not technically crusaders, being differentiated by the nature of their votive obligations and the duration of their service. But the physical setting in which the earliest brethren operated was one created by crusading; and brethren and crusaders alike bore witness to the particular ways in which, by the end of the eleventh century and the early decades of the twelfth, the Latin world approached the concept that violence could be used in the service of the Church and in the hope of spiritual gain.
