ABSTRACT
A t the time when encyclopaedic works on the military orders beganto be produced in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, itwas widely held that the military order was an institution which had existed for most of the Christian era. Many of the orders catalogued in these volumes were reported to have been founded well before the period of the crusades, although there were often conflicting opinions about the precise antiquity of a particular foundation. Various dates were, for example, given for the establishment of the military order which the knights of the Holy Sepulchre were thought to constitute: although some held that it had been founded shortly after the first crusade, its creation was attributed by others to St James the Less in the first century A.D., while its origins were also placed in the time of Gonstantine and in that of Charlemagne. The foundation of the order of Santiago, which in fact occurred in 1170, was often traced back to the ninth century; yet while Some linked it with the supposed discovery of the body of St James during the reign of Alfonso n, others associated it with the legendary victory of Clavijo, which was placed in the time of Ramiro i.1 The accumulation of myth and tradition recorded in these encyclopaedias has exercised a prolonged influence on historians of the military orders: disproof has not always been sufficient to silence a persistent tradition. It is, nevertheless, clear that the Christian military order, in the sense of an institution whose members combined a military with a religious way of life, in fact originated during the earlier part of the twelfth century in the Holy Land. The first foundation of this kind was the order of the Temple, which was established probably in the year 11 19* for the purpose of protecting pilgrims visiting
the holy places and which by 1128 had become involved in the defence of the kingdom of Jerusalem and was assisting in wars against the infidel in Syria. Whatever traditions and legends may have later developed, contemporaries were well aware that it was then that the institution of the military order was emerging. St Bernard was clearly in no doubt, for he wrote of the Temple: 'novum militiae genus ortum nuper auditur in terris... novum, inquam, militiae genus, et saeculis inexpertum'.3 The Templar rule itself refers to 'hoc genus novum religionis', and similarphrases are encountered in various other twelfth-century works.4
