ABSTRACT
As far back as the Middle Ages, many iconographical and literary images clearly linked the military orders with the frontier – that frontier which it was usual to talk about in the singular, namely the border then dividing the Latin world from the territories of infi dels. The brethren at the frontier were regarded as labouring untiringly for the defence and expansion of the Christian faith. The classical historiography of the military orders toyed with this idea in many ways, and the view of the brethren’s superiority that became accepted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is still repeated without question in most popularizing works. Of course, this reading of the medieval history of the military orders is not entirely wrong, but the relationship that the brethren maintained with the frontier proves to be much more complex. In his contribution to this volume Nikolas Jaspert points this out very clearly. Since the last third of the twentieth century, scholarship on the involvement of the brethren on the frontier has benefi ted from the same historiographical renewal that has allowed the study of the military orders to emerge as a fi eld of research in its own right within present-day medieval historical studies, although this development is not without its dangers. 1 However, progress has not been as great as one might expect, and old clichés still persist. In spite of great advances, most of them in English scholarship, the military history of the brethren is not the area of medieval research which has progressed most. 2 In a short but stimulating book Damien Carraz has noted that ‘la relation de l’ordre du Temple au fait guerrier n’a, me semble-t-il, pas encore été vraiment appréhendée dans sa globalité et sa spécifi cité’. 3 For the other military orders the situation is even worse and, as the same French historian has pointed out, we are in need of ‘une histoire totale du domaine de la guerre’ for all orders, which encompasses a complete social and cultural approach. 4
In this chapter, my intention is not to present a comprehensive study of war and
5 fear that I am especially inclined towards generalities or theories. This is not so, and I want to write here, as I have always done, as a practical historian. I am all the more inclined to do this since the conference which occasioned this volume was held in London. I remember that when I started to study the military orders, about two decades ago, I was especially interested in works written in English, in particular those of British scholars, who have always stimulated my thinking. In a recent collaborative book, Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century , Malcolm Barber and María Bonet Donato, who were responsible for analyzing Alan Forey’s contribution, have pointed out the debt I owe to the author of The Templars in the Corona de Aragón . 6 For me and for many others, Alan Forey has been a forerunner. In 2001, during the Teruel Conference, the proceedings of which unfortunately were never published, 7 he confessed that he did not have ‘much faith in any theory of history which seeks to give undue shape to the past’. 8 Indifferent to fashions and trends in historiography, Alan Forey has won renown and still continues to do so by adopting an empirical method, always mindful of the documentation and of events. On the other side of the English Channel, namely on my own, one might consider this position as a return to positivism. But this is not the case. As Malcolm Barber and María Bonet Donato have pointed out, the various books and articles by Alan Forey form ‘a comprehensive work [ . . . ] always supported by documented facts’. 9 Here, modestly, inspired by this method, I will try to make the most of an exceptional documentary corpus concerning midfourteenth century Castile, which sheds light on the relationship that frontier confl ict, military cost and culture had for the brethren of Santiago and their peers.
