ABSTRACT
The nature of the military orders posed some serious problems for contemporaries as well as for later scholars. The historian Edward Gibbon echoed Bernard of Clairvaux when he described them as ‘the strange association of a monastic and military life which fanaticism might suggest, but which policy must approve’.1 All armies share to some extent a combination of fighting with self-denial and discipline, but none to the same extent and with the same ambiguity as the military orders. Among the questions they present and which will be discussed here are whether they were a novelty on the religious and social scene of the twelfth century, whether their members should be regarded as crusaders, whether their service was lifelong or temporary, and how they fitted into the established organization of the church and society. Were they laymen or some sort of canon, monk, or conversus? These questions were much discussed in the middle ages, as they are today, and they may be ultimately unanswerable, in part because people at that time were less concerned than modern scholars with problems of categorization and definition.
