The Assimilation of Templar Properties by the Order of the Hospital

After the spectacular arrest and trial of the order of the Temple, the question arose of the fate of the order and its properties. Pope Clement V convened the council of Vienne in October 1311 to discuss this matter, together with crusades to the holy Land and the reform of the Church. At the council, the pope suppressed the Templar order and transferred its properties to the order of the Hospital. ¹ Clement’s decision at Vienne shaped the future of the order of the Hospital. ² Acquisition of the former Templar estates substantially increased the Hospitallers’ holdings, emphasized the order’s responsibility for recapturing the Holy Land and subsidized the order’s convent on Rhodes and, later, Malta. At the time, however, the order of the Hospital’s immediate concern was the legal opposition the brothers encountered when they tried to claim their new properties. In the interim between the Templars’ arrest and suppression, almost every royal and ecclesiastical authority in Europe had manoeuvered to obtain the Templar properties for themselves. The hospital endured years of litigation to claim its property rights. The fragmentary nature of the Hospitaller main archives for this period provide little evidence of any kind of a centralized administrative process that the order developed to transfer the Templar properties into its possession. Even so, enough materials remain to reconstruct some administrative practices that the order developed during the transfer. The order’s administration of the Templar properties illuminates the relationship between the master and the priories during the early fourteenth century, and offers some insight into the Hospitallers’ financial difficulties during the same period.