ABSTRACT
Most studies of modern memories of the crusades focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in Britain, a period in which the image of the military-religious orders was already well established as one of fierce soldiers, often mysterious and romantic, sometimes tragic or corrupt. This chapter provides the first survey of how the military orders were remembered in Britain in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when they first became the subject of historical study, focusing upon their depiction in four bestselling histories written in the period. The military orders featured little in other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British sources. Thomas Fuller's first book, The Historie of the Holy Warre, focuses primarily on the crusades from 1095 to 1291, with a supplement detailing the later history of the military orders, the causes behind the failure of the Holy Land crusades and the kingdom of Jerusalem, and accounts of important crusaders and the involvement of each of Europe’s nations in the crusade movement.
