ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the presence of members of the Iberian military orders and the depiction of the Crusades in Mexican literature as an aspect of Catholic liberal thought in Mexico in the nineteenth century. By 1840 there were a handful members of these military orders residing in Mexico. They were Classicist intellectuals and politicians, who espoused a moderate Catholic Liberalism in cultural debates, particularly the Knight of Montesa, Jose Justo Gomez de la Cortina, who wrote the only known Mexican piece about the Templars and held a public debate on the utility of learning the history of the Crusades in 1844. All these knights also had strong ties to Spain. Apart from their brief possession of the Lesser Antilles between 1651 and 1665 and some individual knights who acted as colonial administrators in New France in the seventeenth century and in Spanish America in the eighteenth century, the Order of Malta had little presence in the Americas.
