Around 1130 Bernard composed a treatise–titled In Praise of the New Knighthood–extolling the virtues of the Templars’ way of life. The abbot declared the order to be ‘most worthy of total admiration’, lauding its brethren as ‘true knights of Christ fight[ing] the battles of their Lord’, assured of glorious martyrdom should they die. This lyrical exhortation played a central role in popularising the Templar movement across Latin Europe, garnering acceptance for a revolutionary offshoot of crusade ideology that in many ways was the ultimate distillation and expression of Christian holy war.

The example set by the Templars encouraged another charitable religious movement founded by Latins in the Near East to embrace militarisation. Since the late eleventh century, Jerusalem’s Christian quarter had contained a hospital, funded by Italian merchants and devoted to the care of pilgrims and the sick. With the Holy City’s conquest by the First Crusaders and the associated influx of pilgrim traffic, this institution, dedicated to John the Baptist and so known as the Hospital of St John, grew in power and importance. Recognised as an order by the pope in 1113, the Hospitallers, as they came to be known, began to attract widespread international patronage. Under the guidance of its master, Raymond of Le Puy (1120–60), the movement appended a martial element to its ongoing medical functions, emerging by the mid-twelfth century as the second Military Order.

Over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Templars and Hospitallers stood at the heart of crusading history, playing leading roles in the war for the Holy Land. In the central Middle Ages, Latin lay nobles commonly sought to affirm their devotion to God by giving alms to religious movements, often in the form of title to land or rights to its revenue. The mercurial popularity of the Military Orders therefore brought them rich donations in Outremer and across Europe. Despite their relatively humble origins–immortalised in the Templars’ case by their seal, depicting two impoverished knights riding a single horse–both were soon endowed with enormous wealth. They also attracted a steady stream of recruits, many of whom became highly trained, well-equipped warrior-monks (as knights or lower-ranking sergeants). Most medieval European war bands were startlingly amateurish, accustomed only to fighting in short seasonal campaigns and predominantly composed of poorly drilled, lightly armed irregulars. The Templars and Hospitallers, by contrast, could levy expert full-time standing forces: in effect, Latin Christendom’s first professional armies.

The Military Orders became supranational movements. Primarily focused on the protection of the crusader states, they nonetheless developed an array of other European military, ecclesiastical and financial interests, including a prominent role in the Iberian frontier wars against Islam. In the Levant their unprecedented military and economic might brought them a concomitant degree of political influence. Both orders enjoyed papal patronage, gaining independence from local secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and so had the potential to destabilise the Latin East’s sovereign polities. As rogue powers, they might question or even countermand crown authority, or ignore patriarchal edicts and episcopal instruction. For now, though, this danger was more than balanced by the transformative benefits of their involvement in Outremer’s defence.

Together, the Templars and Hospitallers brought a desperately needed influx of manpower and martial expertise to crusader states starved of military resources. Crucially, they also possessed the wealth to maintain, and in time extend, Outremer’s network of forts and castles. From the 1130s onwards, the lay lords of the Latin East began ceding control of fortified sites to the orders, often allowing them to develop semi-independent enclaves in border zones. Command of the castle of Baghras gave the Templars a dominant position in the northern reaches of the Antiochene principality. Rights to Safad in Galilee and to Gaza in southern Palestine brought the order similar rights and responsibilities. The Hospitallers, meanwhile, gained centres at Krak des Chevaliers, perched above the Bouqia valley between Antioch and Tripoli, and at Bethgibelin, one of three strongholds built in southern Palestine to defend Jerusalem and exert military pressure upon Muslim-held Ascalon.⁷⁹

Turning to Christendom

After 1119 the Levantine Franks also began to look beyond their own borders for aid. In theory at least, eastern Christians should have been one obvious source of assistance.* Encircled by Islam and distant as it was from western Europe, Outremer needed a neighbouring ally if it was to achieve long-term survival. Yet, although the crusader states shared a common Christian faith with the Byzantine Empire–the Mediterranean superpower feared and respected by the Muslim world–since Jerusalem’s conquest the Greeks had contributed precious little to the war for the Holy Land. The embittered dispute over Antioch lay at the heart of this failure to secure imperial support and, if unaddressed, this problem looked set to cripple the Frankish Levant for decades to come. In 1137, after long years of distraction elsewhere in Byzantium, Alexius I’s son and heir, Emperor John II Comnenus, marched into Syria to reassert Greek influence over what he considered the eastern fringes of his realm. John managed to impose theoretical suzerainty over Antioch, and from this point forward the principality’s relations with the rest of Outremer were always balanced by its ties to Constantinople. But in military terms the empire’s contribution was disappointing, with expeditions against Aleppo and Shaizar ending in failure. John returned to the East in late summer 1142, probably planning to create a new Byzantine polity at Antioch ruled directly by his youngest son Manuel. As it was, John died in a hunting accident in Cilicia in April 1143–a sudden catastrophe that brought the Greek expedition to an immediate halt.⁸⁰

In fact, Outremer turned most frequently to western Christendom for assistance after the Field of Blood. In January 1120, at a general assembly of the kingdom of Jerusalem’s secular and ecclesiastical leaders in Nablus (north of the Holy City), the crisis facing the crusader states was discussed. This resulted in the first direct appeal to Pope Calixtus II for a new crusade to the Holy Land and a further entreaty to Venice. The Italian mercantile republic responded by sending a fleet of at least seventy ships east in autumn 1122 under the crusading banner. With Venetian help the Jerusalemite Franks captured the heavily fortified city of Tyre in 1124–one of Palestine’s last remaining Muslim-held ports and a major centre of Mediterranean shipping and commerce.* King Baldwin II sought to rally another crusade for a projected attack on Damascus in 1129, but despite recruiting a sizeable party of western knights, the campaign itself proved to be a fiasco.

Intent upon forging closer links with the Latin West and keen to solve their own succession crises, the Levantine Franks also looked to secure eligible European husbands for a number of Outremer’s heiresses. In the crusader states, as in much of medieval Christendom, there was a perceived need for male rule; secular lords, from kings to counts, were expected to lead, or at least direct, their armies in times of war, and military command generally was deemed to be the preserve of men. Ideally, marriage candidates would be high-born aristocrats–men willing to commit to the defence of the Holy Land and possessed of the social standing to bring new wealth and manpower to the East. One such figure was Raymond of Poitiers–the duke of Aquitaine’s second son and a relation of France’s Capetian king–who was married to Constance of Antioch in 1136, bringing a long period of political turbulence in northern Syria to an end. An even more influential union was orchestrated in the late 1120s. King Baldwin II had four daughters with his Armenian wife Morphia, but no sons, and therefore he sought a match for his eldest child Melisende to secure the royal succession. After protracted negotiations, in 1129 the princess duly wed Count Fulk V of Anjou, one of France’s most eminent potentates with ties to the monarchs of England and France.