Military Orders and Crusades by Alan Forey

Abstract

536 BOOK REVIEWS of the importance of individual men and women and their often imperfect responses to the situations in which they found themselves. It is a balanced, humane and scholarly view of the past such as we might expect from the author of The Two Cities. Bernard Hamilton University ofNottingham Military Orders and Crusades. By Alan Forey. [Variorum Collected Studies Series , CS432.] Brookfleld,Vermont:Variorum, Ashgate Publishing Company. 1994. Pp. via, 318. $91.95 approx.) Few scholars have contributed as much to our knowledge of the military religious orders in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries as has Dr. Alan Forey. The present volume contains thirteen of his papers published between 1971 and 1991 , most of them in the 1980's. The first eight, devoted to the military orders as a whole, concern a wide range of important subjects which have often received only cursory attention in the historical literature: their emergence in the twelfth century,recruitment,novitiate and instruction oftheir membership, associated female orders, their role in the Spanish reconquest, in the ransoming of captives from Islam, in holy war against Christians, and in crusading proposals of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Two essays discuss the Hospitallers: their initial militarization, and subsequent constitutional conflict and change within the order. One delves into the history of the short-lived Spanish Order of Mountjoy, and another into the long-lived but little-known English Order of St. Thomas of Acre. The book concludes with an interesting paper on the crusading vows of King Henry III of England. The author is a meticulous scholar and one is constantly impressed by both the chronological and geographical scope of the published primary and secondary sources upon which the articles in the volume are largely based. His capacity to integrate and balance the historical content of official documents with the narrative accounts of the chroniclers enables him to progress beyond the normal expectations of the evidence and to establish a meaningful evolution ofevents. He pursues controversial subjects, points out weaknesses in previously formulated arguments, establishes the present state of the question, and offers new and valuable interpretations while at the same time opening the way to additional avenues of research. He is as comfortable working with such broad matters as the military orders in the Iberian Peninsula over nearly two centuries as with the crucial metamorphosis of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem from a hospitaller to a military organization during the course of a generation. It is not surprising, given his comprehensive grasp of the literature and encyclopedic knowledge of the subject, that his work is so frequently resorted to by contemporary authors working in similar and related fields. Despite the wealth of information he provides, Dr. Forey's conclusions are BOOK REVIEWS 537 nevertheless cautious. He states, as a wise example for the profession, that "because of the paucity ofthe evidence available the most that can be expected of any interpretation is a reasoned and coherent hypothesis" (X/16). Although the subject matter it contains is less comprehensive, the wealth of references to the sources makes this volume a more useful historical tool than his recent work, The Military Orders (1992), which was apparently intended for undergraduates and a wider general readership. On the other hand, the fact that all quotations from the sources are, with the exception of his essay on the ransoming of captives, reproduced in the language of the original, makes a vital part of the present publication inaccessible to that same audience. Both specialist and other readers would best be served ifthe quotes were given in translation in the text and the original reproduced in the notes. The volume would also have profited from the incorporation of subjects into the existing index of persons and places, and a bibliography. Of the many well-documented hypotheses put forward in this book, two may be singled out for comment. The first concerns the author's contentions that the favor experienced by the Templars after receiving ecclesiastical approval at the Council ofTroyes (1 129) should not be "regarded as a serious threat to the fortunes of the Hospital" QX/86) and that the Hospitallers entered into a military role...