Networking at the papal curia as a survival strategy

Abstract

The “balancing act” that the surviving military orders, especially the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights, had to perform in order to survive after the trial of the Templars in the early fourteenth century has been the object of much speculation among historians. This chapter investigates two issues focusing on the Teutonic Order and its networks at the papal curia in the first three decades of the fourteenth century. It looks at how the Teutonic Order reflected on its own existence and role within Christendom in the 1330s through the treatise that a brother of the Teutonic Order, Ulrich, dedicated to Pope Benedict XII in 1335 to defend and promote his order in Avignon. The Teutonic Order was especially successful in organizing its representatives at the papal curia between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Bernard Guillemain notoriously described the fourteenth-century papal curia as a “patriarchal community”.