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Female Hospitallers
Religion was perhaps the dominant force in the lives of medieval Europeans, and was one of the chief motivations for the Crusades. The Roman Catholic belief system was imposed on the Holy Land when the Franks arrived, most visibly by the establishment of a Patriarch of Jerusalem controlled by the new Western rulers. The peculiar circumstances of the East had effects on this European Christianity, sometimes dramatic, some times almost immeasurably subtle.
There were, for example, new orders founded as a result of the Crusades, of which the most famous are the fighting monks such as the Knights of St John of Jerusalem. These warrior priests have achieved lasting fame: less well known is their female companion order, the sister Hospitallers.
The fighting monks and their female companions were a new sort of religious, created directly out of the Crusades. Whereas the lay pilgrims were committed to the journey only for the duration of the conquest, these orders were permanently on station, carrying out their functions as long as their members lived.
The knights combined two theoretically antithetical functions, that of priest and warrior. Christianity was a religion of peace and love, and canonical law forbade its priests from shedding blood by the sword. It was apparent, however, that the extraordinary situation in the East required extraordinary measures. And thus a special dispensation was made for a special order of priests of high birth who could double as military defenders of the Faith. Thus was born the most fanatical groups of Christian warriors spawned in these bloody wars. Two of these groups, the Hospitallers and the Templars, became in their zeal major players in deciding the downfall of the very kingdom they had been instituted to defend.
The Knights of the Temple emerged as a separate order in about 1118. The Knights of the Hospital had already been at work tending to the needs of pilgrims before the First Crusade. The nobles who participated in the First Crusade demonstrated their gratitude by making large grants of land to the order, of which one of the first was a gift by Godfrey of Boulogne of the seigneury of Montboire in Brabant. It is perhaps significant of a family tradition of gift giving to maintain the impetus of the Crusade, as in the case of Ida of Lorraine, his mother, when she erected chapels on her lands at Boulogne a decade later, no doubt also in gratitude for the success of their affairs.
With such important backers, the Hospitallers, the Templars and other orders grew in status and military might at a tremendous rate. Pope Paschal confirmed the Hospitallers as an order in 1113, and their status as fighting monks was fixed by about 1140.
The Templars went on to dominate not only eastern military affairs, but also European banking. The Hospitallers grew in their function as a medical order, and were a significant part of that growth in medical knowledge in the Frankish East which was of such importance to women.
And as well as that, the Hospitallers were unusual amongst the fighting monks in that it consisted of two parts: the brothers and the sisters. The sisters were gathered into a women's convent.
Husband and wives frequently entered the order at the same time. The sister Hospitallers originated at the same time as the Hospital, and credit for this usually goes to a Roman gentlewoman Alix or Agnes. She set up a hospital in Jerusalem after the First Crusade to take care of poor and sick women. The patriarch of Jerusalem approved the foundation of the hospital of St Mary Magdalene by the order.
The order eventually took root in all the countries of Europe.
They fled Palestine after Saladin's reconquest and took refuge in their Western priories.
Abandoning their caring functions, they devoted themselves to prayer. Henceforth, they subjected themselves to the discipline of St Augustine.
Their lives were cloistered and in their solitude they governed themselves, directly answerable only to the Grand Master of their order.1
WOMAN'S REFUGE
The Crusades thus had direct influences on the religious life of some privileged medieval women.
In a wider sense, the reclusive life of nuns in Outremer was attractive to many of those women whose wealth and high birth put them in a position to escape from the chaotic earthly world to a place of regulation, safety and absence of men.
In an immediate sense, within the Crusading Kingdom itself, there were a number of religious foundations for women. The oldest of these was the nunnery of St Maria la Grande which was situated within the Amalfi compound near the Holy Sepulchre. Such nunneries were often associated with particular events in biblical history. Thus, the convent of St Anne was built on the alleged birthplace of the Virgin, and the convent of Bethany on the spot where Lazarus was resurrected. There was also one new order of nuns founded in the Holy Land, the order of St Margaret.
The nun's life was not, however, for every woman. It was almost always only high born women who could expect to achieve the life of a nun: entry into an abbey was usually accompanied by some sort of payment in the form of an endowment or dowry for the upkeep of the newcomer.
A particularly noble entrant to the nunnery at the Holy Sepulchre was the Queen of Georgia, who entered there before 1108.
The significance of her arrival is noted in a letter from Anseau, precentor of the Holy Sepulchre. This document was sent to the canons of Notre Dame in Paris, together with a letter certifying the authenticity of a piece of wood accompanying the paper.
It was, said Anseau's covering note, a piece of the True Cross, brought by the queen, a woman whom Anseau described as being revered more for her saintliness than her noble birth.
At the death of her husband, she shaved her head and took the veil. Then, taking the cross fragment and a large treasure in gold, she retired to Jerusalem with some
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