Atlantis Online
March 29, 2024, 07:46:40 am
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Comet theory collides with Clovis research, may explain disappearance of ancient people
http://uscnews.sc.edu/ARCH190.html
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

The Templars in the Corona de Aragón

Pages: [1] 2 3 4 5 6 7   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: The Templars in the Corona de Aragón  (Read 7185 times)
0 Members and 57 Guests are viewing this topic.
Savannah
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 174



« on: January 11, 2009, 04:03:44 am »

the nature of the grants made to the Templars in 1210 following the conquest of the Rincón de Ademuz suggests that the Crown was becoming reluctant to make important new grants of territory to the Order.
The Crown's attitude towards the Temple finds a more precise expression in the reign of James I, especially at the time of the conquest of Mallorca from the Almohade ruler Abu-Yahya. At the meetings of the Cortes held in Barcelona at the end of 1228 and at Tarragona in September 1229 it was agreed that the land gained in the proposed expedition to Mallorca should be divided among the king, nobles, and clergy according to the size of contingents provided, and promises were made at these assemblies by various magnates and prelates to bring a certain number of troops. (111) After the conquest of Mallorca, these agreements were put into effect; as a result the Temple gained considerably less than a fifth of the island. All who had provided troops were assessed at a certain number of caballerías, according to the size of their contingents. (112) The term was here used merely to signify [32] shares; it did not refer to actual pieces of land, as has often been thought. (113) The largest single assessment was that of the king, who was rated at 5,674½ caballerías, while of the rest the Templar assessment of 525½ caballerías was the fifth largest, coming after those of Nuño Sánchez, Gastoneto of Moncada, the bishop of Barcelona, and the count of Ampurias. As the total number of caballerías was nearly 13,450, the Templar assessment was just under a twenty-fifth of the whole. How large a contingent this figure represented is not clear. The chronicler Desclot states that in the Barcelona assembly the Order promised to contribute thirty horsemen and twenty crossbowmen; (114) but there is no reference to such a promise in the documents drawn up in the Cortes or in the Chronicle of James I, and Desclot's information about other contingents is inaccurate; (115) there seems therefore little reason for accepting his statement. And in the Cortes at Tarragona the lieutenant of the provincial master of the Temple merely promised to bring as many knights as possible. Nevertheless an indication of the number of troops which the Templar assessment represented is possibly provided by the evidence which survives about the share allotted to the Hospitallers. They had arrived too late to take part in the expedition but petitioned the king to give them some land in Mallorca. According to the Chronicle of James I the king agreed to give them the amount allotted for a contingent of thirty knights and also made them a further gift out of his own share; (116) and in the list of caballerías the Hospitallers are assigned first 148 caballerías and then 'by the donation of the king' another 152 caballerías. It may be suggested therefore that the 148 caballerías represented the share for thirty knights, and that each knight was assessed at five caballerías. The Templar contingent would therefore have consisted of just over a hundred knights or their equivalent.

Exactly what the Order gained as its twenty-fifth share is not known, since in the repartimiento the Temple's acquisitions are not given separately. The island was divided into eight parts, four of which were assigned jointly to the king, the Temple, William of Moncada, Raymond Alamán, and William of Claramunt, whose caballerías together comprised about half the total number. (117) Of these four parts the king gained approximately five-sixths and the others one-sixth. But details of the division of the sixth are not given, and it can only be stated what the Temple and these nobles [33] were assigned together, although the proportions of each are known, for William of Moncada was assessed at 276 caballerías and Raymond Alamán and William of Claramunt jointly at 205. The Temple's share of the sixth was therefore a little over a half.

In the city of Mallorca the Temple and the three nobles were given 55 out of 320 operatoria, 4 ovens out of 24, 12 houses of the 89 in the Almudayna, and 393 elsewhere, besides 5 alquerías totalling 66½ jovadas. (118) Outside the city they were granted half of Pollensa, half of the Montaña, a quarter of Montuiri, and a twelfth of the Albufera. (119) The acquisitions in Pollensa consisted of 52 alquerías totalling 285 jovadas; in the Montaña they gained 26 alquerías of 129 jovadas; and in Montuiri their allocation comprised 36 alquerías of 193 jovadas. (120)

Thus in the division of Mallorca James I made no attempt to enforce Raymond Berenguer's charter, which he could have done by granting the Order part of his own share; the only donation he made to the Temple at this time other than those mentioned in the repartimiento was of a castle near the walls of the city of Mallorca given in April 1230 as a residence for the Templars.(121) And the precedent created following the acquisition of Mallorca was to be followed when further conquests were made: when James issued a confirmation of Templar privileges in 1233, during the siege of Burriana, he revoked the Order's right to a fifth of lands conquered from the Moors. (122) When therefore lands were distributed after the conquest of the kingdom of Valencia from the Moorish ruler Zaiyán, the Templars no longer enjoyed a privileged position. Their reward like that of others was to be determined by the extent of their help. (123)

No precise evidence survives about the significance of the Templar forces in the conquest of the Valencian kingdom, but entries in the Chronicle of James I suggest that the Order's troops were important not because of their numbers but because they could be quickly mobilized and could, with the men of the royal household, help to form the nucleus of an army. When early in 1238 the king set out towards the city of Valencia, his army -- according to the Chronicle -- included a commander of the Temple with about twenty knights. This was a small contingent compared with the royal retinue at that time of 130-40 knights, or Roderick of Linzana's following of thirty; but it was a force that was in the field earlier than many contingents coming from Aragon [34] and Catalonia. (124) That this was the importance of Templar troops is also suggested by the Chronicle account of the Burriana campaign in 1233. Troops for the assault on Burriana should apparently have been concentrated at Teruel. None appeared on the day fixed, but messengers reported to the king that the provincial masters of the Temple and Hospital, together with the Calatravan commander of Alcañiz, had been waiting near Murviedro for two days according to orders. These then joined James, and the attack on Burriana appears, from the evidence of the Chronicle, to have been undertaken by the king, the military orders, the men of Teruel and of the bishop of Zaragoza, and a few nobles, who were assisted only later by other lay contingents. (125)

In return for such aid the Templars received certain rewards. In June 1233, during the siege of Burriana, James granted the Templars the alquerías of Benhamet and Mantella, which lay within the terms of Burriana, on the condition that they captured them, (126) and the Templars' assistance was further rewarded after the capture of Burriana by the grant on 25 July of part of the town, including six towers. (127) Three days earlier, for the 'many and gracious services' which the Temple had given in the siege of Burriana, the king also confirmed the grant of Chivert to the Temple. (128) At this time it still lay in Moorish hands, but -- as in many other Moorish strongholds -- the inhabitants preferred to capitulate on terms rather than withstand a long siege, and the provincial master was able to negotiate for its surrender. (129) In 1237 the Templars were given the alquería of Seca in Burriana by the king, (130) and in the next year, following the capture of the city of Valencia, James

remembering the many and gracious services which you our beloved and venerable brothers of the house of the Temple have given us and give us daily and have given now in the conquest of the city and kingdom of Valencia
granted to the Order in the city the torre grande at the gate called Barbazachar for a residence, houses in the same part of the city, land for a garden in La Xarea outside the gate, and twenty jovadas of arable land. (131) In August 1244, following the siege of Játiva, at which the provincial master had been present, the Order was further given half of the shipyard at Denia (132) and later in the same year, at the siege of Biar, James gave the Temple the right to [35] build houses on the walls of Burriana.(133) Two years later James also gave compensation for Ruzafa, which had been promised to the Temple by Peter II. The Order was assigned the alquerías of Moncada and Carpesa, which both lay near the city of Valencia and which James had bought from Peter of Moncada and the royal notary Bernard Vidal. (134) The Order lastly obtained Pulpís, although it was not until 1277 that the Templars gained possession of it from the Order of Calatrava, which claimed to have captured it. (135)
Yet the gains made by the Temple from the Crown following the conquest of Valencia were limited. New donations of property by the king were comparatively few and unimportant, and very little was granted to the Order in the more southerly parts of the kingdom; the Templars were not assigned a leading role in frontier defence there. (136) Nor were all the promises made by previous kings carried out, even though some of the places promised had apparently comprised compensation for the Order's fifth elsewhere. Culla was given by the king in 1235 to Blasco of Alagón, and Montornés in 1242 to a royal notary Peter Sánchez; (137) and although Oropesa had been promised with Chivert to the Temple in 1169, no reference was made to it when James confirmed the Temple's claim to Chivert in 1233, and after its capture it was assigned to the Hospital, which had been promised it in 1149 by Raymond Berenguer IV. (138) No compensation was received by the Temple for any of these places, even though the Order plainly had charters to support its claims. (139) Although the evidence about the conquest of, and allocation of lands in, Valencia is not so precise as that concerning Mallorca, the Templars clearly failed to gain either the fifth promised by Raymond Berenguer IV or all of the other rights to which they could lay claim in the kingdom of Valencia.

While in the first half of the thirteenth century the Temple's share in the Aragonese conquests was declining, this source of new wealth disappeared almost entirely after the acquisition of Valencia, which completed the conquest of the territories assigned to the Aragonese kings in the treaty of Cazorla in 1179. The only further property in reconquered districts that the Order gained from the Crown were houses and land in Murcia, granted by James I in 1266 after the Aragonese expedition there, in which the Templars had participated. (140) The Order's undertaking in 1143 [36] to take part in the conflict with the Moors had therefore proved most profitable to the Temple in the twelfth century, when it received important lordships and rights from Raymond Berenguer IV and Alfonso II; through the grants received from these rulers it had become particularly powerful along the lower valleys of the Segre and Ebro and in southern Aragon. Its rewards in Mallorca and Valencia were of lesser importance.
 

While the Order was gaining important estates from the Aragonese rulers in return for its participation in the reconquista, it was increasing its wealth throughout the Corona de Aragón through other donations and purchases. These other acquisitions were in a variety of forms. Some gifts to the Temple were of cash and movables, especially horses and arms. A considerable number of grants of this kind were made by confratres of the Temple. Although some religious orders founded at the end of the eleventh century, such as Citeaux and Grandmont, prohibited the practice of confraternity, the Rule of the Temple permitted the custom, which soon received encouragement from the papacy. (141) The Order had confratres in Aragon as early as 1131,(142) and the rapid extension of such ties in north-eastern Spain is apparent not only from individual contracts of confraternity which have survived, but also from several lists of confratres which have been preserved. A parchment roll, covering the period up to 1225, thus lists some 450 Aragonese and Navarrese confratres of the Temple. (143) A similar list is found in a late twelfth-century Templar cartulary; in part it reproduces the parchment roll and contains the names of 230 confratres. (144) This cartulary also includes a further list of confratres living in Novillas; fifty-two agreements of confraternity are here detailed. (145) Most of these confratres made bequests of movables to the Order. Those who possessed a horse and arms usually bequeathed these; women commonly left their best garment; and other bequests by confratres were of money. It is difficult to judge, however, how frequently acquisitions of movables were made by the Temple. Although gifts of horses and arms and cash are frequently recorded in contracts of confraternity, information about other donations in these forms has often survived only because these gifts were noted in wills which were preserved because they also referred to rights over landed property. An isolated gift of cash is unlikely to have left any [37] surviving record. As wills not infrequently refer to bequests of movables to the Temple, however, acquisitions in this form may have been of some importance. (146)

Report Spam   Logged


Pages: [1] 2 3 4 5 6 7   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy