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The Templars in the Corona de Aragón

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Author Topic: The Templars in the Corona de Aragón  (Read 7173 times)
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Savannah
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« Reply #15 on: January 11, 2009, 04:23:02 am »

Nevertheless the Usage Princeps namque could be used to justify requests for service on a wide variety of occasions, when the king was opposed by foreign invaders or by rebels. Yet the Aragonese rulers did not try to exact service from the Ternplars and their men at every possible opportunity. The Crown was clearly wary of using the Templars themselves against its Christian enemies. Members of the Order were admittedly called out when the country was in danger of invasion from Castile or France and strong measures were threatened to ensure that service was given; a summons to the master's lieutenant in 1300 thus contained the threat

if you do otherwise we will proceed against you and the possessions of the said Order as is just against those who thus inhumanly refuse to fight for their country. (215)
[137] Yet the timing of summonses in 1285 indicates the king's hesitancy in demanding service from the Templars. On 22 April the Temple's vassals were ordered to join the king, who was at Figueras, and the master was commanded to send some men to the Navarrese frontier as well; (216) further summonses ordering the men of the Temple to join the royal army were issued at the beginning of May; (217) and it was only on 7 June that the military orders themselves were assigned the task of defending the coast, which was being threatened by the French fleet. (218) Nor was the aid of the Templars themselves usually demanded for suppressing risings of nobles. Similarly, although the men of the Temple were summoned more frequently than the members of the Order and were used against rebels, their services were not always sought. When Peter III, for example, called out the men of ecclesiastical lords in 1281, he commanded royal officials not to demand service from men subject to the Templars and Hospitallers, because he had excused them for the time being. (219) On such occasions royal officials who tried to exact service were rebuked by the king and ordered not to enforce service unless the men of the Temple were summoned by the king's command. (220) When the vassals of the military orders were summoned, it was often not until the middle of a campaign, when the king needed reinforceinents. Thus although Peter III began to besiege Balaguer towards the end of May 1280, he did not seek the aid of Templar vassals until the later part of June. (221) Similarly, although the men of religious lords, including the Temple, were summoned for service in Pallars at the end of June 1297, (222) towards the end of May the royal vicar of Cervera had been ordered not to demand service from the Temple's men. (223) In the same way, the Aragonese kings did not always press their demands for redenciones from Templar vassals who did not serve. Although in order to enforce payment Alfonso III in 1289 commanded that all the possessions of the citizens of Tortosa on the island of Mallorca should be seized, (224) on some other occasions demands were abandoned, as in 1290 when the king de gratia gave up his claim to redenciones from the inhabitants of Monzón who had not served on a recent campaign in the north. (225)
The Crown's demands for service were being made at a time when royal encroachments on privilege were being denounced and when a return to earlier custom was being demanded. In [138] this situation the Aragonese rulers were hesitant in making new claims to service, especially as there was in the 1280s the danger that the Temple might give its support to Aragon's French and papal enemies. The only solution for the king, as in the sphere of jurisdiction, was to persuade the papacy itself to agree to a diminution of the Order's privileges. James II therefore in 1297 sought not only the right of merum imperium but also that of hueste and cabalgada in places subject to the military orders and other ecclesiastical lords. (226) But the royal request was rejected, as was a demand made three years later that the king should lead the men of religious lords in expeditions undertaken in defence of the country; (227) and after the dissolution of the Temple the question of military service continued to be an issue in dispute between the Crown and the Hospitallers. (228)

The Aragonese kings' new demands for military service were probably more influenced by the completion of the reconquest than the claims they made in the fields of finance and justice, which formed part of a wider policy. But while royal demands for service against Christians are to be explained in part by the declining importance of the struggle against the Moors once the Aragonese reconquest was completed, it is possible that in seeking this kind of service the Aragonese kings were also influenced by the Templars' reluctance to fulfil the obligation which they still owed of fighting against the infidel. Although the Templars still participated in campaigns against the Moors, (229) they were often slow to respond to royal summonses and sought temporary exemptions for themselves.

The first clear indication of the Order's changing attitude is found in a papal bull issued in 1250, in which Innocent IV ordered the Temple and Hospital to assist in the struggle against the Moors in Spain. (230) This letter was sent in response to a petition from James I, who had obviously complained about the Orders' conduct. Fuller evidence of this reluctance is encountered towards the end of the century. It is revealed, for example, by the timing and wording of a series of royal summonses issued at the end of 1286 and early in 1287, after the treaty made with Granada in 1282 had been repudiated. (231) On 9 December 1286 the king wrote from Mallorca commanding the military orders to go without delay to Valencia to repel an invasion which the Moors were preparing. (232) This first summons was followed at the beginning [139] of January 1287 by a further letter from Alfonso to Peter of Tous, the lieutenant of the provincial master, ordering him to prepare to repel the Moors and not to put forward any excuses; in this letter the king recalled that the Templars had been given lands on the understanding that they would always be ready to defend the kingdom against the Moors, and he threatened to seize some of their property if they did not serve. (233) On 11 April the military orders were further ordered to serve under Berenguer of Puigvert and Peter Fernández,(234) but it was necessary to write again ten days later to the Templars, Hospitallers, and the commander of Alcañiz to order them to go to Valencia immediately; on this occasion the king threatened to seize all their property in Valencia if they did not comply. (235) In the same way, when the Temple was commanded to serve on the frontier for the whole of January 1304, it was made known to the provincial master that

if, which is scarcely to be believed, he delays in carrying out this order, the king will take whatever action he thinks fit. (236)
The Templars did serve on the frontier in the early months of 1304, but after raiding into Granada in conjunction with troops from Murcia and with Alabes Abenraho, the leader of a Muslim force in the service of the Aragonese king, (237) the provincial master wrote from Lorca in May to James II, seeking to excuse the Templars from remaining on the frontier; (238) and the master was again loath to serve when the Templars were further summoned in September of the same year. (239)
This reluctance was apparently not the result of waning interest in the struggle against the Moors: in 1304 the provincial master was exhorting James II to attack and conquer Granada, (240) just as earlier the Templar Olivier in his poem 'Estat aurai lonc temps en pessamen' had urged James I to go on a crusade to the East. (241) It sprang primarily from a lack of adequate resources. In May 1304 the provincial master pointed out to the king that the Order had incurred heavy expenses on the frontier, to cover which it had been necessary to obtain loans; (242) and in September, when service was again being demanded, the master Berenguer of Cardona wrote to the commander of Alfambra, saying

Although we might make our excuses to him [the king] on the grounds that we have spent a large amount of money this year on frontier service and in the kingdom of Murcia, nevertheless, seeing that [140] if we failed him great dishonour would fall on us and the Temple, especially as all the nobles and other ranks are going, and seeing that we want to serve God and uphold the honour of the Temple, we are preparing to go and help our lord the king. (243)
Yet in October he again complained to the king about costs. James therefore on 24 October asked him to bring merely twenty or thirty knights, (244) and on the next day the provincial master ordered the commanders of Alfambra, Villel, Calatayud, Añesa, and Aberín, who had been incurring expense while waiting at Murviedro, to return to their commanderies. (245)
Lack of resources not only made the Templars reluctant to serve; it apparently also meant that when they did serve they had difficulty in equipping an adequate force. Towards the end of the thirteenth century convents did not have enough horses for all fighting brothers: in 1289 the house of Monzón possessed only five hacks and two mules on which its members could ride. (246) Horses for those going to serve on the frontier were provided in part by the provincial master, who borrowed some from Templars who were not called out: on one occasion the master ordered a commander to give his horse to his companion and to borrow another from the commander of Miravet, who had been excused from service. (247) Even the horses which the Templars did possess were not always their own. In 1309 James II received a petition from an individual who was seeking to recover a horse which he had lent to the Order; (248) and in the following year requests were also made for arms and armour which had been loaned to the Templars. (249) Inventories compiled towards the end of the thirteenth century provide further evidence of the inadequacy of the equipment in some Templar houses. When the commander of Huesca drew up a list of his convent's possessions in 1289 he noted that three hauberks and three other coats of mail had been lent to Novillas on the order of the provincial master, and that all that remained at Huesca were four hauberks and seven and a half pairs of chausses. (250)

Such a situation easily explains James II's request to the pope that the Templars should devote all their resources to fighting the Moors of Granada and should send nothing for the support of the Order in the East. (251) But this request was refused. All that the Aragonese kings could do to ensure that the Templars provided an adequate number of troops -- apart from threatening action [141] against their lands -- was to stipulate how many knights were needed for service on each occasion. In May 1287 the king ordered the Temple to maintain thirty knights on the frontier -- the same number being demanded of the Hospital and twenty from Calatrava; (252) and in October 1303 the Temple was ordered to send a hundred knights to Valencia, while the Hospital, Calatrava, and Santiago were asked for contingents of sixty, thirty, and twenty respectively. (253) But since property on the mainland had not been granted to the Orders in return for a specific amount of service, (254) the king had difficulty in enforcing such demands. In the register containing the summons of October 1303 the figure '100' was crossed out and the words 'as large a force as you can manage' substituted, probably as the result of a Templar protest that the Order could not furnish the number required.

Even if it was occasioned by lack of money, this reluctance on the part of the Templars to fight against the Moors, and the Crown's difficulty in enforcing service, could well have helped to justify in the minds of the Aragonese kings a demand for military service against Aragon's Christian enemies: if the Templars did not fulfil the military obligations expected of them in one sphere, then an argument might be put forward for demanding service from them elsewhere.

The encroachments on Templar rights and exemptions which have been discussed apparently all resulted from attempts by the Crown to increase its wealth and power. Although on a number of issues the evidence is very incomplete, it is clear that charters of privilege issued by earlier rulers in themselves gave little protection against these royal demands, for kings did not feel necessarily obliged to accept concessions made by their predecessors: hence the practice of seeking frequent confirmations of privileges. Lip-service might admittedly be paid to the Order's rights and it might be stated that a particular demand was not to harm the Temple's immunities and was not to be used as a precedent, but the more often this was said the more meaningless it became. In some instances the Order was able to reach a compromise with the king, so that not all of the latter's demands were met, but royal encroachments could not be halted by individual action. The Crown could be effectively checked only when widespread hostility to royal policies was aroused, as happened in 1283. Thus, in contrast to the earlier policy of encroachment, there was [142] from 1283 a reversion to past practice, if not an acceptance of all earlier privileges, and apparently the only new demand that was being enforced in the later thirteenth century was for military service against Aragon's Christian enemies; and although the Aragonese kings could put forward a claim based on the Usages of Barcelona, they were hesitant in demanding this service and turned to the papacy for assistance in establishing a right to hueste and cabalgada from the Temple's men.

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