Hospitaller chapters in the medieval priory of Alamania

All religious orders were pious institutions and owned or used property for maintaining their members and financing their activities. And in a sense all religious orders were pugnacious, too. The major source for Benedict of Nursia, Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, ¹ presented the founding father of Western monasticism as a Roman soldier fighting against the devil in a spiritual way. ² Words such as miles or militare and praelium or praeliare abounded in monastic literature long before the medieval military-religious orders were founded from the early twelfth century onwards. Nor was it an entirely new idea that the members of religious orders should help the faithful with both prayers and charitable activities. In a sense, fighting and bloodshed could be considered to be charitable activities, acts of charity or love. One of the best-known papers of the late Jonathan Riley-Smith, the founding father of the Clerkenwell conferences, was entitled Crusading as an act of love. ³