ABSTRACT
A police force for Reformation Ireland, an officer training school for erstwhile French youths, and the private army of a French duke, the self-styled heir to the Byzantine Empire, were each proposed or founded between 1540 and 1616. All three of these disparate sounding groups had a common trait, and they were military orders, even if they were a far cry from their medieval predecessors like the Hospitallers, Templars, or Teutonic Knights. It is easy to think of the military order as an anachronism in the early modern period, one that continued to soldier on and even excel in the form of the Hospitallers but elsewhere was sliding into irrelevance. Yet new military orders continued to be proposed and founded well into the early modern period. This chapter will show that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the military order continued to appeal to many rulers, ecclesiastics, and nobles; people who saw a particular value in the knights of such an order, one that could not be found in a secular soldier. It will argue that the idea of the military order changed drastically in the early modern period in order to remain relevant, becoming less austere to aid recruitment and taking on new duties in some cases rather distant from their original role in holy war. Though some of the orders examined here have been discussed elsewhere, such as the Order of St Stephen, others, including the Order of the Magdalene and the proposed order to protect Tudor Ireland, have received little attention. 1 No comparative study of these early modern foundations and proposed orders exists, something which this chapter hopes to rectify, highlighting the existence of an often-overlooked period in the history of the military orders.
