The Military Orders and the principality of Antioch

Abstract

This chapter explores the processes by which the Templars and Hospitallers came to hold influence in the principality, to determine whether and how their integration into Antioch’s existing structures of power might have contributed to the disasters of 1188. It examines the complex realities emerging from the growth of the military orders in twelfth-century northern Syria. The military orders at times battled the Latin Church hierarchy for ecclesiastical independence, as shown by the disputes between the Templars and the bishop of Valania in the 1160s, and the Hospitallers with the archbishop of Apamea in the 1170s. Moreover, the sale of Margat represented the only occasion when a major Latin castle, in Antiochene possession, was given over to the military orders. As the initial wave of expansion gave way to a more varied and problematic political climate, the princes and nobles of the principality turned to the military orders to shore up, or—at least in theory—recover, unstable border zones.