Warrior monk

Warrior monk or monk-soldier is an established expression derived from Bernard of Clairvaux used to designate members of military and hospitaller religious orders, primarily the Knights Templar.

The expression "monk-soldiers" is commonly used to describe the Templars. Its use is not illegitimate, as Saint Bernard himself associated the words "monk" and "knight". Bernard of Clairvaux, in De laude novae militiae, wrote: "It is as remarkable as it is astonishing to see how they know how to show themselves at the same time gentler than lambs and more terrible than lions, to the point that one does not know whether they should be called religious men or soldiers, or rather that no other names seem better suited to them than these two, since they know how to unite the gentleness of the former with the valor of the latter".

Context

The military orders—at least the three major ones, the Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Teutonic Order—were initially composed of brothers or monks who took religious vows and lived under a monastic rule, with the particularity of "combining monastic life with the profession of arms". It is the rule that defines the order: the Hospitallers followed the Rule of Saint Augustine, the Templars the Rule of Saint Benedict, and the orders of Calatrava, Alcántara, and Aviz followed the same rule as Cîteaux.

Jean-Loup Lemaître notes that "the concept of a 'religious order' is relatively recent, and modern classifications are not those of the past: ordo monasticus and ordo canonicus designated in the Middle Ages a way of life governed by one of the three rules adopted at the Synods of Aachen of 816–817, to which would later be added in the 12th century that of Francis of Assisi, and by the 'institution' (institutio), which brought together the texts regulating liturgical practice and community life, in other words the 'observance'; 'ordinaries', 'customaries', 'constitutions', and 'statutes'".

With the Crusades, "for the first time in the history of Christendom, soldiers lived like monks" or as monks. The Hospitallers took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience; it was only from 1136 onward that their military activity is attested, while their spiritual life was enriched by devotion to the sick and the poor. Initially, the Templars aspired to monastic life, but service in the militia interrupted an essentially ascetic existence.