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Then the two masters said to the envoy: ‘We command you to speak it’. And he said, that, since they commanded him, he would repeat it to them. Then the two masters caused him to be told in Arabic, that he was to come and speak with them the next day at the Hospital; which he did. Then the two masters said to him that his lord was a very bold man, to dare to send such harsh language to the king.
The Lord of Joinville describing how little fear the Grand Masters of the Hospital and Temple had for the deadly Assassins creed and the veiled threats of their envoys.
The Templars complemented quite neatly the activities of the Hospitallers who had been providing shelter and medical care for pilgrims from about 1080. The origins of this order seem to have been initially more directly linked to the monastic life than the more martial Templars, and their first base was in an annex of the monastery of Santa Maria Latina in Jerusalem. After the Crusader conquest in 1099 they very quickly gained royal favour and this patronage allowed the order to obtain properties throughout the kingdom. Through this both political influence and wealth came quickly to the order. By the 1130s the Hospitallers had taken on a military role entirely similar to that of the Templars, and by the time of the Second Crusade in 1147–9 the idea of military-monastic orders had become a natural aspect of Outremer’s Latin Christian life.
Certainly the orders were needed, even in the early twelfth century when the Crusaders had tamed the Fatimids in the field through the series of defeats that they had inflicted upon the Egyptian Caliphate and were protected from any organised riposte from the Saljuqs due to the chaos that continued to shake the Baghdad Caliphate. There were still attacks on pilgrims and according to a letter from the Prior of the Holy Sepulchre in the 1120s the Kingdom was so insecure that no man would dare to venture beyond the walls of Jerusalem.
Both the Templars and the Hospitallers constantly appealed to the faithful of Europe for funds to support their works, and largesse flowed freely to the orders and funded their castle building and recruitment of local troops to garrison these bulwarks and to supplement the small number of knights. Both orders also allied with the Italian maritime republics that had established themselves in each of the Crusader states, and soon enough became economic and political rivals. As we will see below, whilst in the early part of Outremer’s history the Crusaders showed a cohesion very much lacking among their enemies, as the Kingdom aged fatal fault lines emerged between its defenders.
