The Sword and the Green Cross
The Saga of the Knights of Saint Lazarus from the Crusades to the 21st CenturyBy Max J. EllulAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2011 Max J. Ellul
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4567-1421-5Contents
About the Author..............................................................ixAuthor's Note.................................................................xiiiForeword......................................................................xxiChapter 1: Introduction.......................................................1Chapter 2: The History, Character and Spirit of the Order.....................13Chapter 3: The First Crusade..................................................55Chapter 4: The Order and The Crusades.........................................83Chapter 5: The Broader Picture................................................141Chapter 6: From the Holy Land to the French Revolution........................173Chapter 7: The Order in Europe and the Americas...............................207Chapter 8: Resurrecting a Dead Dodo...........................................237Chapter 9: The Lazarite twenty-first century..................................301Chapter 10: Conclusions.......................................................359References and Recommended Reading............................................365
Chapter One
Introduction.
"Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job." James Joyce (1882 – 1941)
It is taken for granted in most of the present day civilized world that a visit to the pharmacy, chemist's or apothecary is a must to procure the prescribed medicine and thus aid and assist the cure of normal ailments. What is not taken for granted is that, to this day, most of the Western world's symbol of a pharmacy or a chemist's is indeed a green cross. Why is the cross green? Not red or black or blue. Green.
This green cross owes its controversial birthpangs to the tumultuous happenings of the first crusade and its immediate aftermath. The green cross came to project one of Christendom's monastic orders of knights, commonly known as the Order of Saint Lazarus. The latter owed its creation to the Latin Catholic church which today is supposed to symbolise the epitome of peace, humility and an abhorrence of war and murder, even when such blood is spilt in the name of a supposedly merciful God.
Although the Old Testament frequently portrays the Almighty as a God of wrath and vengeance, modern – day Christian apologists try hard to neglect whole centuries of Christian history where the words of Exodus were indeed the order of the day:
'The Lord is a man of war.' (Exodus 15:3)
The purpose of this book is to inform the reader of the past and present Order of Saint Lazarus, putting such a religious and military organisation in its proper historical perspective and to, slowly but surely, cast off a huge amount of interpolations and inaccuracies regarding this subject matter.
This is a difficult task, primarily because the collective mental image of a knight normally takes the shape of the widely popular Knights Templar or the Knights of Saint John. Indeed, these two Orders of Knighthood emanating from the harsh crusading centuries totally eclipse all other Orders of Knighthoods in terms of popularity and myth.
Needless to say, one will find numerous web pages throughout the internet, together with promotional and propaganda material from several organisations, all projecting themselves to be the authentic and real Order of Saint Lazarus. They all have their own version of events, most of which start depicting the Order of Saint Lazarus from the crusading period. Fact is frequently juxtaposed with fiction and fantasy. Unfortunately, fallacies and wholesale neglect of the historical evidence have been purposely and strategically intermingled with contemporaneous accounts in order to validate this, or that, version of spurious history. On the other hand, one will also find a number of very serious publications and web pages dedicated to the works of prestigious historians who maintain that there is no real present – day chivalric Order of Saint Lazarus and that such above-mentioned web pages are operated by bogus 'Orders', accredited and acknowledged by no one other than themselves. The conservative and non-sensationalist Catholic Encyclopedia has stated that
'... the historians of the Order have done much to obscure the question by entangling it with gratuitous pretensions and suspicious documents.'
Although this may indeed seem a harsh statement to be splattered across the introductory pages of a book analysing the history of the Order throughout the ages, one must ensure that such a work is projected, from the outset, in a factual manner in order to exclude the possibility of misinterpretation of the subject matter.
In this book I try to disentangle the facts from fiction and mythology. I also try to ensure that the reader understands the very major distinction that one needs to make in this specific, chivalric field: the moral, legal and practical distinction between a Chivalric Order and a Chivalric Organisation.
It is not my intention to present this work as a definitive and final research into the Order of Saint Lazarus. There are hundreds, indeed thousands, of facts and figures and names of unremembered and forgotten knights and dames of the Order which are not even mentioned in this work.
The Order of Saint Lazarus has to be examined with constant reference to the prevailing backdrops of the day. One cannot fully understand a monastic order of warriors unless one scrutinizes the period of the crusades. The crusades also need to be analysed as a political and religious by-product of the papacy and its then constant and self-attained prerogative of integrating its spiritual authority with its temporal authority, even though there is no justification for the latter from the gospels.
The history of the Order of Saint Lazarus touches on the lives, norms, practices and customs of societies spread across the globe and, consequently, spreads across decades and centuries. It will touch on long forgotten mores and norms, extinct empires and kingdoms, and - unfortunately - wars, intrigues, treachery and over-zealousness. There are both heroes and scoundrels in this history. There are pious men who gave much to the Order of Saint Lazarus and there are crooks and con men that gave the Order a very bad name.
This book will try to give a fresh, albeit factual, outline of the Order of Saint Lazarus and also examine the numerous organisations bearing the name of Saint Lazarus in the modern world.
A full account of the Order's history would also inevitably have to list long dead and forgotten Lazarite knights and members, most of them with double or triple barrelled surnames, many bearing a serpentine list of noble titles. These would not make light and intresting reading in this day and age. I have tried to project a factual history that would give a certain impetus to anybody interested in knowing more about this valiant order.
But first, before we embark on our journey across time and continents to savour the mark of the Order throughout the centuries, let us answer a very simple question.
What is chivalry?
Without a clear perception of the term 'chivalry', one cannot even start to address the history of the Order of Saint Lazarus.
Although the military orders are also referred to as chivalric orders, chivalry - as a system per se of ethical ideals - arose from feudalism and reached its highest development in the 12th and 13th centuries. Chivalric ethics originated chiefly in France and Spain and spread rapidly to the rest of mainland Europe and to England. They represented a fusion of Christian and military concepts of morality and still form the basis of gentlemanly conduct. Noble youths became pages in the castles of other nobles at the age of seven; at fourteen they trained as squires in the service of knights, learning horsemanship and military techniques, and were themselves knighted, usually when they reached the age of twenty one.
The chief chivalric virtues were piety, honor, valor, courtesy, chastity, and loyalty. The knight's loyalty was due to the spiritual master, God; to the temporal master, the suzerain; and to the mistress of the heart, his sworn love. Love, in the chivalrous sense, was supposedly largely platonic; as a rule, only a virgin or another man's wife could be the chosen object of chivalrous love. With the Roman church's cult of the Virgin Mary, the romanticized elevation of noblewomen on a pedestal reached its highest expression. At least on paper.
The code of chivalrous conduct was worked out with great subtlety in the courts of love that flourished in France and in Flanders. There the most arduous questions of love and honor were argued before the noble ladies who presided. It is from this custom that the term 'courtly love' came into being. The French military hero Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard, was said to be the last embodiment of the ideals of chivalry.
In practice, chivalric conduct was never free from corruption. This became increasingly evident in the later Middle Ages. Courtly love often deteriorated into promiscuity and adultery and, likewise, pious militancy was diluted into barbarous fights. Moreover, the chivalric duties were not owed to those outside the bounds of feudal obligation. The outward trappings of chivalry and knighthood declined in the 15th century, by which time wars were fought for victory and individual valor was relegated to an irrelevant nuisance.
The above amply demonstrates that the present day collective perception of knights in shining armour derived from a period which materialized much later than the barbaric crusades which gave birth to these monastic warriors. These crusades were indeed called for and encouraged by the Papacy, which believed that it was indeed the will of God to kill and murder what were referred to as 'infidels' or unbelievers.
This was indeed the same Papacy which graces us with modern day Popes who have tried their hardest to project a church of peace and its abhorrence to bloodshed. It is indeed the same church which boasts of hundreds, even thousands of martyrs, most of which are historically unaccounted for, who preferred to die a martyr's death instead of killing another human being. These early Christians were idealized and sanctified for standing up to heathen Roman emperors who demanded that they serve in their armies.
All this changed with the Church's acquisition of temporal power due to Emperor Constantine's politico/religious orchestrations. In desperate need of a unified and servile empire, Constantine, although never a baptized Christian till his deathbed (and even on his deathbed was baptized by an Aryan heretic priest and not by a mainstream ecclesiastic), gave the Roman Christian church the possibility to become in itself an important and essential part of the Roman establishment. The hunted, to use a harsh anecdote, became the hunters. Theologians and Christian prominent personalities bent over backwards to bring about a religious reason for the Church's unashamed change of heart when it came to reconciling itself with bloodshed. Jesus's pacifist suggestions of turning the other cheek, together with some three centuries of Christian pacifist traditions were put aside in order to indissolubly unite Rome and Christianity, even to the point of having their fates inextricably linked for perpetuity.
Eusebius of Caesarea, a Constantinian historian of the early fourth century, tried to reconcile traditional Christian pacifism with the new duties of the Christian citizen of the Roman Empire by distinguishing between the clergy, immune from military service, and the laity, who were now fully expected to wage the just wars for the Christian empire. This symbiosis of the Graeco-Roman and the Christian was furthermore cemented by Ambrose of Milan (d. 397). His stance on such a thorny subject should not have shocked anyone; it suitably befitted his mindset as a former imperial official, a factor which is seldom mentioned by theological apologists writing on this period.
This innovative concept of a Christian just war found a remarkable mouthpiece in the form of a younger contemporary, Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), nowadays referred to as Saint Augustine the Great. He amalgamated the classical and scriptural doctrines of just war to arrive at a number of oblique principles in the context of an active Imperium Romana. His thesis centred on sin, which caused war but which could also be combated by war. He agreed with the pagan Aristotle, who had originally coined the term 'just war' in his volume entitled 'Politics', that the right end of war was peace. He also used the pagan Cicero's words when arguing that
'... it is the injustice of the opposing side that lays on the wise man the duty of waging war.'
Augustine also did not hesitate to agree with generations of pagan Roman lawyers who declared that public war must be supported by authority. He even cited scriptural evidence:
'The commandment forbidding killing was not broken by those who have waged war on the authority of God.'
Augustine did much to ensure that there was a pronounced and accepted movement of the justification of violence from lawbooks to liturgies, from the secular to the religious. The language of the bellum justum often projected what can be better stated as bellum sacrum. It allowed the concept of religious war, to be waged for and by the church. It became an expression of Christian vocation second only to monasticism itself.
Thus, in Carl Erdmann's words, war provided
'... a form of moral action, a higher type of life than peace.'
These were not isolated incidents of prominent Christian individuals who wanted to change the accepted pacifist norm which prevailed to date. This was indeed a premeditated, collective effort by the Church hierarchy to change the mindset of their religious followers. Christopher Tyerman, in his unique history of the Crusades entitled 'God's War', describes this theological transformation in unrivalled terms. He states:
'What may appear today to many Christians and perhaps most non-Christians as an irreconcilable paradox between holy war and the doctrines of peace and forgiveness proclaimed in the Lord's prayer, the Sermon on the Mount and many other Gospel passages has not always been so obvious or recognized. This was certainly the case in educated circles around (Pope) Urban II at the end of the eleventh century ... The Beatitudes had to be reconciled with human civilization, specifically the Graeco-Roman world, or, to put it crudely, ways found around the Sermon on the Mount. Being extravagantly well versed in the highest traditions of classical learning, the Church Fathers did this rather well.'
This concept was exported throughout Christendom. So intimate was the symbiosis of religion and society that bishops in Northern Europe, all chosen from aristocratic families, began to appear as great noblemen complete with military revenues. Monarchs were extolled for their waging of wars, the more enemy dead on the field the better proof of being 'in God's favor', even though their adversaries were Christians themselves. Indeed special fasts, processions and masses were all conducted by the religious in order to ensure victory in battle by their sovereign, even though their adversaries were ironically exercising these same public outcries to the same Christian God so as to ensure their victory.
We have already noted the significance of the Constantinian period to the prevailing theological trends which brought about this dramatic change of thought. Some historians, however, prefer to underline even earlier trends in this ecclesiastical change of heart. Whilst modern-day Christian pacifists argue that in the early Church military service was strictly forbidden, they constantly use the words of Tertullian, a Christian theologian writing in Africa in the early third century to project such pacifist allegory. It is true that Tertullian refers to the Gospel vignette at the Garden of Gethsemane and Jesus' uttering to Peter when he unsheathed his sword. Jesus warned Peter that he who lives by the sword dies by it.
'Every soldier of later times was ungirded by the Lord when he disarmed Peter.'
These were the words of this Christian theologian before his death in circa 220AD. But historians also point out to another story written by the same Tertullian of the 'Thundering Legion' which, in the year 173AD – thus centuries before Constantine – was saved from almost certain annihilation by a violent thunderstorm. This storm not only refilled the Legion's water supply but also put its barbarian enemy to flight. Tertullian himself, and other Christian writers, attributed the thunderstorm to the prayers of Christian soldiers serving in the Legion.
Ironically, the church in the late fourth or early fifth century compiled a list of rules governing the Christian assembly for worship, known as the Canons of Hippolytus. Canon XIV, which is dated to the fourth decade of the fourth century, stipulates that:
1. No Christian should voluntarily become a soldier. 2. If one becomes a soldier, one must not shed blood (the implausibility of such a statement is self-evident). 3. If one does shed blood, one should stay away from the 'sacred mysteries', should not attend church, in other words, until one has done penance (what that penance entailed is not listed or recorded).
(Continues...)
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