A Hospitaller crusade treatise reviewed

ABSTRACT

In 1306/1307 the Master of the Hospital Foulques de Villaret presented a crusading treatise in Latin to the pope. A second, and in some ways rather different, Hospitaller treatise in French has, despite occasional doubts, almost unanimously been placed between 1307 and 1310. It seems, however, to be datable between 1310 and 1328, possibly to the years 1319 to 1323. The later dating would impose some adjustments to the history of projects to recover Jerusalem and in particular to the varied interpretations of the lesser or preliminary operations often termed a passagium particulare.

KEYWORDS:

• Hospitallers
• crusade treatises
• passagium particulare
• Foulques de Villaret
• Pope Clement V

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For example, recently Cornel Bontea, ‘The Theory of the Passagium Particulare: A Commercial Blockade of the Mediterranean in the Early Fourteenth Century?’, in A Military History of the Mediterranean Sea, ed. Georgios Theotokis and Aysel Yildiz (Leiden, 2018), 202–19.

2 The Latin text is in Jacques Paviot, ed., Projets de Croisade (v. 1290 - v. 1330) (Paris, 2008), 189–98; the French text from Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève is in ibid., 221–33, and the one from the BnF in Benjamin Kedar and Silvia Schein, ‘Un projet de “passage particulier” proposé par l’Ordre de l’Hôpital 1306–1307’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 137 (1979): 221–6.

3 Alain Demurger, ‘Les ordres militaires et la croisade au début du XIVe siècle: quelques remarques sur les traités de croisade de Jacques de Molay et de Foulques de Villaret’, in Dei Gesta per Francos: Études sur les croisades dédiés à Jean Richard, ed. Michel Balard, Benjamin Z. Kedar, and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Aldershot, 2001), 119–24.

4 Kedar and Schein, ‘Un projet’, 220–1.

5 Kedar and Schein, ‘Un projet’, 221; Paviot, Projets, 221.

6 Kedar and Schein, ‘Un projet’, 221; Paviot, Projets, 221 n. 3.

7 See below, at note 9.

8 Paviot, Projets, 28, 228, n. 127.

9 Ibid., 199–220; Antony Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land: The Crusade Proposals of the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (Aldershot, 2000), 27–29, 129, contains serious confusions concerning the Hospitaller treatises.

10 Robert Irwin, ‘How Many Miles to Babylon? The Devises des Chemins de Babiloine Redated’, in The Military Orders, 1: Fighting for the Faith and Caring for the Sick, ed. Malcolm Barber (Aldershot, 1994), 62.

11 Mark Dupuy, ‘“An Island Called Rhodes” and the “Way” to Jerusalem: Change and Continuity in Hospitaller Exordia in the Later Middle Ages’, in The Military Orders, 3: Welfare and Warfare, ed. Helen Nicholson (Aldershot, 1998), 343–8.

12 Text in Paviot, Projets, 293–387.

13 Joseph Delaville le Roulx, La France en Orient au XIVe siècle: Expéditions du maréchal Boucicaut, 2 vols. (Paris, 1886), 1: 80.

14 Demurger, ‘Les ordres militaires’, 117–28, 221–7; idem, Les Hospitaliers: De Jérusalem à Rhodes 1050–1317 (Paris, 2013), 471–5. Rhodes town surrendered in August 1309 and not August 1310.

15 Alain Beltjens, ‘Les mémoires relatifs à la reconquête de la Terre Sainte adressés, à sa demande, au pape Clément V par Foulques de Villaret et Jacques de Molay … ’, Bulletin: Société de l’Histoire et du Patrimoine de l’Ordre de Malte 35 (2016): 24–38.

16 Noël Valois, ‘Jacques Duèse (pape Jean XXII)’, in Histoire littéraire de la France 34 (Paris, 1915): 394.

17 Anthony Luttrell, ‘Gli Ospitalieri e l’eredità dei Templari 1305–1378’, in I Templari: Mito e storia, ed. Giovanni Minucci and Franca Sardi (Sinalunga - Siena, 1999), 67–86 [repr. in Anthony Luttrell, The Hospitallers of Rhodes and their Mediterranean World (Aldershot, 1992), no. III]; Anthony Luttrell, ‘The Hospitallers and the Papacy, 1305–1314’, in Forschungen zur Reichs-, Papst-, und Landesgeschichte: Peter Herde zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Karl Borchardt and Enno Bunz, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1998), 2: 593–622 [repr. in Anthony Luttrell, Studies on the Hospitallers after 1306: Rhodes and the West (Aldershot, 2007), no. V], requiring some amendment in the light of this article; further detail in Alain Beltjens, ‘Les vaines tentatives des papes, entre les années 1274 et 1307, en vue de fusionner les ordres militaires pour reconquérir la terre sainte … ’, Bulletin: Société de l’Histoire et du Patrimoine de l’Ordre de Malte 34 (2016): 19–26.

18 Luttrell, ‘The Hospitallers and the Papacy, 1305–1314’, 603–4, 608–9.

19 Pierre-Vincent Claverie, L’ordre du Temple en Terre Sainte et à Chypre au XIIIe siècle, 3 vols, (Nicosia, 2005), 2: 442–7.

20 Christopher Tyerman, ‘Philip V of France, the Assemblies of 1319–1320 and the Crusade’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 57 (1984): 23–4; Gion Wallmeyer, ‘With Pen and Sword: Knights as Crusade Advisors between the 12th and 14th Century’, Francia 46 (2019): 462 n. 49. Wallmeyer gives ‘Thierry de Liège’, presumably the ‘Thierry de Bregue’ sent to the 1320 chapter general by the prior of Bohemia: Jean Raybaud, Histoire des Grands Prieurs et du Prieuré de Saint-Gilles (Nîmes, 1904). 1: 267. A Tertitius de Lorgne was marshal in 1312: Anthony Luttrell, The Town of Rhodes: 1306–1357 (Rhodes, 2003), 17. Leopold, How to Recover, 47, claims that Villaret attended the French council in 1319.

21 Joseph Delaville le Roulx, Les Hospitaliers à Rhodes jusqu’à la mort de Philibert de Naillac: 1310–1421 (Paris, 1913), 53–4.

22 Norman Housley, ‘The Franco-Papal Crusade Negotiations of 1322–3’, Papers of the British School at Rome 48 (1980): 166–85; Christopher Tyerman, ‘Marino Sanudo Torsello and the Lost Crusade’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 32 (1982): 57–73; Christopher Tyerman, ‘Sed nihil fecit? The Last Capetians and the Recovery of the Holy Land’, in War and Government in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of J. O. Prestwich (Bury St. Edmunds, 1984), 170–81.

23 As claimed in Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (Basingstoke, 1988), 151 n. 287, without source.