The Monks of War: The Military Religious Orders - Softcover

Seward, Desmond

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140195017 ISBN 13: 9780140195019

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1996

Synopsis

The military religious orders emerged during the Crusades as Christendom's stormtroopers in the savage conflict with Islam. Some of them still exist today, devoted to charitable works. The Monks of War is the first general history of these orders to have appeared since the eighteenth century.

The Templars, the Hospitallers (later Knights of Malta), the Teutonic Knights and the Knights of the Spanish and Portuguese orders were "noblemen vowed to poverty, chastity and obedience, living a monastic life in convents which were at the same time barracks, waging war on the enemies of the Cross." The first properly disciplined Western troops since Roman times, they played a major role in defending the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, in the "Baltic Crusades" which created Prussia, in the long reconquest of Spain from the Moors, and in fighting the "Infidel" right up to Napoleonic times. This celebrated book tells the whole enthralling story, recreating such epics as the sieges of Rhodes and Malta and the destruction of the Templars by the Inquisition. Acclaimed on publication, it has now been revised and updated, with a concluding chapter to take events into the 1990s.

About this title

About the Author:

Desmond Seward was born in Paris and educated at Cambridge University. He is the author of Richard III: England's Black Legend, The Monks of War, and The War of the Roses.

Review:

"Undeniably the work of someone who knows and accepts the standards of critical history, but ... who sees the past also as an epic or a colourful spectacle"
—Professor David Knowles in The Times Literary Supplement

"His scholarship is great, his theme both interesting and largely unexplored and his judgment sound"
—Economist

"The book is excellent and firmly based on the primary sources of which Seward has a remarkable grasp."
—New Society

"Compulsive reading, attractively written, and retaining one's fascinated interest throughout"
—Catholic Herald

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0140195017
• ISBN 13: 9780140195019
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416