Scholarly interest and popular interest in the military orders show no sign of abating. Their history stretches from the early twelfth century to the present. They were among the richest and most powerful religious corporations in pre-Reformation Europe, and they founded their own states on Rhodes and Malta and also on the Baltic coast. Historians of the Church, of art and architecture, of agriculture and banking, of medicine and warfare and of European expansion can all benefit from investigating the orders and their archives. The conferences on their history that have been organized in London every four years have attracted scholars from all over the world. The present volume records the proceedings of the Fifth Conference in 2009 (held in Cardiff as the London venue was in the process of refurbishment), and, like the earlier volumes in the series, will prove essential for anyone interested in the current state of research into these powerful institutions. The thirty-eight papers published here represent a selection of those delivered at the conference. Three papers deal with the recent archaeological investigations at the Hospitaller castle at al-Marqab (Syria); others examine aspects of the history of the military orders in the Latin East and the Mediterranean lands, in Spain and Portugal, in the British Isles and in northern and eastern Europe. The final two papers address the question of present-day perceptions of the Templars as moulded by the sort of popular literature that most of the other contributors would normally keep at arm's length.

Introduction; 1: The Military-Religious Orders: A Medieval 'School for Administrators'?; 1: The Latin East; 2: Archaeological and Fresco Research in the Castle Chapel at al-Marqab: A Preliminary Report on the Results of the First Seasons; 3: The Two Hospitaller Chapter Houses at al-Marqab: A Study in Architectural Reconstruction; 4: Meat Consumption and Animal Keeping in the Citadel at al-Marqab: A Preliminary Report 1; 5: The Order of St Thomas of Canterbury in Acre; 6: Templars, Franks, Syrians and the Double Pact of 1244; 7: Royal and Papal Interference in the Dispatch of Supplies to the East by the Military Orders in the Later Thirteenth Century; 8: The Hospitallers and Charles I of Anjou: Political and Economic Relations between the Kingdom of Sicily and the Holy Land 1; 9: King James II of Cyprus and the Hospitallers: Evidence from the Livre des Remembrances; 2: Hospitaller Rhodes and Malta; 10: Smoke and Fire Signals at Rhodes: 1449; 11: Success and Failure in the Practice of Power by Pere Ramon Sacosta, Master of the Hospital (1461-67); 12: Battlefield Tourism: A Description of the 1480 Siege of Rhodes; 13: Woven Tapestries: Manifestations of Grandeur, Politics and Power as well as Pictorial Sources for Hospitaller History: A Re-identification; 14: Politics and Power in Grand Master Verdalle's Statuta Hospitalis Hierusalem (1588); 15: Towards the End of the Order of the Hospital: Reflections on the Views of Two Venetian Brethren, Antonio Miari and Ottavio Benvenuti; 3: The British Isles; 16: The Military Orders in Wales and the Welsh March in the Middle Ages 1; 17: The Military Orders at the Court of King John; 18: Walking a Thin Line: Hospitaller Priors, Politics and Power in Late Medieval England; 19: Procedure, Political Influence and Preceptorial Appointments in the Hospitaller Priory of England: The Templecombe Disputes of 1463-79; 4: Italy; 20: Sta Maria in Carbonara in Viterbo: History and Architecture of a Templar Preceptory in Northern Lazio; 21: The Spanish Military Orders in Italy: Initial Remarks on Patronage and Properties (Twelfth-Fourteenth Centuries); 22: The Hospitallers in Southern Italy: Families and Power; 23: The Teutonic Order in Italy: An Example of the Diplomatic Ability of the Military Orders; 5: Northern and Eastern Europe; 24: The Counts of Brienne and the Military Orders in the Thirteenth Century 1; 25: A Geography of Power: The Hospitallers in the Territorial Policies of the Bishops of Strasbourg in Lower Alsace in the Thirteenth Century; 26: The Priors of the Knights Hospitaller from the Piast Dynasty in the Province of Bohemia: Hereditary Princes or Ecclesiastical Dignitaries?; 27: Royal Power and the Hungarian-Slavonian Hospitaller Priors before the Mid-fifteenth Century; 28: Politics, Diplomacy and the Recruitment of Mercenaries before the Battle of Tannenberg-Grunwald-Zalgiris in 1410; 29: Power to the Educated? Priest-brethren and their Education, using Data from the Utrecht Bailiwick of the Teutonic Order (1350-1600); 30: Hidden in the Bushes: The Teutonic Order of the Bailiwick of Utrecht in the 1780-1806 Revolutionary Period; 6: The Iberian Peninsula; 31: Troubles and Tensions before the Trial: The Last Years of the Castilian Templar Province; 32: The Relationship between the Crown and the Monastery of Santos during the Middle Ages; 33: The Recruitment of the Portuguese Military Orders: A Sociological Profile (1385-1521); 34: The Portuguese Military Orders, the Royal Power and the Maritime Expansion (Fifteenth Century); 35: The Port City of Setúbal (Portugal) under the Control of the Order of Santiago (1400-1550); 36: Inquiring about Honour in the Portuguese Military Orders (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries) 1; 7: Templar Mythology; 37: 'From the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant to Freemasonry and the Priory of Sion': An Introduction to the 'After-History' of the Templars; 38: The Myth of Secret History, or 'It's not just the Templars involved in absolutely everything'