Crusade of Fire

Over the next two centuries, Europe would continue to send periodic crusader armies to the defense of the Holy Land, until it became all too clear that the Latin Kingdom could not be held.

This, then, was the environment in which Hugues de Payens found himself, though history tells us nothing specific about his activities during this period. Some accounts suggest that he made several trips back and forth to France, but most agree in stating that, at the time he founded the Order, he had been in the Levant for twenty-two years. Knowing that he had left behind a son in France, we can speculate that at least a part of his original motivation in taking the Cross may have been the seductive possibility of winning lands and even a title in the Holy Land, if the crusade was successful. If so, however, that was an ambition that would come to have no meaning, once his son grew to manhood and took holy orders, thereby binding himself to the Church rather than carrying on the de Payens name and lineage. By 1128, when Hugues achieved papal recognition for the Order, the heir of his body had become Abbot of Saint Columb?s at Sens, and was beyond the need of any secular inheritance.

Meanwhile, during those years between arriving in the Holy Land and conceiving of the institution that would leave an indelible mark on history, Hugues? life probably would have been little different from any other knight who had chosen to stay on after the end of the First Crusade. Despite the hardships of desert warfare, there would have been a certain satisfaction and even a heady excitement to being part of a victorious army, especially as a member of the knightly class. As the colonization of the new Latin Kingdom got underway, the very nature of the land to be governed would have required constant military activity to retain the precarious toe-hold the Westerners had established in the midst of their Muslim enemies.

It is more than likely that this would have been the principal occupation of Hugues and his crusading partners, some of whom undoubtedly became co-founders of the Order with him. In the beginning, as their function shifted from active warfare to peacekeeping, perhaps they even enjoyed the opportunity to be a law unto themselves—young men searching for adventure—despite the hardships of life in the desert.

Only vaguely and as a matter of passing note would Hugues and his companions have become aware of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, established in the previous century and perhaps officially founded in 1113, when the Hospital received a charter as a religious order dedicated to nursing sick and injured pilgrims. As yet, however, the Order of St. John had not taken on any military function to reduce the numbers of pilgrims who needed such assistance. That was still to come, following the example to be set by a military order still to be born.

The hard fact was that outside the cities that marked the hearts of the four crusader states—Jerusalem, Antioch, Edessa, and Tripoli—the Holy Land still was not safe for pilgrims, though that had been the ostensible reason for the First Crusade. The two-day journey between the port of Joppa and the Holy City was particularly dangerous, for bandits and brigands made their camps in the caves along the way, whence they sallied forth to prey on pilgrims bound for the holy places.

The danger had been underscored just before Easter of 1119, when travelers on a Lenten pilgrimage to the River Jordan were set upon by Muslim raiders from Ascalon and Tyre. Unarmed and weakened from fasting, three hundred had been slain outright, and another sixty taken prisoner.