In Praise of the Knighthood

The monk and the knight-the two quintessentially medieval European heroes-were combined in the Knights Templar and in the other military orders founded in the era of the Crusades. With characteristic eloquence, Bernard of Clairvaux voices the cleric's view of knights, warfare, and the conquest of the Holy Land in five chapters on the knights' vocation. Then the Cistercian abbot who never visited Palestine and discouraged monks who proposed doing so, in another eight chapters, provides a spiritual tour of the pilgrimage sites guarded by this 'new kind of knight-hood and one unknow to ages bone by'.