Ubicunque orbis terrarum: the military orders across the globe

This chapter considers how wide the world of the military orders is and has been. Military religious institutions have operated across much of the globe performing a wide range of different roles, adapting and being adapted to meet the needs of the culture and society in which they work. In the Middle Ages, the Teutonic Order’s literature and art suggest that the brothers were encouraged to take an interest in the world outside Catholic Europe. The Hospitallers did not apparently have a global policy, although in the early modern period individual Hospitallers invested resources outside Catholic Europe, while secular powers attempted to involve them in their expansionist plans outside Europe and the Mediterranean. The Templars had least awareness of the wider world. The Iberian orders spread most widely as part of Spanish and Portuguese global expansion, although they were involved as tools of kings rather than acting as free agents.