The Order of Christ in Portugal

In Portugal the contribution that the Templars had made to the emergence and independence of the kingdom during its wars against the occupying Muslims was not forgotten. In 1319, with Papal permission, the Portuguese King Diniz reconstituted the Templars as the Order of Christ (Ordem dos Cavaleiros de Nosso Senhor Jesus Chsto), and-after four years of negotiation-he was authorised by Pope John XXII to endow the order with the Templars’ possessions. Moreover, in 1357 the Order of Christ, which initially had been based in the Algarve, was transferred to the Templars’ former headquarters northeast of Lisbon at Tomar, with its magnificent rotunda patterned after

Constantine’s domed Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In essence the Order of Christ was the Templars under another name, the main difference being that, in addition to their vows of poverty and chastity, the knights pledged obedience to the king; they had been nationalised and now existed to serve the interests of the Portuguese crown.

Successive kings of Portugal were able to install royal princes or other favourites as Grand Master of the new order. The greatest of these was Prince Henry the Navigator, appointed in 1418, who used the wealth of the order to establish the navigators’ school at Sagres from where the first great wave of exploratory voyages, likewise financed by the order, were launched down the coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope and eventually to Asia. Vasco da Gama, who discovered the sea route round Africa to India in 1497, was himself a member of the order, and soon the Templar cross, adopted by the Order of Christ, was emblazoned on the sails of Portuguese ships sailing to Brazil, India and Japan. By the end of the fifteenth century the order possessed 454 commanderies in Portugal, Africa and the Indies. It is no exaggeration to say that Templar wealth, given a new purpose in the vision of Prince Henry the Navigator, inaugurated the new Age of Discovery that would transform the world-and open up the New World-over the next four centuries.

The Order of Christ was secularised in 1789 and in 1834 lost all of its possessions, under an anti-Church government. However, it was re-established-and survives-as an order of merit awarded for outstanding service to the Portuguese republic.

Prince Henry the Navigator, Grand Master of the Reconstituted Tempiars

Prince Henry was a younger son of King John I of Portugal and a grandsonof John of Gaunt of England. In 1415, at the age of twenty-one, he commanded the expedition which achieved Portugal’s first overseas conquest when it captured Ceuta in North Africa from the Muslims. The crusading legacy in Portugal exerted tremendous influence during Prince Henry’s time. The expulsion of the Arabs and Berbers from the Algarve was still a part of the living memory of most Portuguese, and bodies of knights, including the Order of Christ, continued to man castles throughout the kingdom.

Fulfilling the mission of the Templars, reconstituted as the Order of Christ, of which he was the Grand Master, Prince Henry’s ships carried on a constant war against the infidel. But though still pursuing his crusading ideal, Henry increasingly mounted his explorations for the sake of knowledge, leading to a series of discoveries down the coast of Africa and out in the Atlantic, including the Madeira islands in 1418 and the Azores and the Cape Verde islands in 1456.

Though Henry did not himself sail with these expeditions, he was their intellectual inspiration and through the Order of Christ he provided the financial wherewithal. He based himself at Sagres on a wild and windswept Atlantic headland of the Algarve, from where the first long caravels were launched, revolutionising shipping with their wide hulls and small adaptable sails, and their ability to sail close to the wind. Here at Sagres Henry attracted astronomers, geographers, cartographers and sailors, a community of scholars and adventurers who joined together under his direction to conquer the unknown.

Prince Henry died and was buried at Sagres in 1460, but the impetus of his work continued. The achievements of Vasco da Gama, who found the first sea route round Africa to India in 1498, of Ferdinand Magellan, who in 1519 initiated the first voyage round the world, and of Christopher Columbus, who discovered America in 1492, were all the fruits of Prince Henry the Navigator’s lifelong endeavour as Grand Master of what had been the Templars.