THE KNIGHTS OF St John had long been in the forefront of affairs in the East, but the increasing wealth of the Order in Europe also made its members men of consequence in their own countries, where they were to be found playing a leading part in national and international politics. Bonifacio di Calamandrana, one of the ast to hold the office of Grand Commander of Outremer, was a rich and influential statesman who mediated in the rivalries between France, Aragon and Naples at the close of the thirteenth century. The popes of Avignon found the Knights of Rhodes especially useful servants, and around 1340 we find all the provinces of the papal states in Italy being administered by Hospitallers for their absentee master.
Juan Fernandez de Heredia would be notable enough as an example of these royal and papal ministers; he is all the more interesting for his exceptional mastership of the Order of St John and for his more unusual character as a bibliophile and patron of letters. He was born into a landed family of southern Aragon, presumably about 1310, and was a Knight of St John by 1328. While still in his twenties he was appointed to the former Templar commanderies of Villel and Alfambra, which his family’s territorial influence in the area had apparently prised from royal control, and he thus benefited from the rule that anyone who recovered a property for the Order was entitled to hold it for life. His father held a minor place at court, in the household of the Infanta Leonor, and Heredia became the com-
Pope Benedict XI with three Hospitaller attendants (foreground), 1304, illumination from the Liber Indulgentiae.
Panion of the heir to the Aragonese throne, Peter, with whom he shared a passion for the chase and also for literature and history.
His fortune was made when in 1346 the young King, who is known to history as Peter the Ceremonious, had Heredia appointed Castellan of Amposta. This office, in which he succeeded the King’s great-uncle, Don Sancho (a former Admiral of the Order), had gained special weight through the acquisition of the Castle of Mira vet and the vast estates owned by the Templars on the lower Ebro; as Castellan, Heredia became one of the greatest magnates of the kingdom of Aragon. He soon gave a presage of both his administrative talent and his taste for books by ordering the creation of the Cartulary of Amposta, in which all the charters of the Cas-
Heredia in middle age (miniature from the Lihro de los Enperadores).
Tellany were copied out, in a script of meticulous regularity, in six huge volumes; and he began exercising his lifelong patronage of learning by supporting students at the universities of Lerida and Montpellier, the future anti-pope Benedict XIII being apparently one of his proteges.
Heredia was entrusted with various royal missions, one of which took him to Avignon and inaugurated his involvement in the afairs of the papacy. He travelled in 1355 to Rhodes to enforce disciplinary and administrative changes that Innocent VI was seeking in the Order. It is hardly to be supposed that Heredia was well received by his brethren in the character of a reformer. He was the father of four illegitimate children; he was using his vast revenues to buy estates for his own and his family’s enrichment; the high office he held had been gained in despite of his Order’s proper rules of promotion, and he appeared to be bent on laying his hands on every priory of the Hospital within his sphere of influence - In 1354 he had been named Prior of Castile, though the opposition of Peter the Cruel, who intruded his own nominee into that dignity, prevented him from making good his claim. In 1356 he received the Priory of Saint-Gilles, thus combining the two most powerful offices of the Order in Europe.
The reason for this spectacular advancement was the high opinion that Innocent VI, like Peter
Of Aragon, had formed of Heredia’s abilities. On his return from Rhodes the Pope entrusted hfm with the military protection of the papal state, and sent him with Cardinal Talleyrand on a diplomatic mission designed to avert the clash of the English and French at Poitiers; the attempt failed, and Heredia characteristically decided that if he could not stop a fight he would join it. He found himself on the losing side. The Black Prince at first was for executing an envoy who could thus flout diplomatic neutrality, but allowed himself to be persuaded that a ransom of ten thousand francs would be a penalty more satisfactory to all concerned. Heredia rebounded from this as he was to do from many other reverses to find himself appointed Captain-General of the papal army at Avignon.
In 1359 the Pope granted him leave of absence to fight for Aragon in its war against Castile - a war in which Heredia had already lent the important diplomatic service of negotiating with Henry of Trastamara, Peter the Cruel’s halfbrother, his taking of arms against the King; that sovereign’s attitude over the Castilian Priory made Heredia’s sympathies unequivocal. There followed a tug-of-war between the King of Aragon and the Pope for the services of their minister; so fierce was the Pope’s eagerness that he first excommunicated Heredia to enforce his return and then promptly made him Governor
Heredia (miniature from the Grant Cronica de Espanya).
Heredia (miniature from the Grant Cronica de los
Of the Comtat-Venaissin. The splendid town walls of Avignon which Heredia built and which dominate the city to this day are a monument to this period of his career.
Avignon was at this time at the height of its splendour, under a series of able popes who created there a magnificent court and made the city the intellectual capital of Europe. It was a world in which Heredia was at home, both as a statesman and as a man of culture, and we find him during these years taking an active part in the revival of scholarship, building up his fine library, commissioning for it copies and translations of the classics, consorting with the Greek scholars who came to Rhodes, and taking a special interest in the history of the classical and modern Greek world of which, as a Knight of Rhodes, he had personal experience.
Heredia’s influence suffered a blow in 1365 by the election of Raymond Berenger as Master of the Hospital. As a Provencal long opposed to Heredia’s dominance, Berenger looked with no good grace at his accumulation of offices, especially the Priory of Saint-Gilles. Nevertheless stripping him of his acquisitions was not an easy matter; when the previous Master had tried to extract from Heredia the dues he owed to Rhodes, he had been defeated with the utmost aplomb through the appointment of a commission of cardinals which decided that the best
Solution to the difficulty was the cancellation of all Heredia’s debts to the Order. Berenger had to travel to Avignon himself, and found the more willing ear of Urban V. Heredia retired to Spain and had to give up both Saint-Gilles and his nominal appointment of Castile.
For three years Heredia enjoyed undiminished prestige at the Aragonese court. He formed a close friendship with the heir to the throne, John, who was then a youth in his late teens and who acquired in these years an esteem and admiration for Heredia that were to endure a quarter-century of separation. It was largely due to Heredia’s tutelage that John became the earliest perhaps of medieval princes to be interested in Greek literature, and his brief reign in Aragon saw a florescence of scholarship that not merely anticipated but in part influenced that of Renaissance Italy.
An important triumph for Heredia’s policy occurred in 1369, when Henry of Trastamara succeeded in defeating his brother and establishing himself as King of Castile. Besides being a political benefit to Aragon, this victory permitted a solution to the question of the Templar lands in Castile, which the Order had been vainly claiming for half a century. By renouncing its rights in favour of the Knights of Calatrava, the Hospital was able to obtain in exchange their commanderies in Aragon. Heredia also used his power at court to foil Berenger’s efforts against him by adding the Priory of Catalonia to his emoluments.
In December 1370 Urban V died, and before the conclave met to choose his successor Heredia had already contrived to install himself in the papal palace. The new Pope, Gregory XI, was an energetic man of forty-two; he had been created a cardinal at the age of twenty by his uncle, the luxurious Clement VI, and during his long career at the court of Avignon had become a strong partisan of Heredia. The irrepressible Castellan was immediately restored to his military command and became a central figure in the great crusading plans that the Pope was hatching for the Order of St John. These included entrusting the defence of Smyrna, of which Gozon had washed his hands, wholly to the knights; Heredia was also invested with extraordinary powers as Lieutenant of the Order in Europe. He was to assemble a levy of 400 Knights Hospitaller and 400 squires and lead them on a new campaign into Greece.
Heredia in the guise of Mark Antony (miniature from the Grant Cronica de los Conquiridores).
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