Forty papers link the study of the military orders' cultural life and output with their involvement in political and social conflicts during the medieval and early modern period. Divided into two volumes, focusing on the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe respectively, the collection brings together the most up-to-date research by experts from fifteen countries on a kaleidoscope of relevant themes and issues, thus offering a broad-ranging and at the same time very detailed study of the subject.

Introduction (Jonathan Riley-Smith)

1. Nikolas Jaspert (University of Heidelberg), Military Orders at the frontier: Permeability and demarcation
2. Philippe Josserand (University of Nantes), Frontier conflict, military cost and culture: The Master of Santiago and the Islamic border in mid-fourteenth century Spain
3. Xavier Baecke (Ghent Univeristy), The symbolic power of spiritual knighthood: Discourse and context of the donation of Count Thierry d'Alsace to the Templar Order in county of Flanders
4. Damien Carraz (University of Clermont-Ferrand), Pragmatic literacy, archival memory, and conflicts in Provence
5. Karl Borchardt (MGH, Munich), Conflicts and codices: The example of Clm 4620, A collection about the Hospitallers
6. Simon Phillips (University of Cyprus), Conflicts within the culture of the Hospitaller Order
7. Nicole Hamonic (University of South Dakota), Founding and financing perpetual chantries at Clerkenwell Priory, 1242-1404
8. Christie Majoros-Dunnahoe (University of Cardiff), Re-examining the function of the houses of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in England
9. Anthony Delarue (Rome), The use of the double-traversed cross in the English priory of the Order of St John
10. Helen Nicholson (University of Cardiff), The Templars' estates in the west of Britain in the early fourteenth century
11. Julia Baldo-Alcoz (University of Navarra), Defensive elements in the Templar and Hospitaller preceptories of the Priory of Navarre
12. Luís Adão da Fonseca & Maria Cristina Pimenta (CEPESE), The Commandary of Noudar of the Order of Avis in the border with Castile: History and memory
13. Paula Pinto Costa & Lúcia Maria Cardoso Rosas (University of Porto), Vera Cruz de Marmelar in the XIIIth-XVth centuries: a St. John's commandery as an expression of a cultural memory and territorial appropriation
14. Mariarosaria Salerno (University of Calabria), The Military Orders and the local population in Italy: links and conflicts
15. Elena Bellomo (University of Cardiff), The Sforzas, the papacy and control of the Hospitaller priory of Lombardy
16. Conradin von Planta (Freiburg im Breisgau), Advocacy and "defensio" - the protection of the houses of the Teutonic Order in the region of the upper Rhine during the 13th and 14th centuries
17. Maria Starnawska (John-Dlugosz University), The role of the legend of St. Barbara's head in the conflict of the Teutonic Order and Swietopelk, the duke of Pomerania
18. Anton Caruana Galizia (Newcastle University), The European nobilities and the Order of St. John, 16th - 18th centuries
19. Renger E. de Bruin (Centraal Museum, Utrecht), The narrow escape of the Teutonic Order bailiwick of Utrecht, 1811-1815

Jochen Schenk (PhD Cantab) was a lecturer of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow. His recent publications include Templar Families. Landowning Families and the Order of the Temple in France, c.1120-1312. He is also the author of a number of articles dealing, mainly, with the Order of the Temple's social structure, the Templars' religious life, and the military orders' contribution to state building in the Latin East. He is currently working on a cultural history of the crusader states.

Mike Carr (PhD London) is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His first monograph, Merchant Crusaders in the Aegean, 1291-1352, was published by Boydell and Brewer in 2015. He has published articles on his main interests, which include relations between Latins, Greeks and Turks in the eastern Mediterranean, the crusades, maritime history and the papacy. He is also the co-editor of the volume Contact and Conflict in Frankish Greece and the Aegean, 1204-1453, with Nikolaos Chrissis (Ashgate, 2014).