A military order is any one of a variety of Christian societies of knights that were founded from the Middle Ages onwards for the purpose of crusading – propagating or defending the faith (originally Catholic, and after the Reformation sometimes Protestant), either in the Holy Land or against Islam (as, for example, during the Reconquista) or pagans (mainly in the Baltic region) in Europe. Many orders have, since the end of the Crusades and the Ottoman incursions, become secularized, and are usually represented by Roman Catholic ceremonial, missionary and charitable organizations in modern times.
Read more about Military Order: History, Purpose and Function, List of Military Orders, Other Uses
Famous quotes containing the words military and/or order:
“Nothing changes my twenty-six years in the military. I continue to love it and everything it stands for and everything I was able to accomplish in it. To put up a wall against the military because of one regulation would be doing the same thing that the regulation does in terms of negating people.”
—Margarethe Cammermeyer (b. 1942)
“In schools all over the world, little boys learn that their country is the greatest in the world, and the highest honor that could befall them would be to defend it heroically someday. The fact that empathy has traditionally been conditioned out of boys facilitates their obedience to leaders who order them to kill strangers.”
—Myriam Miedzian, U.S. author. Boys Will Be Boys, ch. 3 (1991)