Order of Calatrava - After The Fall of Granada

After The Fall of Granada

At his death (1487), Ferdinand of Aragon exhibited to the chapter, assembled for the election of a new grand master, a Bull from Innocent VIII that invested him with authority to administer the order, and to this decree he compelled the electors to submit. Thus ended the political autonomy of the Order of Calatrava. The reason of its being—the struggle against the Moors—seemed, indeed, to end with the fall of Granada (1492).

The canonical bond between Calatrava and Morimond had been relaxing more and more. The King of Spain was too jealous of his authority to tolerate any foreign—especially French—intervention in the affairs of his kingdom. The canonical visits of the Abbot of Morimond ceased; difficulties were raised when the grand prior came from Morimond to take possession of his dignity. The last French prior was Nicholas of Avesnes, who died in 1552.

After a long contest, a compromise was effected in 1630, leaving to Morimond its right of electing the grand prior, but limiting its choice to Spanish Cistercians. Moreover, the knights of the order were virtually secularized: Pope Paul III commuted their vow of celibacy to one of conjugal fidelity (1540).

As members of the order were allowed to found families, and were authorized by Julius III (1551) to make free use of their personal property, the vow of poverty also passed into virtual desuetude. In 1652, under Philip IV, the three Spanish orders took a new vow: that of defending the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. This was the last manifestation of any religious spirit in the orders. The military spirit, too, had long since disappeared. The orders had, in fact, fallen into a state of utter inactivity.

The commanderies were but so many pensions at the king's free disposal, and granted by him rather predictably to the high-born than to the deserving in character, whatever their social status. In 1628 the Order of Calatrava was declared to be inaccessible not only to tradesmen, but even to sons of tradesmen. The last attempt to employ the knights of the three orders for a military purpose was that of Philip IV, in quelling the rebellion of the Catalans (1640–50), but the orders restricted their efforts to the complete equipment of one regiment, which has since been known in the Spanish army as "The Regiment of the Orders".

In 1750 the singer Farinelli was made a Knight of the Order of Calatrava.

When the Bourbon dynasty occupied the throne, Charles III, having founded the personal order of his name, levied upon the old orders a contribution of a million reals to pension 200 knights of the new order (1775). Their revenues being the only remaining raison d'être of the order, confiscation necessarily led to dissolution. Confiscated by King Joseph (1808), re-established by Ferdinand VII at the Restoration (1814), the possessions of Calatrava were finally dissipated in the general secularization of 1838.