Order of The Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy

The Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy (or the Order of Merced, O.Merc., Mercedarians, the Order of Captives, or the Order of Our Lady of Ransom) was one of many dozens of associations that sprang up in Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries as institutions of charitable works. The work of the Mercedarians was in ransoming impoverished captive Christians (slaves) held in Muslim hands, especially along the frontier that the Crown of Aragon shared with al-Andalus (Muslim Spain).

Starting before the First Crusade, many hospices and hospitals were organized by the chapters of cathedrals or by the monastic orders. Within the communal organizations of towns, local charitable institutions such as almshouses were established by confraternities or guilds, or by successful individual laymen concerned with the welfare of their souls, but often only local historians are aware of them.

Broader-based and aristocratically-funded charitable institutions were more prominent and are more familiar, and the episodes of aristocratic and even royal ransom and its conditions, were the subject of chronicle and romance. The knights of the original Order of St John—the Knights Hospitaller—and the Templars in their origins are well known, and the impact of their organized charity upon the religious values of the High Middle Ages is more fully estimated in their spheres.

The Order of Merced, however, an early 13th century popular movement of personal piety organized at first by the Catalan Peter Nolasco, was concerned with ransoming the ordinary men who had not the means to negotiate their own ransom, the "poor of Christ." Nolasco and the fraternity that grew around him were motivated by an urban mentality that transcended kith and kin in a broader social consciousness; though they were lay folk, such a movement could only find expression through a specifically Christian form: within its first five or six years the movement was organized into a recognized order of the Church, still in the early 13th century the one transcendent institutional framework in Europe aside from the Papacy. (Brodman 1986).