The Order of Montesa was created in 1317 to inherit the Valencian estates of the suppressed Templars — the Crown of Aragon’s answer to the problem of what to do with the Temple’s wealth. Placed under Calatrava’s rule, it kept the Templars’ defensive role on the Valencian frontier and became the Aragonese counterpart of Portugal’s Order of Christ.
The Order of Montesa was the Crown of Aragon’s solution to a delicate problem: when the Templars were suppressed in 1312, their great estates in Valencia could not simply be handed to the Hospitallers without strengthening a foreign power on Aragonese soil. Instead a new native order was created to absorb them.
Founded in 1317 and named for its chief castle, Montesa continued the Templars’ frontier mission in Valencia — the direct Aragonese parallel to the Order of Christ founded in Portugal in the very same years.
King James II of Aragon petitioned the papacy for a new order to hold the former Templar (and some Hospitaller) properties in his realm. Pope John XXII agreed, and in 1317 the Order of Santa María de Montesa was established, endowed with the Temple’s Valencian castles and lands.
The order was placed under the rule and visitation of Calatrava, giving it a Cistercian discipline and linking it to the wider Iberian family of orders rather than to the international Hospitallers.
From its castle at Montesa the order garrisoned the southern frontier of the Crown of Aragon against the Muslim kingdom of Granada and defended the Valencian coast against Barbary and Granadan raiders.
In 1400 it absorbed the small Order of Sant Jordi d’Alfama, adding that order’s black cross to its own red one and consolidating the crusading orders of the Aragonese lands into a single body.
Like the Castilian orders, Montesa’s mastership was drawn steadily toward the crown. Its independence lasted longer than theirs, but in 1587 the mastership was incorporated into the Spanish crown under Philip II.
Thereafter the order endured as an honorific and administrative institution, its knights the gentlemen of the Valencian establishment.
Montesa is the clearest Aragonese proof that the Templars were not so much destroyed as reorganised: their Valencian wealth and role passed intact to a new order under a new name.
Its ruined castle, thrown down by the earthquake of 1748, still stands as a monument to the strange afterlife of the Temple in the Crown of Aragon.