The Order of Montjoy was a small military order founded in 1173–1174 at Alfambra, in the Kingdom of Aragon, by Rodrigo Álvarez de Sarria, a Leonese count and former knight of Santiago, and named after Montjoie outside Jerusalem. Its eastern knights died at Hattin in 1187. In 1188 Alfonso II of Aragon merged it into his Hospital of the Holy Redeemer at Teruel, which passed to the Templars in 1196, while a Castilian and Leonese breakaway at Monfragüe joined Calatrava in 1221.
The Order of Montjoy, Monte Gaudio in Spanish, was a small military order founded in the Kingdom of Aragon in 1173–1174 by Rodrigo Álvarez de Sarria, a count from Galicia in the Kingdom of León who had been a knight of the Order of Santiago. For its first years it was known simply as the Order of Alfambra, after the castle north of Teruel that Alfonso II of Aragon gave it in July 1174 in return for holding his frontier against Muslim Valencia.
The name came a few years later. On a pilgrimage in 1176–1177 Rodrigo acquired land in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, including Montjoie, the hill outside Jerusalem from which pilgrims caught their first sight of the city. The order never grew large on either front, and within fifteen years of its foundation it had lost its independence.
Rodrigo left Santiago because he found its discipline too lax, above all because its knights were allowed to marry, and he wanted a stricter rule modelled on the Cistercians’. The papal legate Cardinal Hyacinth, the future Pope Celestine III, gave permission, and Pope Alexander III approved the new order before 24 December 1173 on condition that it took in no former knights of Santiago and no property Santiago claimed. A papal bull of 1180 confirmed it. Unusually for an order under a Cistercian rule, it answered directly to the Holy See rather than to Cîteaux or to the Order of Calatrava.
Alfambra was its first seat, charged with the frontier south of Teruel. In the East, the lands Rodrigo received on his pilgrimage came from Raynald of Châtillon, and Baldwin IV of Jerusalem confirmed them on condition that Rodrigo and his knights fight there. The order also received smaller grants in Castile and Italy. Neither front brought it many recruits: the name Monte Gaudio appears less and less in the documents after 1180, and an attempt around 1186 to unite the order with the Knights Templar came to nothing.
The order’s knights in the East fought at the Battle of Hattin on 4 July 1187, where Saladin destroyed the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and none of them survived. The fall of Jerusalem that October ended the order’s role in the Holy Land.
In 1188 Alfonso II folded the brothers of Alfambra into the Hospital of the Holy Redeemer, which he had founded at Teruel. The merged Order of the Holy Redeemer kept Alfambra’s rule and customs, added the hospital’s work of ransoming captives and caring for the needy, and received generous royal grants.
It broke apart in 1196. The brothers, unhappy with their master Fralmo of Lucca, replaced him with Rodrigo González; Fralmo took the mastership back against canon law, gave up the Cistercian rule and led the order into the Knights Templar that same year. Its houses in Aragon, Alfambra among them, passed to the Templars.
Rodrigo González’s supporters, most of them Castilian and Leonese knights, refused the union. In 1196 Alfonso VIII of Castile granted them Monfragüe, a castle on a ridge above the Tagus in Extremadura, and they carried on there as the Order of Monfragüe until Ferdinand III of Castile joined them to the Order of Calatrava in 1221.
So the order ended three ways: its eastern knights died at Hattin, its Aragonese houses went to the Templars, and its Castilian remnant was absorbed by Calatrava. When the Templars were suppressed, Alfambra passed to the Hospitallers, and Juan Fernández de Heredia, later Grand Master of the Hospitallers at Rhodes, began his career as its commander. The Order of Montesa, founded in 1317, owed something to proposals made then to revive Montjoy.