The Order of Montjoy was a short-lived Cistercian military order founded around 1173 by a disaffected Castilian noble, straddling the Holy Land and Iberia. Chronically short of men and money, it was absorbed by the Templars in 1188, and its Spanish remnant was folded into Calatrava — a small order remembered mainly for how quickly the great ones swallowed it.
The Order of Montjoy — Montegaudio in Spanish — was one of the many small military orders that flickered briefly in the 12th century before being absorbed by the giants. Founded by a Castilian count who had fallen out with the Order of Santiago, it tried to hold ground on two crusading fronts at once, in the Holy Land and in Iberia.
It took its name from Montjoie, the hill north of Jerusalem from which pilgrims caught their first sight of the holy city. But it was always too poor and too few to matter, and within fifteen years it had ceased to exist as an independent order.
Around 1173 Count Rodrigo Álvarez de Sarria, a former knight of Santiago, founded the order with Cistercian backing and estates in both the Latin East and Castile. The pope confirmed it in 1180, and it built a base at Montfragüe on the Tagus in Extremadura.
The problem was arithmetic: the order never attracted enough knights or endowments to garrison the Holy Land and the Iberian frontier at the same time. Its handful of brothers were spread far too thin to make a difference on either front.
The disaster of 1187, when Saladin destroyed the army of Jerusalem at the Battle of Hattin and took the holy city, was the end of Montjoy’s eastern hopes. In 1188 the order was merged into the Knights Templar.
Its Iberian remnant clung on at Montfragüe for a generation before being absorbed, around 1221, into the Order of Calatrava. Montjoy’s brief career shows how hard it was for a minor order to survive between the Templars, the Hospitallers, and the great Spanish orders.