St. Pachomius Library: Knights of Saint Catherine

The Knights of St. Catherine

The records of the mediæval Western Church and of some of the royal bureaucracies mention in passing that certain knights were "of St. Catherine" or "of the Order of St. Catherine". Although the oldest instances of this usage are uninformative, by the late Middle Ages it was possible for an upper-class traveller to obtain this title by making the famously arduous pilgrimage to the Monastery of St. Catherine near Mount Sinai, or the considerably easier one to St. Catherine's Church, Bethlehem.
The Monastery of St. Catherine undertook extensive fund-raising campaigns in the mediæval West, and was directly responsible for the initial spread of the cult of St. Catherine in Roman Catholic territory (although the monastery itself was always Orthodox). Not surprisingly, several of the documented Knights of St. Catherine seem to have acted as local sponsors for these projects, and, though probably not secretly Orthodox themselves, were at least friends of Orthodoxy in an hostile environment.
A number of separate Orthodox and Roman Catholic authorities considered themselves empowered to bestow the title; the Abbot of Sinai knighted someone as recently as 1956. Sometimes the leaders of pilgrimages themselves would knight their followers as "Knights of St. Catherine"; some pilgrims seem to have simply knighted each other, or themselves. Apparently it was the pilgrimage itself which validated the knighthood.
Tradition, however, asserts that in earlier times the Order was more than an honourary decoration, that it was a real "Order" like the Hospitallers or Templars. Antiquaries of the late XVII and early XVIII Centuries published detailed accounts of the Order. Its knights were said to have followed the Rule of St. Basil (but without the requirement of celibacy; the knights were married men who served two-year shifts in the desert). They guarded the Monastery and its caravan-lines in the Crusader period or even earlier, and were vaguely associated with the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, into which the Palestine branch of the Knights of St. Catherine was eventually absorbed. There is no hard evidence to support any of these claims, and all of the historically documented Knights lived well after the Crusades; on the other hand, the tradition does not seem particularly far-fetched or anachronistic, and many historians accept that the Knights of St. Catherine at least aspired to have an organised conventual life in the Holy Land, whether or not they ever actually attempted it.
--- Norman Hugh Redington
Under construction --- far from complete! Read with caution.

ABOUT:
- Jennifer R. Bray: The Medieval Military Order of St. Katherine, (1983). Bull. Inst. Hist. Res. (56/133): 1. Denies the existence of an Order in the formal sense.
- Pierre Hélyot: Histoire des Ordres Monastiques, Religieux et Militaires, Chap. 35, (1714) Paris: N. Gosselin, 1714. --- Google Book
- Jean Hermant: Histoire des Religions, (1698) Rouen: Besongne, 1698, pp. 46-48. --- Google Book
Names of Some Known (and Alleged) Knights:
- XV Century:
  - Anselme Adornes: A merchant-prince of Bruges who travelled the known world; his colourful life has been dramatised in a series of historical novels by Dorothy Dunnett and in a Belgian movie. He was knighted at Sinai. As advisor to James III of Scotland, he was blamed for the loss of Berwick and hanged by the king's opponents in 1483; his body is in Bruges' famous Eastern-influenced Kerk van Jeruzalem.
  - Graf Philipp von Katzenellenbogen
  - Pedro Sánchez de Mena of Burgos
  - Detlev Schinkel: A pilgrim from Schleswig who reached both Sinai and St. Anthony's hermitage in Upper Egypt in 1436. At the latter site, he left heraldic graffiti including the arms of the Knights of St. Catherine.
  - Jakob Truchseß
  - Simón Vázquez of Castile
  - Lambrecht van den Walle: Travelled with Anselme Adornes.
- XVI Century:
  - Martin von Baumgarten: Author of a well-known early travel-book, Peregrinatio in Ægyptum, Arabiam, Palestinam, et Syriam. He was knighted at Sinai in 1507.
  - M. Daubray, Baron de Bruyeres: Secretary to the King of France. He was a source for the antiquarian writers late in the century.
  - Estêvão da Gama: The son of Vasco da Gama and leader of a Portuguese attack on Ottoman ports in the Red Sea. He made several of his men Knights of St. Catherine at the monastery after raiding at-Tur in 1541.
- XX Century:
  - Wendell Phillips: Knighted in Cairo by Abp. Porphyrius III of Sinai. A controversial American businessman, adventurer, and self-taught archæologist who is said to have been the prototype for Indiana Jones, Phillips led an expedition to Sinai in 1951.
  - William B. Terry: A member of Phillips's expedition.
The Knights in Fiction:
- John G. Edgar: The Boy Crusaders, (1865). Edinburgh: Gall and Inglis, 1870. A boys' adventure novel by the author of an adult history of the Crusades. One of the characters becomes a Knight of St. Catherine. The Knights are described as very similar to Templars or Hospitallers. They are depicted as based in Acre and holding the castle of "Kakhow", Edgar's spelling in his nonfiction of Caco (Qaqun). I am unsure if any of this derives from documentary sources; the Monastery of St. Catherine apparently did have a daughter-house in Acre during the Crusader period (see Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land, Cambridge, 2005, p. 175).
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