Catholic military orders without Crusades

Fladoodle

I was wondering what people thought the state of holy orders in the vein of the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutons might be like in the case of a butterflied or failed crusades.
From reading up, it seems some groups of knights in the service of the church existed pre-crusades in very small numbers, but the knightly orders as we understand them appear to develop out of the success of the crusades.

Say the Byzantines manage to hold against the Seljuks so no crusades are called, or the first crusade fails miserably etc. Would orders such as this exist in a similar way that they did or would their existence be unnecessary?
Were they an inevitable development of the medieval papacy or were they just a thing that happened to come about due to the specific circumstances?
It seems their foundations are primarily tied to the idea of holy war/just war that the crusades were built on, so I guess it's more about whether or not this idea would gain traction without the crusades.
 

Mosak

As I don't know much about the later history, I'll limit myself to the first hundred or so years after the First Crusade.

Thinking of specific orders, the Hospitallers militarised to provide pilgrims to Jerusalem with armed escort. The Templars came into being for similar reasons, originally to guard the route between Jaffa and Jerusalem. A desire to protect pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land could reasonably lead to some militarisation even without successful Crusades, but, limiting myself to the Templars and Hospitallers as they're the two I know about, I can't see the Orders expanding into the military forces they were in OTL.

First, in a Muslim-controlled near-East their growth would be stymied - I can't see e.g. Yaghi-Siyan, Ridwan etc. tolerating the build-up of armed groups of Christians. Second, with no Crusader states, the resources that allowed the Orders to prosper - money, land, and castles granted them by lords in Outremer - would not have been accessible to them.
All that is to say that, if they did still develop in the absence of a successful Crusade, the Military Orders would be very different to the OTL ones.

As to your broader point, about whether the idea of Orders could gain traction without the Crusades: if they did, I suspect it would have to happen much later. The Orders grew so rapidly in large part because of massive donations from European lords, and the popularity of those donations was in large part a result of the massive cultural impact of the success of the First Crusade. With no successful crusade, and hence no crusader states, supporting Christians in Outremer doesn't become such a popular way to demonstrate one's piety, and so, even if the Orders still came into existence, they'd have little chance of growing so powerful.

There's also the angle that, if the First Crusade had failed, the papacy's position would likely have been weakened, leaving it with less clout to support any Military Orders.
 
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Fladoodle

That's very interesting, thankyou, and was pretty much my thinking as well.

The issue I was also considering was whether that would mean no Teutonic-style state in the formerly pagan Baltic, or the Spanish holy orders that came about to fight against the moors.
Did the crusade directly inspire these orders? Or might they develop on their own?
In any case, what would become of the Baltic region? Presumably it would be Christianized eventually, somehow.
 
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