When the Hospitallers—Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, or of Malta—first emerged from their humble position of ministering to the afflictions of their fellow-pilgrims, and commenced to assume a military organization under Raymond du Puy, about the year 1120, their statutes required the three ordinary monastic vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity.[895] In fact, they were at first Benedictines; but when they became numerous enough to form a separate body, they adopted the rule of St. Augustin. When the rule for the Templars—“Regula pauperum commilitonum sanctæ civitatis”—was adopted in 1128, at the council of Troyes, it contained no special injunction to administer a vow of celibacy, but the context shows that such a condition was understood as a matter of course.[896] Some little difficulty was evidently experienced at first, since, from the nature of the case, novices had to be trained warriors who must frequently have been bound by family ties, and whose education had not been such as to fit them for the restraints of their new life. It is probable also that the perpetual nature of the obligations assumed was not easy to be enforced upon the fierce members of the brotherhood, for, in 1183, Lucius III., in confirming the privileges of the order, specially commands that no one who enters it shall be allowed to return to the world.[897] The history of these two orders is too well known to require it to be traced minutely here. If, with the growth of their reputation and wealth, the austere asceticism of their early days was lost, and if luxury and vice took the place of religious enthusiasm and soldierly devotion to the Cross, they but obeyed the universal law which in human institutions is so apt to render corruption the consequence of prosperity. One conclusion may be drawn, however, from the proceedings by which the powerful order of the Temple was extinguished at the commencement of the fourteenth century. Notwithstanding the open and scandalous licentiousness of the order, it is a little singular that the interminable articles of accusation against the members contain no allusion to unchastity, while crimes most fantastic, practices most beastly, and charges most frivolous are heaped upon them in strange confusion.[898] As the object of those who conducted the prosecution was to excite a popular abhorrence that would justify the purposed spoliation, it is evident that the simple infraction of vows of chastity was regarded as so venial a fault and so much a matter of course that its proof could in no way serve the end of rousing indignation against the accused.