The second institution was the so-called Order of Saint Maurice which, if it was an order at all, hardly merited the name of a military order by any stretch of the imagination. Yet whatever it lacked of the military spirit has since been largely supplied by romance, insofar as it was involved in the story of a layman who became antipope. When Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoia, renounced the throne, he retired to Ripaglia where he had built a church in honor of the holy martyr Maurice to whom the house of Savoia had a special devotion. There, in 1434, the duke with five other knights established the Sacred Militia of Saint Maurice—a rather pompous title for a group of elderly widowers who had retired into a hermitage. Four years later, the remnants of the Council of Basle revolted against the legitimate Pope Eugene IV and elected the above-mentioned Amadeus. He accepted under the title of Felix V and abandoned his solitude in Ripaglia in the company of the other knightly widowers. Thenceforth history has little to tell about the Sacred Militia of Saint Maurice. In 1572, Emmanuel Philibert, after lengthy negotiations, obtained from Pope Gregory XIII permission to allot the possessions of the Order of Saint Lazarus in his territory to the languishing Order of Saint Maurice. Out of this merger developed the military religious Order of Saint Maurice and Lazarus—the last of the military orders to come into existence. Its objective was to curtail piracy on the high seas and combat the enemies of the faith. However, the institution from its very inception was an affair of the Savoian dynasty, the duke and his successors assuming the office of grand master. The knights vowed obedience to the duke and were subject to him not only as vassals but also by virtue of a religious vow. They pledged themselves to serve in the convents of the order for five years; one of these convents was in Turin for the ground forces and the other in Nice for the naval forces. The character of the Order of St. Maurice and Lazarus was completely changed when Victor Emmanuel II, in 1860, made it a simple order of merit. Other dynastic orders of knighthood having some ties with the Church were quite different. The motives for establishing them were various. Some owed their origin simply to a chance occasion or a romantic event not infrequently of a frivolous nature; some were commemorative of a signal victory in battle or the accession of a prince to the throne. Often enough, politics played a role, when a sovereign would wish to bind his nobles closer to the crown. By way of example, we shall mention here some of the more illustrious dynastic orders of knighthood.