How to Christianize war? How to provide yourself with an armed force inclined to faithfully and constantly stand in defense of Christianity and fulfill its mission of fighting the infidels? Medieval Christianity answered these two questions by creating, not without some resistance, original institutions - military monastic orders. Hybrids of “monsters”, in the words of Isaac Stella, living like monks, according to the rule - Benedictine or Augustinian, but not quite monks, acting like knights, but not in the image of those representatives of the aristocratic caste who are always ready to fight among themselves, not worldly knights reviled by St. Bernard, but knights of Christ, “clad in the armor of iron and the armor of faith.” The Reconquista and the Crusades contributed to the fact that these orders spread widely in the Holy Land, in Spain and on the shores of the Baltic Sea. As the independence of the monarchies from papal power strengthened, the monarchs' growing distrust of these military forces, which sometimes became real states, as the service of the mission was increasingly replaced by simple belligerence, the military monastic orders gradually lost their viability and were forced to turn again to charitable activities. Then were born the legends and rumors that the modern historian debunks, while at the same time doing justice to these vivid testimonies of the collective imagination of medieval people, making an excellent overview of these legends.