Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/209

 The Crusading Epoch brought subtle influences toward a male-loving soldiery in Europe. The Christian cavalier transferred to the East soon became pederastic. Especially is it curious to discover how the vowed Orders of knighthood circumvented the letter of their pledge to be chaste sexually, by their permitting coition with males. Several great military orders tacitly decided that pederasty was materially a lesser sin than to break the vow of continence as to women. Hence the sombre Templar fraternity gradually became riddled with homosexualism, noble and ignoble. The downfall of the Templars indeed was intimately united to that fact. Not less similisexual was the tremendous military Deutscher Orden. Its warlike social story, in Venice and Poland, is filled with uranianism. The Order of Malta has always been a chosen retreat for the uranian aristocrat.

Suggestions of more than merely spiritual bonds between the famous Paladin confraternity can be discerned in the pages of its chroniclers. The same observation applies to some of the passionate intimacies between the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table. Indeed, at this period of chivalry, love for women was continually a mere idealism, expecting and receiving no sexual return. Often it could not, by any stretch of honour, receive such return. Knightly woman-worship was much a matter of lute and lay, a spiritual pose. Malory sounds notes of passion that vaguely make similisexual melody. Later, incontestable representatives of soldier-uranians thicken. It may startle many a reader to know that Gonsalvo de Cordova, General Tilly, Prince Eugène of Savoy, certain princes of Orange, Duke Charles of Burgundy (1433-1477) that great soldier-prince Henri de Condé, the Duc de Vendome, Pietro Duke of Parma, the youthful and brave Conradin of Hohenstaufen and his kinsman Friedrich of Baden, the "blameless" paragon of chivalry,