No one had thought harder about the Templars’ curious fusion of the roles of monk and knight, and no one was better suited to putting into words the spirit of this potent new order. But Bernard was not the only one thinking seriously about the Templars. Far away from the Holy Land another patron was thinking about how he could help support the newly founded order. His name was Alfonso, king of Aragón, and he was at the forefront of the struggle against Islam—not battling Seljuqs and Fatimids in the Holy Land, but fighting the Moors of southern Spain, in the war known as the Reconquista.
