User blog:123chaseyoung/Knights Hospitaller vs Sohei Monks



Knights Hospitaller : Medieval tanks sworn to protect Christiandom from heathens and themselves

vs

Sohei : Buddhist warriors who took up arms to take on the Feudal lords



Two holy warriors, sworn to protect their religion, duke it out in today's episode of Deadliest Fiction.



 WHO IS DEADLIEST?



Knights Hospitaller
The Knights Hospitaller, or the Order of the Knights of Saint John and also famously as the Knights of Malta, nicknamed The "Religion", are a Christian military order established in the Middle Ages. Founded by a group of individuals in an Amalfitan hospital dedicated to St. John the Baptist in Jerusalem, the knights were initiated as a humanitarian movement dedicated in helping, caring and protecting pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land. During the First Crusade, the organization became a military unit by the orders of the Papal ministry. Their job was to defend the Holy Land and its Christian inhabitants from infidel tryning to raid or invade Christian lands. In the next century and the subsequent loss of Jerusalem, the Knights Hospitaller moved out and conquered Tripoli and Cyprus. When Pope Clement dissolved their rival, the Knights Templar, the Knights Hospitaller became one of the leading fighting force of the religion, conquering and setting up their new headquarters in Rhodes. They also set up orders throughout Europe such as Germany, Britain, Netherlands and others.

After the Crusades, the traditional armored knights were dissolved with the introduction of gunpowder, but the Knights Hospitaller still existed as a powerful force by now acquiring muskets and firearms mixed in with their traditional knightly armor and virtues. They fought in many battles and sieges of the Ottoman–Venetian War, such as in Rhodes, Tripoli, Preveza, as well as the infamous Siege of Malta, which was one of the greatest sieges in human history. They also colonized small parts of America, and during the Napoleonic Wars, they had a brief war with Napoleon, to which they finally lost Malta. Today, the Knights Hospitaller still exist as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta as a humanitarian and charity organization while even retaining their militaristic allegiance to the Papacy.

Sohei
Warrior monks had existed in Japan since the end of the Japanese classical age. At first, they simply existed to fight other monks; much of religion was politics, so when two monasteries had a feud, often violence would break out. For over two hundred years, the Sohei merely existed to fight each other in small temple conflicts.

All this changed when the Genpei war, one of the many great civil wars of Japan, began. The two warring clans, the Minamoto and the Taira, wished to bolster their samurai forces, and appealed to the now many warrior monasteries. Both sides obtained help from various groups, and their skill in battle was famous.

After the Genpei war, the monks went back to rebuilding their monasteries, and didn't really participate in the wars of the next couple hundred years, once again only fighting each other. The Onin war started in 1467, localized in Kyoto, where many monasteries were, so much of the Sohei could no longer be passive. This conflict grew into a nation-wide civil war, now known as the Sengoku Jidai.

Meanwhile, in the countryside, a new face of the warrior monks arose; the Ikko-Ikki. These religious fanatics believed in the downfall of the Feudal system, and led a peasant rebellion against the Samurai rulers. Many of the daimyo lords, including Tokugawa Ieyasu, future founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, sent armies to fight the rebels. The Ikko Ikki took began to spread, conquering more land, but eventually, in 1580, they were defeated.

While the next twenty years saw more warrior monks siding with various forces, when Japan was unified under Tokugawa, the time of the warrior monk ended.

TBF