The Night’s Watch and Medieval Holy Orders
Medieval Europe saw its fair share of harsh winters. In 1258 temperatures plummeted to such an extent that an estimated 20,000 people starved to death in London alone, with people in such desperation that they gnawed bark from the trees. In 1357, starving wolves prowled through England’s Sherwood Forest, hunting humans and livestock alike. But compared to those Westerosi who suffered a Long Night lasting generations, 8,000 years before the Targayren Conquest, the Europeans were summer children.
The Night’s Watch was established in the wake of the Long Winter. They were established as a military order charged with defending the realm of men against the horrors, or as they’re called “Others”, beyond the wall. No such parallel existed in European history, unless we look to the Roman legionaries posted on Hadrian’s Wall. But if we look to the peripheries of Medieval Europe—specifically the Holy Land at the time of the Crusades—we can see patterns into which the men of the Night’s Watch fit.
One was the Knights Templar, a military holy order whose job was to protect pilgrims passing through the Holy Land. Another was the Teutonic Order, initially charged with caring for the sick in the same vein as the Knights Hospitaller, but militarised at the end of the 12th century. Both Templars and Teutons took vows of celibacy, renouncing female contact of any sort, including kissing their mothers; and this embracement of chastity finds echoes in the vow of the Night’s Watch’s: “I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory.”
We don’t know the wording of the vow sworn by knights of the Teutonic Order. It’s safe to say, however, that rather than harkening on about night gathering and one’s watch beginning, it centered around defending the Holy Land from the infidel and helping take it back for Christianity. But we know there were many similarities: encouraging poverty, chastity, and obedience to God’s will.
There are also a number of similarities regarding the hierarchical structures of the fictional and historical orders. Just as men of the Night’s Watch are answerable entirely to their elected Lord Commander, the Templars and Teutons were utterly obedient to their elected Grand Master. Both the historical and the fictional orders were also completely autonomous; they weren’t answerable to individual individuals, kings or countries or individuals outside their order as they were seen as serving a higher purpose.