Die Kreuzritter

All of the historical information in the 7th Sea Die Kreuzritter supplement is accurate up to and including the battle at Tannen in 1411, where the Order of the Black Cross was apparently destroyed. They began as a charitable order of hospitallers during the Crusades, became very wealthy and played politics back home in Theah, and lost.

Rumors persisted, though, that the Black Crosses weren't really gone. For a while, the story went that they were plagued by Bianco curses following their destruction of that infernal family in 1400, and had to disappear to avoid them. Then it was that die Kreuzritter were still hunting Bianco in a weird shadow war. Rumors died down for a while in the late 1400s, only to experience a resurgence around 1480 when a series of suspicious murders were attributed to "secret Vaticine assassins" because the deaths greatly benefitted the Hierophant. The legends of the hidden Church warriors hunting Bianco were turned to fit a new mania for hidden Church warriors hunting the Hierophant's enemies, whomever they were.

After Mattias Lieber's break from the Church in 1517, such allegations started to reach truly ridiculous heights. If the Black Crosses existed and were half as fearsome as Objectionist propagandists made them out, Lieber would have been dead long before he reached his trial for heresy.

Die Kreuzritter became an anti-Vaticine by-word in many of the lands embracing Objectionism, because for them it highlighted the hypocrisy and corruption of the Vaticine Church. The Inquisition didn't serve that purpose quite so well - they had always been very open about their intentions and their methods towards heretics and sorcerers, and they had several centuries of theological thinking to back both up. But the idea of an Hierophant to preached divine wisdom and peace with one mouth and ordered secret executions with another resonated with those who felt that they needed to tear down the Vaticine Church. Knights of the Black Cross began showing up in the religious polemics of the day, especially as characters in inflammatory plays and stories. These "evil Church assassins" were so strongly caricatured that eventually their authors began to credit them with evil sorceries and, in one especially vicious satire, paint the black crosses on their tabards upside-down, aligning them with the Legion-worshippers they once exterminated.

As these screeds moved from legitimate complaints against the Vaticine Church to slander to sheerest paranoid fantasy, many Objectionists started to push away from them. They were trying to establish a serious, thinking person's faith, reinvigorating the basic teachings of the Prophets after centuries of hierophantic meddlings obscuring the essential nature of the texts. These ridiculous allegations were beginning to make them all look like wild-eyed crazy people, seeing Vaticine plots in every misfortune and Vaticine assassins hiding under the beds. After the War of the Cross, such villifications stopped almost entirely. No one had the heart for it anymore.

Besides, why would the Vaticine Church need a secret band of killer warrior-monks? They had the Inquisition already, a very public band of killer warrior-monks. What problems could the Church possibly have that a hand-picked group of Inquistors couldn't handle?