obtained from Alfonso the Battler, king of Aragon and Navarre. Alfonso, without an heir, had made the Hospitallers, the Knights Templar and the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre his legatees. When he died in the fall of 1134, the will was not respected. Charged with representing the three orders, Raymond came to Spain and began negotiations with Ramon Berenguer IV. The group relinquished their territorial rights, unless Berenguer died without issue. In exchange, they obtained the royal rights in Barbastro, Calatayud, Daroca, Huesca, Jaca, Zaragoza and all the towns that Aragon would later conquer, as well as in all the castles and towns of the kingdom with more than thirty peasants. The Hospitallers reserved the land necessary to build a church and a settlement in Jaca. On 24 June 1158, pope Adrian IV confirmed this agreement at the request of Berenguer. In April 1157, Raymond went to Portugal to renew the will of Alfonso. The presence of the Grand Master of the Order earned him, in addition to what he had already obtained 17 years earlier, enormous gifts from Ramon Berenguer IV and the bishop of Lérida. At the end of the year he was in Estopiñán del Castillo in Aragon and in the south of France where the abbot of Saint-Gilles, a certain Bertrand, gave permission to build a chapel. Pierre II de Posquières, the bishop of Lodève, gave him the churches of Saint-Julien and Saint-Vincent de Nébian. In July 1158, he met with Guichard of Pontigny, archbishop of Lyon and Guy II, count of Forez, to obtain, on 16 July 1158, an exemption from tolls by land and by water. On 25 October 1158, Raymond was near Verona where he obtained from Frederick Barbarossa a general confirmation of the exemption. In the Holy Land In 1143, pope Celestine II issued a bull that gave the Hospitallers jurisdiction over the Santa Maria Alemanna (Church of Saint Mary of the Germans) in Jerusalem, a hospital that since 1128 accommodated German pilgrims and Crusaders who could neither speak the local language nor Latin. Although formally an institution of the Hospitallers, the pope commanded that the prior and the brothers of the domus Theutonicorum (house of the Germans) should always be Germans themselves, so a tradition of a German-led religious institution could develop during the 12th century in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The latter, who gained their independence in 1190, remained under