Oh, Great Teacher! How the seeds of the King ignored my presence here in this solitude; and I couldn't die with you and my Brothers, witnesses who pay with their blood the purity and innocence of the Order! Or perhaps destiny kept me in reserve, an old man, so that with my words I could certify the truth and be from the generations to come, the historian of the decline of the Order? What irony! But when will he read what I entrust to these pages?

We went through anxious times. Like a storm sweeping in one night the golden splendor of the plane leaves in the courtyard, so our Order was dissolved and scattered in all the winds. Many were the Brothers who were lost in the last battle for the Order! Some older ones retired to the Cistercian monasteries or to their relatives. The younger ones, my last companions, those who still had all their strength, joined the Hospitallers or the Order of Calatrava in Spain or other Brotherhoods and serve the same purpose under a different attire adorned with a different cross. But who cared about interrogations even now that everything has passed?