In 1214 Alcántara was first committed to the care of the Castilian Knights of Calatrava, who had lately received great support after their performance in 1212 at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa against the Almohades.

They gave up the scheme and transferred the castle, with the permission of the king, to a peculiar Leonese order still in a formative stage, known as the Knights of St Julian de Pereiro.

This order's genesis is obscure, but according to a somewhat questionable tradition, St. Julian de Pereiro was a hermit of the country of Salamanca, where by his counsel, some knights built a castle on the river Tagus to oppose the Muslims.

The rise of such dissensions could be attributed to the fact that military orders had lost the chief object of their vocation when the Moors were driven from their last foothold in the Iberian Peninsula.

Some authors assign as causes of their disintegration the decimation of the cloisters by the Black Death in the fourteenth century, and the laxity which allowed recruitment from the most poorly qualified subjects.

Lastly, there was the revolution in warfare, when the growth of modern artillery and infantry overpowered the armed cavalry of feudal times, while the orders still held to their obsolete mode of fighting.

During the fatal schism between Pedro of Castile and his brother, Henry the Bastard, which divided half Europe, the Knights of Alcántara were also split into two factions which warred upon each other.

Adrian VI went farther, in favour of his pupil, Charles V, for in 1522 he bestowed the three masterships of Spain upon the Crown, even permitting their inheritance through the female line.

The administration was now re-titled once again by royal decree of 1 August 1876, as the Tribunal Metropolitano y Consejo de las Órdenes Militares, with the responsibility for regulating the proofs of nobility and the admission and investiture of the knights, the appointment of charges and officers, the creation or suppression of parishes, the construction or repair of churches and chapels, the direction of the benefices and hospitals and modification of regulations or statutes; the government thus formally recognised the continued legal existence of the four Orders.

Alfonso XIII obtained de facto papal approval of his new title of Grand Master and Perpetual Administrator when the Holy See confirmed certain regulations in 1916.

In a modification of the earlier act, the Ministry of War by a decree of 5 August 1931 declared the four Orders subject to the Spanish law on Associations, to which status it had also converted the five Maestranzas and named a "Junta, or Provisional Commission", to which it gave juridical personality in place of the Consejo.