Knights Hospitaller

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  In 1565, the island of Malta held perhaps 700 knights and 8,000 soldiers against an Ottoman invasion force of roughly 40,000 men. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent had dispatched some 400 ships. The knights had no relief coming from Sicily. Half their number would be killed. And yet they held on. That defense is among the most improbable military stands in Mediterranean history, and it was mounted by an organization that had started five centuries earlier not as a fighting force at all, but as a hospital. Who were these men? How did a charitable brotherhood that cared for sick pilgrims become one of the most formidable military powers of the medieval world? And what happened to them after the world they fought for dissolved around them?

• 2. From Hospital to Holy War

  ›

  Merchants from the Italian city of Amalfi, sometime in the late 1060s, established a hospital in Jerusalem dedicated to John the Baptist, near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Benedictine monks staffed two wards there, one for men and one for women, funded in part by a wealthy Amalfian named Mauro of Pantaleone. At the time it was simply a refuge for Christian pilgrims making the journey to the Holy Land. The organization's formal identity took shape after the First Crusade succeeded in 1099. Godfrey of Bouillon, the crusade's leader, endowed the hospital before his death in 1100. Pope Paschal II recognized the abbey of St Mary, the parent institution, as a church of the Holy See on the 19th of June 1112. Then, on the 15th of February 1113, the Pope issued the papal bull Pie postulatio voluntatis to Blessed Gerardo Sasso, formally creating the monastic Hospitaller Order. The Pope exempted the hospital from tithes, subordinated it directly to papal authority, and gave its professed brothers the right to elect their own master. From that moment, the Hospital of St John was no longer merely a charity. It was an institution with its own legal standing and a direct line to Rome. The shift toward military service came gradually. Knights in western Europe began leaving horses and weapons to the Hospitallers in their wills during the 1120s. Pope Innocent II noted in the early 1140s that the Order had "servants" protecting pilgrims. Raymond du Puy, who succeeded Gerard as master in 1120, is credited with formalizing the military dimension. He decided, some time before 1136, that Hospitallers could fight to defend the kingdom or besiege a pagan city. Pope Innocent II then gave the Order its coat of arms in 1130: a plain silver cross on a field of red, to distinguish it from the Templars. By the Siege of Ascalon in 1153, the Hospitallers were fighting alongside kings. Raymond du Puy himself convinced King Baldwin III of Jerusalem to press the siege rather than withdraw, and the fort surrendered to the Crusaders on the 22nd of August 1153.

• 3. Castles and Command

  ›

  King Fulk of Jerusalem handed the Hospitallers their first castle in 1136, the fortress of Bethgibelin, built to contain the Fatimid garrison at Ascalon. It also guarded the pilgrim road between Jaffa and Jerusalem. More followed rapidly. The Krak des Chevaliers came to them in 1142, a gift from Raymond II, Count of Tripoli, and would become one of the most famous fortifications in the crusader world. By one estimate the Order held 25 castles as of 1180, concentrated especially in the County of Tripoli and the Principality of Antioch. Alongside their military brothers stood two other ranks: the brothers infirmarians, who maintained the hospitals, and the brothers chaplains, who handled religious services. The headquarters, known as the convent, was managed by a full administrative staff including a seneschal, a marshal, a preceptor, a hospitaller, a prior, a draper, and a treasurer. From the 13th century, the hierarchy also included a turcopolier, commanding local auxiliary forces called turcopoles, and an admiral commanding the Order's navy. When Pope Innocent IV approved a standard battlefield uniform in 1248, knights shed their restrictive closed capes and instead wore a red surcoat bearing a white cross. At the height of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Hospitallers held seven great forts and 140 other estates in the region. The two largest, their twin bases of power, were the Krak des Chevaliers and Margat, both in Syria. Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, pledged his personal protection to the Order in a charter of privileges granted in 1185.

• 4. Rhodes: Sovereign Island

  ›

  When Acre fell in 1291 and the crusader kingdom finally collapsed, the Order had nowhere to go. The knights retreated first to Cyprus, where their master Guillaume de Villaret found them becoming entangled in local politics. His solution was bold: acquire independent territory. He chose Rhodes, then part of the Byzantine Empire, and reorganized the Order into eight langues, or tongues, each corresponding to a geographic region: Aragon, Auvergne, Castile, England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, and Provence. Guillaume's successor, Foulques de Villaret, carried out the plan. After more than four years of campaigning, the city of Rhodes surrendered to the knights on the 15th of August 1310. They also took control of neighboring islands, the Anatolian port of Halicarnassus, and the island of Kastellorizo. In 1312, Pope Clement V dissolved the Knights Templar and transferred much of their property to the Hospitallers via the Ad providam bull. Now sovereign rulers, the knights built extensively. On the peninsula of Halicarnassus, at present-day Bodrum, they raised Petronium Castle, incorporating stone from the partially destroyed Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The threats came steadily. An attempted invasion by Andronicus and his Turkish auxiliaries was repelled in 1334. The knights held the city of Smyrna on the Anatolian coast from 1374 until Timur besieged and captured it in 1402. The Sultan of Egypt attempted an invasion in 1444; Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, who had taken Constantinople in 1453 and made the Order a priority target, launched another assault in 1480. Both failed. The final siege of Rhodes came in 1522, when Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent sent 400 ships and a force of as many as 100,000 to 200,000 men. Grand Master Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam had around 7,000 men-at-arms. After six months the knights surrendered, but were permitted to withdraw to Sicily. Pope Adrian VI proclaimed Philippe Villiers a Defender of the Faith.

• 5. Malta and the Great Siege

  ›

  After seven years without a home, the Order secured new quarters through an agreement between Pope Clement VII and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. In exchange for Malta, Gozo, and the North African port of Tripoli, the knights would pay Charles V one annual Maltese falcon on All Souls' Day, delivered to the Viceroy of Sicily. This became known as the Tribute of the Maltese Falcon. The island the knights received was, by their own description, "merely a rock of soft sandstone". They proceeded to transform it. Hospitals were built first. Then fortresses, watch towers, and churches. French gradually replaced Italian as the official language within the Order. Relations with the indigenous Maltese were complicated: most knights were French and excluded Maltese from membership, and they were especially resented for taking advantage of local women. Yet the two groups coexisted, partly because the knights boosted the economy and defended against outside attack. Then in 1565, Suleiman sent roughly 40,000 men to finish what he had started at Rhodes. Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette commanded the defense. Most of the island's cities were destroyed. About half the knights were killed. On the 18th of August, with the garrison's numbers dwindling daily, de Valette's council urged abandonment of Birgu and Senglea and retreat to Fort St. Angelo. De Valette refused. The Viceroy of Sicily delayed sending relief; his orders from Philip II of Spain were, by the source's description, obscurely worded. He had left his own son with de Valette, yet he hesitated until his own officers forced his hand. On the 23rd of August came the last major assault, repelled with great difficulty, the wounded fighting alongside the fit. The death on the 23rd of June of the Ottoman corsair and admiral Dragut had already proved a serious blow to the besiegers. By the 1st of September, Ottoman morale had collapsed. On the 8th of September, having heard of Sicilian reinforcements arriving in Mellieha Bay and unaware how small the force was, the Ottomans broke off the siege and withdrew. Of the roughly 40,000 Ottoman soldiers who had landed, around 15,000 eventually returned to Constantinople. The capital city built afterward, named Valletta in honor of the Grand Master who held the line, was designed by the military engineer Francesco Laparelli and completed in 1571.

• 6. Decline and Dissolution

  ›

  Valletta flourished: by 1577 its Conventual Church of St. John was complete, housing works by Caravaggio. The Sacra Infermeria accommodated 500 patients and was ranked among the finest hospitals in Europe. A Public Library opened in 1761, a University followed in 1768, and a School of Mathematics and Nautical Sciences was added in 1786. But the Order's moral standing was eroding even as its buildings rose. Cut off from the crusading purpose that had defined it, the knights turned to policing the Mediterranean through a campaign called the Corso, targeting the Barbary pirates and seizing ships suspected of carrying Turkish goods. A judicial court, the Consiglio del Mer, was established in Valletta to handle complaints from captains who felt wrongfully stopped. Around 1700, the court was receiving numerous grievances about Maltese piracy. Knights enrolled in the French Navy and others for pay and adventure, serving powers that were sometimes at peace with the Ottomans. A letter sent in February 1641 from an unknown dignitary in Valletta to Louis XIV of France described the Order's financial straits, noting that England, the Netherlands, Bohemia, and Germany were providing almost nothing. The French Revolution dealt the organization a near-fatal blow. The decree of the French National Assembly in 1789 formally abolished the Order in France. In 1792, the Revolutionary Government seized its French assets and properties. Then in June 1798, Napoleon invaded Malta. He arrived off the island on the 9th of June and demanded that Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim allow his fleet to enter port. The Grand Master replied that only two foreign ships at a time could enter. Napoleon ordered an invasion. French troops disembarked on the 10th of June, attacked at seven points on the morning of the 11th, and Hompesch negotiated surrender on the 12th of June. He left for Trieste on the 18th of June and resigned as Grand Master on the 6th of July 1799. Russian Emperor Paul I gave refuge to the dispersed knights in Saint Petersburg. The knights elected Paul as Grand Master, though this was never ratified under Roman Catholic canon law. A Russian Grand Priory of no fewer than 118 Commanderies was created, dwarfing the rest of the Order. By the early 19th century, 90% of the Order's income came from the Russian Grand Priory. With priories lost across Europe, the Order was governed by Lieutenants rather than Grand Masters from 1805 until 1879, when Pope Leo XIII restored the Grand Mastership.

• 7. Successors and Legacy

  ›

  Five organizations today continue the traditions of the Knights Hospitaller, and all five have formally recognized each other. The most senior is the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, based in Rome, which traces its Grand Masters directly back to the original Order. It maintains diplomatic relations with 112 countries, official relations with 6 others, and holds permanent observer status at the United Nations. It issues its own passports, currency, stamps, and vehicle registration plates. Its 13,500 members, 95,000 volunteers, and over 52,000 medical personnel operate in 120 countries, caring for the poor, sick, elderly, disabled, and homeless. In 2001, the Order signed an agreement with the Maltese government granting it exclusive use of Fort St. Angelo for 99 years. The Protestant branch of the tradition runs through the Bailiwick of Brandenburg, which became Lutheran in 1577. It continued paying financial contributions to the main Order until 1812, when the Protector of the Order in Prussia, King Frederick William III, converted it into an order of merit. His son, King Frederick William IV, restored it to its place as the chief non-Roman Catholic branch of the Hospitallers in 1852. The Alliance of the Orders of Saint John of Jerusalem, which formalizes cooperation among the German, Dutch, and Swedish Protestant orders, was founded in 1961. In England, the Most Venerable Order of Saint John was recreated by European aristocrats in 1831, received a royal charter from Queen Victoria in 1888, and expanded across the British Empire and the United States. Its most visible activities today are the St John Ambulance Brigade and the Saint John Eye Hospital in Jerusalem. The original Hospital of Saint John, built between 1099 and 1291, was rediscovered in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. Excavations by the Israel Antiquities Authority between 2000 and 2013 revealed that it had been able to accommodate up to 2,000 patients from all religious backgrounds, with Jewish patients receiving kosher food.