III.

The Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem

Members of the military religious order of the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem are most often referred to as Hospitalers. The Hospitalers were the oldest institution among the three great military orders of the Roman Church in Palestine, although they originally performed charitable rather than military functions. They were established before the First Crusade (1095-1099). In the 11th century the French nobleman Gerard founded an order to care for sick pilgrims near the Church of Saint John the Baptist in Jerusalem. In 1113 Pope Paschal II officially recognized the order, which limited membership to men of noble birth.

Members of the order wore a black cloak with an eight-pointed Maltese cross on it, and the order’s organization was similar to that of the Templars. The Hospitalers had a grand master who presided over a centralized organization of knights, chaplains, and servants.The Hospitalers followed the popular monastic Rule of Saint Augustine, named for the Roman bishop, Augustine of Hippo, who had inspired many of its practices. These regulations, like those that Bernard of Clairvaux wrote for the Templars, governed the order’s daily rituals of prayer, study, and work. The Rule of Saint Augustine was frequently adopted by monks in the 12th century.

Under the order’s second grand marshal, Raymond du Puy, it began to take on military duties in addition to its work at the Hospital of Saint John. By 1200 the Hospitalers’ charitable functions were playing a secondary role to their military duties. Successes in war defending the Holy Land enriched the order with vast gifts of property in Europe and Palestine. In the 12th century the Hospitalers acquired three impressive fortresses in Palestine at Krak des Chevaliers, Belvoir, and Margat. At the height of their power in the 13th century, the Hospitalers regularly supplied 500 knights to defend the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem against the Empire.

The Crusader states were finally defeated in 1291, and the Hospitalers fled to Cyprus before setting up their headquarters on the island of Rhodes in 1309. For more than two centuries the order inhabited that island as the Knights of Saint John of Rhodes. From their outpost on the island, they used their navy to prevent Muslim colonization in the Eastern Mediterranean. While at Rhodes, the order’s wealth continued to grow. Besides the many pious contributions made to support its military efforts, the order was further enriched in 1323 when it acquired some of the Templars’ wealth.

The Knights of Rhodes were the only Christian presence in the entire Eastern Mediterranean after 1453 when Constantinople, the last mainland Christian stronghold in the East, fell to the Ottoman Empire. They continued to hold Rhodes against frequent Muslim attacks until 1522, when they were finally defeated after a long siege. In 1530 Holy Roman Emperor Charles V gave the Knights the island of Malta to serve as their next military base. The order then became known as the Knights of Malta. The Knights’ formidable garrison on the island helped to prevent Muslim expansion into Europe, and it remained unconquered until 1798, when French emperor Napoleon I forced the island to surrender.

By that time the Knights had lost many of their other European possessions. As a Catholic order, the Knights had lost all of their English and most of their German lands to Protestant rulers in the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation (1517-1648). Their possessions in France were seized during the French Revolution (1789-1799). With the fall of Malta, the order moved its monastery to Trieste, Italy, and then to Rome in 1834.

In 1961 Pope John XXIII recognized the order as a religious community of the Roman Catholic Church and an order of chivalry. Today the order continues to manage hospitals and to care for refugees and casualties of war, duties it never completely abandoned, despite the importance of its military endeavors during medieval and early modern times.

The primary legacy of the Hospitalers was a military one. They provided a necessary defense against Muslim threats in the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe, threats that lasted long after Christian dominance in the Holy Land had ended.