The Knights Hospitaller (also known as the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta,
Knights of Malta, Knights of Rhodes, and Chevaliers of Malta; French: Ordre des Hospitaliers) is a Christian
organization that began as an Amalfitan hospital founded in
Jerusalem in 1080 to provide care for poor and sick pilgrims to the Holy Land. After the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in
1099 during the First Crusade it became a religious/military order under its own charter, and was charged
with the care and defense of the Holy Land. Following the loss of the Holy Land by Christian
forces, the Order operated from Rhodes, over which it was sovereign, and later from Malta where it administered a vassal state under the Spanish viceroy of Sicily.
When Napoleon captured Malta in 1798 the Knights ceased to be associated with
any one place, but gave rise to successors in existence until the present.
History
Foundation and early history
In 600, Abbot Probus was commissioned by Pope Gregory the Great to build a hospital in Jerusalem to
treat and care for Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. In 800, Charlemagne, Emperor of the
Holy Roman Empire, enlarged Probus' hospital and added a library to it. About 200
years later, in 1005, Caliph Al Hakim destroyed
the hospital and three thousand other buildings. In 1023, merchants from Amalfi and
Salerno in Italy were given permission by the Caliph
Ali az-Zahir of Egypt to rebuild the hospital in
Jerusalem. The hospital, which was built on the site of the monastery of Saint
John the Baptist, took in Christian pilgrims traveling to visit the Christian holy
sites. It was served by Benedictine Brothers.
The monastic hospitaller order was founded following the First Crusade by the
Blessed Gerard, whose role as founder was confirmed by a Papal
bull of Pope Paschal II in 1113. Gerard acquired territory and revenues for his
order throughout the Kingdom of Jerusalem and beyond. His successor,
Raymond du Puy de Provence, established the first significant Hospitaller
infirmary near the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Initially the group cared for pilgrims in Jerusalem, but the order soon extended to providing
pilgrims with an armed escort, which soon grew into a substantial force.
The Hospitallers and the Knights Templar, formed in 1119, became the most powerful
Christian groups in the area. The order came to distinguish itself in battles with the Muslims,
its soldiers wearing a black surcoat with a white cross.
By the mid-12th century the order was clearly divided into military brothers and those who worked with the sick. It was still
a religious order and had privileges granted by the Papacy; for example, the order was exempt from
all authority save that of the Pope, and it paid no tithes and was allowed its own religious buildings. Many of the more
substantial Christian fortifications in the Holy Land were built by the Templars and the Hospitallers. At the height of the
Kingdom of Jerusalem the Hospitallers held seven great forts and 140 other estates
in the area. The two largest of these, their bases of power in the Kingdom and in the Principality of Antioch, were the Krak des
Chevaliers and Margat. The property of the Order was divided into priories, subdivided into bailiwicks, which in turn were divided into
commanderies. Frederick
Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, pledged his protection to the Knights of
St. John in a charter of privileges granted in 1185.
Grand Master and senior knights Hospitaller in the 14th
century
Knights of Cyprus and Rhodes
The rising power of Islam eventually expelled the Knights from Jerusalem. After the fall
of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Jerusalem itself fell in 1187), the Knights were confined to the County of Tripoli, and when Acre was captured in 1291 the order
sought refuge in the Kingdom of Cyprus. Finding themselves becoming enmeshed in
Cypriot politics, their Grand Master Guillaume de Villaret created a plan of acquiring their own temporal domain, selecting
Rhodes to be their new home. His successor Fulkes de
Villaret executed the plan, and on 15 August 1309, after
over two years of campaigning, the island of Rhodes surrendered to the knights. They also gained
control of a number of neighboring islands and the Anatolian ports of Bodrum and Kastelorizo.
The Knights castle at Rhodes.
The Knights Templar were dissolved in 1312 and much of their property was given to
the Hospitallers. The holdings were organized into eight tongues
(one each in Aragon, Auvergne, Castile, England, France,
Germany, Italy, and Provence).
Each was administered by a Prior or, if there was more than one priory in the tongue, by a
Grand Prior. At Rhodes and later Malta, the resident knights of each tongue were headed by a Bailli. The English Grand Prior at the time was Philip
Thame, who acquired the estates allocated to the English tongue from 1330 to 1358.
Rhodes and other possessions of the Knights Hospitaller of St. John.
On Rhodes the Hospitallers, now known as the Knights of Rhodes, were forced to become a more militarized force,
fighting especially with the Barbary pirates. They withstood two invasions in the 15th
century, one by the Sultan of Egypt in 1444 and another by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1480 who, after capturing Constantinople, made the Knights a priority target.
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In 1494 they created a stronghold on the peninsula of Halicarnassus (now Bodrum). They used
pieces of the partially destroyed Mausoleum of Maussollos, one of the Seven
Wonders of the Ancient World, to strengthen Bodrum Castle.[1]
In 1522 an entirely new sort of force arrived: 400 ships under the command of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent delivered 200,000 men to the island. Against this force the Knights,
under Grand Master Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, had about 7,000
men-at-arms and their fortifications. The siege lasted six months, at the end of
which the surviving defeated Hospitallers were allowed to withdraw to Sicily.
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Knights of Malta
Armoiries of the Knights Hospitaller, intermixed with those of
Pierre d'Aubusson, on a
bombard ordered by the latter. The top inscription further reads: "F. PETRUS DAUBUSSON
M HOSPITALIS IHER".
After seven years of moving from place to place in Europe the Knights became established in 1530 when the Holy Roman Emperor,
King Charles V of Spain, as King of Sicily,
gave them Malta, Gozo and the North African port of Tripoli in perpetual fiefdom in exchange for an annual fee of a single Maltese falcon, which they were to send
on All Souls Day to the King's representative, the Viceroy of Sicily. (This historical
fact was used as the plot hook in Dashiell
Hammett's famous book The Maltese Falcon.)
The Hospitallers continued their actions against the Muslims and especially the Barbary
pirates. Although they had only few ships they quickly drew the ire of the Ottomans, who were unhappy to see the order resettled. In 1565 Suleiman sent an invasion force of about
40,000 men to besiege the 700 knights and 8000 soldiers and expel them from Malta.
At first the battle went as badly for the Hospitallers as Rhodes had: most of the cities were destroyed and about half the
knights killed. On 18 August the position of the besieged was becoming desperate: dwindling
daily in numbers, they were becoming too feeble to hold the long line of fortifications. But when his council suggested the
abandonment of Il Borgo and Senglea and withdrawal to
Fort St. Angelo, Grand Master
Jean Parisot de la Valette refused.
The Viceroy of Sicily had not sent help; possibly the Viceroy's orders from Philip II of
Spain were so obscurely worded as to put on his own shoulders the burden of the decision whether to help the Knights at
the expense of his own defences[citation needed]. A wrong decision could mean defeat and exposing Sicily and Naples to the
Ottomans. He had left his own son with La Valette, so he could hardly be indifferent to the fate of the fortress. Whatever may
have been the cause of his delay, the Viceroy hesitated until the battle had almost been decided by the unaided efforts of the
Knights, before being forced to move by the indignation of his own officers.
On 23 August came yet another grand assault, the last serious effort, as it proved, of the
besiegers. It was thrown back with the greatest difficulty, even the wounded taking part in the defence. The plight of the
Turkish forces, however, was now desperate. With the exception of Fort St. Elmo, the
fortifications were still intact. Working night and day the garrison had repaired the breaches, and the capture of Malta seemed
more and more impossible. Many of the Ottoman troops in crowded quarters had fallen ill over the terrible summer months.
Ammunition and food were beginning to run short, and the Ottoman troops were becoming increasingly dispirited at the failure of
their attacks and their losses. The death on 23 June of skilled commander Dragut, a corsair
and admiral of the Ottoman fleet, was a serious blow. The Turkish commanders, Piyale Pasha
and Mustafa Pasha, were careless. They had a huge fleet which they used with
effect on only one occasion. They neglected their communications with the African coast and made no attempt to watch and
intercept Sicilian reinforcements.
On 1 September they made their last effort, but the morale of the Ottoman troops had
deteriorated seriously and the attack was feeble, to the great encouragement of the besieged, who now began to see hopes of
deliverance. The perplexed and indecisive Ottomans heard of the arrival of Sicilian reinforcements in Mellieħa Bay. Unaware that
the force was very small, they broke off the siege and left on 8 September. The
Great Siege of Malta may have been the last action in which a force of knights won
a decisive victory.[1]
When the Ottomans departed the Hospitallers had 600 men able to bear arms. The most reliable estimate puts the number of the
Ottoman army at its height at some 40,000 men, of whom 15,000 eventually returned to Constantinople. The siege is portrayed
vividly in the frescoes of Matteo Perez d'Aleccio in the Hall of St. Michael and St. George, also known as the Throne Room, in the Grand Master's Palace in
Valletta. Four of the original modellos, painted in oils by
Perez d'Aleccio between 1576 and 1581, can be found in the Cube Room of the
Queen's House at Greenwich, London. After the siege a
new city had to be built – the present city named Valletta in memory of the Grand Master who
had withstood the siege.
In 1607 the Grand Master of the Hospitallers was granted the status of Reichsfürst (Prince of
the Holy Roman Empire, even though the Order's territory was always south of the Holy
Roman Empire). In 1630 the Grand Master was awarded ecclesiastic equality with cardinals, and the unique hybrid style His Most Eminent Highness, reflecting both
qualities qualifying him as a true Prince of the Church.
Following the Christian victory over the Ottoman fleet in the Battle of Lepanto in
1571, the Knights continued to attack pirates and Muslim shipping, and their base became a centre for slave trading well into the
18th century, selling captured Africans and Turks and
freeing Christian slaves. A thousand slaves were needed to equip and man each of the Order's galleys[citation needed].
Turmoil in Europe
The Order lost many of its European holdings following the rise of Protestantism, but
survived on Malta. The property of the English branch was confiscated in 1540. In 1577, the
German Bailiwick of Brandenburg became Lutheran, but
continued to pay its financial contribution to the Order until the branch was turned into a merit Order by the King of Prussia in 1812. The "Johanniter Orden" was restored as a Prussian Order of Knights Hospitaller in 1852.
Baron Vassiliev, a 19th-century Knight Commander
The Knights of Malta had a strong presence within the Imperial Russian Navy and
the pre-revolutionary French Navy. When
De Poincy was appointed governor of the French colony on
St. Kitts in 1639 he was a prominent Knight of St. John and dressed his retinue with the
emblems of the order. The Order's presence in the Caribbean was eclipsed with his death in
1660. He also bought the island of Saint Croix as his personal estate
and deeded it to the Knights of St. John. In 1665, St. Croix was bought by the French
West India Company, ending the Order's presence in the Caribbean.
In 1789 France erupted in revolution and anti-clerical and anti-aristocratic furor, forcing many French knights and nobles to flee for their
lives. Many of the Order's traditional sources of revenue from France were lost permanently.
The decree of the French National Assembly Abolishing the Feudal System (1789) abolished the Order in France: V. Tithes of
every description, as well as the dues which have been substituted for them, under whatever denomination they are known or
collected (even when compounded for), possessed by secular or regular congregations, by holders of benefices, members of
corporations (including the Order of Malta and other religious and military orders), as well as those devoted to the maintenance
of churches, those impropriated to lay persons and those substituted for the portion congrue, are abolished (...) (The Decree
Abolishing the Feudal System, August 11, 1789, J.H. Robinson, ed., Readings in European History 2 vols. (Boston: Ginn, 1906), 2:
404-409) The French Revolutionary Government seized the assets and properties of the Order in France in 1792.
The loss of Malta
Their Mediterranean stronghold of Malta was captured
by Napoleon in 1798 during his expedition to Egypt.
As a ruse, Napoleon asked for safe harbor to resupply his ships, and then turned against his hosts once safely inside Valletta.
Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim failed to anticipate or
prepare for this threat, provided no effective leadership, and readily capitulated to Napoleon, arguing that the order's charter
prohibited fighting against Christians. He resigned his office and retreated into obscurity. The order continued to exist in a
diminished form and negotiated with European governments for a return to power. The Tsar of Russia
gave the largest number of knights shelter in St. Petersburg and this gave rise to the
Russian tradition of the Knights Hospitaller and
recognition within the Russian Imperial Orders.
In 1798, following Napoleon's taking of Malta, the order was dispersed, but with a large number of refugee knights sheltering
in St Petersburg, where they elected the Russian Emperor, Paul I as their Grand Master
– a rival to Grand Master Ferdinand Hompesch, then held in disgrace. Hompesch abdicated in 1799, under pressure from the Austrian
Court, leaving Paul as the de facto Grand Master. As Grand Master Paul I created, in addition to the Roman Catholic Grand
Priory, a Russian tradition within the Hospitaller Order – the "Russian Grand Priory" of no less than 118 Commanderies dwarfing
the rest of the Order, and open to all Christians. Paul's election as Grand Master was never ratified under Roman Catholic Canon
law, and the Russian Priory was a de facto rather than a de
jure part of the Roman Catholic Order.
By the early 1800s, the order had been severely weakened by the loss of its priories throughout Europe. Only 10% of the
order's income came from traditional sources in Europe, with the remaining 90% being generated by the Russian Grand Priory until 1810. This was partly reflected in the
government of the Order being under Lieutenants, rather than Grand Masters in the period 1805 to 1879, when Pope Leo XIII restored a Grand Master to the order. This signalled the renewal of the order's fortunes as
a humanitarian and religious organization. Hospitaller work, the original work of the
order, became once again its main concern. The hospital and welfare activities, undertaken on a considerable scale in World War
I, were greatly intensified and expanded in World War II under the Grand Master Fra' Ludovico Chigi della Rovere Albani (Grand
Master 1931-1951).
Modern successors
Sovereign Military Order of Malta
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Flag of the Order of Malta
In 1834, the revived Order established a new headquarters in Rome. The Sovereign Military
Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, better known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), remains a Roman Catholic religious order which claims
sovereignty under international law and has been granted permanent observer status at the United
Nations, although its claims of sovereignty are disputed by a handful of scholars.
Revival in Britain as the Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem
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The property of the Order in England was confiscated by Henry VIII because of a dispute with the Pope over the dissolution of his marriage to
Catherine of Aragon, which eventually led to the dissolution of the monasteries. Although not formally suppressed, this caused the activities of the English Langue to come to an
end. A few Scottish Knights remained in communion with the French Langue of the Order. In 1831, a British Order was founded by Frenchmen
claiming to act on behalf of the Order in Italy, and eventually became known as the Most Venerable Order of St John of Jerusalem in the British Realm. It received a Royal
Charter from Queen Victoria in 1888 and spread
across the United Kingdom, the British
Commonwealth, and the United States of America. However, it was only recognized by
the Sovereign Military Order of Malta in 1963. Its most well-known activities are based around St. John Ambulance.
Protestant continuation in continental Europe
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Following the Protestant Reformation, most German chapters of the Order declared their continued adherence to the Order while accepting Protestant theology. As the Balley Brandenburg des Ritterlichen Ordens Sankt Johannis vom Spital zu
Jerusalem, the order continues today, gaining increasing independence from its
Catholic mother order. The Protestant branch spread into several other countries (i.e. Hungary,
the Netherlands, and Sweden). These sub-branches are now
autonomous as well.
This branch holds the official title Brandenburg Bailiwick of
the Knights' Order of the Hospital of St John in Jerusalem.
All four branches are in loose alliance with the British order in the Alliance
of Orders of St John of Jerusalem.
Mimic orders
Following the end of World War II, and taking advantage of the lack of State Orders in
the Italian Republic, an Italian called himself a Polish Prince
and did a brisk trade in Maltese Crosses as the Grand Prior of the fictitious "Grand
Priory of Podolia" until successfully prosecuted for fraud. Another fraud claimed to be the Grand Prior of the Holy Trinity of
Villeneuve, but gave up after a police visit, although the organisation resurfaced in Malta in 1975, and then by 1978 in the USA,
where it still continues.
The large passage fees collected by the American Association of "SMOM" in the early 1950s may well have tempted a man named
Charles Pichel to create his own "Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Knights Hospitaller"
in 1956. Pichel avoided the problems of being an imitation of "SMOM" by giving his organization a mythical history, claiming that
the American organization he led had been founded within the genuine Russian tradition of the Knights Hospitaller in 1908; a spurious claim, but
which nevertheless misled many including some academics. In truth, the foundation of his organisation had no connection to the
genuine Russian tradition of the Knights Hospitaller. Once created, the attraction of Russian Nobles into membership of Pichel’s
'Order' lent some plausibility to his claims.
These organizations have led to scores of other mimic, or self-styled, Orders. Two offshoots of the Pichel Order were
successful in allegedly gaining the patronage of the late King Peter II of Yugoslavia, and King Michael of
Romania. The former Order, based in California, gained a substantial following under leadership of the late Williams
Formhals, who for some years, and with the support of historical organisations such as The Augustan Society, claimed to be a
Polish prince of the Sangusko family.
See also
References
- Cohen, R. [1920] (2004-04-15). in Julie Barkley, Bill Hershey and PG Distributed
Proofreaders: Knights of Malta,
1523-1798. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved on 2006-05-29.
- Nicholson,, Helen J. (2001). The Knights
Hospitaller. ISBN 1-84383-038-8.
- Noonan, Jr., James-Charles (1996). The
Church Visible: The Ceremonial Life and Protocol of the Roman Catholic Church. Viking, p.196. ISBN
0-670-86745-4.
- Read, Piers Paul (1999). The Templars. Imago,
p.118. ISBN 85-312-0735-5.
- Some Notes About the Sovereign Military Order of Malta in the U.S.A. "Nobilta" (Rivista di Araldica, Genealogia, Ordini
Cavallereschi September/October 1999). Istituto Araldico Genealogico Italiano., Vol VII, No. 32. Reference by Carl Edwin Lindgren
relating only to the Order in the United States.
- Tyerman, Christopher (2006). God's War: A New
History of the Crusades. Allen Lane, p.253. ISBN 0-7139-9220-4.
- Peyrefitte, Roger. Knights of Malta. Translated from the French by Edward Hyams. Secker & Warburg, London, 1960, page
96.
External links
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