hospice, while
support and donations were received in Syria and in the West,
especially from those who had themselves benefitted from the
Jerusalem hospital. For several years that organization was
not entirely independent but formed part of a broad Holy Sepulchre
movement which had inspired the crusade itself. This movement
had several branches: an ecclesiastical group formed by the
Canons of the Holy Sepulchre, a charitable element in the adjacent
hospital, and a military wing consisting in the 1110s of knights
owing obedience to the Prior of the Holy Sepulchre. These knights
apparently lived in the Hospital quarters until 1120 when they
moved to the Temple area and established themselves there as
a military order, the Templars (3).
In Syria the Hospital was accepted as a separate entity, but
the earliest donations in the West showed monies for the Holy
Sepulchre and the Hospital being collected jointly and men making
gifts which were often addressed ambiguously to God, to the
Holy Sepulchre, to Saint John, to the poor and sick in Jerusalem
or to some combination of these. Many Western Latins knew that
there was a hospital in Jerusalem but were slow to recognize
it as an independent institution.
In 1113 Girardus secured an important papal
privilege which recognized the Hospital's independence; its
members were considered to be in some sense technically religious
and they were given the power to elect their own ruler. This
document did not create an "order"; indeed orders
were not really defined before the thirteenth century. Nor did
the privilege grant a "sovereignty", since the Hospital
was always subject to the pope and even after 1113 it was still
to some extent subordinate to the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who
was in effect its bishop. The pope also confirmed the Hospitallers
in possession of their properties both in Asia and the West;
these were said to include a xenodochium or hospice at Saint
Gilles in Provence and six others in Italy, but it seems likely
that all or most of them did not exist or, if they did, that
they were not in Hospitaller hands in 1113. The Hospital may
have been attempting to secure various hospices which had been
founded for, and sometimes dedicated to, the Holy Sepulchre;
alternatively, certain xenodochia planned in 1113 had not yet
been founded (4).
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What in particular
was new about the Hospital was the idea of practical service
to the poor and sick for their sake rather than the performance
of charitable tasks as a means of securing the carers' own salvation
(5). For decades after 1113 the Hospital's
activity was centred on its hospital. Travellers' accounts were
full of admiration for its medical and charitable activities,
and returning pilgrims and crusaders made generous donations
to the Order. The doctors, medicines and diet in the hospital,
and its size and efficiency were regarded with astonishment
(6). In 1143 a separate German hospice
of Sancta Maria Alemannorum was subordinated to the Hospital
of Saint John by the pope with the proviso that it continue
to be managed by Germans and to serve them (7).
After the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 a central Conventual hospice
and hospital were established in Acre, and after the loss of
Acre in 1291, a Conventual hospital functioned at Limassol on
Cyprus (8).
Meanwhile the Hospital's nature changed profoundly. Priest-brethren
received papal sanction in 1154 and gradually it became a predominantly
military or military-religious order. The holy land was in great
need of military defence. From 1120 this function, and especially
the protection of travelling pilgrims, was the special task
of the Templars; that military force proved popular and the
Hospital may have felt the need to compete with it for recruits
and donations. There was nothing unusual in an ecclesiastical
corporation providing military service, but the notion of professed
religious being bound to warfare and the shedding of blood went
beyond the dilemma implicit in an armed crusade with religious
motives, and it provoked some controversy. The Hospital gradually
acquired castles and other military responsibilities, though
these did not at first involve its own professed brethren in
fighting (9). The Order's Rule, probably
datable to the 1130s, made no mention of fighting, of military
members or of noble requirements for membership (10),
and as late as 1178 the pope was reminding the Hospitallers
that their primary obligation lay in their charitable activities
(11). However the Hospital probably
had its own military brethren by about 1160 and in 1168 the
Master was leading Hospitaller troops in battle(12).
At some |
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[3] A. Luttrell,
"The Earliest Templars", in Autour de la Première
Croisade, ed. M. Balard (Paris, 1996).
[4] Luttrell (1997), 44-52. Historians of the Order
and of its priories have always accepted the existence of the seven
supposed xenodochia; this puzzling problem requires further research.
[5] G. Lagleder, Die Ordensregel de Johanniter/Malteser
(St. Ottilien, 1983), 76-78.
[6] A new text is in B. Kedar, "A Twelfth-Century
Description of the Jerusalem Hospital", in The Military Orders,
ii: Welfare and Warfare, ed. H. Nicholson (Aldershot, 1998); summary
in J. Riley-Smith, Hospitallers: the History of the Order of St.
John (London, 1999), 19-30. The archaeology of the Hospital quarter
in Jerusalem is frustrated by wholescale modern clearances which
have left only traces of the foundations.
[7] Excavated and restored since 1967 but not yet satisfactorily
published; for its history, M.-L. Favreau-Lilie, "Alle Origini
dell'Ordine Teutonico", in Militia Sacra, ed. E. Coli et al.
(Perugia, 1994).
[8] A. Luttrell, The Hospitaller State on Rhodes and
its Western Provinces: 1306-1642 (Aldershot, 1999), item X, 66-68.
Extensive and as yet unpublished excavations at Acre have yet to
establish precisely the site of the medical and pilgrim wards; nothing
is known of the Limassol hospital.
[9] The chronology of the militarization process is
still under debate; summary and hypotheses in Riley-Smith (1999),
30-37.
[10] The Rule referred to the three
religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and also to the
servitium pauperum: Cartulaire général de l'Ordre
des Hospitaliers de S. Jean de Jérusalem: 1100-1310, ed.
J. Delaville le Roux, 4 vols. (Paris, 1894-1906), i, no. 70 para.
1. The phrases obsequium pauperum et tuitionem fidei and ad augmentum
fidei et tuitionem christiani nominis atque pauperum obsequium were
apparently inserted in 1489 into what was purportedly the original
Rule: Guillaume Caoursin, Proemium in Volumen Stabilimentorum Rhodiorum
Militum Sacri Ordinis Hospitalis Sancti Johannis Hierosolymitani
(Ulm, 1496), f. 23, 25v-26. Sire, 212, attributes the addition of
the phrase Tuitio Fidei to the first Master Fr. Raymond.
[11] Cartulaire, i, no. 527.
[12] H. Nicholson, "Before William of Tyre: European
Reports on the Military Orders' Deeds in the East, 1150-1185",
in Military Orders, ii. 116.
12 Statutes of 1206 in Cartulaire, ii, no. 1193 (pp. 39-40), which
may, however, date somewhat earlier: cf. A. Luttrell, "The
Hospitallers' Early Written Records", in The Crusades and their
Sources: Essays Presented to Bernard Hamilton, ed. J. France - W.
Zajac (Aldershot, 1998), 150-151.
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