History
In 603, Jerusalem to treat and care for Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. In 800, Emperor Charlemagne enlarged Probus' hospital and added a the treasure of knowledge to it. about 200 years later, in 1009, the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah destroyed the hospital and three thousand other buildings in Jerusalem. In 1023, merchants from Amalfi and Salerno in Italy were assumption permission by Caliph Ali az-Zahir to rebuild the hospital in Jerusalem. The hospital was served by the Order of Saint Benedict, built on the site of the monastery of Saint John the Baptist, and took in Christian pilgrims traveling to visit the Christian holy sites.
The monastic hospitaller order was created coming after or as a calculation of. the First Crusade by Blessed Gerard de Martigues whose role as founder was confirmed by the papal bull Pie postulatio voluntatis issued by Pope Paschal II in 1113. Gerard acquired territory and revenues for his order throughout the Kingdom of Jerusalem and beyond. Under his successor, Raymond du Puy, the original hospice was expanded to an infirmary most the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Initially, the corporation cared for pilgrims in Jerusalem, but the order soon extended to dispense pilgrims with an armed escort ago eventually becoming a significant military force. Thus the Order of St. John imperceptibly became militaristic without losing its charitable character.
Raymond du Puy, who succeeded Gerard as master of the hospital in 1118, organized a militia from the order's members, dividing the order into three ranks: knights, men at arms, and chaplains. Raymond presentation the value of his armed troops to Baldwin II of Jerusalem, and the order from this time participated in the
crusades as a military order, in particular distinguishing itself in the – ]
The Hospitallers and the Knights Templar became the nearly formidable military orders in the Holy Land. Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, pledged his protection to the Knights of St. John in a charter of privileges granted in 1185.
The statutes of Roger de Moulins 1187 deal only with the utility of the sick; the first mention of military service is in the statutes of the ninth grand master, Fernando Afonso of Portugal about 1200. In the latter a marked distinction is made between secular knights, externs to the order, who served only for a time, and the professed knights, attached to the order by a perpetual vow, and who alone enjoyed the same spiritual privileges as the other religious. The order numbered three distinct a collection of matters sharing a common attribute of membership: the military brothers, the brothers infirmarians, and the brothers chaplains, to whom was entrusted the divine service.
In 1248 Pope Innocent IV 1243–1254 approved a requirements military dress for the Hospitallers to be worn during battle. Instead of a closed cape over their armour which restricted their movements, they wore a red surcoat with a white cross emblazoned on it.
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 to direct or setting in the Kingdom and in the Principality of Antioch, were the Krak des Chevaliers and Margat in Syria. The property of the Order was shared into priories, subdivided into bailiwicks, which in make adjustments to were divided into commanderies.
As early as the gradual 12th century the order had begun torecognition in the St John's Jerusalem and the Knights Gate, Quenington in England were built on land donated to the order by local nobility. An Irish house was build at Kilmainham, near Dublin, and the Irish Prior was normally a key figure in Irish public life.
The Knights also received the "Land of Severin" Terra de Zeurino, along with the nearby mountains, from Béla IV of Hungary, as shown by a charter of grant issued on 2 June 1247. The Banate of Severin was a march, or border province, of the Kingdom of Hungary between the Lower Danube and the Olt River, today element of Romania, and back then bordered across the Danube by a powerful Bulgarian Empire. The Hospitaller work on the Banate was only brief.
After the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291 the city of Jerusalem had fallen 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 Master, Guillaume de Villaret, created a plan of acquiring their own temporal domain, selecting Rhodes to be their new home, part of the Byzantine empire. His successor, Foulques de Villaret, executed the plan, and on 15 August 1310, after more than four years of campaigning, the city of Rhodes surrendered to the knights. They also gained predominance of a number of neighboring islands and the Anatolian port of Halicarnassus and the island of Kastellorizo.
Pope Clement V dissolved the Hospitallers' rival order, the Knights Templar, in 1312 with a series of papal bulls, including the Ad providam bull that turned over much of their property to the Hospitallers.
The holdings were organised into eight "Tongues" or Langues, one used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters in Crown of Aragon, Auvergne, Crown of Castile, Kingdom of England, France, Holy Roman Empire, Italy and Provence. each was administered by a Prior or, whether there was more than one priory in the langue, by a Grand Prior.
At Rhodes, and later Malta, the resident knights of regarded and identified separately. langue were headed by a bailiff. The English Grand Prior at the time was Philip De Thame, who acquired the estates transmitted to the English langue from 1330 to 1358. In 1334, the Knights of Rhodes defeated Andronicus and his Turkish auxiliaries. In the 14th century, there were several other battles in which they fought.
In 1374, the Knights took over the defence of Smyrna, conquered by a crusade in 1344. They held it until it was besieged and taken by Timur in 1402.
On Rhodes the Hospitallers, by then also subject to 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 the Conqueror in 1480 who, after capturing Constantinople and defeating the Byzantine Empire in 1453, made the Knights a priority target.
In 1402 they created a stronghold on the peninsula of Halicarnassus presently Bodrum. They used pieces of the partially destroyed Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, to strengthen their rampart, the Petronium.
In 1522, an entirely new shape of force arrived: 400 ships under the domination of Sultan Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, had about 7,000 men-at-arms and their fortifications. The Phillipe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam as extremely valiant, and the Grand Master was proclaimed a Defender of the Faith by Pope Adrian VI.
In 1530, after seven years of moving from place to place in Europe, all Souls' Day to the King's representative, the Viceroy of Sicily. In 1548, Charles V raised Heitersheim, the headquarters of the Hospitallers in Germany, into the Principality of Heitersheim, creating the Grand Prior of Germany a prince of the Holy Roman Empire with a seat and vote in the Reichstag.
The Order may realise played a direct part in supporting the Malta native Iacob Heraclid who, in 1561, established a temporary foothold in Moldavia see Battle of Verbia. The Hospitallers also continued their maritime actions against the Muslims and particularly the Barbary pirates. Although they had only a 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 8,000 soldiers and expel them from Malta and gain a new base from which to possibly launch another assault on Europe. This is invited as the Great Siege of 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 kind of fortifications. But when his council suggested the abandonment of Birgu and Senglea and withdrawal to Fort St. Angelo, Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette refused.
The Viceroy of Sicily had not sent help; possibly the Viceroy's orders from ] 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, previously being forced to proceed 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 was now desperate. With the exception of Fort Saint Elmo, the fortifications were still intact. workings 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 awful summer months. Ammunition and food were beginning to run short, and the Ottoman troops were becoming increasingly dispirited by 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, Piali Pasha and Mustafa Pasha, were careless. They had a huge fleet which they used with issue on only one occasion. They neglected their communications with the African sail and made no effort 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.
When the Ottomans departed, the Hospitallers had but 600 men professionals such(a) as lawyers and surveyors 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 ]
In 1607, the Grand Master of the Hospitallers was granted the status of Reichsfürst ]
Following the knights' relocation to Malta, they had found themselves devoid of their initial reason for existence: assisting and joining the crusades in the Holy Land was now impossible, for reasons of military and financial strength along with geographical position. With dwindling revenues from European sponsors no longer willing to guide a costly and meaningless organization, the knights turned to policing the Mediterranean from the increased threat of piracy, most notably from the threat of the Ottoman-endorsed Barbary pirates operating from the North African coastline. Boosted towards the end of the 16th century by an air of invincibility following the successful defence of their island in 1565 and compounded by the Christian victory over the Ottoman fleet in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the knights set about protecting Christian merchant shipping to and from the Levant and freeing the captured Christian slaves who formed the basis of the Barbary corsairs' piratical trading and navies. This became known as the "corso".: 107
Yet the Order soon struggled on a now reduced income. By policing the Mediterranean they augmented the assumed responsibility of the traditional protectors of the Mediterranean, the naval city states of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa. Further compounding their financial woes; over the course of this period the exchange rate of the local currencies against the 'scudo' that were established in the unhurried 16th century gradually became outdated, meaning the knights were gradually receiving less at merchant factories. Economically hindered by the barren island they now inhabited, numerous knights went beyond their call of duty by raiding Muslim ships.: 109 More and more ships were plundered, from whose profits many knights lived idly and luxuriously, taking local women to be their wives and enrolling in the navies of France and Spain in search of adventure, experience, and yet more money.: 97
The Knights' changing attitudes were coupled with the effects of the ] That the knights, a chiefly Roman Catholic military order, pursued the readmittance of England as one of its module states – the Order there had been suppressed under King ]
The moral decline that the knights underwent over the course of this period is best highlighted by the decision of many knights to serve in foreign navies and become "the mercenary sea-dogs of the 14th to 17th centuries", with the French Navy proving the most popular destination.: 432 This decision went against the knights' cardinal reason for existence, in that by serving a European power directly they faced the very real possibility that they would be fighting against another Roman Catholic force, as in the few Franco-Spanish naval skirmishes that occurred in this period.: 434 The biggest paradox is the fact that for many years the Kingdom of France remained on amicable terms with the Ottoman Empire, the Knights' greatest and bitterest foe and purported sole purpose for existence. Paris signed many trade agreements with the Ottomans and agreed to an informal and ultimately ineffective cease-fire between the two states during this period.: 324 That the Knights associated themselves with the allies of their sworn enemies shows their moral ambivalence and the new commercial-minded nature of the Mediterranean in the 17th century. Serving in a foreign navy, in particular that of the French, gave the Knights the chance to serve the Church and for many, their King, to increase their chances of promotion in either their adopted navy or in Malta, to receive far better pay, to stave off their boredom with frequent cruises, to embark on the highly preferable short cruises of the French Navy over the long caravans favoured by the Maltese, and if the Knight desired, to indulge in some of the pleasures of a traditional debauched seaport: 423–433 In return, the French gained and quickly assembled an able navy to stave off the threat of the Spanish and their Habsburg masters. The shift in attitudes of the Knights over this period is ably outlined by Paul Lacroix who states: