The Military Orders Volume III

History and Heritage

Victor Mallia-Milanes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351542524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the last twenty years there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in the Military Orders. With a history stretching from the early twelfth century to the present day, they were among the richest and most powerful orders of the church in medieval Europe. They founded their own states in Prussia and on the Mediterranean islands of Rhodes and Malta. They are of concern to historians of the Church, art and architecture, government, agriculture, estate management, banking, medicine and warfare, and of the expansion of Europe overseas. The conferences on their history, which have been organized in London every four years, have attracted leading scholars from all over the world. The present volume records the proceedings of the Third Conference in 2000 and is essential reading for those interested in the progress of research on these extraordinary institutions. Of the thirty papers published in this collection, two deal with the orders in general, while eighteen concentrate on the Hospital of St John, six on the Temple, and three on the Teutonic Order, together with another on the Order of the Sword Brothers which it absorbed. The preponderance of works on the Hospitallers is perhaps a particular characteristic of this volume, but the fact that most of the papers relate to provincial life, rather than to the headquarters in the east, Prussia, or Malta, accurately reflects modern concerns, as do the contributions on historiography, the papacy, cultural history, and religious life. Examples of new research interests are the paper on bioarchaeology and the two on liturgy.

PART I

Historiography

Chapter 1

Hospitaller Historiography: Heritages and Heresies

Anthony T. Luttrell

The so-called heritage movement encourages and often exploits a wide public interest in the past, in its monuments, and in other survivals. Some heritage enterprises are merely businesses which are inspired by tourist statistics while operating heritage centres through audio-visual aids, guide tapes, and so forth; even for respectable bodies, concern for conservation sometimes amounts to little more than a face-saving exercise in damage limitation. The disadvantages involved have been debated extensively.¹ Much tourism-conditioned activity is evidently irreversible, but the dangers and deficiencies could perhaps be reduced. Ludicrous mythologies have perverted the history of the Templars, and the heritage of other military-religious orders has been distorted in many, sometimes gruesome, ways.² However, the various branches of the Hospital of Saint John enjoy a special position in that they are still active, useful charitable institutions as well as possessing a military-religious past which forms an essential component of their present heritage.

Unscientific history has no validity, and the importance of the religious and medical concerns of the Hospital’s modern branches cannot justify any falsification of their own past. Yet existing welfare states face increasing difficulties in caring directly for the sick, for the elderly, and for others, so that in consequence society evidently needs to mobilize alternative machinery to provide effective non-state welfare care; good examples are the St John’s Ambulance Brigade in Britain and the Malteser Hilfdienst and the Johanniter in Germany. Such bodies are well aware that they can attract funds and volunteers through the glamour of their past and on the strength of their traditions: ‘The peculiar achievement of the Knights of Malta is the conjuring trick by which they turn titles and ceremonies into hospitals, ambulances, medical supplies, transport of goods for the needy, and services of all kinds – a conjuring trick the more singular because its ingredients are fantasy and its product substance.’³ The risk is that well-intentioned attempts to foster public relations may somehow distort Hospitaller historiography.

Arguably the strictest regard for accuracy must in the long term be the most effective media weapon. The Hospital’s material heritage cannot be claimed exclusively by any single body. What now survives is dispersed in differing ways between the Order of Malta, other Orders of Saint John, national States with their commissions for the classification and protection of monuments, various official bodies administering Hospitaller sites, and private persons owning, for example, a former commandery that has been converted into a hotel. Action may originate outside the orders, as in the case of the Council of Europe, which in 1970 produced a major exhibition on the Hospital with an excellent catalogue and an important bibliography,⁴ or from the orders themselves, as for example when the Protestant Johanniter-Orden and the Catholic Malteser-Orden collaborated in an extensive collective volume on the Hospital in Germany.⁵ No single institution can be wholly responsible for promoting the Hospital’s history or for opposing self-styled ‘unrecognized’ orders, though the five legitimate orders have a False Orders Committee which meets regularly.⁶ Many monuments once belonging to the Hospital actually lie outside the Christian world. Thus there was a threat in 2000 that the Hospitallers’ former German church in Jerusalem would be handed over to an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group.⁷ The astonishing excavations of the great Hospitaller palace at Acre in Israel are financed, and its restoration to some extent constrained, by a tourist development company, and in such a case the archaeologists’ natural desire publicly to display the results of their investigations may be frustrated by economic and political considerations.⁸ There are rumours about the future utilization of the Hospital’s fortified commandery at Kolossi on Cyprus, while its great castle at Bodrum in Turkey, which has been adapted for various museums and is overrun by tourists, faces a degree of degradation.

On Rhodes, where the tourist influx and the profits from it are immense, the problem is extreme. After 1912 the Italians extensively restored the medieval town and fortifications; they invented an Italian auberge and rebuilt the Master’s palace in horrendous Fascist taste. Their motives were largely colonial, that is political.⁹ After 1947 the newly-installed Greek authorities sought at first to emphasize the Byzantine aspects of the Rhodian heritage, but the pressures of Western tourism led the Greek archaeological service to make extraordinary efforts to preserve the Hospitallers’ Latin town, so that much has been excavated or restored and a fine new museum is now open there.¹⁰ On Malta there is much to be saved. The problem of whether parts of the heritage, such as the former conventual church or Caravaggio’s masterpiece, belong morally to the Order or to the Maltese people can still arouse debate, especially as some Maltese regard the Hospital’s presence as that of a former occupying power.

Governments have profited from mass tourism while investing minimally in the heritage. Recently, however, the Order of Malta has itself leased its old conventual headquarters in Fort Saint Angelo and partially restored it, though not without provoking discussion, while there is now an official Valletta Rehabilitation Project. Furthermore, the heritage and archaeological establishment on Malta has recently been restructured, improving prospects for future conservation.¹¹

Similar dilemmas arise in Western Europe, where commanderies and churches are sometimes destroyed or clumsily restored, but where many associations and historical societies devoted to the Hospitallers’ contemporary activities seek to defend and conserve their monuments, sometimes putting them to modern use and attracting tourists or creating museums. The priory buildings, museum, and library at Clerkenwell and the great medieval barns at Temple Cressing are obvious English examples of excellent heritage management. There is a renewed museum at the Swiss commandery of Bubikon;¹² an English archaeologist has purchased, restored, excavated, and published the Aragonese commandery at Ambel;¹³ the frescoes in the church of San Bevignate in Perugia¹⁴ and the commandery buildings at Poggibonsi¹⁵ have been protected and published; the ancient house and church at Asti have been excavated and studied;¹⁶ a volunteer group has restored the French commandery at Coulommiers;¹⁷ and there are many other examples of such salvage operations. Scientific investigation and publication can in fact be an effective way of safeguarding a monument.

The rural landscape itself may sometimes be considered as part of the heritage. An entire region can be approached through its Hospitaller buildings and art,¹⁸ and it may be possible to reconstitute the past of an abandoned commandery and its estates by supplementing written texts with topographical surveys, place-name information, aerial photographs, early-modern estate books, and so forth.¹⁹ The outstanding study of the Hospital’s impact on the development of the countryside is undoubtedly the one made in Normandy,²⁰ and elsewhere there are good arguments for the complete investigation of the settlement, economy, and exploitation of an area once controlled by a military order using sophisticated archaeological techniques; this possibility is especially attractive in Spain, where castles, irrigation systems, mills, and sheep tracks were important elements in the military orders’ activities.²¹ An ambitious approach to regional heritage is provided by the Centre Larzac Templier et Hospitalier, which works to protect three impressive fortified villages in Southern France which are under threat from a new motorway. It seeks to do so by developing and preserving them as a coordinated enterprise that is oriented towards an advantageous absorption of the mass tourist and is designed to improve the region’s economy; the aim is to mobilize support through educational events designed for the general public and by a programme of conservation and research.²² An initial colloquium held in the late-medieval commandery at Sainte-Eulalie de Larzac in 2000 contains many studies²³ and a monograph series is under way.²⁴

In addition to those seeking to raise support for charitable causes, other schemes plan to attract visitors or simply to profit financially from film-shows and walk-around presentations with videos, sounds, and smells. A plethora of such tourist attractions has developed on Malta. There is a ‘Malta Experience’ in the Hospitallers’ great infirmary in Valletta and a ‘Great Siege of Malta and Knights of St. John’ experience which is actually located beneath the Order’s archives; the latter is primarily devoted not to Malta but to the history of the Hospital from its origins until the present day. Much more scientific, and with genuine objects accurately labelled, is the new museum in the Master’s palace at Rhodes. Some initiatives come from the orders themselves, as for example through certain television programmes shown in Germany or by means of the comic-strip history of the Hospital produced by the Oeuvres Hospitalières françaises de l’Ordre de Malte; the latter contains some rather bizarre and inaccurate items, but its overall presentation of developments is not unreasonable.²⁵ Various branches of the Hospital do not always resist the temptation to manipulate the past and to make propaganda through unjustifiable claims. Thus several branches chose, somewhat controversially, to celebrate the ninth centenary of the original ‘foundation’ of the Hospital in 1999, nine centuries after the Latin conquest of Jerusalem.

Hospitaller history can undoubtedly be publicized in ways that are both accurate and attractive, despite the possibility of over-simplifications or even of errors on the part of those who present it. It seems essential to combat fundamental heresies: Hospitallers were not Templars, they were religious but not monks, they were not technically crusaders nor, in many cases, were they nobles or knights; some were priests and others women. Popular misunderstandings of such matters can be extensive, and confusions concerning the Templars are a special obstacle to a correct presentation of Hospitaller history. The extremely productive excavations at Clerkenwell raise different, more complex proble...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Historiography
• Part II: Liturgy and Fiction, Heraldry and Piety
• Part III: Templars, Teutonic Knights, and Other Military Orders
• Part IV: Hospitallers
• Select Bibliography
• Index