It seems unlikely that the Knights Hospitaller were entirely free of strange rituals similar to those practised by the Templars, yet the Hospitallers survived the destruction of the Templars and Indeed benefited from their demise by acquiring the greater part of their properties. Possibly they survived Philip IV’s avarice and ambition because their headquarters was on Rhodes, though this can hardly be the whole explanation as most of their property was In France. Certainly In 1312 Philip was already making menacing noises about ‘reforming’ the Hospitallers, and in that same year, as if to put the initiative back into Papal hands, Clement V announced his own inquiry and programme of reforms. But both Philip IV and Clement V died within a year of James of Molay, and it is this that may have saved the Knights Hospitaller.
But though no accusations of heresy, blasphemy or sodomy were made against the Hospitallers, their reputation was in some measure tarnished by the atmosphere of charges made against the Templars. Even Pope Clement VI, the namesake of that earlier Clement who had struggled to save the Templars, was writing sadly in 1343 that it was ‘the virtually unanimous and popular opinion of the clergy and laity” that the Hospitallers were doing nothing to advance the interests of Christendom or to promote its faith.
Nevertheless, the Hospitallers held on to Rhodes until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1522. They then retreated to Malta, where they withstood a five-month Ottoman siege in 1565, and six years later Hospitaller ships were part of that great Western armada which defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto off the coast of western Greece, the battle that finally put into permanent reverse the Muslim aggression that had begun when the Arabs first conquered the Holy Land nine hundred years before. But marooned on Malta, the order of the Knights Hospitaller became enfeebled; in 1792 the French National Assembly confiscated its estates, and in 1798 the Hospitallers offered no resistance when Napoleon came to Malta and after a one-day siege expelled them from the Island.
The Hospitallers were dispersed throughout Europe, though they reformed, with the Tsar as Grand Master, In Russia, while In the 1820s the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem was founded In the 1820s with the Intention of forming a mercenary army to liberate Greece from Ottoman rule. But this order soon took on an entirely pacific nature devoted to charitable works, as did offshoots and revivals In Britain (where Henry VIII had confiscated the property of the original order), Germany and Italy. The latter, the Sovereign Order of Malta, has Its headquarters In Rome and has observer status (as a quasl-sovereign state) at the UN. It has recently returned to Malta, whose government granted It a lease on the Fort Sant Angelo.
In Britain, the modern-day Hospitallers-the (largely Protestant) Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem-are best known for their service organisation, the Saint John’s Ambulance Brigade. This was established In 1887, though already In 1882 the order had established Its Saint John’s Eye Hospital In Jerusalem. The order remains active In Britain, the Commonwealth and the USA, and maintains Its headquarters at St John’s Gate In Clerkenwell, London-ln what had been the gatehouse to the medieval English Grand Priory of the Knights Hospitaller.
World History
