The formal title of the Knights Hospitaller was The Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem. They are also known as the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.
The Hospitallers were founded in Jerusalem, probably around 1023, to provide care for poor, sick or injured pilgrims to the Holy Land. After the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, during the First Crusade, the organisation became a religious and military order under its own Papal charter, charged with the care and defence of the Holy Land. Following the conquest of the Holy Land by Islamic forces in 1291, the knights took refuge in the Kingdom of Cyprus, a Crusader kingdom on the island of Cyprus. Their Master, Guillaume de Villaret, sought to acquire for the order its own temporal domain, to distance itself from any local politics, and settled on the island of Rhodes. After four years of campaigning, the city of Rhodes finally surrendered to the knights (under Guillaume's successor, Foulques de Villaret) in 1310.
Throughout the 12th and 13th centuries, the Hospitallers' great rival order was the Knights Templar (full title: the Poor Fellow–Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon; a.k.a. the Order of Solomon's Temple). The Templars were founded in 1119, and recognised by papal bull in 1139. They were among the most skilled fighting units of the Crusades, and became prominent in finance throughout Christendom – developing innovative financial techniques that were an early form of banking. They were active until 1312, when they were disbanded by Pope Clement V under pressure from King Philip IV of France, who was deeply in debt to them.
The Hospitallers were driven out of Rhodes in 1522 by the Ottoman Empire, after a six–month siege. They withdrew to Sicily, and stayed there until 1530, when Charles I 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 (an actual, live peregrine falcon).
Following Napoleon's invasion of Malta, they were dispersed throughout Europe. In 1834 they settled definitively in Rome, and began once more to concentrate on hospital work. This work was greatly intensified during the two world wars.
The order survives today as the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta – also known as the the Sovereign Military order of Malta, or simply the Knights of Malta. It is the world's oldest surviving military order. One of its better–known manifestations is the St. John Ambulance Brigade – whose roots in the Order are signified by the Maltese cross on its badge.
© Haydn Thompson 2017