Hospitaller Orders

The interest in St John Order’s spirituality is enjoying a growing interest, especially among members of the Order and, at the same time, it is also beginning to attract the attention of scholars. On the other hand, neglecting the proper spiritual dimension of the ancient and recent history of the St John’s Hospital means coming to a partial understanding of its being a "Religion", that is, a religious order. The essay points out the essential and present-day traits of the St John’s spirituality and explains its historical origins, developments and transformations, in order to arrive at the identification of today's characters of a secular evolution – to this day unique in its hospital and military features - still experienced and proposed as a journey of personal sanctification.

The presence of the Hospitallers in the territory of Puglia and Basilicata almost coincided with the
origins of the Hospital in Jerusalem, gradually assuming the form and structure of a Priory with its
seat at Barletta. Notwithstanding the outcome of the series of suppressions and confiscations in
the eighteenth century, as a matter of fact, the Order continued to be represented in both regions
and, with the fusion of the three Priories of Southern Italy, gave birth to the Grand Priory of Naples
and Sicily. The new institutional establishment brought about the constitution of the Association of
the Italian Knights of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and whose delegations began to operate
also in Puglia and the Basilicata. From the second half of the nineteenth century, the Delegation
of Puglia and Basilicata developed into a peripheral extension of the Grand Priory, and its subject
territory coincided with that of the old Priory of Barletta. The Knights’ activities extended to the
provinces of both regions, reaching such a high level that they led to the formation of the second
delegation of Puglia (The land of Otranto). From the research carried out, a significant chapter emerges
regarding the history of the delegations and of the development of this new nucleus of the structure
and organization of the Order on Italian territory.

The outbreak of the First World War did not find the Order of Malta unprepared to meet its new challenges. A century had passed since the institution had given up its military role and it was now adjusting itself to a complete recovery of its original charitable and hospitaller mission. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its network of providing relief throughout Europe had had the opportunity of bringing up to scratch new ways and forms of extending charitable aid both in times of peace (like earthquakes, outbreaks of epidemics, etc.) and in times of war (especially during the Italo-Turkish conflict). The Great War witnessed the members of the Order lined up on opposite fronts, unarmed, organised in military networks to provide assistance to the sick and the wounded, employed both at the centre (Grand Magistracy) and at the periphery (Grand Priories, Associations) to run the means of extending all forms of relief (hospital-trains), field hospitals (Santa Marta at the Vatican), ambulances, and clinics. The war years were also a period of suffering even for the Order which found itself having to confront the difficult situation created by the departure of the Gran Master Thun und Hohenstein from the Headquarters and to carry the higher costs required to support the persons employed at the war front and the huge economic expenses which weighed heavily on the future of the Order. This effort, however, enhanced the esteem and respect for the Order at the ecclesiastical and international level.

The availability of capital was a common problem for European and Mediterraenan states in early modernity. The paper traces the attempts by Hospitaller Malta (1530-1798) to balance the accounts of its Treasury mainly through the relocation of income from the Knights Hospitallers’ property on the continent. Malta, a small island south of Sicily, was actively engaged on the Habsburg-Ottoman war frontier and its constant need for credit forced its government, the religious military Order of St John, to seek alternative means to bolster its coffers. Connections with Genoa, still a significant financial centre after the ‘golden age’ of the sixteenth century, were fostered for this purpose. This study re-creates credit-transfer patterns on the Genoa-Malta route in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, highlighting the role of Palermo and Messina in northern Sicily as two principal remittance stations in Hospitaller Malta’s financial network, and analysing the impact of the Ottoman threat and diplomacy on these connections.







... | Ayuda. Flow of Capital in the Mediterranean: Financial Connections between Genoa and Hospitaller Malta in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Autores: Ivan Grech; Localización: International journal of maritime history, ISSN 0843-8714, Vol. 17, Nº. 2, 2005 , pags. ...

La spiritualità giovannita sta godendo, di recente, un crescente interesse soprattutto fra i membri dell’Ordine e, nello stesso tempo, incomincia ad attirare l’attenzione anche degli studiosi. D’altra parte, trascurare la dimensione propriamente spirituale della storia antica e recente dell’Ospedale di San Giovanni significa giungere ad una comprensione parziale del suo essere una “Religione”, cioè un ordine religioso. Il saggio puntualizza i tratti essenziali e attuali della spiritualità giovannita e ne spiega le origini storiche, gli sviluppi e le trasformazioni, per giungere, poi, ad individuare i caratteri odierni di una evoluzione secolare – rimasta unica nel suo genere ospedaliero e militare –  tuttora vissuta e proposta come itinerario di santificazione personale.

DOCUMENTS OF THE ORDER OF MALTA IN THE PARCHMENTS  OF DIGITAL IMAGES ARCHIVE OF THE LIBRARY  OF THE LITHUANIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 

At present the Division of Manuscripts of the Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences has retained 1412 parchments dating back to XI-XX century. It is one of the largest collection of parchments in Baltic countries. The content of the parchments concerns a current territory of Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Latvia,  Estonia, Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Austria and Italy.  Among them we can find nine historically important documents related to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and beginnings of its operation on Polish lands: Confirmation letter by Bishop Benedict of Poznan to the Order of St. John. (Bishop Benedict of Poznan confirms the right of the Order of the Hospital (of St. John) of Jerusalem to manage the shelter of St. Michael’s Church in Poznan, donated by Duke Mescho of Poland, and to use the tithes from (villages of) the Kostrzyn province, donated by Bishop Radovanus of Poznan, for the maintenance of the shelter; and also donates St. Michael’s Church and all its tithes to the Order of St. John and Confirmation letter by Pope Celestin III to the Order of St. John. (Pope Celestin III confirms the right of the Order of the Hospital [of St. John] of Jerusalem to manage the shelter in Poznan with all the tithes donated for the maintenance of the shelter).

William Hayley''s "The Hermit's Dog" has a political background in two historical events--the 1792 expulsion of Carthusians from the Grande Chartreuse valley, and the diaspora of a knightly religious order throughout Europe, following the 1798 loss of Malta by the Knights of St. John (Hospitaller) to Napoleon. The poem was written after war broke out between England and France in 1803, after England's refusal to return Malta to the Knights gave Napoleon an occasion to declare the Treaty of Amiens breached. Yet Blake dehistoricizes the poem in his illustration, making the dead noble a knight from the time of the Crusades, and making Hayley's secular hermit into a monk.