Download PDF | Jonathan Riley Smith (auth.) The Knights Of St. John In Jerusalem And Cyprus, C. 1050– 1310 A History Of The Order Of The Hospital Of St. John Of Jerusalem Volume One Palgrave Macmillan UK ( 1967)
570 Pages
PREFACE
In this book, I have treated the Order of St. John as an institution in the Latin settlement in the Levant and as an international exempt Order of the Church. I have only briefly considered its possessions in Europe. I feel that this approach is justifiable, for, however important the properties in the West became, their first task remained the supplying of the Convent in Jerusalem, Acre or Limassol with money and material. Their interest for me is therefore secondary.
It is always hard to find a workable and consistent system of nomenclature. I have used the English form of Christian names whenever possible; and, when surnames contained prepositions, I have used ‘de’ in French and English names and ‘of’ in those of all other nationalities (Roger des Moulins — but William of S. Stefano) or in those of persons identified with places over which they had powers of administration (William (Archbishop) of Tyre, Raymond (Count) of Tripoli). The use of place-names raises further difficulties, for, in Latin Syria, the Franks and the Arabs gave different names to the same villages and towns. I have used the Frankish name for every place that was in Christian possession, except for those early losses with which the Hospitallers had relations after their return into the hands of the Muslims (Margat for al-Margqab, but Afamiyah for Apamea). Of course I use Arabic or Turkish names for towns that were never occupied by the Franks.
I can, however, be accused of inconsistency on two points. I feel it pedantic to use crusader or Arabic names for those towns that are already well known and refer to Tyre, Sidon, Aleppo and Homs rather than to Sour, Sagette, Halab and Hims. And my maps, unlike my text, give the Frankish names for all places once in crusader possession, whether they were lost to the Muslims or not (Apamea for Afamiyah). I think that this is justifiable, because of the special difficulties of cartography: and in the few cases concerned, J have given cross references in the Appendix or the Index. In the interests of uniformity, I have followed K.M. Setton (editorin-chief), 4 History of the Crusades, in my transliteration of Arabic, Turkish and Mongol.
‘The system used by the American scholars compiling these volumes is pedantic and often extremely ugly; but at last we have a full-scale reference work with a standard transliteration which is lucidly explained in an introductory chapter.
I have made no attempt to give the modern equivalents of the terms of measurement used in the Latin settlement, whether concerning money or land. Many of these are still subjects of dispute, and it seems more teasonable to ask the reader to use his own judgement and compare sums of money with each other, although it should be remembered that there was inflation in the thirteenth century.
I should like to thank those many persons without whose help this book would never have been completed. To Dr. R.C. Smail I owe more than I can say. He first introduced me to the Crusades, and I alone know how much I have benefited from his teaching and example. He read this book in typescript, as did Professor L.H. Butler, the general editor of this series, whose help and encouragement over several years and detailed criticisms in the final stages I now recall with gratitude. Mr. R.J. Adam read the typescript at a time when I needed guidance and gave me much valuable advice. I also benefited from the criticisms of Dr. D.S. Chambers, Mr. J.E. Reade, Mr. D. Seward and Mrs. M.C. Lyons, who gave up much of their time to read the work.
I am also very grateful for the assistance I received on many matters from Sir Steven Runciman, Professor C.R. Cheney, Professor J.D. Mackie, Professor J. Prawer, Chevalier J. Galea, Rev. A. Zammit Gabarretta, Dr. A.T. Luttrell, Dr. W.N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, Mr. M. Benvenisti, Mr. D. J. Gifford, Mr. and Mrs. D. Johnston, Mr. T.M. Farmiloe, Miss E.Ellen, Mr. P. Evans, Mr. P. J. F. Riley-Smith, the family Khayat, Mr. A. Kamel, Mr. Deeb el Sheik Yousni, Miss H. Nicholls and Mrs. G.T. Robinson.
I received courteous assistance from the librarians and staff of the Reading Room of the British Museum, the London Library, the libraries of the universities of Cambridge, St. Andrews and Jena, the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, the Royal Malta Library and the libraries of the priories of England and Scotland of the Venerable Order of St. John.
The manuscript was typed by Mrs. Laing, Mrs. A. Carmichael, Miss A. Dyson and Miss E.M. Beaty. The maps were drawn by Mr. W. Bromage, who carried out with great pat’ence the corrections that became necessary three years after his original work had been com pleted. Illustrations were provided by the Institut francais in Beirut, Aerofilms Ltd, the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, the Bibliothéque municipale, Lyons, The National Park Authority, Israel, and Press Information Office, Israel.
I should like to thank my maternal grandparents for their encouragement and advice: my grandfather, Sir John Craik Henderson, read much of the book at an early stage and his criticisms were of great help to me. But most of all, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my parents. The project that has now ended could never have been begun without their support, financial as wellas moral. To them, this book is lovingly dedicated. St. Andrews J.8.C. R.-S. December 1966
INTRODUCTION
No individual Knight Hospitaller dominates the history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Among the professed brethren of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, one will find no Bernard of Clairvaux, no Thomas Aquinas, no Suger of St. Denis. Although the Hospitallers made an important contribution to the ideals and organisation of the care of the sick poor, their decline from early principles of purity was swift, and they earned the disapproval of some of the most powerful intellects of the time. By the middle of the thirteenth century their way of life was already outdated, imperfectly reflecting the hard, ascetic ideals of an earlier age.
They were, however, members of an important Order of the Church. Its greatness lay in its corporate personality and in the practical application of a unique ideal. Associated with the Crusades, whose concepts and fortunes moulded the character of contemporary Rurope, its activities expressed the confident, expansionist ambitions of the twelfth century, while foreshadowing the new gentleness and tolerance of the thirteenth. As one of the first international Orders, with estates in every part of Europe, the Hospital exercised a profound influence upon political events and economic developments. As an agent of ecclesiastical power, it remained a weapon at Rome’s command during the centuries of the papal monarchy.
As one of the richest corporations in Latin Syria, with the advantage of overseas possessions, it was one of the most important institutions in the Kast.
The historian is fortunate in his material. There survives a large collection of documentary evidence, which, if it does not often reveal those intimate details that bring to life the character and personality of individuals, permits the accurate portrayal of a rich institution in two centuries of growth. These documents have been published in a monument of patient scholarship that must command the gratitude of every student of the Crusades.! They can be supplemented by the many references to the Hospitallers in writings of the time, for the brethren exercised substantial political power in more than one state, while the Crusades, with which they were inextricably linked, had an enduring fascination for contemporaries.
The survival of the Order of St. John, although in much changed forms, and the recent revival of crusader studies have contributed to an interest that has borne fruit one-hundredfold.! But, if one may continue the metaphor, the quality of the harvest has been poor. The works that have increased our understanding of the Order have been primarily concerned with its possessions and policies in Europe rather than with developments in Latin Syria, the defence of which became the reason for its existence, where its headquarters lay and to which the produce of its European estates was sent. Nevertheless, two works of great merit have concerned themselves with the Order in the East.
A study of the Hospitallers in the Holy Land and in Cyprus by Delaville Le Roulx was published in 1904. It was the first to make use of the author’s volumes of collected documents, and it has remained the standard work on the Order in Latin Syria. It was, however, limited in scope. Delaville Le Roulx appears to have wished to discuss the difficult question of the Hospital’s origins, to establish a chronological sequence of events, to identify the Ordet’s officers, and to describe its organisation and activities within the general framework of the Crusades and the history of the Latin East. His task was well accomplished and all modern studies are indebted to him.
But in other respects the book was disappointing. Although careful in his approach to problems of chronology and identification, Delaville Le Roulx’s attitude towards the part played by the Hospital in Latin Syria was partisan; and the problems that interested him demanded the use of a narrative form with an emphasis upon chrono-logical development, carrying the story of the Hospital from one magistracy to another. Analysis was therefore impossible, and many important problems were left not only unsolved, but without even the benefit of discussion.!
A few years later, Prutz wrote the best of all the general works on the Military Orders. He studied them as wide-ranging, international organisations and wrote fine chapters on their ecclesiastical exemptions, their participation in European politics, their economic activities and the social consequences of their development. But he was not primarily concerned with Latin Syria and added little to what was already known in that field.?
The publications of these two important works were divided by only four years. The history of the Hospital in the Levant could now be seen against the general background of privilege and international activity. The subject appeared to have been exhaustively considered and only two later historians have written about the Hospitallers in Sytia. King gave a narrative account of their activities that was attractive and useful, but which was gullible and not very original. More recently, Flugi van Aspermont has written what is little more than a paraphrase of Delaville Le Roulx’s work.4 There is therefore a need for a detailed and analytical treatment of the history of the Order in the first two centuries of its existence.
The origins of the Order of St. John are to be found in confused and imperfectly known events in the eleventh century. We have followed Delaville Le Roulx in choosing the year 1310 as marking the end of the first stage of its history. By that year the Hospitallers had moved their headquarters from Cyprus to the island of Rhodes. It was not only that they had changed their seat of government. A seties of reforming statutes had prepared the Order for a new situation. The destruction of the Order of the Temple two years after our period ended not only removed a powerful rival, but also led to a great increase in the landed wealth of the Hospital. With the fall of Acre in 1291 the Holy Land had been lost and the first and most fruitful period of the Crusades had ended. The Order’s principal enemy became the Turks, the theatre for its operations the sea.!
Most modern historians accept that the crusading ideal was a synthesis of old and new elements.2 In the most general terms, we can establish the first of these as being the concept of a Holy War in defence of Christendom, undertaken at the initiative of the papacy. This had been developing in Italy and in Spain, and was accompanied by the gradual transformation of the idea of the ‘soldier of Christ’ into one in which the phrase bore a more literal and a more militant interpretation. It was modified by the organisation and spirituality of pilgrimages, increasing in numbers and in scope throughout the eleventh century, and by the attempts of the Church to impose the Truce of God in France. It was adopted by a selfconscious and reforming papacy, which regarded Christendom not only as the society of all Christians, but as a universal body politic, transcending all earthly boundaries, whose ruler on earth was the Pope, supreme judge and monarch, the heir of the Caesars.
But when Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in 1095, hewas also reacting to certain immediate spiritual and political necessities. Among these there predominated his desire to help the Byzantine Empire and so to end the developing schism between the Latin and Greek Churches, the need to assert his position in the West, his wish to bring peace to Europe by directing the brutal energies of knights towards creative and spiritual goals and his ambition to exercise jurisdiction over what the Gregorian reformers regarded as Church lands in the East. We can suggest that the response to his call was conditioned by equally multifarious and complex factors: by the new revolutionary spirituality of the age, resulting from the immediate implementation of its ideals by a revitalised Rome, by developments in feudalism, by the numbers of landless knights, by famine in northern France and by the growth of popular messianic movements.
Some definition of the Crusade itself must now be attempted. This is possible, at least for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, because the first two Crusades evolved an exemplar that was followed by succeeding expeditions, although less closely than has been supposed. Of course there were changes, in a revolutionary period, in society, economics and politics. There was an increased formality, a shift of emphasis between the various elements, developments within the elements themselves. But these changes were in quality — or away from it — rather than in kind, and what follows is proposed as a general tule, although every instance produced its own exceptions.
The Crusade was a Holy War, but one that was quite different from any other. It was a war of reconquest, for the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre or for the defence of Christendom, wherever in peril and against whomsoever endangered it. But it was also a pilgrimage to a given point and with given aims; and it embodied the penitential, sacrificial and juridical characteristics of a pilgrimage. It was, paradoxically, the Anti-War, an instrument of peace, bringing fraternal aid to the Christians in the East and closely linked to the Truces of God in the West. It was the expression of the universality of the Church and of the political unity of Christendom. It was at the same time international and the army of the one Christian state, and it was therefore initiated and organised by the Pope. It could be, and did become, a weapon of punishment, the final sanction in the hands of the papal judge-monarchs.
The Crusade was considered to be Holy Work. Its participants were the elect, the soldiers of Christ, supported spiritually by the indulgence and distinguished from ordinary men not only by their task, but by their vow, their wearing of the Cross and their special legal rights. Crusading thought from the first recognised a new kind of soldier, and the exercise of arms, which had aroused ecclesiastical distrust and suspicion, was given some moral justification. ‘Now become soldiers of Christ, you who once were robbers. Now legally fight against barbarians, you who once fought against brothers and blood relations .. . those who were the enemies of the Lord, now these will be his friends.”!
The concept of the soldier of Christ had attraction in an age that believed in the essential unity of Christendom, the interaction between the spiritual and the temporal worlds and the imminence of heavenly justice. It gave the knight the respectability that previously he had so notably lacked. It was reflected in secular literature. But nowhere was it more clearly expressed than in the great apologia for the Military Orders, the De /aude novae militiae, written by St. Bernard for the Knights Templar before 1136. There is evidence that at this time the Templars were exposed to both external criticism and internal doubts.
Their detractors were arguing that warfare was inherently unholy, that it was activated by hatred and greed because it necessarily entailed killing and plundering. These criticisms were answered by their first Master, Hugh de Payens, in a treatise that stressed the defensive and essentially pacific nature of the Order’s duties ‘in war against the enemies of peace’. ‘Indeed I say to you that you do not hate, which is unjust, because you do not hate man but iniquity. Again I say, you ate not greedy, which is unjust, because you acquire that which should be justly taken for sins and that which is justly yours because of the work that you do.”
St. Bernard went further. He developed the comparison betweenthe old and new knighthoods that had found expression in crusading excitatoria and secular literature. The old knighthood was false, criminal, without virtue or honour, occupied with unjust conflict: ‘non dico militiae, sed malitiae’ (“I do not speak of knighthood but of knavery’). ‘If you prevail... you live a homicide... whether dead or alive, whether victorious or conquered, you have committed homicide. Unhappy victory which, overcoming man, succumbs to corruption.’ But a new knighthood had appeared in the land of the Incarnation.
The new knight, the Templar, was occupied in dual conflict, temporal and spiritual, and when he killed a malefactor, he did not commit homicide but malecide. ‘And so advance with safety, soldiers, and fearlessly drive off the enemies of Christ, confident that neither death nor life can separate you from the love of God.’ ‘How glorious are the victors who return from the war! How blessed the martyrs who die in war!’ St. Bernard emphasised that pagans should be killed only if Christendom could not be defended against them in other ways. But it was preferable that they should be destroyed rather than that they should menace the just. ‘In the death of the pagan, the Christian is gloried because Christ is glorified.”!
The Templars and the brethren of other Military Orders were therefore the exemplars of the new knights, the ‘sages’. And among these they enjoyed a pre-eminence, because they provided an answer to the special problems of crusading. Indeed it must be doubted whether the crusading movement could ever have been successful, for all the magnificence of its theory and its glorious imagery. Not only did it reflect an ideal rather than reality and presume a concept of papal government that was already becoming unacceptable in the midthirteenth century, but it also contained inherent difficulties and contradictions.
Before a Pope called a Crusade, he must gauge the response that his appeal might evoke. It was inexpedient to raise an army so large that it could not be easily controlled or to have certain leaders outside Europe at a time when they were needed nearer home. There is evidence that Pope Urban II was originally thinking in terms of a limited expedition at the time of the First Crusade.2, Pope Eugenius ITT was opposed to the participation of Conrad of Germany in the Second Crusade.!
On the other hand, some enthusiasm was preferable to a stony silence or a polite indifference. Of the rulers of Europe in 1274, only the aged, notoriously immoral and garrulous James of Aragon answered the call of Pope Gregory X to the Council of Lyons.? Again, political conflicts in the West had to be resolved before the army could march. There had to be some attempt to lessen the numbers of dependants who accompanied the expedition, finances had to be raised, transport must be arranged, the various armies had to be co-ordinated and directed towards some strategically sound goal. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw many attempts to solve these problems.? But all these efforts had been made in vain if the expedition, once launched, became unmanageable. It was on this point that theory and practice were never able to meet.
As the army of the universal Christian state, the Crusade was an instrument to be used at the will of the Pope. It was authorised and organised by him; but in canon law no priest could take up arms, nor could he physically direct them. The conduct and the captaincy of the expedition could not belong to the Pope, nor to his legate, whose task, with one exception, was always that of predication, exhortation and arbitration.4 For the reconquest of Spain and Jerusalem, for the defence of Christendom and the Latin states in the East, for the punishment of schismatics and heretics, the papacy had to rely upon the enthusiasm and sincerity, the industry and the competence of temporal powers.
There was, however, one answer to these problems. It was by no means satisfactory, but it became increasingly important in the thirteenth century, as enthusiasm for the Crusade waned,! and as the perils threatening the Holy Land perceptibly increased. It lay in the existence of the Military Orders: disciplined standing armies, organised on religious and hierarchical lines, dependent in the last resort upon the Pope himself. The importance of the obedience and discipline that differentiated the brethren from secular knights was already stressed by St. Bernard. The Templars ‘go and come at the orders of their commander.
They wear what is given to them and do not presume to take other clothing or food... They live openly according to a common Rule... without property, in one house under one custom, careful to preserve unity of spirit in the bond of peace... They do what the will of their Master or common necessity indicates.’ By the 1130s, with the encouragement of St. Bernard, the Templars were models of a new chivalry, their Order a weapon at Rome’s command. The Hospital was transformed more slowly into a Military Order from an institution committed to the care of the poor pilgrims who, with Jerusalem now in Christian hands, came in increasing numbers to the Holy City.
The papacy was clearly reluctant to sanction this metamorphosis, which was not completed until late in the twelfth century, and the Order continued to fulfil dual roles. But because the conversion of the Hospital into a Military Order was slow, it tells us much of the pressures upon institutions in the twelfth century and reflects in miniature the problems inherent in the crusading movement.
Tripoli between 1098 and 1109. The island of Cyprus was seized by Richard Coeur de Lion in 1191, and there a kingdom was created in which western chivalry flowered in the fourteenth century. To the north, on the mainland, the kingdom of Lower Armenia accepted Latin Christianity in the late twelfth century and throughout our period had close and important relations with its Frankish neighbours.
These six states have for long attracted the romantic interest of Europeans. Their architectural remains, their fortresses in the desert or on the mountains and their romanesque cathedrals in Arab cities have aroused the admiration of travellers. Their stirring but tragic history has excited the imagination of generations of novelists and historians. But it is only now that we are beginning to understand more clearly the constitutional history of these extraordinary states where western institutions developed in an alien environment, conditioned by the pressures of colonisation, unusual political events and stern military necessities.
In the kingdom of Jerusalem the first century of its existence saw the emergence and the collapse of a strong and energetic monarchy, the second witnessed the growth of an articulate school of lawyer barons, whose political thought has not received the attention it deserves. The other settlements produced their individual forms of government. It will be necessary in the course of this study to pay attention to the structure and politics of these states, for not only were they affected by the activities of the Hospitallers, but in their turn influenced developments within the Order.
The Hospital of St. John was one of the most powerful corporations in Latin Syria. In the thirteenth century the Hospitallers played an important part in the government of the kingdom of Jerusalem. All historians of the Crusades and of Latin Syria have recognised their importance; but most have regarded their activities with hostility. To these the Order was an independent and overpowerful element within the state, with its own foreign policy, while its behaviour was dictated by self-interest and was often in opposition to the needs of the Christians in the Holy Land.!
Did the Order deserve this obloquy? How powerful was it? What part did it play in the internal life of the Latin settlements in Palestine, Syria and Cyprus? The answers to these questions may be found in an examination of its participation in the politics of the Latin Rast and in a study of its structure, its estates, its ecclesiastical exemptions and feudal privileges. And a solution of these problems could contribute to our understanding of a larger subject: the constitutional history of Latin Syria.
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