John Of Jerusalem Research Articles

The occupation of Belvoir by the Hospitallers

What do we know about the occupation of the castle of Belvoir by the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem? This paper endeavors to draw up the state of the written documentation, consisting of a few chronicles, both Arabic and Latin, supplemented by charters from the Hospital’s collections. The history of the castle is put into perspective with the process of militarization of the Order and its growing involvement in the defense of the Latin states of the East. Acquired between 1165 and 1168, Belvoir quickly played a key role in the defense of Galilee, to the point of appearing as a major fortress of the Hospital. By January 1189, however, the place was taken over by the Ayyūbids. In 1241, following a treaty with al-Kâmil, Sultan of Egypt, the castle and its territory were returned to the Hospitallers. However, we do not know the circumstances under which the brothers moved back into a castle that had, in the meantime, suffered several destructions. In 1255, the Order strengthened its position by absorbing the possessions of the monastery of Mount Tabor. But, between 1263 and 1266, the campaigns of the Sultan Baybars resulted in the destruction of the Hospitaller settlement in eastern Galilee.

Carpaccio’s Original Painting Installation in the Scuola Dalmata: Where and Why

The original installation of Vittore Carpaccio’s narra­tive paintings in the Scuola Dalmata has long been assumed to have been in the upper chapter hall, following the practice used in other Venetian confraternities (Scuole). Studies and observations dur­ing the recent conservation campaign of the canvases have led to a new hypothesis that Carpaccio may very well have instead placed his paintings on the ground floor, as we see them today, due to a heated dispute with the Priory of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem over the control of the upstairs premises.

The Charism of Care of the Order of St John and Female Monasticism

Abstract The charism of care inspired the foundation of various medieval religious orders, the Order of St John of Jerusalem being the most renowned of these. This article uses a case study of a female Hospitaller convent in Bargota in the kingdom of Navarre, to examine to what extent the charism of hospitality influenced the Order’s decision-making. By identifying the factors lying behind the foundation of the convent in the early fourteenth century and its dissolution a century later, it contributes to the discussion on the relevance of female Hospitaller monasticism in the Late Middle Ages and argues that the Order sustained the convent as long as the women’s care-worthiness outweighed the burden of cura monialium.

The beginnings of the Order of Saint John in Jerusalem, or: Muristan revisited

The order of Saint John was founded during the 12th century south of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in an area known today as Muristan. The heart of the order's residence was the once famous hospital, which was the origin of numerous pilgrim hostels and hospitals throughout Europe. Given its historical significance, it is surprising how little is known about this building complex. Through pilgrims' reports and statutes of the order, the functioning of the hospital is relatively well known. But as a result of later changes and destruction only a few remnants of the medieval building stock have survived and are largely unexplored until today. In an interdisciplinary research project the development of the Muristan from antiquity to modern times is being investigated. Archival records are being re-evaluated, preserved and accessible architectural remains are documented and analysed by methods of building archaeology. This article presents some results of the project on the medieval development of the Muristan and the seat and hospital of the Order of St. John.

Hospitaller Aesthetics: The Self-Fashioning of a Supranational Military Religious Order

The Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem was founded in the late eleventh century to assist sick and indigent pilgrims in the Holy Land. Its mission expanded in the twelfth century to include fighting alongside crusaders in the Levant. Hospitaller activities became bifurcated, exhibiting both warlike functions and daily prayers. This paper details the deliberate self-fashioning by the Order’s hierarchy for its own geopolitical survival by means of notable books and artworks produced in several hundred Hospitaller commanderies flourishing across Europe. The decor and activities in these domiciles reinforced Hospitaller piety and helped finance forays into the Mediterranean battle zone. From the first siege of Rhodes in 1480 to the Great Siege of Malta in 1565, a carefully crafted image of the knights as defenders of Christendom showcased core Hospitaller values. Guillaume Caoursin’s Description of the Siege of Rhodes (1480), Geertgen tot Sint Jans’ altarpiece in the Low Countries (ca. 1485), Pinturicchio’s fresco cycle in the Piccolomini Library of the Duomo in Siena (1502-1507), Jacques de Bourbon’s Oppugnation de Rhodes (1525), and Sabba da Castiglione’s Ricordi (1546) are but some of the vehicles for expressing the stability of the Order through literary descriptions and visual renderings. Robust imagery was broadcast throughout the commanderies, where the knights tended to the needs of the Order while maintaining independence from secular lords and episcopal authorities.

How Joannites\u2019 economy eradicated primeval forest and created anthroecosystems in medieval Central Europe

During European states’ development, various past societies utilized natural resources, but their impact was not uniformly spatially and temporally distributed. Considerable changes resulted in landscape fragmentation, especially during the Middle Ages. Changes in state advances that affected the local economy significantly drove trajectories of ecosystems’ development. The legacy of major changes from pristine forest to farming is visible in natural archives as novel ecosystems. Here, we present a high-resolution densely dated multi-proxy study covering the last 1500 years from a peatland located in CE Europe. The economic activity of medieval societies was highly modified by new rulers—the Joannites (the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Knights Hospitaller). We studied the record of these directorial changes noted in the peat profile. Our research revealed a rapid critical land-use transition in the late Middle Ages and its consequences on the peatland ecosystem. The shift from the virgin forest with regular local fires to agriculture correlates well with the raising of local economy and deforestations. Along with the emerging openness, the wetland switched from alkaline wet fen state to acidic, drier Sphagnum-dominated peatland. Our data show how closely the ecological state of wetlands relates to forest microclimate. We identified a significant impact of the Joannites who used the novel farming organization. Our results revealed the surprisingly fast rate of how feudal economy eliminated pristine nature from the studied area and created novel anthroecosystems.

Reconstructing Kilmainham: the topography and architecture of the chief priory of the Knights Hospitaller in Ireland, c.1170–1349

ABSTRACT For almost 400 years the Knights of St John of Jerusalem – the Knights Hospitaller – maintained a priory in Kilmainham, Co. Dublin, as their principal residence in Ireland. Nothing survives of it above ground. The priory's early history and topography are mainly shrouded in mystery, but a fourteenth-century registrum illuminates the workings of its community and the character of its members, and provides valuable evidence relating to the appearance of its architecture and layout when it was at the peak of its prosperity. Yet the registrum has never been subjected to detailed scrutiny. Recent research on the Hospitallers in Ireland on the one hand, and on the organisation of domestic space in medieval contexts in Ireland on the other, has prompted this comprehensive appraisal of the evidence in Kilmainham's registrum.

Analysing Deposition and Site Formation Processes in Medieval Cess Pits Using Bone Fragmentation

Signatures of animal bone fragmentation have huge potential for understanding deposition and archaeological site formation processes, yet they are scarcely studied, especially in medieval urban contexts. Archaeological investigations at 1–5 Benjamin Street, Farringdon uncovered a number of medieval cess pits and other contexts associated with the Hospitaller Priory of St John of Jerusalem. The well-preserved zooarchaeological assemblage from these contexts was deemed an excellent case study for in-depth bone fragmentation analysis to both test and display the utility of the method at this type of site. The analysis revealed that material from the lowest fills of the cess pits differed from the upper fills in that fragmentation was more intensive. Based on the size and weight of fragments, and surface modifications related to burning and taphonomy, we postulate that floor and hearth sweepings were occasionally deposited in the cess pits whilst they were in use. This material was likely further fragmented when cess pits were periodically emptied. Faunal specimens in the upper fills have different fragmentation and taphonomic signatures and more likely relate to opportunistic refuse deposition or capping after the use of the cess pits. This analysis shows the archaeological potential of this approach when aligned with specific research questions concerning deposition.

La Orden del Hospital en España durante la Edad Media: un estado de la cuestión

Estado de la cuestión sobre la orden de San Juan de Jerusalén y su presencia en la Península Ibérica, haciendo referencias tanto a los lugares que quedan de la orden hospitalaria como a los últimos libros y artículos publicados sobre el tema.

A CRISTIANIZAÇÃO DO ESPAÇO: O PROTAGONISMO DA VERA CRUZ EM MARMELAR

Since the Christianization of the city of Jerusalem (fourth century), the borders of Christendom were constantly changed. This factor intensified in the medieval context, due to the Muslim occupation both in the regions of the east, as the Iberian Peninsula. Military Orders, which arise after the First Crusade contributed significantly to the consolidation of this process. In Portugal the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, recognized by the papacy in the twelfth century played a significant role, through the Crato Priory. This consisted in commendations regime and bailias, local units of the hospitaller deployment in the region. Among these commendations, Marmelar´s stands out in this text, by having in its interior a venerable fragment as derived from the Vera Cruz. This relic contributed to enlarge the spiritual heritage and prestige of the place, being subject of disputes, but also having political and demographic significance.

Juan Fernández de Heredia y Plutarco. Las Vidas Paralelas

Juan Fernandez de Heredia, Great Master of the Saint John of Jerusalem’s Order, passionate person for grecolatin culture and great humanist promoter, find hollow between his occupations as State man for promoting numerous works, and between these, a translation of the Plutarc’s Parallel Lives, which is recovered in this way for Occident. Two translators took order of such commission: one byzantine translator, Talodiqui, and one aragonese translator, Nicolaus; the latter translate what the byzantine translator had translated in byzantine language. The byzantine version has not arrived to us; yes, nevertheless, the byzantine version. This paper analyses several questions which have to see with the difficulty of a translator function not from the Plutarc’s aragonese text, but a intermediate text that have disappeared. Nevertheless, the aragones translation not ceases to see one linguistic invaluable document for the studious of romanist and aragonese language.

Oltre i muri della chiesa: la decorazione di San Pietro a Sorpe (Catalogna) come imposizione sul territorio

The pictorial cycle of Sant Pere de Sorpe (Pyrenees, Catalonia) is of great complexity. Its study has been a difficult issue due to the removal and scattering of its different fragments among several museums, whilst some of them have been partially preserved in situ. Moreover, the quality of the materials employed and the iconography has been a source of confusion among those scholars studying the cycle. In this paper we will focus our analysis on the features of the Calvary scene. As a result of the recent discoveries and the reinterpretation of the historical, formal and iconographical data, we can hypothesise that the execution of the paintings was promoted by the order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, which places the paintings at the end of the twelfth century, bonding in this way the iconographic models to those of the Holy Sepulchre.

Asentamiento, desarrollo y ocaso de la Orden del Santo Sepulcro en Galicia. Un panorama general y un documento singular

The Order of the Holy Sepulchre, despite its early presence in the old kingdom of Galicia, possibly favored by the good relations between jerosilimitana and compostelana churches, failed to achieve in the visibility of the Santiago Order in Galicia, the mitifi cation of the Temple or the importance and significance of St. John of Jerusalem. However, even though the usual precariousness and brevity of the mediaeval sources worth of orders in Galicia, it´s posible to reconstruct with contextualized and solid documented properly its implementation, development and decline; this was until late in Galicia in mid-sixteenth century, a few years after the abolition of the Order (1489) and the integration of their property in St. John. These pages are complete with the release of a unique document, the will and testament of one of the last knight commanders of the Holy Sepulchre in Galicia, friar Juan de Loureiro (1467), which is so far the only maintained of a knight friar in the Middle Ages.

Where Two Crosses Met: Religious Accommodation between a Reformed Protestant Community and a Commandery of the Order of Malta (Loudun, circa 1560–1660)

This article represents a local study investigating the relations between the commandery of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem and a Reformed Protestant community from about 1560 to 1660. The chosen locality is the French provincial town of Loudun and the article spans the French Wars of Religion and the period of recovery and reconstruction beyond. The relationship between Loudun's commandery and Reformed community manifests the sometimes astonishing interplay of conflict, accommodation, and necessity. The Protestant use of the commandery's church enabled the Reformed community to entrench itself in Loudun and remain there until the Crown revoked all the civil and religious prerogatives that it had granted to this religious minority. For its part, the commandery's fortunes and misfortunes became tied to that Reformed Protestant presence. The commandery's recovery in the first half of the seventeenth century in part drew upon the momentum of the Catholic resurgence, but the earlier Protestant use of the commandery's church and the repairs that the Protestants effectuated on the edifice gave the commandery a foothold in that process of recovery. This at times begrudged interdependence between commandery and Reformed community allowed for something resembling cross-confessional relations where one would least expect to find them.

Forms of Oblivion: Losing the Revels Office at St. John's

This essay investigates the collective forgetting of the site of the Revels Office from 1560 to 1607: the Hospital and Priory of St. John of Jerusalem, Clerkenwell. It argues that as a space of rehearsal and theatrical transaction for generations of city actors, the Great Chamber at St. John's deserves to be remembered. To that end, Sherman gathers draws on texts by John Stow, Thomas Heywood, and William Shakespeare, as well as on the Revels account books, the Loseley survey of lead, and artifacts unearthed in recent archaeological excavations. Together, these permit the partial reconstruction of a place central to Elizabethan drama. To explore why the Revels Office at St. John's has been occluded in our cultural memory, the essay discusses the theories of Paul Connerton, Mary Carruthers, and Maurice Halbwachs on collective forgetting. It concludes that different forms of oblivion have converged in producing this loss, ranging from willed displacement to shifting social frameworks to the erasure of labor for the sake of promoting the sprezzatura of performance.

… I ever loved thee, lady mine, and yet my love increases: Rhodian Portrait Ceramics and Cultural Dialogue in the Mediterranean

The medieval city of Rhodes kept a secure position as artistic and commercial crossroads, where pottery was the most intensely traded commodity. Here, I focus on a group of fifteenth-century ceramics decorated with profile busts of men and women excavated there, near the Orthodox Church of St. Spyridon. Used in a culturally complex urban centre, these vessels borrowed elements of design, and the concept of portrait-ceramics and love pots from Italy, where spouses and lovers exchanged such objects as ritual gifts. I explore the patronage, production, and function of these ceramics within the specifics of Rhodes, to see how they were suited to serve this cosmopolitan society governed by the Hospitaller Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, while displaying comparable feelings of power and (romantic) character common in Italian portraiture.

Italian Baroque Music in Malta: A Madrigal from the Music Archives at the Cathedral Museum in Mdina

The Mdina Cathedral Museum in Malta owns the most important collection of Italian baroque music south of Naples. The collection consists mostly of sacred music since it originated in the archives of the music chapel in St. Paul’s Cathedral, but there are also secular compositions reflecting the tastes of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, who made their home on the island from 1530 to 1798. The museum’s musical holdings consists of 159 printed works by Italian seventeenth-century composers and over 600 manuscripts, some anonymous, of Italian and Maltese music. The number (33) of unique works, editions, or partbooks adds interest to the fund and makes it relevant to the history of Italian music with regard to the activity of music publishers – Roman, Venetian and Sicilian, in particular – who found in Malta a profitable market for their exports. The edition of a manuscript madrigal for tenor, bass and harpsichord continuo by a lesser Sicilian composer, Filippo Muscari, evidences the widespread, early baroque fashion for madrigalian duets started by Northern Italian composers such as Monteverdi and Grandi whose works are present in the Maltese collection.

Vir Maxime Catholicus: Sulpicius Severus' Use and Abuse of Jerome in the Dialogi

This article examines Sulpicius Severus' use of the image of St Jerome in his Dialogi, a work intended to defend Sulpicius' earlier Vita Martini, as well as to censure the low standards of the Gallic clergy and ascetics. Sulpicius, by misrepresenting the contents of Jerome's epistle xxii, was able to offer an indirect critique of his compatriots. Moreover he played to a secondary pro-Rufinian audience by reworking Rufinus' arguments and casting them in Jerome's face. These included such sore points as the reception of Jerome's epistle xxii, his volte-face on the question of Origen and his excommunication by John of Jerusalem. This use of figured speech adds another dimension to this text, one which suggests that Sulpicius was not as friendly towards Jerome as has previously been thought.

Excavations at the priory of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, Clerkenwell, London by Barney Sloane and Gordon Malcolm

<i>Excavations at the priory of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, Clerkenwell, London</i> by Barney Sloane and Gordon Malcolm

Discovering a Military Order of the Crusades: The Hospital of St. Sampson of Constantinople

When the Crusaders captured Constantinople in 1204, they converted a Byzantine hospital, the xenon of St. Sampson, into a Western hospitale, a hostel for poor and/or sick pilgrims, which was soon organized as the basis of a military order, attracting numerous donations. Prominent among them was the property given in Douai (Flanders) by the Latin archbishop of Thessalonica, aiming to create a daughter institution that would serve the local poor. This house flourished throughout the thirteenth century, then faced serious problems that led to its incorporation into the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. When the Byzantines recaptured Constantinople in 1261, the brothers of St. Sampson fled to Corinth, where they built another hospital. This structure has been recently excavated, revealing a multi-purpose unit wherein people received medical care, while the house served the public in numerous (including commercial) ways.