Hospital knight duty
- Richard Crooks
- Oct 7
- 6 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
I wasn’t very good at history at school, maybe because the way it was taught didn’t interest me.
Perhaps because he’s my namesake, I remember Richard I (the Lionheart). He was an English king and knight, and went off on a crusade with other English men to win back Jerusalem from Saladin and his Muslim hordes. Good English pilgrims would then once more be safe to travel to the Holy Land. I even constructed and painted an Airfix-like model of my hero, which was put on the bookcase in my bedroom. Great stuff. Except that most of what I was taught or remember, isn’t strictly accurate.
Although Richard was born in Oxford, his parents (Henry II and Eleanour of Aquitaine) were both French. And he probably spoke French more than English. His French nickname was ‘Cœur de Lion’. The crusades, including the third one that he helped lead, were generally western-European affairs of mainly French, Southern Normans, German, and English. Supported by the Republican navies of Venice, Pisa and Genoa, of-course. They were organised by the Roman Pope, who promised favours in the afterlife (‘indulgences’) to those who ‘took the cross’. The pilgrims to be protected were Christians of all nationalities.
Saladin was a Sunni Muslim, but actually a Kurdish commander in the Seljuk empire. The Ayyubid empire/dynasty he annexed/founded eventually stretched from Syria, through Egypt and down through western Arabia along the Red Sea coast.
I never got taught any of this. Or I wasn't paying attention. I also don’t remember learning about what Christian pilgrims did before the Crusades. In fact, Christians had always made pilgrimages to the Holy Land. As early as the 603 AD (i.e., before Muhammed had received his visit from Gabriel), Pope Gregory I had commissioned a hospital to be built in Jerusalem, to care for and treat pilgrims. We should probably think of this establishment more as a lodging or hospice. Many pilgrims would have probably have been hungry and exhausted after such long and dangerous travels. And, in case the travellers were bored, emperor Charlemagne commissioned construction of an adjoining library, in 800 AD.
Now rested, fed-and-watered, and well-read, the religious tourists just needed a local travel agent to take them around the famous sites. To this end, Italian merchants from Amalfi came to the rescue. They got permission from the ruling Shia Fatimid empire/dynasty, to build a monastery, plus two more hospitals. The Benedictine monks who moved in, were to be the pilgrims’ tour-guides.
One of the two hospitals (built in the 1060s, at around the time of the Norman Conquest of England), was named the Hospital of St John.
Soon, Shia Muslim Fatimid tolerance to Christians seemed to diminish, and Christians were increasingly being persecuted. This was the main reason why the catholic Pope Urban II (born Odo of Chatillon, in Champagne) commissioned the First Crusade. Jerusalem was captured on July 15, 1099. After founding the ’crusader states’, and seeing off a Fatimid counter-attack, most of the crusaders felt they had done their duty and returned home.
Godfrey of Bouillon was crowned the first King of Jerusalem, and he remained to rule with a small number of knights and foot-soldiers. He gave an endowment to the Hospital of St John, which was now well-known and respected. The Pope then formed the monks of the hospital into a separate order, called the Hospitaller Order.
An infirmary was added, meaning it would now be more recognisable as a modern, charitable hospital.
Although the hospital may have hired knights and foot soldiers as security guards, it soon expanded its remit to provide local armed escorts for pilgrims. Many visiting or serving knights bequeathed their horses and weapons to the hospital, and so the organisation gradually became militaristic. They may have modelled themselves on the Knights Templar, that had been founded in 1120.
Eventually the Knights Hospitaller were recognised by the Pope in 1130 with their own coat of arms; a plain silver cross on a field of red. Their other symbol was an eight-pointed cross.
Fast forward to that chap Saladin, who I had heard of. He captured the city of Jerusalem in 1187. Nevertheless, the Kingdom of Jerusalem remained and was administered from elsewhere. But that state eventually fell in 1291.
The Knights Hospitaller left and sought refuge in the (French) Kingdom of Cyprus, but needed a new home. They decided on Rhodes and eventually took it by force from the Eastern Roman Empire, along with Halicarnassus (now Bodrum) and Kastellorizo (the most easterly Greek Island that lies of Kas, and which Missy Bear could not visit in her Turkish spring tour).
The Knights organised themselves into eight ‘langues’ or tongues, depending on the mother country of the knights. Each had its own lodge and was headed by a bailiff. They were now known as the Knights of Rhodes.
On a previous sailing charter in 2019, with Tony and Rachelle, we visited the Street of the Knights to see these lodges. The English one was relatively small, I seem to remember. We also visited the Knights’ headquarters – the impressive Palace of the Grandmaster.
The Knights were constantly at threat from at first the angry Eastern Romans, and then by Barbary Pirates (or Ottoman Corsairs from north Africa). And finally by Ottoman Turks from mainland Asia Minor/Anatolia. One of those pirates was Barbarossa, who’s brother had been captured by the Knights and imprisoned in Bodrum Castle. As I wrote in a blog from Season 2:
“Rhodes was key to controlling north-south trade between Constantinople and its Egyptian bread basket. And the pesky Knights had been pirating that sea-borne trade. When Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent captured Rhodes in 1522, thus evicting the Knights Hospitalier (who escaped to Malta), he made Barbarossa the island’s Governor.”
When the Knights fled to Malta and established themselves there, they didn’t use their first coat of arms, but the eight-pointed star, which we all know as the Maltese Cross.
You may be wondering why I chose to write a blog about the Knights Hospitaller. It is actually more unusual that I haven’t written about them. They had control of Missy Bear’s local cruising area for over 200 years. And the Knights managed hospitals far across the Aegean, from Corinth, and Negroponte (now called Chalcis, opposite Evia island) in the west, to Constantinople in the east.
As well as all the castles they helped build to secure the Holy Land, you now learned that they constructed castles in Cyprus, Kastellorizo, Rhodes, and Halki. They also left fine ruins on many of the other Dodecanese islands that Missy Bear is familiar with, such as:
· Tilos (1309–1470);
· Symi (1309–1522);
· Leros (1309–1522);
· Kalymnos (1310–1522);
· Nisyros (1315–1522); and
· Kos (1337–1523)
It was while standing on top of one of these medieval bastions on the island of Halki, with Al and Judith off Money Penny, and gazing across the sea to Rhodes, that I decided to blog. The weather was fine, the panoramic view was amazing, but it had been a long drive and then a long, steep walk to get here. Why build a castle here?
Now, of course, most of the sites that the Knights selected for their castles were already sites occupied by previous occupiers, notable the acropolises of ancient Greek-speakers, and then the Eastern Romans (Byzantines). These sites were closer to the gods and so maybe had sacred significance. There was already building material available. At Halki, for example, the polygonal and isodomic retaining walls are founded directly on the bedrock, and date from the fourth century BC. Inscriptions and architectural members built into the walls of - now abandoned - houses and churches of the main village (chorio) lower down the hill, date from Classical and Hellenistic times. On one terrace, two rock-cut benches have the inscription ‘Aios EkaTins’ meaning ‘of Zeus of Hekate’.
But those same vantages offered early medieval warning systems: for the Knights spotting Ottoman navies or Barbary pirates; or subsequently for the Ottomans spotting Venetiuan navies.
During the Hospitaller period (1309-1522), the Grand Master and engineer was Pierre d'Aubusson (1479-1503). He was from the ‘langue d’ Auvergne’, and he oversaw extensive building works around the castle. His own coat of arms is quartered with those the Knights.
It was this Grand Master who surrendered to the Ottoman Turks in 1522.
Then Halki castle was used as an observation post, and the chorio recovered economically. But with the eradication of piracy in 1830, the inhabitants gradually abandoned Chorio to establish a new settlement at the harbour of Emporeios, where Missy Bear was moored-up.
If you gazed back inland from the cockpit, you could see the castle perched high up like an eyrie, and think about how it came to be: a string of connections linking the establishment of an old hostel in Jerusalem to some French princes and nobles keen to avoid purgotary.
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