ABSTRACT
In his Die Vassal/en Christi, published in 1988, Berthold Waldstein-Wartenberg drew attention to an unknown description, extant in a single Munich manuscript, of charitable activities performed in the Jerusalem hospital. An examination of the Munich text leaves no doubt that it was indeed the Hospitallers' hospital in Jerusalem that was being dealt with. Waldstein-Wartenberg was therefore right to date the text before the fall of Jerusalem in 1187. Theoderich- who according to Robert Huygens's redating probably visited Jerusalem in 1169- writes that he saw in the palatium more than 1000 beds. The Jerusalem hospital lagged significantly behind its counterparts - and probable models - in the Muslim and Byzantine spheres. In the twelfth century, field hospitals seem to have been a rarity. The twelfth century also knew much lower ratios: at the hospital of the Pantocrator monastery in Constantinople, which John Comnenus founded in 1136, thirty-six attendants served fifty sick, a ratio of 1.4 patients per attendant!
