ABSTRACT
When the Hospitallers moved their Convent or headquarters to Cyprus after the loss of Acre and the final collapse of Latin Syria in 1291 they took with them a medical tradition which had earlier been transferred to Acre following the fall of Jerusalem in 1187. The Order of St John had grown out of a hospice in Jerusalem, and its Rule said nothing of military activities or of knighthood or nobility. It had gradually become a predominantly military institution, but even when the poor and sick were no longer of paramount concern the maintenance of its medical and charitable tradition was still of spiritual and moral significance, especially for opinion in the West. This divergence between declining tradition and active practice resulted in ambiguities. Many of the medical, liturgical and other regulations concerning hospital matters contained in the Order's statutes were applicable only in the main conventual hospital, while there was considerable terminological confusion between the poor, the sick and the sick poor; between pilgrims and other travellers; between charity and hospitality; and between medical hospitals, various types of hospice and the infirmaria fratrum reserved for the Hospitaller brethren. There was also a distinction between donats, who were members of the Hospital and under obedience to it, and those pensioners who could purchase or contract for board and lodging in retirement and old age. 1 The Hospitallers' original concern, reflected in their Rule, was with the poor, an involvement which was directed 65increasingly to those poor or pilgrims who became ill. This expressed a contemporary urge to give practical help to the suffering as an end in itself rather than as a means through which the agent of the good works might hope to secure salvation. 2
