ABSTRACT
Even after the loss of Jerusalem in 1187 and its oldest and largest hospital there, the Order of St John of Jerusalem continued to fulfi l its charitable mission by creating new hospitals in each of the subsequent locations it established itself in, fi rst in Acre, then in Cyprus, Rhodes, and fi nally in Malta. 1 The number of hospitals for the sick in the Order’s provincial holdings outside of the East, however, remains the source of some debate. In some cases it has been taken for granted that the Order built and maintained these institutions and that they would have been a fundamental aspect of Hospitaller activity in all of the Order’s numerous properties throughout Europe, which extended as far west as Ireland. 2 However, it is diffi cult to identify large hospitals operated by the Order aside from their central convent (the few exceptions being institutions in large urban centres like Toulouse or Genoa), and this has, conversely, led to the dismissal of the possibility of a charitable function in the Knights’ provincial holdings. Without a discernible charitable function the Order’s western houses are seen to have then functioned almost exclusively as rent collecting properties, maintained only to raise funds, which were then sent to the headquarters of the Order. However, perhaps neither of these two descriptions – that the Order maintained a Hospitaller function throughout western Europe, or that the Order provided these services only at its central convent – is wholly accurate. It is possible that their common point of comparison, the nature and activities of the Order in its western houses versus what it was doing in the East, confuses the issue. The function of the western houses has in some ways been set against the organization and activities of the Order’s earliest institutions in Palestine and weighed according to its similarities to this ‘right’ original form. In other words, the fi rst Hospitallers in Jerusalem defi ned the function of the Order, namely that they would care for the sick and the poor. Houses in western Europe that seem not to have provided these services have consequently been regarded as failed opportunities for the Order to mimic its activities in the East, their actual function remaining largely unexplored.
