ABSTRACT
Our knowledge of the twelfth-century Jerusalem hospital has been broadened in recent years by the publication of an anonymous description dating from the 1180s.1 This has prompted several attempts at reinterpreting the celebrated plan of the Muristan area made by the Swiss architect Conrad Schick in the 1870s-90s and sent in a final version to the Palestine Exploration Fund in London just before his death in December 1901 (Figure 11.1).2 In two such attempts – by Benjamin Kedar and Alain Beltjens respectively – the hospital’s eleven wards are identified with a block of groin vaults which Schick recorded lying in the north-western corner of the Muristan, just south of the Holy Sepulchre.3 Beltjens also identifies a series of vaults along the southern side of the Muristan as remains of the xenodochium for women.4 Such interpretations, however, leave a number of important questions unanswered. For example, if all the vaulted buildings on Schick’s plan are to be interpreted as infirmaries, where was the conventual area in which the brothers (and sisters) lived? Where were their dormitory, refectory and chapter house? It should also be remembered that Schick’s plan shows only foundations and basements; the structures that these supported at ground or first-floor level, however, may have been quite different in form and function. Another puzzling question concerns the status of the small, former Greek Orthodox church of St John the Baptist from which the Order took its name. Is it likely that an international order of the Church of the stature of the Hospitallers would have retained so modest a structure as its principal
1 B.Z. Kedar, ‘A Twelfth-Century Description of the Jerusalem Hospital’, in MO, 2, pp. 3-26; A. Beltjens, ‘Le récit d’une journée au grand hôpital de Saint-Jean de Jérusalem sous le règne des derniers rois latins ayant résidé à Jérusalem ou le témoignage d’un clerc anonyme conservé dans le manuscrit Clm 4620 de Munich’, Bull. de la Soc. de l’Histoire et du Patrimoine de l’Ordre de Malte, 14 (2004), numéro spécial.
