ABSTRACT
For understanding both the seven Ierosolimitani mentioned at Utrecht in 1122 and the seven xenodochia or ptochia belonging to the Jerusalem Hospital at Saint-Gilles, Asti, Pisa, Messina, Bari, Otranto and Taranto according to papal privileges from 1113 to 1135 (or 1138), it helps to bear in mind the following points: In the context of what today is called the First Crusade, ecclesiastical institutions were founded on important pilgrim routes and harbours in the West to support travellers to the Holy Land. These institutions were usually run by confraternities or canons and supervised by the local bishops. Some of them may have wanted to gain papal exemption and to be affiliated to prestigious institutions in Jerusalem such as the Holy Sepulchre or the Hospital. The Utrecht Ierosolimitani were a group or confraternity of pilgrims to Jerusalem. Neither the sources nor the circumstances substantiate the hypothesis that they were early Hospitallers. But there is evidence that the xenodochia at Saint-Gilles, Asti and Pisa, and possibly also the one at Messina, actually belonged to the Hospitallers, either already in 1113 or soon afterwards. This may be true even for the xenodochia at Bari, Otranto and Taranto, although they were not Hospitaller possessions in the later twelfth century or in the thirteenth. One explanation for this could be that the Hospitallers in Apulia, though not in Sicily, failed to secure the favour of King Roger II of Sicily (d. 1154) and lost what Pope Paschal II had tried to give them. The Hospital became a fully recognized, autonomous order in the legal sense only through Pope Anastasius IV in 1154, a privilege that deservedly caused an uproar in Jerusalem.
