The Fifteenth-Century Hospital of Rhodes: Tradition and Innovation

The Hospitallers started building a great hospital on Rhodes in 1440 following a bequest by their late Master, Fr. Antoni Fluvià (1428–1437), and by 1489 it was sufficiently advanced in construction for an inscription to be mounted commemorating its completion. The building, which now houses the town's Archaeological Museum, is the best preserved conventual hospital of the Order even after its extensive restoration by the Italians between 1914 and 1919 when its new use as a museum was established. The other conventual hospitals are either missing or greatly changed. The crusading hospital of Jerusalem is known only from a nineteenth-century plan; ¹ the one at Acre is not securely identified, ² nor is the first hospital of Rhodes, while that of Cyprus is missing altogether. We have a sound enough idea of what the first hospital of the Order at Birgu on Malta was like when it was first built, ³ as well as of the great hospital built somewhat later at Valletta. ⁴