ABSTRACT
The history of the Order of St John is closely linked to the history of the nobilities of Europe, the élite social groups that were at the centre of cultural life in European societies and of the confl icts which they experienced. In one sense this is selfevident, as the Order recruited the great majority of its membership from the nobilities of Europe and derived an important aspect of its identity from this élite social group. The two are also linked through their historiography, in that historians’ ideas concerning both the nobilities of Europe and the Order of St John during what is conventionally termed in Anglophone scholarship the early-modern period, have followed a similar trajectory, one that has shifted from characterizing their fortunes from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries as one of ‘decline’, to employ a basic terminology, to one of ‘triumph’. 1 For the nobilities of Europe this re-assessment has involved asserting, broadly speaking, their continued dominance, politically, economically, and socially. 2 As for the Order of St John, recent monographs have argued that far from experiencing a downward spiral into irrelevance and anachronism, as Elizabeth Schermerhorn described in her infl uential book on the subject almost a century ago, the Order continued to play an active role in Mediterranean politics and saw recruitment levels increase. 3 These historiographical parallels are suggestive of the links that existed between the fortunes of the Order of St John and the nobilities of Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and it is the purpose of this chapter to explore some of those links and to put forward some directions for research into the questions that emerge from the discussion.
