Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

it one of the largest and most widespread religious orders (and one of the
richest international corporations) of its time. It was also given a number
of key fortresses in the lands of the crusader states of the Levant and soon
became, with its rival the Order of the Hospital, a key element of the defensive
system of those states as a whole.
The Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem grew to be a military
order in a completely different way. It began as a body of hospitallers
under the Augustinian Rule, attached to a hospital in Jerusalem founded by
merchants from Amalfi in Italy at some time after 1060. This hospital had
initially been placed under the patronage of St. John the Almoner, patron
saint of hospitallers, and subordinated to two Benedictine abbeys, one for
men and one for women, founded at the same time. Its services impressed
the crusaders who conquered Jerusalem in the First Crusade, and it was
erected into a separate (though still very minor) order in 1103, and soon
rededicated to the much greater saint, John the Baptist. Under the government
of its first master, the Blessed Gerard (who died in 1120), other privileges
and donations quickly followed, and the young order developed
along the same general lines as that of the Temple after 1130, with properties
and minor houses scattered throughout Latin Christendom. The order’s
first nobly born master, Raymond du Puy, composed the earliest rule
of the order, probably between 1145 and 1153. The rule incorporated not
only the primitive unwritten customs of the order, but certain elements of
both the Augustinian and (to a lesser extent) Benedictine Rules and certain
elements in common with (but not necessarily borrowed from) the Rule of
the Temple. Nevertheless, this rule made no mention of the knights who in
the meantime had certainly come to form, with the lay hospitallers and
their priestly chaplains, one of the distinct classes into which the membership
of the order was divided.
How the Order of the Hospital came to include knights has indeed remained
something of a mystery. Recent arguments, however, contend, on
the basis of the small amount of evidence that has survived, that the order
began to take in knights as brethren almost immediately after the election
of Raymond du Puy to the mastership in 1123, that their admission was
probably the result of a desire on the part of Raymond to recruit from the
same pool as the Templars (not yet organized as an order), and that these
knights from the start carried out military duties similar to those undertaken
by the Templars. Certainly the order had been given major castles to
defend by the time the statutes were written (Bethgibelin in 1136; Krak de
Chevaliers, Bochee, Lacu, and Felicium in 1144), and soon rivaled the Templars
in the number and importance of their military possessions in the
Holy Land. Nevertheless, in contrast to that of their rivals of the Temple,
the role of the knights in the Order of the Hospital was for a long time con-
Orders of Knighthood, Religious 371