The origins of the Hospital in Jerusalem goes back to around 600 AD, when Abbot Probus of Ravenna was commissioned by Pope Gregory the Great to build a hospital in Jerusalem to treat and care for Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. This hospice was destroyed fourteen years later when Jerusalem fell to the Persian – Jewish armies: The Christian population was slaughtered, and their churches and monasteries destroyed. Rebuilt after the Byzantine reconquest, it was enlarged by Charlemagne. In 1009, Fatimid caliph Al Hakim destroyed the hostel again and a large number of other buildings in Jerusalem. In 1048, the Fatimid Caliph Al-Mustansir Billah gave permission to merchants from the Republic of Amalfi to rebuild a hospital in Jerusalem on the site of the monastery of St John the Baptist. The hospital was run under the auspices of the Benedictines monks of the Latin Church of Santa Maria Latina in Jerusalem. Throughout the new persecutions against the Christians after the conquest of Jerusalem by the Seljuk Turks in 1078, the Hospital continued to operate.
The community which ran the hospital became independent during the First Crusade in around 1099, under the leadership of a monk called Gerard. After Jerusalem was taken by the First Crusade, Gerard adopted the policy of receiving all needy patients, irrespective of religion. He organized the Fratres Hospitalarii into a regularly constituted Religious Order under the protection of saint John the Baptist. The members of the Order became known as Knights of St. John or Hospitallers. The formal establishment of the Knights Hospitallers under Brother Gerard was confirmed by the Papal bull Pie postulatio voluntatis of Pope Paschal II in February 1113. All the Knights were religious, bound by the three monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
By then, the Hospital was an already wealthy and powerful organization within the kingdom of Jerusalem, and Gerard expanded its operations far beyond the limits of the city, establishing daughter hospitals at Bari, Otranto, Taranto, Messina, Pisa, Asti and Saint-Gilles, placed strategically along the pilgrim route to Jerusalem.
It was his successor, Grand Master Raymond du Puy (1083-1060), who militarized the Order. He organized the Order into three classes: To the nobles he assigned the profession of arms, for the protection of pilgrims; the ecclesiastics were to exercise the religious functions; the lay-brothers were to take care of the pilgrims and the sick. The military role of the Hospitallers really began in 1137 when Foulques I, king of Jerusalem, transferred possession of the castle of Bath-Gibelin in the east of Gaza to the Order.
From then on, the Order appears in all the wars that the armies of the kingdom of Jerusalem fights against the Saracens. Under siege, the Kingdom of Jerusalem found it increasingly difficult to stand against its enemies. Following the example of the Templars, Raymond du Puy then developed a system of protection for the pilgrims by providing them with security in their travels to the Holy Places. Little by little, knights and men of arms were hired and participated in the defense of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
-The artist’s website: http://www.markstaceyart.co.uk/
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