The Hospitallers’ historical activities : 1291-1400

Abstract

During the fourteenth century, while the Hospitallers were colonizing and defending Rhodes, there was (apparently) no attempt to produce a proper chronicle of the Order's history. Many brethren of the Hospital came from petty noble, knightly or urban patrician families in which, like the rest of their class, they normally received little formal education; probably a good many were unable to read or write. They were destined for a military life or for the administration of the Hospital's numerous European estates, and even the more outstanding brethren, some of whom served as royal or papal captains and counsellors, were not normally intellectuals. Yet the gibes of extremists like Marsiglio of Padua, who wrote that in the Hospital and other such Orders "both literate and illiterate persons are accepted indiscriminately", were not really justified. The Hospital did, in fact, contain educated men with literary and historical interests; 'there were, in addition to the ordinary chaplains of fratres presbiteri, a number of university trained brethren. Yet, although the Hospitallers preserved their records with care and at least one fourteenth-century Master of the Order was a great patron of historical compilations, there was no significant development of a historiographical tradition.