Offering shelter to pilgrims : patterns of land acquisitions among the Hospitaller and the Templar military orders

Abstract

Towasds the end of the seventeeth century, a knight Hospitaller undertook the enduring task to write a treatise about the commanderies of the Order of St. John. The author was the Grand Cross and Prior of Lombasdy Gio Maria Caravita and the title of the work was Trattato delle Commende ed Amministrazione.

The opening chapter of Gio Maria Caravita's treatise on the commandery is entitled Della Prima Grigine delle Commende e del lora Nome. No historical background to the origin of the commanderies is given. On the contrary, Caravita approaches the commanderies from a synchronic point of view defining the basic unit of the Order's organization as landed property being given out as a temporary benefice. This territorial cluster could consist of one or more of these units, hospices, churches, chapels, convents, units of land, livestock' and in some cases even a cemetery. That was what the term meant at the time Casavita was writing. He does not go into the evolutionasy process which the concept of commandery had undergone through the ages, although he makes occasional references to its history which he borrows from Giacomo Bosio's work. Caravita's primary concern was the set-up of the Hospitaller commandery as this emerged from the current statutes and the decisions taken on the matter by the Venerable Council.