Capital, conflict, and Mediterranean frontiers : the mobilization of funds from the Order of St John’s European estates in early modernity

Abstract

The Order of St John was originally founded as a hospice-keeping institution in eleventh-century Syria. By the following century it metamorphosed into a Christian military unit to adjust to geopolitical evolutions which saw the Holy Land transformed into a frontier territory where Muslims and Christians clashed bracing the mantra of religious ideology. Keeping hospices and fighting Islam increased the financial demands on the Order, and consequently the reliance on its continental estates which the knights hospitallers systematically acquired throughout the first few centuries of their existence.