Epilogue [The struggle for supremacy : the Mediterranean world in 1453 and beyond]

Abstract

After more than 900 years of existence, the Hospitaller Order of St John is still very much alive, with more than 13,500 Knights and Dames active in charity worldwide of which only a mere 100 in Malta itself. This book will have taken you from the humble beginnings, when it started of as a hospitaller initiative of Amalfitan traders in Jerusalem in c. 1054 to serve as a charitable institution for Christian pilgrims coming from all over Europe and locals, to phases of militarisation when politically depending on the Latin East. The articles in this book will have informed you about the period the Hospitallers, together with the newly formed Order of the Temple and much later the Teutonic Order, formed the standing army of Western Christian powers in the Holy Land, adding to their identity new and perhaps confusing aspects of nursing and soldiering. The journey continues, after the Holy Land was lost in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, the Hospitallers gained territorial and political sovereignty in Rhodes and Malta. During these ‘island state’ periods, the Hospitallers did not forget the initial reason for their existence, charity. It planted the seed of carrying out charity under cover of arms, at land and sea, extending it to policing the Mediterranean to protect Christendom against Muslim and Ottoman expansionism, to guard Christian shipping and to free Christian slaves. The Hospitallers went about their manner of protecting Christianity even long after mainland Europe deemed this protection unnecessary, out of date and in conflict with their international trade policies. This Epilogue will treat the modern period of the Hospitaller Order, after Napoleon Bonaparte temporarily stalled the organisation when he evicted the Hospitallers from Malta in 1798. After re-grouping and contemplating on their situation, the Order turned full circle to its core business of being global hospitallers and a charitable institution, reaching out far and wide. While this article will take the reader to the modern period, this paper will first trace the development of the Hospitaller chivalric character over the centuries, tracing the transformation of chivalry over the centuries into the modern times. At some point, examples of Hospitaller chivalry and charity are quoted, based on the corpus of inscribed texts at St John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta, which can be regarded as samples of chivalry and charity in context.