Abstract
For the last eight years we have had no supplies at all from the kingdom of Jerusalem… We have had to endure immense and unreasonable expenses for many years with respect to the city of Acre, on account of the attacks of the perfidious sultan of Egypt, and we were forced to meet double — even more than double — the costs at the time of his last assault. These were so much the greater because the noble city of Antioch was in danger of being taken. All the Muslim marches and frontiers are turned on our castles of Crac des Chevaliers and Margat, because the sultan is focusing his attention on them and threatens them greatly. And you ought not to doubt that we are depressed by our sorrows and anxieties, since our present records show that more than 10,000 men are provided for by our Order in this region, over and above the 300 brothers of our Order who are resident. We do not see how we can meet the costs, unless God has mercy on us, especially because the sultan has said that he will not make truces and our castles are on a war footing. And those of you who have been with us in the Levant know well that we cannot be supplied from here, particularly because the Cilician plain, from which we have been accustomed to draw provisions, has been deserted through drought and fear of the sultan.1
This cri-de-coeur from Master Hugh Revel in 1268 underlines the fact that his Order’s estates in the Latin East were never sufficient for its support. Its commitments imposed a constant strain on its resources, a strain that contemporaries found hard to understand. Seeing only a rich and powerful institution, they confused its assets with liquidity.2 And they were not fully aware of its difficulties in the East, which were compounded by the absence of cultivators, the vagaries of climate, the prevalence of pestilence and earthquakes, and the small area of land left in Christian hands after 1187.3 The Order was reported to be in financial difficulties in 1170, 1247, 1255, 1259, 1268, 1301, 1306 and 1310.4
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Notes
Bronstein, The Hospitallers, pp. 65–6, 142; Jean-Bernard de Vaivre, ‘Les six premiers prieurs d’Auvergne de l’ordre des Hospitaliers de Saint-Jean de Jérusalem’, Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1997), pp. 969–73; Francesco Tommasi, ‘L’ordinamento geografico-amministrativo dell’Ospedale in Italia (secc. XII–XIV)’, in Religiones militares, ed. Anthony Luttrell and Francesco Tommasi (Città di Castello, 2008), pp. 73–5, 102, 104.
Esg. §55; Cart Hosp 3:164, no. 3279. Cf. Alan Forey, ‘The Military Orders and Holy War against Christians in the Thirteenth Century’, English Historical Review 104 (1989), pp. 1–24.
For what follows, see Jonathan Riley-Smith, ‘The Origins of the Commandery in the Temple and the Hospital’, in La Commanderie. Institution des ordres militaires dans l’Occident médiéval, ed. Anthony Luttrell and Léon Pressouyre (Paris, 2002), pp. 9–18.
Jean-Loup Lemaître, Prieurs et prieurés dans l’occident médiéval (Geneva, 1987), passim.
Tommasi, ‘L’ordinamento’, pp. 97–9. Luttrell (‘The Earliest Hospitallers’, pp. 44–5) has argued quite convincingly that of the seven xenodochia in the West listed in the papal privilege Pie postulatio voluntatis of 1113, only two, those of St Gilles and Messina, were at that time in Hospitaller hands and that the others may have constituted a wish list. For St Gilles, see Cart Hosp 1:25, no. 24. For a commander serving at St Gilles under the prior from the late 1150s, see Cartulaire du prieuré de Saint-Gilles, ed. Daniel Le Blévec and Alain Venturini (Paris, 1997), pp. xx–xxii, 198; Cartulaire de Trinquetaille, pp. 90–1. See also Hiestand, ‘Die Anfänge’, pp. 52–3; Luttrell, ‘The Earliest Hospitallers’, p. 50.
Cart Hosp 1:185, no. 246; Luttrell, ‘The Hospitaller Province of Alamania to 1428’, Ordines militares, ed. Zenon Novak (Torun, 1995), p. 23.
Of the commanderies in England in 1338, 13 were held by knights, 16 by sergeants and 7 by chaplains. Anton Mifsud, Knights Hospitallers of the Venerable Tongue of England in Malta (Valletta, 1914), p. 77.
See 1294 §1; Gregory O’Malley, The Knights Hospitaller of the English Langue 1460–1565 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 226–8.
See Jonathan Riley-Smith, ‘King Henry II, Patriarch Heraclius and the English Templars and Hospitallers’, ‘Come l’orco della fiaba’. Studi per Franco Cardini, ed. Marina Montesano (Florence, 2010), pp. 1–7. The Anglo-Norman Riwle could have been composed in connection with that important event. The Hospitallers’ Riwle, pp. xlvii–viii.
Gervase of Canterbury 1:325; Herbert of Bosham in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. James Robertson and Joseph Sheppard, 7 vols (London, 1875–85), 3:514. One eyewitness of the embassy on its visit to England thought its display wildly extravagant. Ralph Niger, De re militari, pp. 186–7.
Gesta Regis Henrici secundi, 1:335–6; Roger of Howden 2:299–300; Ralph of Diceto 2:32–3; Gerald of Wales 5:360–1; 8:203 (in which Gerald wrongly gives the location of the meeting as Winchester); Roger of Wendover 2:416. See The Great Roll of the Pipe for…AD 1184–1185, ed. Pipe Roll Society (London, 1913), p. 45, according to which King Henry granted the patriarch money from the rents of the Honour of Boulogne. For his use of this source in ‘crusade’ funding, see Mayer, ‘Henry II’, p. 726.
Records of the Templars in England in the Twelfth Century, ed. Beatrice A. Lees (London, 1935), pp. lvi–vii. The inscription on the church was destroyed by workmen in 1695.
Jochen Burgtorf, ‘A Mediterranean Career in the Late Thirteenth Century: The Hospitaller Grand Commander Boniface of Calamandrana’, HME, pp. 73–85. See also rubric to Cart Hosp 3:665, no. 4267; The Templar of Tyre, p. 192; Cart Hosp 3:519, no. 4007. For the Hospital and Aragon, see Anthony Luttrell, ‘The Aragonese Crown and the Knights Hospitallers of Rhodes’, English Historical Review 76 (1961), p. 4.
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© 2012 Jonathan Riley-Smith
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Riley-Smith, J. (2012). Provincial Government and the Estate in Europe. In: The Knights Hospitaller in the Levant, c.1070–1309. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137264756_14
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