The Hospitallers of Saint John: healing, fighting, inheriting the Temple

A merchants' hospital, before the crusades

Before the knights, there was a hospital; and before the hospital, merchants. In the last third of the 11th century, traders from Amalfi, the small maritime republic on the Gulf of Salerno, obtained from the Muslim masters of Jerusalem permission to maintain, a few steps from the Holy Sepulchre, a Latin monastery, Sainte-Marie-Latine, and near it a house where pilgrims from the West were received: those who arrived exhausted, ruined or sick, and those who died at the end of the road. A brother named Gerard was in charge of it when the crusaders took the city on 15 July 1099. The house was then neither an order nor a military body: it was a charitable hostel, dependent on the Benedictines, and its patron, according to William of Tyre, was Saint John the Almsgiver, a patriarch of Alexandria; the order itself would bear the name of Saint John the Baptist. The victors, who had learned what a clean bed was worth after a thousand leagues on foot, showered it with gifts; Godfrey of Bouillon granted it lands, and the lords who went back to Europe left it revenues in their own countries, in Provence, in Poitou, in Normandy, in Catalonia.