The Hospitaller State on Rhodes and Its Western Provinces, 1306-1462 (review)

Anthony Luttrell. The Hospitaller State on Rhodes and Its Western Provinces, 1306-1462. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Variorum, 1999. x + 340 pp. $105.95 (0-860-78-796-6).

Anthony Luttrell has assembled a collection of nineteen of his articles, originally published separately, concerning the Knights of Saint John (the Hospitallers) from 1306 to 1462—years when the Knights used the island of Rhodes as their center of operations. Only one of these articles, "The Hospitallers' Medical Tradition, 1291-1530" (previously published in 1994), discusses medicine.

With the fall of Acre in 1291, the Knights suffered a major setback: they lost their foothold on the Palestinian coast, and Western Europeans tended to blame them and the rival military order, the Templars, for Christianity's failure to resist resurgent Islam. Luttrell's first two articles explain how the Hospitallers managed to take control of Rhodes before 1312 by cooperating with Genoa and winning the support of Pope Clement V. As the Knights were conquering this new territory, they also managed to restore their image among Latin monarchs and prelates and thereby avoided the catastrophe that befell the Templars at the hands of Philip IV and Pope Clement. Luttrell emphasizes that Rhodes was ideal for the Hospitallers. By building up their own fleet and allying with Genoa or Venice, the Knights were able to resist the Ottoman Turks. From this strategically located island, they could also enforce the papacy's blockade of Islamic ports.

Luttrell's sole essay on medical history begins before 1306 with an account of the Knights' original hospital in Jerusalem (1099) and describes their successor hospitals at Acre, Cyprus, Rhodes, and finally Malta. In each of these locations, the Order quickly reestablished its renowned medical services, which included care provided by trained physicians and surgeons. Luttrell suggests that the prime reason for the Knights' interest in sustaining their hospital was to promote goodwill in the West—and yet, as he himself points out, during their eight-year exile following the Turkish conquest of Rhodes (1522) the Hospitallers continued to offer medical care for the needy, even briefly on the beaches near Naples, before they finally secured a permanent home on Malta (1530). From Luttrell's own narrative, then, it would seem that at least some sincere Hospitallers saw their charitable tradition as an essential element of their vocation, and not simply as a tool to win support from European leaders.

Luttrell strongly rejects any link between the Jerusalem hospital's highly medicalized treatment of the sick and subsequent developments in Western hospitals. In doing so, however, he ignores overwhelming evidence that many thirteenth-century hospices in Italy and France adopted rules for assisting their guests and patients that were clearly patterned on the regulations governing the care of the sick in the Jerusalem hospital.

A greater problem with Luttrell's medical article, however, is its failure to discuss a newly discovered description of the Jerusalem hospital dating from the 1170s. In 1989 an Austrian researcher, Berthold Waldstein-Wartenberg, reported that a manuscript in the Bavarian State Library contained a text with new information regarding the Knights' hospital. More recently, Benjamin Kedar published this anonymous document. In his introduction, Kedar stressed that it clearly refers to the Jerusalem hospital and includes a fascinating description of patient wards and of mobile clinics that the Knights maintained to assist warriors wounded in battle. This text also reveals that the Knights accepted Moslem and Jewish patients. Luttrell knew about this discovery, but apparently never bothered to read the text, since he states that it did not refer to the Jerusalem hospital—despite several explicit references in this anonymous document to the Jerusalem institution.

Given the nature of this collection, it is understandable that Luttrell avoided making any generalizations about Hospitaller history from 1306 to 1462. Nevertheless, it is disappointing that he never addressed the...