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233 chapter ten Aspects of Hospitaller and Templar Memory jonathan riley-smith In the 1290s Frà William of Santo Stefano, the first serious historian of the Hospital of St. John, who wrote what is still the accepted account of its beginnings, was scathing about the myth-makers who had been at work: ‘‘Our order began in the manner I have found in histories which are received and believed as authoritative by all men. It is said that there was a more ancient beginning . . . but that is not to be found in any authoritative source. . . . Now let us leave vanity and hold to the truth, for glorifying in lies is displeasing to God.’’∞ William was not, of course, taking into account the way visions of the past can be transmuted by emotional forces surfacing in times of crisis. I wish to draw attention to the way memory was distorted by three traumatic events. Echoes of the first, an internal dispute about the direction the Hospital of St. John was taking in the twelfth century, were to be heard for hundreds of years. The second, the loss of Jerusalem in 1187, may have had the effect of relocating in the minds of many of the Templars the scene of their foundation. The third, the catastrophic situation in which the Templars found themselves in the early fourteenth century, gave rise to speculation about the behavior of an earlier grand master. The Militarization of the Hospital Grants recorded in two charters dated 17 January 1126 were witnessed by men encamped with a Christian army that was advancing, or was just about to advance, into territory controlled by Muslim Damascus, because the main engagement was fought eight days later.≤ The presence among these witnesses of six Hospitallers, one of whom was a brother with the 234 institutional memory and community identity title of Hospitalis constabularius,≥ suggests that the Hospital of St. John, which had been established to care for poor pilgrims when they were ill, was making a contribution to Christian warfare only six years after the foundation of the Temple; not merely in a policing or protective capacity but as an element in an invasion force. The order was given its first major castle ten years later,∂ and its growing military reputation must have begun to attract richer nobles, who appear in its ranks from the 1140s.∑ Although no reference to a brother knight can be found before a doubtful one in 1148,∏ the knights must have been quite numerous by the 1160s, because a report sent to Rome suggests that they were already occupying many of the major posts in the order,π and because the design of the castle of Belvoir, begun at about that time, allowed for a large conventual enclosure.∫ The near silence enveloping the growth in the order of a military wing, which reigned for forty years, masked the controversial nature of this development. In the 1160s the internal tensions, which took more than a decade to resolve, could no longer be suppressed. They were generated by unease about the relationship between nursing and warfare and by worry about resources, since the care of the sick on the scale felt to be appropriate competed with the growing costs of war. They were fueled by the way the master, Gilbert of Assailly, who energetically pursued militarization, had plunged the order into near bankruptcy.Ω Gilbert, who succumbed to what seems to have been a clinical depression, resigned the mastership in 1171 and retired to a cave to live as a hermit. In the chaos that followed, compounded by Gilbert’s mood swings, most of the brothers in the central convent made demands that were to be confirmed by Pope Alexander III, including the insistence that the conventual chapter give consent to the acquisition of frontier castles and to any important agreements made on the order’s behalf.∞≠ The views of different factions were reflected in two papal letters of the late 1170s, which must have echoed opinions that had been transmitted to the apostolic see by the parties concerned. In Piam admodum Pope Alexander stated that the Hospitallers’ prime obligation was to care for the poor and that they should not be diverted into military enterprises except on very special occasions, which he believed had already been defined before 1160 as those on which the relic of the True Cross was carried with the Christian army, and then only if the order’s contribution was seen to be [3...

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