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The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 130-132



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Book Review

Der Malteserorden.
Wandel, Internationalität und soziale Vernetzung im 19. Jahrhundert


Der Malteserorden. Wandel, Internationalität und soziale Vernetzung im 19. Jahrhundert. By Carl Alexander Krethlow. [Europäische Hochschulschriften. European University Studies. Series III History and Allied Studies. Vol. 890.] (Bern: Peter Lang. 2001. Pp. 812. $85.95.)

The doctoral thesis under review here, which was accepted at the University of Bern in fact in 1997, has set itself the task of following in proper detail the destiny of the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta from the loss of Malta in 1798 up to the beginning of World War I, and its transformation from being a traditionally oriented order of knights, which toward the end of the eighteenth century had defined its raison d'être only with difficulty through its naval warfare against the Barbary corsairs, to a community highly esteemed by the European aristocracy which finally also took up charitable tasks. The primary question to present itself was that of the strategies for survival of this order of knights in the course of the nineteenth century. In addition, the author is interested in how the international character of this community, which had existed since its beginnings in the age of the crusades, articulated itself in the era of national states.

The study is based on the extensive archives of the Grand Master's Office in Rome as well as the surviving records of the Grand Priorate of Bohemia-Austria in Prague, and is also able to draw on the lists of members for the period from 1800 to 1918, which are not, it is true, quite complete (among others, the founder of the Sodality of the Rhenish-Westphalian Devotional Knights of Malta, August, Baron von Haxthausen, is missing), but they do provide material [End Page 130] on a total of 3591 members whom the author has evaluated prosopographically. In his account of the state of research, the author is quite scathing in his comments on the inadequate state of literature on the history of the Order, especially for the nineteenth century, but he has himself provided only an inadequate and in part faulty bibliography, and in particular he did not consider it necessary to examine and incorporate the findings of further studies on the topic that have appeared since 1997. Thus in this connection one should refer, among others, to the dissertation by Urs Buhlmann Malteserkreuz und Preussenadler. Ein Beitrag zur Gründungsgeschichte der Genossenschaft der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Malteser-Devotionsritter, which was brought out by the same publishers in 1999.

After sketching out the bases of the Order's conception of itself (with very interesting reflections on the nobility as a traditional and international elite) and of the prevailing conditions, thus also providing a brief outline of the history of the Order until 1798, the author expatiates on an attempt at understanding the history of the Order's mentality in which he examines the effects of the revolutionary events since 1789 on the Order from political, military, personal, and economic aspects. The Order, which, with the loss of Malta and of twenty-one of the twenty-five Grand Priorates, seemed to have lost the very basis of its existence, was forced to carry out a re-orientation in the formulation of its conceptions of value and objectives, especially as the Congress of Vienna was unable to agree on a return of the Maltese islands. Life within the Order, the members of the Order in their various ranks, whereby the honorary knights were soon by far to exceed in number the Knights of Justice as full members proper, and the question of recruiting are presented in detail. It is apparent here how much, on the one hand, the Order speculated on the high entrance fees for the honorary knights and experienced positive reactions and support through the award of its decorations from ruling heads of state and their spouses to meritorious servants of the order, on the other hand, however, European Catholic...

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