Studies on the Hospitallers after 1306: Rhodes and the West (review)

Studies on the Hospitallers after 1306 is the fifth volume of Anthony Luttrell’s collected articles to be produced in the Variorum Collected Studies Series. Previous volumes include The Hospitallers in Cyprus, Rhodes, Greece and the West 1291–1440 (London, 1978); Latin Greece, the Hospitallers and the Crusades: 1291–1440 (London, 1982); The Hospitallers of Rhodes and Their Mediterranean World (Aldershot, UK, 1992); and The Hospitaller State on Rhodes and Its Western Provinces, 1306–1462 (Aldershot, UK, 1999).

The first two of these are unfortunately out of print and difficult to obtain; all are expensive. The research in all five is meticulous and superb, and one is compelled to wish that Luttrell would synthesize his lifetime of archival research into a single unified volume. There probably never has been, and may never be again, anyone with a comparable mastery of the Hospitaller archives. But unless and until such a work appears, these five volumes provide the best in-depth resource for the later history of the Hospitallers, and they are indispensable to scholars of the military orders.

The articles in Studies on the Hospitallers were published between 1998 and 2003. Eighteen are in English, four in Italian, and two in French. Some are relatively easy to obtain elsewhere, but many are not, and some are virtually impossible to get in North America unless one has access to the interlibrary loan offices of the best research libraries. The first two articles, taken together, provide an overview of the state of the art of Hospitaller studies in the decade or so before 2000, and although now slightly outdated, are still very useful and worth the price of the book by themselves (I: “The Military Orders: Some Definitions,” from 1998, and II: “The Military Orders: Further Definitions,” published in 2000).They are dense, considered, and erudite, and should be read slowly and reflectively by anyone interested in the subject.

The subjects of the remaining articles vary considerably, as is the case in collections of this sort. They include surveys of archival material (III: “The Hospitallers’ Early Written Records,” and XX: “The Hospitallers in Hungary before 1418: Problems and Sources”), discussions of finances (VI: “The Hospitallers and Their Florentine Bankers: 1306–1346,” VII: “The Finances of the Commander of the Hospital after 1306,” and XVI: “The Contribution to Rhodes of the Hospitaller Priory of Venice: 1410–1415), natural disasters (X: “Earthquakes in the Dodecanese: 1303–1513”), iconography (XVII: “Iconography and Historiography: the Italian Hospitallers before 1530”), and the papal inquest of 1373 (XI: “Gli Ospedalieri a Genova dall’ Inchiesta Papale del 1373” and XIX: “The Hospitaller Commanderies in Roussillon: 1373”).

One strength of this volume is the valuable transcriptions of texts appended to many selections. There is a short annotation from the Master’s register in 1437 in IX: “English Contributions to the Hospitaller Castle at Bodrum in Turkey: 1407–1437”; XIX: “The Hospitaller Commanderies in Rousillon: 1373” contains a seventeen-page inquest dealing with commanderies in the kingdom of Aragon, produced in 1373 for the papacy. An article dealing with a salacious sexual scandal in a Catalan convent of Hospitaller sisters, Alguaire, includes twelve-page deposition of the defense mounted by the male commander of the convent (XXII: “Margarida d’Erill Hospitaller of Alguaire: 1415–1456”); a priceless two-page transcription of a now-lost fragment of the Hospitallers’ archives on Rhodes is included in XXI: “The Hospitaller Commandery of the Morea: 1366.” A pair of short administrative documents from 1410 and 1413 respectively is included in XXIV: “L’oeuvre religieuse des Hospitaliers à Rhodes.”

The volume ends with a seven-page “Addenda et corridenda,” which includes both a supplementary bibliography of those of Luttrell’s writings between 1999 and 2006 that have not yet been published in a collection, and a set of additional citations for the previous twenty-four articles, which itself reads like a bibliographic overview of recent...