The Military Orders Volume II

Welfare and Warfare

Helen Nicholson, Helen Nicholson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351542555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Nearly nine centuries after their first appearance, caring for pilgrims in hospices and protecting them from attack on the road, Military Orders continue to play a variety of social and charitable roles today. This collection of thirty-three papers from the second international conference on the Military Orders, contributed by scholars from Europe, the Middle East and the United States, reflects a variety of concerns, but the focus is very much on the beginnings of the Military Orders and their heyday at the time of the Crusades.The subject matter reflects the Military Ordersa (TM) wide-ranging activities, dealing with topics such as medieval hospital care, crusading in the Middle East, warfare in Lithuania, piracy in the Mediterranean, castles in Bohemia, the Reformation in Switzerland and 17th-century European diplomacy. This volume complements the Proceedings of the very successful first conference, The Military Orders: Fighting for the Faith and Caring for the Sick, edited by Malcolm Barber (1994) and now out of print.

Part I
Welfare

1
A Twelfth-Century Description of the Jerusalem Hospital

Benjamin Z. Kedar

In his Die Vassal/en Christi, published in 1988, Berthold Waldstein-Wartenberg drew attention to an unknown description, extant in a single Munich manuscript, of charitable activities performed in the Jerusalem hospital. Without specifying his reasons, Waldstein-Wartenberg presented this description as the work of an anonymous German monk who visited Jerusalem before 1187. He went on to utilize it in his discussion of the Hospitallers' care of the sick and provision for foundlings, but unfortunately chose to dispense with references to specific passages of the quite long text.¹ Moreover, a comparison of his presentation with the manuscript suggests that his readings must have been in some crucial cases faulty. Yet such flaws do not detract from the importance of Waldstein-Wartenberg's discovery, one of the most exciting that have been made in crusade studies in recent years.

It is symptomatic of the communications barriers in our profession that so significant a discovery- made by a scholar who did not publish in mainstream journals- has been virtually overlooked: suffice it to mention that Waldstein Wartenberg's book has not been listed in the Bulletin of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. ² To the best of my knowledge, the Munich text (though not Waldstein-Wartenberg's utilization of it) has been alluded to in current research only once, and then only briefly. In his paper on the Hospitallers' medical tradition, Anthony Luttrell mentioned a Latin treatise dealing with hospitals, doctors and patients that is extant in a Munich manuscript, observing that 'nothing in it indicated that it was describing the Hospitallers' hospital. '³

An examination of the Munich text leaves no doubt that it was indeed the Hospitallers' hospital in Jerusalem that was being dealt with. Early in his treatise the anonymous author reveals that it is the 'hospitale beati Iohannis' he is about to extol;⁴ later he states that he has been describing the care conferred on sick pilgrims 'in hospitali sancti Iohannis apud Ierosolimam'. ⁵ Elsewhere he observes that the brothers of the hospital are active 'non solum in lerosolima', and immediately afterwards he alludes to the 'hospitale in Ierusalem' as their main establishment.⁶ Waldstein-Wartenberg was therefore right to date the text before the fall of Jerusalem in 1187.⁷ On account of similarities between the text and the Hospitaller statutes of 1182 one is tempted to date the text between 1182 and 1187; but of course it is possible that the statutes merely codified prevailing practices. In any case, the Munich text presents a description of the Jerusalem hospital, possibly in the 1180s, by an eyewitness who tells us that he stayed in it for some time. ⁸

Who was this eyewitness? Waldstein-Wartenberg consistently referred to him as a German monk, but did not give his reasons for doing so. Possibly it was the anonymous writer's mention of talenta and solidi that led Waldstein—Wartenberg to consider him a German, as the talent was a unit of account then current in Germany.⁹ Yet this is not conclusive, since it is possible that our author, who affects a linguistic purity, chose to speak of talenta, which are attested in classical literature, rather than of bezants, which he may have considered a neologism. His frequent biblical citations, as well as his quotations from Ovid and Horace, ¹⁰ suggest that he was a cleric. And a cleric of considerable learning, for his vocabulary is remarkably rich: he writes, for instance, that the brother who supervises the care of the sick is called 'quasi anthonomasice hospitalarius'; the sick women have been assigned a palace which, like that of the sick men, is 'amfractuose pervicos distinctum'. ¹¹

Unfortunately, the anonymous author did not find his match in the scribe whose copy of the treatise has come down to us. Carelessly duplicating words or syllables, the scribe apparently misconstrued some of the less common expressions, probably skipping words or even passages. His carelessness and limitations can be gauged by comparing other texts he copied with their critically edited counterparts: for example, where the Josephi historiographi tractatus de exordio sacrae domus H ospitalis jerosolimitani has 'Bohamunt', our scribe writes 'Scamunt'; ¹² when one pope states: 'Sed quod dolentes referimus', our scribe garbles the statement by writing 'volentes referimus';¹³ where another pope grants the hospital the right that excommunicated persons 'a divino officio non coartentur', our scribe skips the crucial 'non'; ¹⁴ and where still another pope writes 'tam exemptis quam non exemptis', our scribe gives only the first two words, and changes, a few lines below, 'hujusmodi' into 'hujusmode', and 'eidem indulto' into 'eadem indulto', ¹⁵ and so forth. Such carelessness explains why the extant text of the treatise is very corrupt, with several sentences incompre hensible. Moreover, the text breaks off in mid-sentence, with the scribe having left blank the remaining five lines of his last page.

The codex, now in the Bavarian State Library, Munich, was formerly the property of the monastery of Benediktbeuern. It is rather astonishing to note that no less a student of Hospitaller history than Jean Delaville Le Roulx had dealt with this codex and came tantalizingly close to dealing with the treatise of our concern. In the introduction to his Cartulaire, published in 1894, Delaville Le Roulx stated that the codex is interesting for Hospitaller history, as beyond various fragments from the Patristic literature it contains several pieces referring to the Order of the Hospital, the last of them being a 'traité inconnu sur I'Hôpital'. ¹⁶ Yet Delaville Le Roulx wasted no further words on this unknown work which is, of course, the anonymous treatise we are concerned with. Similarly, in the Munich Library's catalogue that appeared in the same year, 1894, the work is rather inexhaustively described as 'tractatus alius'. ¹⁷ Only Günter Glauche's recent catalogue, published in 1994, accurately presents the text as a fragment 'über Krankenpflege bei den Johannitern', refers to Waldstein Wartenberg's book and dates the manuscript to the mid-fourteenth century. ¹⁸

The treatise, as preserved in the Munich manuscript, consists of three parts, or distinctiones. The first amounts to a laudation of Christian charity, which culminates in the statement that it is most fitting for the House of Charity, the forerunner of all virtues, to take the Lord's precursor for its patron. ¹⁹ The second distinctio, which takes up more than one half of the treatise as it has come down to us, describes the works of charity bestowed on the sick in the Jerusalem hospital. It is in this part that the admission of the sick, the beds, clothing, food and medical care with which they were provided, and the tasks of the staff that attended to their needs are dealt with in detail; it concludes with a short section on the treatment of sick and pregnant women. The rubric of the third distinctio promises to deal with the attention given to orphans and adults; but shortly after the care of orphans (or rather foundlings) has been dealt with, and as our author turns his attention to noble pilgrims who, unwilling to spend their own money, accept the Order's hospitality, the text breaks off. At present there is no way to know whether the original treatise contained further distinctiones and whether these described the military activities of the Hospitallers; the possibility cannot be ruled out.

The abundant information contained in the treatise includes details that specify or extend existing knowledge as well as totally new facts. Let me give just one example of the first kind before going on to the second.

The statutes of 1182 mention that the hospital used to receive and nourish all infants cast away by their parents. ²⁰ Our author speaks more specifically and probably more realistically- of little children cast away by their mothers, who were brought to the hospital by the first who found them; of mothers who secretly, with forehead covered, deposited their infants at the hospital; and of mothers who, having given birth to twins, retained one of the children and delivered the other to St John. The foundlings were entrusted to nurses, each of whom- be their number one thousand- received twelve talents a year and, on each major holiday, a meal equal to that of the brothers in quantity and variety. Moreover, the nurses were under constant supervision. Often they had to bring the children to the hospital, where each was inspected by the sisters of the house; and if these found that a child had been badly attended, it was committed to the custody of another nurse. We are told that these children were known, especially in the Latin East, as filii beati Iohannis. On reaching adulthood they were given the choice to serve the one who had raised them- St John or 'to embrace the seductive allurements of the frivolous world.'²¹ ...