The Hospitallers, the Mediterranean and Europe

Festschrift for Anthony Luttrell

Nikolas Jaspert, Karl Borchardt, Karl Borchardt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317028505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Modern study of the Hospitallers, of other military-religious orders, and of their activities both in the Mediterranean and in Europe has been deeply influenced by the work of Anthony Luttrell. To mark his 75th birthday in October 2007 twenty-three colleagues from ten different countries have contributed to this volume. The first section focuses on the crusading period in the Holy Land, considering the Hospital in Jerusalem, relations with the Assassins, finances, indulgences, transportation and the careers of the brothers and knights. The second and third sections move to the later Middle Ages, when the Hospitallers had their centre on Rhodes, and military and charitable activities in the East had to be supported with men and money from the West. The papers in the second section consider the Hospitallers on Rhodes, relations between Rhodes and the West and plans for crusades, while the third section includes papers on the Hospitallers in the Iberian Peninsula and in Hungary, the territorial administration of the Order of Montesa in Valencia, a plan to transfer the headquarters of the Teutonic Order from Prussia to Frisia, and a Hospitaller reconsideration of warfare and learning on the eve of the council of Trent. The final paper proposes new definitions and guidelines for future work on the military-religious orders. The authors include both well-known experts and younger scholars who promise to follow in the footsteps of Anthony Luttrell and to continue research into the Hospitallers and their fellow orders, these peculiar European communities avant la lettre.

PART 1
The Crusader Period

Chapter 1
A Note on Jerusalem’s B m rist n and Jerusalem’s Hospital¹

Benjamin Z. Kedar

On 5 Ramadan 438, a date that corresponds to 5 March 1047, N ser-e Khosraw, a Persian civil administrator turned pilgrim and traveller, arrived in Jerusalem. In his detailed description of the city we read:

Jerusalem has a fine, well endowed B m rist n [hospital]. Many people are given drugs and elixirs. The physicians who are there receive salaries from the endowment for this B m rist n.²

This passage attests to the existence, in eleventh-century Muslim Jerusalem, of a true hospital – that is, a hospital in which salaried physicians attend to patients. Such hospitals, which were exclusively medical institutions, are known to have existed elsewhere in the realm of Islam. For instance, in 872 Ahmad b. T l n, ruler of Egypt, founded a hospital at Fust t (Old Cairo), each ward of which was reserved for a different illness. In 981 ‘Ad d al-Dawla, who ruled a large part of the Islamic empire in the second half of the tenth century, built a large hospital in Baghdad; the well-equipped institution, which came to be known as al-‘Ad di hospital, had 24 physicians, whose number in 1068 had risen to 28.³

In the realm of Islam, professional medical treatment was also quite commonly available outside of hospitals. The Cairo Geniza, that vast repository of discarded documents written in the Hebrew script that constitutes a major source for the history of the area between north-western Africa and India – and especially of Egypt and Palestine – in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, amply attests to this availability. ‘In the Geniza papers’, writes Shelomo Dov Goitein, ‘we find a Jewish doctor, and often more than one, in many a little town or large village and occasionally Christian and Muslim colleagues are mentioned as well. The prescriptions preserved indicate that even for humdrum cases of constipation or of the loosening of bowels a doctor was consulted.’⁴ In the event of serious illness, even a man of limited resources could benefit from a consultation of several doctors; this happened for instance in Ramle, Palestine, in about 1060.⁵ There were oculists, physicians treating wounds, healers specializing in stomach troubles, experts in bloodletting, and professional veterinarians, one of whom treated a donkey that had suffered a dislocation while carrying building materials.⁶

During roughly the same period as that in which the Persian traveller N sere Khusraw described the Jerusalem B m rist n with its salaried physicians, a rich Amalfitan by the name of Maurus established a hospital in Jerusalem, and another in Antioch. So reports the contemporary chronicler Amatus of Montecassino (born ca. 1010) in his Ystoria Normannorum, which covers the period 1016–78; the chronicle survives only in an Old French translation dating from ca. 1300.⁷ A short, anonymous notice about Archbishop John of Amalfi (ca. 1070–ca. 1082) reports that he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he was received by Amalfitans who, a few years earlier, had established there two hospitalia, one for men and one for women.⁸ The Jerusalem-born William of Tyre, writing about a century later, proffers more details: merchants from Amalfi founded a monastery in honour of the Virgin Mary near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and located there an abbot and monks from their country. A convent was later erected nearby and, finally, a xenodochium for pilgrims, healthy or sick.⁹

What was the nature of the Amalfitan ‘hospital’ in Jerusalem? The eleventh-century West had no counterparts to the contemporary hospitals of the Islamic world, where salaried physicians regularly attended to patients and medical lore accumulated. It is symptomatic, from this point of view, that when, in the late eleventh century, Constantine the African translated into Latin The Complete Book of the Medical Art by ‘Al ibn al-‘Abb s al-Maj s, he omitted the advice to visit hospitals in order to gain medical knowledge, for hospitals in which such knowledge could have been acquired did not yet exist in the Latin West.¹⁰ Should we conclude therefore that the Amalfitan ‘hospital’ was merely a hospice of the type then current in the West? Possibly so. But an alternative hypothesis – namely, that the Amalfitans were influenced to some extent by the superior medical practice of the Islamic world – is also conceivable.

When the Amalfitans established their Jerusalem ‘hospital,’ presumably some time after the middle of the eleventh century, they were no newcomers to the Muslim Levant. There is evidence for the voyage of one Leo Amalfitanus to Egypt in 978.¹¹ The eleventh-century Christian chronicler Yahy of Antioch reports that when in May 996 the suspicion arose in Cairo that the fire that had consumed 16 warships in the city’s arsenal was started by ‘Romish merchants from Amalfi’, the mob alongside Berber soldiers massacred 160 of the Amalfitans and looted their wares. Other Amalfitans were able to escape.¹² This means that there may have been a colony of perhaps as many as two hundred Amalfitans in Cairo at the time.¹³ Two Geniza letters attest to the presence of Amalfitan merchants in Egypt in the mid-eleventh century, while a third mentions a Jewish merchant’s voyage from Alexandria to Amalfi, via Constantinople and Crete, in the same period.¹⁴ Indeed, it has been hypothesized that the Amalfitans provided naval assistance during the Fatimid conquest of Egypt in 969, secured a favourable commercial status in return, and thus became predominant among the Latin Christians who traded in the Muslim East.¹⁵ At any rate, it is plausible to assume that the Amalfitans who decided to establish a ‘hospital’ in Jerusalem were cognizant of the availability of professional medical services in the Islamic world. Indeed, the existence of Jerusalem’s B m rist n could hardly have escaped them. Given that the Jerusalemite al-Muqaddas, writing in the 980s, reported that in al-Sh m (that is, Syria/Palestine) the physicians were generally Christians,¹⁶ one may hypothesize that the Amalfitans hired some Oriental Christian physician(s) to provide professional medical treatment in their new establishment.

This hypothesis is supported by a close reading of the above-mentioned anonymous notice about Archbishop John of Amalfi. The notice reports that in the two hospitalia the Amalfitans had erected in Jerusalem some time before the archbishop’s arrival, ‘infirmi curabantur’.¹⁷ Now, it has been claimed that the term infirmus refers to the disabled and the weak (who may, however, also be suffering from some disease), whereas the terms egroti and egrotantes refer unequivocally to the sick.¹⁸ However, the phrase ‘infirmos curare’ is biblical; Christ enjoined the Apostles: ‘infirmos curate’,¹⁹ a charge that has always been understood to mean, ‘Heal the sick’. We may therefore conclude that when the anonymous notice asserts that ‘infirmi curabantur’ in Jerusalem’s Amalfitan hospitalia, it is the healing of the sick that is being referred to – although, unlike the Muslim B m rist n, the hospitalia did not treat only the sick. Before mentioning the curing of the sick, the anonymous notice spells out that the hospitalia were erected ‘ad homines et mulieres recipiendos, in quibus et alebantur’. In other words, the primary function of the hospitalia was to provide shelter and food for pilgrims from the West. In addition, the sick among them were offered a cure. Writing in the 1170s or early 1180s about the beginnings of the Jerusalem Hospital, William of Tyre makes the same point when he asserts that to the pre-1099 xenodochium were gathered both the healthy and the sick (sanos vel egrotantes).²⁰ It should be noted that the earliest reference to sick people in the post-1099 Jerusalem Hospital appears in Albert of Aachen’s account that in 1101 a messenger of Count Roger of Apulia – that is, Roger Borsa, Bohemond’s brother – brought to Jerusalem 1,000 bezants, one-third of which was earmarked ‘in sustentatione hospitalis languidorum et ceterorum inualidorum’.²¹ ‘Languidus’ and ‘invalidus’ usually mean ‘sick’ and ‘feeble,’ respectively.²²

Ample documentation from the 1180s, much of which has come to light in recent years, leaves no doubt that the Jerusalem Hospital of the Knights of Saint John by that time served, inter alia, as a true hospital in which salaried physicians attended to a large number of patients, and its daily routine resembled in many important respects that of hospitals in the Islamic world and Byzantium.²³ At present, our documentation does not mention salaried physicians, or professional medical treatment in the Jerusalem Hospital at an earlier date.²⁴ But, as we know, the earliest mention of a phenomenon in the available documentation must not be regarded as constituting proof of that being actually the phenomenon’s earliest occurrence. The phenomenon may have occurred earlier; it may have developed gradually. Possibly its earliest form took shape already with the establishment of the Amalfitan hospitalia. For these were not erected on a cultural tabula rasa. They were established in an area about whose medical services we are quite well informed, by people who were no newcomers to the Muslim Levant.

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the symposium ‘Medicine and Disease in the Crusades’, held in January 2005 at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College, London.

2 Sefer Nameh. Relation du voyage de Nassiri Khosrau en Syrie, en Palestine, en Égypte, en Arabie et en Perse pendant les années de l’hégire 437–444, ed. and trans. C. Schefer, (Paris, 1881), p. 21; my thanks to Professor Reuven Amitai for having translated this passage for me. W.M. Thackston’s translation locates the B m rist n in Jerusalem’s eastern part: N ser-e Khosraw’s Book of Travels (Safarn ma), trans. W.M. Thackston, Jr., Persian Heritage Series 36 (Albany, NY, 1986), p. 23. The translation appears to be based on an edition defect...