Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Sire H. J. A.
Title : The Knights of Malta
Year : 1996

Link download : Sire_H_J_A_-_The_Knights_of_Malta.zip

THE AGE OF software, economists and pocket calculators has been caught napping; that of chivalry has crept up behind it and taken it unawares. A hundred years ago the Order of Malta appeared a mere honorific memory of the crusades: its Grand Master was an Austrian nobleman treated as a sovereign prince only by his own Emperor and the Holy See; it numbered little more than a thousand knights drawn from the innermost circle of the European aristocracy. Today the Order exchanges ambassadors with nearly sixty governments; it has more than ten thousand knights in thirty-nine national associations throughout the world; its decorations have been proudly accepted by republican heads of state from Africa to the United States; and above all it conducts an international Hospitaller activity with few equals in size, modernity and efficiency. The resurgence of this nine-hundred-year-old institution, the crusading order of the Knights Hospitaller, to the position it holds today is one of the most surprising phenomena of the twentieth century. It therefore seems right, in offering this contribution to its historiography, to write of it as an institution of the present, and in particular to show the rich trail that the Order has left behind in the history, art and culture of the European nations. This is the purpose of the central section of the book, which pauses in the general narrative to describe the Order's various national groupings. For the remaining historical account the original intention was simply to precis a story familiar from a long tradition of writing, but it became apparent that here too a new approach was necessary. Recent work has thrown completely new light on a subject which - apart from the first three centuries of the Order's history - has been largely the preserve of amateur historians. Works such as Braudel's masterly treatment of Mediterranean affairs in the sixteenth century, Gangneux's local study of Provence and Fontenay's articles on naval history have made a contribution of much greater precision, and annihilated the national propaganda that sometimes took the place of genuine history. The duty of reinterpretation makes it necessary to give prominence to topics which have hitherto been wrongly or obscurely presented, while more famous scenes such as the sieges of Rhodes and Malta, or the role of the Knights Hospitaller in the crusades, have been reduced to their bare bones. At the same time it has been impossible, in a book of this size, to substantiate every interpretation, and readers who find them unfamiliar are referred to the more detailed works cited in the notes. A work which ranges over nine centuries and a whole continent cannot hope to escape many errors, especially in view of the almost millennial jungle of mis-statement which confronts every historian of the Order of St John. It is a subject in which excellent work is being done by many people all over the world, and if too many hoary errors have been repeated here their airing will still be useful if it provokes the betterinformed to expose and denounce them. One of the efforts at correction attempted here is that of rescuing the names of members of the Order from the havoc wrought with them by monoglot chroniclers, and restoring them to a form which their owners would at least have recognised. The list of Grand Masters is also designed to provide more information of a national kind than is available elsewhere, but here too there are gaps which it would be useful to fill. Recently there has been established in France the Societe de l'Histoire et du Patrimoine de l'Ordre de Malte; its purpose is to promote the study of the Order's history and in particular to recover from oblivion and neglect the great artistic and architectural wealth which that history has left behind. This book is offered as a contribution to both those ends, not in one country only but in all the lands whose past has been touched by the Knights of St John. Finally, it may be appropriate to repeat the advertisement which Caxton prefixed to another chivalric history: 'Herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, virtue and sin.' The survival of Malory's epic shows that these ingredients are capable of preserving a story over many centuries, just as the survival of the Order of Malta shows the power of ideals to sustain an institution through the vicissitudes of history and ideological change. ...