Hospitallers, in the Roman Catholic Church, are charitable brotherhoods, founded for the care of the poor and of the sick in hospitals. They follow for the most part the rule of St Augustine, and add to the ordinary vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, that of self-dedication to the particular work of their order. The Knights of St John of Jerusalem (see below) and the Teutonic Knights (q.v.) were both originally hospitallers. The Knights Hospitallers of the Holy Spirit were founded at Montpellier in 1198 by Guy of Montpellier, and the hospitallers of Our Lady of Christian Charity at Paris in the end of the 13th century by Guy de Joinville. And numerous similar orders have been established since then.
THE ORDER OF THE KNIGHTS OF ST JOHN OF JERUSALEM, otherwise called the Knights of Rhodes, and afterwards of Malta, a celebrated military and religious order of the middle ages, originated about 1048 in a hospital, dedicated to St John the Baptist, which some merchants of Amalfi built at Jerusalem for the care and cure of pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre. After the conquest of Jerusalem by the crusaders under Godfrey of Bouillon in 1099, the hospital servants were joined by many from the Christian army, who resolved to devote themselves to the service of the poor and sick pilgrims. Gerard, the first rector of the hospital, formed them into a regularly-constituted religious body, bound by the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and subject to the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Pope Pascal II. gave his sanction to their institution as an order in 1113. Raymond du Puy, the successor of Gerard, extended the activity of the order by pledging its members to protect pilgrims on the roads from the sea to the Holy City. Soon afterwards the order became predominantly military: the Hospitallers were sworn to defend the Holy Sepulchre to the last drop of their blood, and to make war upon the infidels wherever they should meet them. Having become military as well as religious, the order was recruited by persons of high rank and influence, and wealth flowed in from all quarters. Various hospices, called commanderies, were established in the maritime towns of Europe as resting-places for pilgrims, who were there provided with the means of setting out for Palestine. These branch establishments also collected the revenues of the order, and received candidates for admission to its ranks. After the conquest of Jerusalem by Saladin the Hospitallers established themselves at Acre in 1191. Soon afterwards a bitter rivalry sprang up between them and the Knights Templars, which finally set them in battle array one against the other in 1259, when victory inclined to the former. The Hospitallers clung with desperation to Acre, the last Christian stronghold in Palestine; but after a terrible siege by the ruler of Egypt, they were compelled to sail away to Cyprus (1291), where the king of the island gave them an asylum for some years.
In 1185 Frederick Barbarossa took the order under the protection of the empire. In the following century the title of 'master' was changed by Pope Clement IV. into 'grand-master.' The brethren consisted of three classes, knights, chaplains, and serving brothers, these last being fighting squires, who followed the knights in their expeditions. The order was in the 12th century divided into eight 'languages'—Provence, Auvergne, France, Italy, Aragon, England, Germany, and Castile. Each 'language' embraced several grand-priories, and under these again were a number of commanderies.
In 1310 the knights, under the grand-master Fulk de Villaret, in conjunction with a party of crusaders from Italy, captured Rhodes and seven adjacent islands from the Greek and Moslem pirates, and carried on from thence for more than two hundred years a successful war against the Turks. During this period the Hospitallers were the owners of nearly 19,000 manors in Europe, and to these 9000 more were added on the suppression of the Knights Templars in 1312. In 1523 they were compelled to surrender Rhodes to Sultan Solyman, and retired to Candia (Crete). In 1530 Charles V. assigned them the island of Malta, with Tripoli and Gozo. Tripoli was surrendered in 1551 to the corsair Dragut, who in 1565 laid siege to Malta, which the Hospitallers had strongly fortified. Dragut was beaten off at the end of four months with the loss of 25,000 men. The knights continued for some time to be a powerful bulwark against the Turks; but after the Reformation a moral degeneracy overspread the order, and it rapidly declined in political importance. In 1798, through the treachery of some French knights and the weakness of the last grand-master, Hompesch, Malta was surrendered to the French. The lands still remaining to the order were about this time confiscated in almost all the European states; but, though extinct as a sovereign body, certain branches of the order, with more or less just claims to legitimate succession, have continued during the 19th century to drag on a lingering existence in Italy, France, Spain, England, and Germany. After 1801 the office of grand-master was not filled up, till in 1879 the pope appointed a grand-master for the Italian and Bohemian 'languages.' In their military capacity the Hospitallers wore red surcoats over their armour. The badge worn by all the knights was a Maltese cross, enamelled white and edged with gold. The motto of the order was 'Pro fide,' with the later addition of 'Pro utilitate hominum.'
There are two modern associations which ascribe their origin to the original order—the Brandenburg 'Johanniterorden' and the English order of the Knights of St John. The former, a direct descendant of the German 'language' of the old legitimate order, was reorganised in 1853, and did good service in the campaigns of 1866 and 1870. In England the property of the old order was confiscated in the first year of Elizabeth's reign, and the order itself was dissolved and declared to be illegal by Henry VIII. in 1541. Nevertheless the 'language' of England was resuscitated in 1827; the revived society has its headquarters at St John's Gate, Clerkenwell, London. Its efforts are purely philanthropic: it distributes charity to convalescents who have just left hospital, maintains cottage hospitals and convalescent homes in the country, and an ophthalmic hospital at Jerusalem. It has founded the street ambulance system, and was chiefly concerned in the origination of the Red Cross Society.
See Histories of the order by Bosio, Del Pozzo, Vertot
(Eng. 1728), Taaffe (1852), Porter (1883), De Salles (1839); and Delaville de Roux's Les Archives, la Bibliothèque, et la Trésor de l'Ordre de St-Jean à Malte (1883).