The Hospitallers’ early written records

Abstract

Modern historians of the military-religious Order of Saint John have been able to use a variety of written records dating back virtually to the crusaders' conquest of Jerusalem in July 1099. The Hospital may well have lost some documents when Jerusalem fell in 1187 and others disappeared in 1291 at the fall of Acre; furthermore, whatever records were kept on Cyprus from 1291 to 1310 were somehow lost thereafter, and much of what was in the chancery on Rhodes, where the Hospital's Convent or headquarters moved from Cyprus in about 1310, was destroyed or abandoned in the course of the next two centuries or during the final siege of 1522. A significant portion of the Rhodian archive was, however, taken in 1530 to Malta where it still remains.