The Hospitallers of Rhodes: Prospectives, Problems, Possihilities^
The Hospitallers of Rhodes: Prospectives, Problems, Possihilities^ BY ANTHONY LUTTRELL The Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta has almost always 2 lacked effective historiographical machinery ). There is only one complete history of the Hospital which is seriously founded on the main archive sources in Malta and Rome, that 3 of Giacomo Bosio who died more than 350 years ago in 1627. ^ Individual scholars have produced works on particular topics, periods or regions, but many of them are limited in scope or largely repetitive; often they fail to utilize significant materials, published or unpublished. The Hospital has survived as a chivalric or hospitaller Institution; but it has been separated from its own archives on Malta since 1798 and it does not naturally produce historians of its own, while Maltese scholars have ignored the history of the Hospital 4 during the centuries before it reached their own island in 1530. ^ The Military Orders do attract a fringe of writers interested in bogus modern foundations or esoteric revivals, some of which are inspired by a scarcely scientific attraction for the glamours of titles, 1) The Standard work is J. DELAVILLE LE ROULX, Les Hospitaliers ä Rhodes jusqu'ä la mort de Philibert de Naillac: 1310-1421 (Paris, 1913; reprinted with preface by A. LUTTRELL: London, 1974), supplemented by the survey in A. LUTTRELL, "The Hospitallers at Rhodes: 1306-1421," in A History of the Crusades, gen. ed. K. SETTON, iii (Madison, Wisc, 1975). This item and 23 other articles are reprinted in A. LUTTRELL, The Hospitallers in Cyprus, Rhodes, Greece and the West, 1291-1440: Collected Studies (London, 1978).
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