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Trying to find a clear position for the Knights in the structure of feudal society was difficult: they, though called knights, maintained independence from the monarchs; they revered the pope as their leader but were not instruments of the Church's subordination; they arose in the crusade era but did not always coincide with the crusades.
Most of the Knights have long since vanished, but the last vestiges can still be found in the hospital's emblem.
Knights of the Medical Care
The emergence of the Crusader Order marked the fusion of Christian theory and chivalric practice, especially the three major orders, namely the Knights of The Healer, the Knights Templar, and the Teutonic Order.
The establishment of the Order was by no means instantaneous, and there was no clear unified deployment in the early days, at least from the experience of the Order of Medicine, it was originally a charity in nature, far from the image of a militarily armed knight.
As early as the 11th century, pilgrimages from Western Europe to Jerusalem became popular in order to provide pilgrims with a place to stay and basic accommodation.
Some Italian merchant groups, with the permission of the Sultan of Egypt, set up two asylums in Jerusalem for St. John the Giver and St. Mary of Magdalene.
When the Seljuk Turks occupied Jerusalem in 1076, their attitude towards Christianity was questionable, and although there were many pilgrims from the West, the Christians in the holy city, especially the asylum, suffered a lot.
The turning point occurred in 1099, when the First Crusade was victorious and Jerusalem was recaptured, and the Knights of The Medical Care ushered in a comprehensive development phase.
With the influx of large-scale pilgrims, the function of the two asylums as relief and accommodation bases was greatly expanded, not only the workload of their members increased sharply, but also to support the daily operation of this "enclave", more and more Western European nobles donated their real estate and wealth to the shelter.
Goldfrauy of Bouillon, a model of medieval knighthood, included his estate in Brabant under the name of the shelter.
It was also during this period that the military function of St. John's Asylum increasingly surpassed that of philanthropy, not only to provide basic accommodation for pilgrims, but more importantly to guard the newly established Christian kingdom in Jerusalem and ensure the safety of local Christian lives and property.
It actually became a colonial bloc of Western European feudalism in Palestine, and the True Knights of Care emerged.
The uniform dress of the Order of the Medical Care is derived from the early shelters, with both male and female members wearing black robes and white octagonal crosses embroidered on the left chest, so that the white cross on a black background later became the coat of arms of the Order of The Medical Order.
As the first crusader order to be established, the Medical Order has always been headquartered in Jerusalem, which was captured by Sultan Saladin of Egypt (reigned 1174-1193) in 1187.
The Headquarters of the Order was forced to move to Acre, and it began a long journey of wandering:
First in 1291 the Fall of Acre, the Knights moved to the island of Cyprus, and 20 years later they moved to rhodes, which were farther away from the Holy Land and less extensive, and thereafter remained their main base until 1522.
Although the Knights of The Medical Care defended the Christian faith in the Mediterranean for hundreds of years from this stronghold, and created a feat of 7,000 men against an army of 200,000.
However, they had to face the fact that the era of knights was long gone, and the Knights of Medicine inevitably declined.
This slightly tragic history had a good ending: in 1530, the remnants of the Order received permission from the German Emperor Charles V to base themselves on the island of Malta.
Napoleon's expedition in 1798 cost the Order territory forever, but in 1834 the Order of Malta was rebuilt in Rome and continues to this day.
The Knights of The Medical Care first developed from shelters that facilitated pilgrims, especially the Asylum of St. John the Giver, so the Knights of The Medical Care are sometimes referred to as the Knights of St. John, and the flag of the Knights of St. John is shown, and later the Knights of Malta also used this flag.
The Knights were built as fortifications in Valletta. From Manoel Island in Gotsla, overlook st. Michael's Fort in Valletta, one of the main strongholds of the Order of Malta.
Knights Templar
Although the Knights Templar was not the first to be established, and its history was only two centuries long, its glorious achievements made it the most prestigious Of the Crusader Order.
Unlike the Knights of The Healing, the Knights Templar emerged from the outset as a purely military organization, with its members explicitly vowing to fight for the defense of the Holy Land and the protection of pilgrims.
King Baldwin II of Jerusalem (reigned 1118-1131) established the Headquarters of the Order in 1120 in the palace.
It is said that the palace was once the temple of King Solomon, hence the name "Knights Templar", although its official title is slightly longer: Christ and the Poor Knights of Solomon's Temple.
However, the Later Development of the Knights Templar was far less modest than its name, and it soon became the richest and most powerful order in Christendom, and a formidable force for its expansion of membership and power.
The Statutes of the Order were formulated by the famous St. Bernard of The Ming Valley (1090-1153), who was naturally one of the main initiators of the Order Templar.
For the esteemed Cistercian theologian, the Knights Templar embodied the perfect combination of two seemingly irreconcilable things, religion and war:
The knights should be the strictest and ascetic Cistercian monks, who should uphold chastity, obedience, and poverty, while they, as knights, attack the pagans, not only to recover Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, but also to spread the gospel of Christ to the whole world.
So the Costume of the Knights Templar is white robes, the most prominent core is decorated with red crosses, white symbolizes purity, and red is the blood sacrificed for Christ.
However, as ironic as its name of power and humility, the Templar Order's religious ambitions became ironic of its rapid decline:
They profess to uphold their chastity, but victory makes them indulge in depravity; they profess absolute obedience, but glory makes them lazy and arrogant; they profess to be content with poverty, but wealth corrupts them with luxury.
Saladin's reconquest of the Holy Land gave the Knights Templar a similar dilemma, but their luck was far less than that of the latter, and they were no longer able to find a stable base, becoming a wanderer.
To make matters worse, their vast wealth and independent attributes have made them a thorn in the side of the emerging state, a thorn in the flesh, and the monarchs must get rid of it quickly.
The fallen knights who had lost their religious will also became a dangerous group in the eyes of the church, and it was under the double strangulation of the king and the church that the Templar knights gradually disappeared from history.
The Knights Templar's first headquarters were located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and crusaders from Western Europe believed that this was where the legendary Temple of Solomon was located, which is said to be the origin of the Templar name.
Restored image of the Templars on display at the Tdouin Abbey in Coxede, Belgium.
Teutonic Knights
The Teutonic Knights had deep roots in their early years with the Knights of the Healing Order, most similar in basic attributes to the Knights of the Healing Order, but they also had their own distinct ethnic attributes, which can be seen from its name, and its main members came from the German region.
The origins of the Teutonic Knights date back to around 1128, when merchants from Lübeck and Bremen founded a hospital in Acre, part of the "Asylum of the Virgin Mary of Germany" in Jerusalem.
The formal formation of the Order was relatively late, and it was not until 1198, when the German Emperor Henry VI, in order to convene the Crusades, separated the Germans from the Order of The Medical Knights and formed a knightly military society, whose members were limited to Germans of aristocratic origin.
Members of the Teutonic Order wore white cloaks, a black cross on their left shoulders, and in some cases a German coat of arms, the Black Hawk on a gold background, was worn in the middle of the cross.
Compared with the first two knights, the teutonic knights had a more tortuous migration. After the fall of Acre in 1291, they first moved to Venice to settle down.
He was later invited by the Slavs to move to the Baltic Sea and set up his headquarters in Marlborough in Danzig (present-day Gtansk, Poland).
Here the Teutonic Knights fulfilled the mission of the Christian Knights in another way: they expanded the eastern frontiers of European civilization by fighting the pagans of Prussia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
In the 16th century, Prussia converted to Protestantism, bringing the Knights' path as a military order to an end.
In 1809 Napoleon invaded eastern Germany and disbanded the Order, but it was soon rebuilt in 1834 and remains a charitable organization based in Vienna.
Pictured here is the authorization of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in 1236 to allow the Teutonic Knights to invade Prussia. This has had a profound impact on the geopolitics of Central and Eastern Europe. The German painter Peter Janssen (1844-1908) painted it between 1895 and 1903.
The Malbork Castle of the Teutonic Knights, which is today Marlborough in Poland