Some years ago, while researching a book concerning the literature of the Cold War, I came upon a French Communist front organization active in the late 1940s with what I thought was an amusing name—Combattants de la paix, which might be roughly translated as “Warriors of Peace.” This group was active in various phases of the Soviet “Peace Offensive” in which various eminent Western intellectuals—including Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Erica Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bertrand Russell played prominent roles—up through the McCarthy Era. The “Warriors of Peace” struck a chord in my medievalist’s consciousness, though not one relevant to the research I was then conducting. But now the stir-craziness of pandemic isolation and a friend’s jigsaw puzzles encourage me to return to the theme.
In a post three weeks ago I explained that a friend has loaned me two high-tech wooden jigsaw puzzles. To the first, an exquisite religious panel by Fra Angelico, I devoted an essay of iconographic description. I arrive now at the second, which features a gorgeous book painting from an early Renaissance historical chronicle in the National Library of France. Its subject is the amazing defense made by the Knights Hospitaller of their stronghold on the island of Rhodes when besieged by the huge army of the Sultan Mehmed in 1480. In the painting reproduced in the puzzle the Ottoman attackers foregrounded on its left side are given visual top billing. Never mind the challenge they present to the Christian knights in the serried ranks within the castle walls. Think of the challenge their jig-sawed gorgeousness presented to me.
Military metaphors have probably been popular since the invention of language. Ovid has a well-known poem “Every Lover is a Soldier”. In my own lifetime I have been witness to wars on poverty, drugs, obesity, Christmas, women, cancer and other adversaries too numerous to mention. Even in the spiritual realm warfare antedates St. Paul’s donning his breastplate of salvation. Was it not Job who said “The life of man upon earth is a warfare”? But the medieval Christian Church, moving beyond metaphor, saw the rise of several small armies composed of men who were at once monks and Marines, “Combatants for the Prince of Peace,” usually called the Military Orders.
The most important of these, the subject of my puzzle and my theme today, was the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, usually called the Knights Hospitaller (after their principal charitable vocations) or the Knights of Malta (after the island stronghold to which they strategically retreated after being kicked out of Rhodes in a second siege, in 1522). But I must mention at least two other such orders, the Teutonic Knights and the Knights of the Temple, or Templars. The Templars are probably the military order today’s general reader is most likely to have heard of. That is because the conspiracy theories instrumental in its grisly destruction have become only more lively and fantastic in the seven hundred years since. Today if you want to persuade people that Hilary Clinton is involved in a pedophile ring operating out of a pizza parlor, you will probably be called a QAnon nut-job. On the other hand write a book about how the Templars kept Jesus’s hook-up with Mary Magdalene under wraps until Leonardo da Vinci blew the whistle on that caper in his “Last Supper” and you’ll make a few millions. The Templar factor makes all the difference.
The English words hospital and hospitality, though obviously related, today have gone in separate directions with only one of them necessarily suggesting medical attention. The medical implication arose in the Middle Ages. Ancient “hospitality” is perhaps best illustrated in biblical terms in the parable of the Good Samaritan, who ministered to a severely injured traveler both by addressing his wounds and by paying for a recuperative rest at an inn. Premodern travel was an arduous and often dangerous business; one of the common motives of medieval travel was religious pilgrimage, and for Europeans the pilgrimage par excellence was that to Jerusalem. Already early in the Middle Ages charitable people established pilgrim hostels; religious hospitality was also to be had at many monasteries. The Knights Hospitaller had their remote origins in that mileu, but the order’s militarization and prominence came in the Crusades. The bellicose knights enjoyed their greatest prestige after the fall of Constantinople when from their stronghold on the island of Rhodes they long hindered the trade and expansive ambitions of the Ottomans in the Mediterranean. In this regard the knights’ heroic repulse of a third siege, that of Malta in 1565, was perhaps of even greater significance than the stunning and better remembered Christian naval victory in the Battle of Lepanto (1571).
I found the hardest part of the puzzle was the challenge of the Turkish tents on the left side and the top, both the two ornate ones and, especially, those in the soldiers’ campground seen in the distance. But I knew the very moment the last remaining blob of ambiguous gray necessarily fitted into the last lacuna on the board that I had to learn more about the Knights of Malta and their formidable Muslim adversaries, especially the Sultans Mehmed the Conqueror and Suleiman the Magnificent. So I did what has become a custom for me during the pandemic lockdown while I have had no access to the university. I simply ordered a few promising and affordable second-hand books on-line. Two of these were essentially light reading: The Siege of Rhodes (1985, English translation 2006) is a work by the popular Japanese historian Nanami Shiono, whose field of expertise is Italy from Brutus to the Borgias. The Shadow of God (2002) is “a novel of war and faith” by Anthony Goodman, an octogenarian medical professor and history buff. .The differences between an historical novelist and a novelistic historian are not all that great, and both of these books are good, exciting reads. Two others were much more substantial, One is the learned biography Suleiman the Magnificent (1944) by the Harvard historian R. B. Merriman. The other is the “official” history of The Knights of Malta (Yale, 1994) by H. J. A. Sire, a British free-lance historian whose Gibbonesque style I find enviable. Of the battles for Rhodes and Malta he begins thus: “Our story carries us to a period of eighty-five years in which the Order of St John, comparable in numbers to the population of a village, produced three leaders and three feats of arms worthy of an empire.” I was astonished to discover that the author was himself a member of the order he studied. Admittedly the group these days is more similar to the Knights of Columbus than those of Jean de la Valette, but still….Indeed researching the historian was in this instance nearly as engaging as his own research. Sire is a theologically arch-conservative Roman Catholic vehement in his hostility to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Some years after the publication of this authorized history, the Grand Master of the Sovereign Order of Malta felt obliged to suspend its author from the brotherhood on account of controversial attitudes expressed by him in a subsequent book about the current pope, Francis I. I have not seen the book, but there is perhaps a clue in its title: The Dictator Pope. Ah, Combattants de la paix!
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