The 1330 Chapter General of the Knights Hospitallers at Montpellier

Of all the international military monastic orders of the Middle Ages only the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem have left reasonably complete records. The publication of documents from their archives has not, however, evenly represented the great historical epochs of the order's past; for the Holy Land period (ca. 1096–1291) we have almost everything, for the Rhodian era (1310–1522) we have almost nothing. This situation has not gone unnoticed, but it has remained uncorrected. Twenty-five years ago John La Monte reported that documents pertaining to the Hospitallers after 1310 were among the important lacunae of crusade historiography, and, more recently, James Brundage has called attention to the fact that nothing has been done to fill this gap. With the exception of a handful of documents published by Joseph Delaville Le Roulx one must still turn to Sebastiano Pauli's eighteenth-century miscellany for original records of the Hospitallers during the two centuries they held Rhodes. The proceedings of the Montpellier Chapter General published here represents a modest attempt to advance beyond the current state of affairs.