The Hospitaller Background of the Teutonic Order

This article examines the foundation in 1190/1191 of a German field hospital outside the walls of Acre during its siege by the Christians studied against a background of Hospitaller affairs in Jerusalem before its loss in 1187. The article relies on contemporary texts rather than the myths which rapidly appeared, while documents issued by the papal chancery suggest misunderstandings of the situation in Syria. The field hospital was the creation of Germans arriving at Acre by sea and overland but its later development inside the walls was, at least partly, conditioned by the long-term mistrust and strife between Romance-speaking and Germanic parties in Jerusalem where the Germans established, at some distance from the main Hospitaller compound, a separate church and hospital dedicated to Santa Maria Alamannorum.  In 1143 the pope adjudicated that the Germans were to be subject to the Hospital but were to be administered by Germans speaking German to those for whom they cared. By 1187 there were Hospitaller brethren and possessions in German lands but Santa Maria Alamannorum seems not to have had its own members or properties there. Those Germans at Acre in 1190/1191 would have known about their Jerusalem hospital but would not have sought an institutional link with it because that would have recognized Hospitaller claims to control them. In 1187 the Hospitaller Master and many brethren were killed and their Jerusalem headquarters was lost; no new Master was elected for some time and control passed to a succession of evidently disoriented senior officers. A new Master Garnier de Nablus reached Acre in June 1191 but by then the Hospitallers' rift with the Germans had hardened. and the Teutonic foundation in Acre successfully maintained its independence. How far the Hospitallers’ mismanagement of the situation eventually limited or impoverished their own order's future in German lands remains incalculable.