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The Order's Second Commandery at Acre

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         "Acre was a hugely important city during the Crusades as a maritime foothold on the Mediterranean coast of the southern Levant and was the site of several battles, including the 1189-1191 Siege of Acre and the 1291 Siege of Acre. It was the last stronghold of the Crusaders in the Holy Land prior to that final battle in 1291. At the end of Crusader rule, the city was destroyed by the Mamluks ..."       "During the Crusades it was officially known as Sainct-Jehan-d'Acre ... after the Knights Hospitaller who had their headquarters there and whose patron saint was John the Baptist ..." THE HOSPITALLER CITADEL AT SAINT-JEAN-D'ACRE "From the first years of the Crusaders in the city, the Hospitallers received donated properties. In 1110, King Baldwin granted the Knights Hospitaller permission to keep the constructions located north of the Saints-Croix church. In 1130, these buildings were damaged during works near the church and the Hospitallers...
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Modest Beginnings in the Muristan

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  "Muristan research project ... deals with the early phase of the Order of St John , whose origins in Jerusalem date back to the tim e before 1099 and which, during the period of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099-1187) developed into one of the great military religious orders and became the Order of Hospitallers. The beginnings of the order can be traced to an area south of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre." [D Heinzelmann & J Kruger, 2021, 'The beginnings of the Order of Saint John in Jerusalem, or : Muristan revisited', ( Medievalista.Online , 30), is essentially an updating of C Schick, 1902, 'The Muristan, or the Site of the Hospital of St John at Jerusalem', ( Palestine Exploration Quarterly , 34.1). It applies recent archaeological discoveries (up to 2020) on to Schick's original drafting work (1870 and 1900).] Image 1: The background map of the Muristan and adjoining Church of the Holy Sepulchre was drawn by C Schick in 1869/1870 to mark the prope...
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Two Istrian Frescoes

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The Istrian peninsular at the top end of the Adriatic Sea is a small enough spit of land in the European scheme of things but it has long been jam-packed with demographic tension. During the Late Medieval to Early Modern periods (1400s and 1500s) it could well have been one of the most contested areas on the planet. For a start, Istria was (and is) populated by three different ethnicities ― Italian, Slovenian, Croatian. In addition, this fractious littoral region was surrounded by three acquisitive empires ― Maritime Venice, Austrian Hapsburgs, Ottoman Turks.  An intriguing insight into this cockpit of animosity is given by its one element held in common, the Roman Catholic Church. In what is likely to have been an insular peasant society, serially suspicious and distrustful of any and all political authority, there was a shared space. Rare examples of seeing the world as if through one lens are still to be found in two tiny stone churches.  Tucked away in a forest on the site...
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The Tallinn Fragment

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1. REMEMBER AT ALL TIMES TO BRING GOOD DEEDS WITH YOU "I call all and everyone to this dance:  pope, emperor, and all creatures poor, rich, big , or small.  Step forward, mourning won't help now!  Remember though at all times to bring good deeds with you  and to repent your sins  for you must dance to my pipe." Totentanz  of Reval (Tallinn) "On 23 August 1468 Lubeck's city council issued a letter to its counterpart in Reval requesting the transfer of the properties of a Reval cleric, Diderik Notken, to Bernt Notke, painter and burgher of Lubeck. According to this letter, Diderik had bequeathed all his real property in Reval for the wellbeing of his soul and for his relatives (to slichied ziner zelen vnde behuff syner angeborenen vrund). The painter referenced in this letter was the same Bernt Notke (c. 1440-1508) who around 1463 painted a cycle called the Dance of Death (Totentanz) in the chapel of St Matthew in Lubeck, which he later replicated under the b...
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