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Ride of the VALKYRIES

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  ... the English called them wælwulfas ,  'slaughter-wolves' ... "Viking raiders were never a bolt from the blue, unknown barbarian sails on a North Sea horizon. Their victims had encountered Scandinavians many times before, but as traders rather than agents of chaos; the surprise was in the violence , not the contact ." The Vikings ominously enter the written record in the pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  for the year 789 AD:       ' Here [King] Beorhtric  [of Wessex] took [Mercian] King Offa's daughter Eadburh. And in his days came first three ships of Northmen from Hordaland: and then the reeve rode there and wanted to compel them to go to the king's town because he did not know what they were; and then they killed him. These were the first ships of the Danish men which sought out the land of the English race. ' Some corrective notes are required for the chronicler's account. This occasion was probably not the first 'visit' of the th...
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Naval Knights on Malta

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The Hospital  ...  considered itself permanently at war with the infidel ...  The Turk in the Levant and the Muslim corsair from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli ... along the Barbary coast ...  On their own through their regular statutory caravans or cruises throughout the Mediterranean, or with allies in formal war ...  Hospitallers tirelessly strive to seek him out, capture his ships, seize his merchandise, and carry his men into slavery ...  the whole relentless endeavour to keep the idea of the crusade alive ... [V Mallia-Milanes, 2003, 'Images of the Other: Venice's Perception of the Knights of Malta', Racial Discrimination and Ethnicity in European History , 63-77] NOTABLE NAVAL VICTORIES of the KNIGHTS OF MALTA These words formed the title of a newspaper feature piece run in the Sunday Times of Malta  on December 20, 2015. The article traced a number of battles at sea that were depicted in paintings from the Palazzo Falson Collection  in Malta. It ...
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Hospitallers in Clerkenwell

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  HENRY II  King of England  Vs  HERACLIUS  Patriarch of Jerusalem In 1185 King He nry summoned a Great Council   at the Hospitallers' House in Clerkenwell.  Before the lords of the church and his realm he addressed his eminent suitors from the Holy Land, Heraclius the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Grand Master of the Templars, and the Grand Prior of the Knights Hospitaller.  He had considered their request for him to lead a new crusade to Palestine and now made his decision known to them ― "for the good of his realm and the salvation of his soul" he must stay in England, but would provide money instead. HERACLIUS :  'We seek a man even without money, but not money without a man'. HENRY :   'Though all the men of my land were one body and spoke with one mouth, they would                    not dare speak to me as you have done'. HERACLIUS :  'Do by me as you did by that blessed ma...
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