The Knights Hospitaller: A Military History of the Knights of St John Paperback – 8 Aug. 2023

Interesting and knowledgeable book

With the concentration over the last few decades upon the “Rennes le Chateau / Holy Blood - Holy Grail” balderdash the Knights Templar have monopolised studies of the Christian Military Orders despite the fact that, at less than two centuries, they had probably the shortest existence of any of the Orders ! By comparison the Hospitallers, founded around the same time still have an existence today and were important in European History well into the Sixteenth Century – indeed without their victory at Malta in 1565 the whole history of Europe may well have changed.Carr’s book is exactly what it says, a military history off the Hospitallers from their founding in the twelfth Century to the early Twenty-First. The book has a delightfully traditional style of history writing, almost entirely narrative with little analysis of reasons or ‘what might have beens’ which often cloud and pad much modern history writing. In a way that is wonderfully reminiscent of Victorian histories there are numerous, and sometimes quite frequent, insertions of fascinating snippets of tangentially relevant information.I have to say I liked this book, it is sometimes superficial and you feel that you want more information but given its scope and its page count this is something that is unavoidable. I did find the author’s credulity (gullibility ?) on some of the details present to be mildly annoying – do we really believe that Lescaut de Romegas, the Knight commanding the Hospitaller ships at Lepanto, personally seized his flagship’s tiller and guided into to the attacked on the Ottoman flagship ? Really ? REALLY ? I would suggest highly unlikely, and I wonder if he would even have had the skill to do so if he had wanted to … But, to be fair, whilst there are a number of these highly dubious statements they are easy to spot - and thus ignore, although their word count could probably have been better used.My greatest criticism of the book, not a deal breaker but something that is a significant shortfall, is the complete lack of any maps. A map of the entire “area of operations” of the Mediterranean would have been useful but most of us do have a mental map of the island and towns, however the lack of maps of the two major Sieges (Rhodes and Malta) make much of narrative confusing and barely understandable – its fine telling us that the next attack was moved from the St Nicholas Tower to the Langue of Italy, without a map of the City such narrative is less than educating. If you are going to make sense of much of these bits of the narrative you will need a map ! Just a minor point - why not use the near contemporary illustration of Vallette for the cover ? The "reimagining" is just horrible !But overall this is a book well worth a read and does, hopefully, start to restore the Hospitaller’s importance to the narrative of European History. Certainly, as I said earlier, they are considerably more important than the short-lived and fairly insignificant Templars.

Excellent piece of history. Exciting and accessible. Highly recommended.

excellent reading. May read it twice.