Further Thoughts on the Layout of the Hospital in Acre

1The original house of the Hospitaliers in Acre had been situated close to the cathedral of the Holy Cross, east of the present line of the Ottoman walls. It was demolished when the cathedral’s north portal was constructed and before 1149 the brothers must have moved to the site which was thenceforward to be associated with them, further to the west and just south of the walls of the old town.2 Their commandery, the church of which was already a magnet for the townspeople by 1175, incorporated a hospital to serve the pilgrim traffic passing through the city and was unusual in that its officers included a treasurer as well as a hospitalier. Its buildings were said to be magnificent.3

2It was, however, to become the order’s international headquarters and as such needed enlargement. The sensational results of recent excavations have revealed that an extravagant building campaign was begun around 1200, creating a large courtyard to the north (Y),4 with impressive structures on the eastern and western sides and a line of huge halls along the northern, close to the original city wall. Two charters, issued by Guy of Lusignan and Henry of Champagne in 1192 and 1193 respectively, paved the way for this extension. The convent’s northern boundary wall was to run between the Gates of St Mary (or Our Lady) in the north-east and St John (or the Hospital) in the north-west. The Gate of St Mary (M) was situated next to the surviving Burj al-Khazna, which can be identified as the ‘turris hospitalis’ referred to in 1192.5 Elements of the Gate of St John may survive in the one which now leads out through the remnants of the town wall behind the Hospitalier courtyard (J), and a large subterranean drain, associated with a latrine tower (L), may mark the passage of a street that ran from that gate through the town.⁶ If this is the case, the grants made in the 1190s comprised a smaller area than that covered by the agglomeration of buildings a decade or so later, since it had come to engulf the Gate of St John and the street itself; in fact the wording of Henry of Champagne’s charter suggests that this was already intended in 1193. By 1235 the order seems to have extended its compound even further to the west, as far as the New Gate, which was the next one along the old city wall after the Gate of St John.⁷ In this paper I will ask whether more can be deduced about the Hospital’s lay-out from historical materials, including charters relating to Acre, the maps ascribed to Paolino Veneto and Pietro Vesconte (the latter commissioned by Marino Sanudo),⁸ the decisions of the Hospitalier chapters-general which met between 1206 and 1288,⁹ the Esgarts (the records of Hospitalier case law) and the Usances (the order’s customs).¹⁰

3The decision to establish the headquarters in Acre cannot have been an easy one. The building campaign there must have strained the order’s finances and it was soon to be faced by the prospect of rebuilding its largest castles, Crac des Chevaliers and Marqab, after a destructive earthquake in 1202 which did a great deal of damage to Acre as well.11 The costs associated with such structures were high. When the Templars came to reconstruct their castle of Safad in the 1240s they were reported having to budget for expenditure over the first two and a half years of a sum of 1, 100,000 saracen besants, in addition to the income generated by the villages nearby.12 Since mercenary knights were serving in Acre a few years later for 120 besants a year, this could have been the equivalent of paying a year’s wages to over 9,000 knights.13 In the 1190s the Hospital must also have been faced by the questions whether Jerusalem would be recovered and, if it was, whether the headquarters should be moved back to their original site south of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is hard to know when the prospect of a return to Jerusalem faded, although it is clear that by the time Christian control was restored in 1229 the order was too firmly ensconced in Acre to relocate; it reoccupied its hospital in Jerusalem, but never moved back its central administration.14 Then there was an issue that certainly troubled the Templars. Acre was a noisy, wicked port-city, full of secular soldiery and a far from ideal location for a religious community. The Templars toyed with the idea of moving their headquarters to Chastel Pèlerin down the coast, although in the end they stayed where they were.15

4In fact the Hospital’s central convent may have settled in the northern castle of Marqab for a time during the 1190s. It may be significant that a dispute with local Templars degenerated into violence.16 Some of the leading Hospitaliers in the east were in Marqab in January 1193, when the master and the bishop of Baniyas, whose diocese was almost entirely under the order’s control, came to an agreement about tithes.17 As late as 1206 the Hospitaliers met in general chapter in the castle.18 Chapters-general were by no means always to be convoked to the same place19 and the restoration of Marqab after the earthquake may have needed the Personal attention of the master and the conventual bailiffs. Or the building works in Acre may have been too disruptive for any meeting to be held there. But it is just possible that the order had still not made up its mind whether to settle in Acre. Of course the logic of the situation, as for the Templars, was that it should. If one had to manage from Palestine a great international institution, most of the members and capital assets of which were in Europe, Acre was in direct communication with the west, besides being the seat of secular government and the main port of entry and departure for pilgrims, whom the Hospitaliers were committed to serve.

5The site of the headquarters of the Hospital is easy to identify, because the crypt of the church (C) can still be seen and north of it is the agglomeration of high quality buildings, erected around an open square, which have recently been excavated. As late as the 1680s these stood to a substantial height.20 They appear to have been known collectively as the palais, a term which was also used by the Templars for their headquarters; on the arrival in Acre in 1272 of the Templar grand master William of Beaujeu, the mercenaries he had brought from Europe rioted for pay ‘ante pallacium dicte domus’.21 The word ‘palais’ is to be found in Hospitalier legislation with reference to the refectory, which, as we shall see, was almost certainly in this compound,22 and to the disciplining of servants, who, if convicted of insulting a brother, stealing or fighting, would be whipped ‘through the palais as far as the gate’.23 In this collection of buildings resided the master – a reference to the palatium magistri in a document of 1270 could refer to the whole complex or to part ofit24 – and the conventual prior,25 together, perhaps, with the petty officers and the brother sergeants-at-service. Somewhere within it there was also a prison.26 The halls along the north wall, in one of which were discovered sugar pots carefully stacked in preparation for distribution to the sugar cane plantations in the following season,27 were clearly storerooms and warehouses. Other warehouses, now lost, must have lined the eastern range as well, because the easternmost section of a street, which was driven through the compound and will be referred to later (R), ran under a building, or series of buildings, given the name of la vote; and the street’s eastern gateway was ‘opposite the ... bath [of Saint John], which is near the head of the aforenamed vote’ 28 In 1264 a preceptor volte Sancti Johannis was in post.29 A parallel officer in the Temple, the comandour de la voute d’Acre, was responsible for the purchase of supplies, and their importation by sea, and the Templar retrais told the story of a comandour de la voute who had bought a shipload of grain which turned out to be damp and unusable.30 We can assume, therefore, that the Hospitalier preceptor volte was in charge of supplies and stores. Among the halls and warehouses lining the northern and eastern sides of the compound must also have been found the armoury,31 the clothes store or parmentarie32 and the treasury, where the order’s relies must have been kept;33 its storage facilities were secure enough for outsiders to deposit their charters with the order.34

6Also in the agglomeration, because it was close to the church, was a large room, used for Sunday and annual chapters and for chapters-general,35 and the conventual refectory.36 The latter must have been hall-like, because the tables of the conventual brothers were situated along its walls and those who sat on the outer side when the inner was not yet full were to be disciplined.37 The refectory could have been situated in or over the fine hall (H) on the south side of the yard or over a large undercroft (X) to the east; the building above was reached by a beautiful staircase (S).

7Perhaps nearby were the order’s stables, which suffered a serious fire in 1267,38 although they could have been elsewhere in the city, as may have been the ox-stalls, wood-sheds, piggery and chicken houses referred to in 1270.39 These might be thought to have been too rustic to have been found in the middle of a great conurbation, but many examples of animal husbandry were to be found within Acre, such as the boverels/boveriae or cattle stalls which were scattered about the town40 and the pigsties in the Genoese quarter.41

8And somewhere was the hospital for the sick. It contained its own chapel, perhaps at the end of one of its wards.42 Its reputation in thirteenth-century Acre seems to have been as high as it had been when in twelfth-century Jerusalem and there survive the records of gifts to it by pilgrims, crusaders and residents of the kingdom.43 The language often used by the donors was formulaic and probably originated with the order itself – ‘seeing and considering the works of love and mercy which are performed every day and continually in the holy house of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem’;44 ‘recognizing the many works of charity which the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem confers on and incessantly performs for the poor of Jesus Christ’45 – but it is certain that many visitors were deeply impressed. In 1217 the crusader King Andrew of Hungary was extravagant in his praise not only of the order’s care of the sick poor, but also of its concern to bury them and its shouldering of military responsibilities.46 A decade or so later an extraordinary story of a Muslim sultan’s endowment of the hospital seems to have been widespread in the west.47 In 1268 King Louis IX of France remembered seeing with his own eyes the order’s work in Acre.48 Some charters issued on behalf of men who must have been patients – although of the richer sort – survive.49 If we are not provided with the kind of information we have with respect to its predecessor in Jerusalem, it is worth remembering that details of the working of that hospital have only recently come to light.50 But, most importantly, we do not know exactly where the Acre hospital was.

9Paolino Veneto’s map shows three named buildings, or complexes of buildings, aligned from north to south: hospitale, ecclesia and domus infirmorum. This looks clear enough. As has already been pointed out, the ecclesia or church is easily identifiable in the position given it by Paolino just to the south of the main compound (C). Its ruined walls were still standing in the 1680s and the number of bays recorded in an illustration of that time have been confirmed by excavation. The first reference to a church on this site is in a charter of 114951 and elements of the crypt have been dated to the twelfth century, although it is clear that the building was extended greatly in the thirteenth. To the south of it lay, according to Paolino, the domus infirmorum, which looks like a latinization of the phrase palais des malades, used by the brothers of their hospital for the poor;52 one redaction of Paolino’s map portrays a ward-like building with doors at either end.53 This would leave the structures around the courtyard to the north of the church, described by Paolino by the word hospitale, as residential, administrative and storage buildings, a conclusion which appears to be confirmed in the wording of a charter of July 1252 in which the regent, Henry of Cyprus, gave the order the right to construct gates at either end of a street which ran through the compound and which was:

below la vote which belongs to the same house. That street is between the Ospital des malades and the church of St John on one side; and on the other side is the grand maneir of the brothers of the aforesaid house. And ... they can make one of the gates at the head of that aforesaid street. towards the spot at which one enters the street of the Genoese. And they can build the other gate at the other head (of the street), which lies in the direction of the baths which are called of St John and which runs towards the street of the Provençaux.54

10So at its western end this street entered a highway probably running from the New Gate down to the Genoese quarter and at its eastern end it joined a road descending from the Gate of St Mary down to the Provençal quarter near the port. On what seems to have been the other side of that road stood the ‘Baths of St John’, which were, presumably, public.

11A section of a medieval street, running between the main compound and the church, has been cleared (R) and one’s first impression is that it was this that separated the church of St John and the main hospital on one side from the administrative conglomeration, to which the charter of 1252 gave the name le grand maneir, on the other. It is certainly possible that a large undercroft surviving south of the church (U) and ‘crusader’ structures under an Ottoman bathhouse nearby could have been part of the domus infirmorum/palais des malades,55 but this conclusion has been thrown into doubt by one of the most startling of the excavators’ discoveries. The enormous warehouses that line the northern limit of the Hospitalier compound end in the west with an internally plumbed latrine tower (L), containing sixty stalls on two levels, associated with an elaborate sewage pit and the town drainage System.56 An expensive facility which enabled sixty persons to relieve themselves simultaneously must have been serving a massive residential population. One’s first reaction is that only a hospital could have provided so many people and that the latrine tower could mark the northern end of the palais des malades, which could have taken up the whole of the area to the west of the courtyard, which has not yet been excavated (B).

12In this case we would have to find a street dividing the structures round the yard, which would now include the hospital itself, and the church, from le grand maneir, which would be to the south. Although no such street has been found, an impressive gateway has been discovered immediately south of the church (G), which is substantially intact and could have been the eastern of the gates authorized by Henry of Cyprus in 1252.57 There are some surviving thirteenth-century residential buildings in the district to the south of this gateway, together with the undercroft to which I have already referred.58 but these would not now be related to the hospital of the sick. In this case, Paolino’s domus infirmorum could have been the order’s infirmary, which was near the conventual church,59 seems also to have been close to the baths of St John60 and cannot have been far from the hospital of the sick, because doctors would visit it.61

13So in one model the palais des malades would be found south of the church; and the impressive gateway might have been its entrance. In the other it constituted the western wing of the main conglomeration, ending in the latrine tower. I incline to the first rather than the second model for three reasons.

14First, it is dangerous to ignore the evidence provided by Paolino Veneto, which is clear and specifie. Secondly, the phrase le grand maneir, carrying with it the implication of residence, suits the great structures around the yard better than the district to the south, even though the latter contained residential buildings. Thirdly, a list of the indulgences to be gained in Acre, the ‘Pelrinages et pardouns d’Acre’, specified additional ones which pilgrims could accumulate each time they walked round the palais des malades.62 If meant to be taken literally – and it is hard to imagine that pilgrims were welcome thronging the wards themselves – it would have been impossible for visitors to walk round the outside of a hospital which was the west wing of the main agglomeration. The hospital must have been a free-standing structure, which is what Paolino’s domus infirmorum looks like.

15But how then are the sixty stalls in the latrine tower to be explained? Large numbcrs of knights and other men were attached to the Hospital, serving the order either for pay63 or out of devotion: à la charité.64 Very little is known about them, but when they came into their own in fourteenth-century Rhodes, and at Marienburg and Königsberg of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia, they were already part of a long tradition. The military orders must have been responsible for at least part of the upkeep of devotional volunteers and the lengths to which they would go is evidenced by the magnificent central court at Marienburg with lodgings, a chapel and a banqueting hall for nobles who came to take part in the Teutonic Order’s Reisen.65 The thirteenth-century Hospitaliers were also employing mercenaries, including technicians responsible for crossbows and artillery, and western and indigenous turcopoles.66 The mercenaries were occasionally supplemented by those provided by western powers. For example, the will of King Philip II of France in 1222 budgeted for 100 knights (not including those in the convent) which were to be employed by the order for three years.67 In addition, there were also large numbers of wage-earning servants; some of them could have been employed by the day, but others would have been resident. Indeed the Hospital seems to have made much more use of servants than did the Temple, which had a larger class of brother sergeants. There was also an indeterminate number of prisoners-of-war and slaves.

16In 1268 the master Hugh Revel referred to more than 10,000 men being fed by the order in the east, cum presentes fecimus annotari, over and above the 300 brothers who were resident there.68 He may have been exaggerating, but his reference to some sort of counting procedure suggests that he was not and one wonders where all these men were housed. Between 2,000 and 3,000 could have been serving in the castles of Crac des Chevaliers and Marqab and perhaps another 2,000 would have been scattered among the greater convents, like Tripoli, and smaller fortresses in the Levant. A large number of men, however, must have been resident in Acre, where, for one thing, the order had a section of the city walls to defend,69 and the location of the latrine tower suggests that they might well have been housed on the western side of the courtyard of the main compound (B).

17If large numbers of men employed by or serving the order were being housed in barracks attached to the central agglomeration of buildings, this would provide an explanation for an otherwise inexplicable development, which distinguishes the Hospitaliers from the Templars: the removal by 1230 of the conventual brothers to an auberge in the northern suburb of Montmusard,70 where they lived under the command of the marshal.71 It is hard to say how many brethren-at-arms normally came to be housed in the auberge. About thirty were in the convent in Jerusalem in 1170, but that was early and at a time of crisis.72 Surviving figures for the knights and sergeants-at-arms ‘of the convent’ involved in thirteenth-century military engagements run into hundreds,73 but it is not clear whether mercenaries and liegemen were counted in the overall numbers, which must also have included brothers summoned from all over the east for a particular campaign, since every brother-at-arms would rank as conventual as long as he stayed in Acre or made himself subject to the marshal. Perhaps one should suppose a normal complement of between fifty and 100 brothers-at-arms resident in Acre. It could have multiplied after the losses of Crac des Chevaliers in 1271 and Marqab in 1285, although it is possible that some brothers were sent back to Europe. The loss, however, of forty brothers (and 100 horses) in the fall of Tripoli in 1289 was regarded as serious enough for urgent steps to be taken to replenish the convent.74

18The auberge (identified as the maisun de l’hospital, alberges or hospicium Hospitalis on the Acre maps of Matthew Paris, Paulino Veneto and Pietro Vesconte) was located in the northern part of Montmusard, although its actual distance from the main Hospitalier buildings would not have been more than 700 metres. The site has been lost and is anyway built over by the modem town. In it were the individual cells in which, by the thirteenth century, all the conventual brothers slept, including the bailiffs, which suggests that most of the leading conventual officers — the grand commander, the treasurer, the drapier and the hospitalier – spent their nights in the auberge. There was perhaps a suite of rooms for the marshal, since he could put up bailiffs from Europe who arrived in Acre.75

19The word auberge originated as an alternative form of herberge, the term used by the Templars for a military encampment.76 It is clear that to the Hospitaliers it had the same meaning77 and the brothers seem to have held to the fiction that the building in Montmusard was an encampment of a military force on the march. By the later thirteenth century, however, it was ‘a very large palais’, ’very long and very beautiful’, with a hall large enough to be the scene of lavish fortnight-long festivities, including theatrical presentations of the legends of Arthur and the queen of Femenie, to celebrate the coronation of King Henry in 1286.78 The existence of such an impressive hall brings a refectory to mind, but although the brothers could get permission to give private parties in the auberge79 they were supposed to eat in the conventual refectory in the main compound, to which they would process two by two. The marshal was responsible for seeing that they did so and that they were properly dressed.80 And although there was a chapel in the auberge, which as part of the fiction that it was a military encampment was portable, accompanied the convent on campaign and was probably served by the ‘caravan priest’ referred to in 1263,81 it seems that only certain hours – such as Matins in the middle of the night – were said in it.82 For conventual Mass, Vespers and probably Lauds the brothers had to process down to the main conventual church and the marshal was described standing outside the church with a lantern to make sure that they arrived on time.83

20There were precedents for the management of outlying establishments at some distance from the main headquarters buildings. In Jerusalem before 1187 the Hospitaliers had had a subsidiary German hospital near the Temple, a pilgrim hospice and stables beyond the northern wall and their own cemetery to the south, overlooking the Hinnom valley.84 They recovered the cemetery when Christian control was restored in 1229. Wernher of Kybourg, probably one of the emperor Frederick II’s crusaders, had died in Acre and had been buried by the Hospitaliers there, but, presumably in fulfilment of a promise they had made to him, they now transferred his bones to Jerusalem.85

21The hospital they ran in Acre in the twelfth century also required them to have a cemetery and burial rights. Their cemetery was a section of the town burial ground of St Nicholas, just outside the walls and close to the gate of that name.86 In April 1200 the bishop confirmed their possession of it and added the right to enclose their section and to build in it a chapel, which became their mortuary church of St Michael, served by a priest and an acolyte, where there was regular intercession for the dead. Visits by the faithful on the feasts of St John the Baptist, the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Michael were indulgenced.87

22The sisters of St John, moreover, who had lived with the brothers in a double house in Jerusalem,88 had been placed in their own separate community in Acre by 1219.89 Thereafter they must have lived enclosed lives as canonesses regular, isolated from the convent proper. Most Hospitalier nunneries had the same financial obligations as the male commanderies and were expected to pay annual responsions for the upkeep of the headquarters. One cannot imagine the sisters in Acre being in the position to do so, unless they had been independently endowed, and it must have been with them in mind, along with the general material benefit that would accrue, that the Hospital made a bid for the Benedictine nunnery of St Lazarus of Bethany, exiled from its shrine near Jerusalem and now situated in the centre of Acre. In 1256 Pope Alexander IV gave St Lazarus to the order, permitting it to replace the abbess and nuns as they died out with an equivalent number of Hospitalier sisters. The Hospital was taking possession of the abbey and its goods in 1259, but the gift was revoked by Pope Urban IV in 1261 soon after he came to power. Urban, who as patriarch of Jerusalem had bitterly opposed the grant, stated bluntly in his bull of revocation that he believed that Alexander had been deliberately misinformed and that, far from being near collapse, St Lazarus had a community of over fifty nuns.90

23But these examples of outlying dependencies do not explain an extraordinarily inconvenient arrangement, according to which the conventual brothers residing in the auberge had to process down to the central compound from another part of the town several times a day to hear the office in the church and to eat their meals in the refectory. A justification for such a cumbersome procedure, which was obviously an attempt to keep up the appearance of conventual life in the central compound, may have been that it was considered necessary to isolate them from the secular troops now occupying barracks there. Other, and more convenient, parallels are probably to be found in the architecture of Hospitalier castles. At twelfth-century Belvoir and Belmont, and at thirteenth-century Crac des Chevaliers and Marqab, the brothers seem to have lived enclosed lives in a defined space within the castle.91 The same arrangement was probably to be found in the Templar compound in Acre.92 In fourteenth-century Rhodes the collachio, a walled-off part of the town where the Hospitalier convent lived, was supposed to fulfil the same purpose, although residence in it seems never to have been limited entirely to members of the order.93 The brothers of the Hospital were religious first and soldiers or nurses second and the demands of the religious life meant that they should spend much of their lives in enclosure, which provided the ambience for prayer and contemplation.