When the Past Makes Saints: The Knights of Malta from Sinners to Martyrs in "Il glorioso trionfo della sacrosanta religion militare di S. Giovanni Gierosolimitano (1619)”

Abstract

After the fall of Rhodes (1522), the Order of St. John needed to recover its reputation as militia Christi and to redraft its chivalrous ideals within the context of the Catholic Renewal. However, this so-called Religion met this challenge partially and late, although it represented its glorious past as a gallery of saints and martyrs, even if they were not always officially recognised by the Church. This past, since its origin in the Holy Land, casted a shadow of sanctity into the present, confirming this Religion as being semper eadem. Such a representation is found in the book Il glorioso trionfo della sacrosanta religion militare di S. Giovanni Gierosolimitano, published in 1619 in Italy and Spain, which is investigated in this paper. In these peculiar acta sanctorum, the knights of St. John were por-trayed between their religious fidelity and military value up to the extreme of martyrdom. However, this sacrifice silenced the real behaviour of men whose religious practice was often inadequate. The narrative strategies of this work are set within the context of the coeval literature on the Crusades and the “Christian soldier”, and included: the hagiographic reconstruction of the Order origins and devel-opment, the providential interpretation of military victory/defeat, the stereotyped portrayal of the “bar-barous” infidel, the complaint about the internal divisions of Christianity against the Turk, the urgent appeal to the reconquest of the Holy Land.