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Sign up for free Log in. A hundred years ago the Order of Malta appeared a mere honorific memory of the crusades: its Grand Master was an Austrian nobleman treated as a sovereign prince only by his own Emperor and the Holy See; it numbered little more than a thousand knights drawn from the innermost circle of the European aristocracy. Today the Order exchanges ambassadors with nearly sixty governments; it has more than ten thousand knights in thirty-nine national associ- ations throughout the world; its decorations have been proudly accepted by republican heads of state from Africa to the United States; and above all it conducts an international Hospitaller activity with few equals in size, modernity and efficiency.
The resurgence of this nine -hundred-year-old institution, the crusading order of the Knights Hospitaller, to the position it holds today is one of the most surprising phenomena of the twentieth century. It therefore seems right, in offering this contribution to its historiography, to write of it as an institution of the present, and in particular to show the rich trail that the Order has left behind in the history, art and culture of the European nations.
