Original subtitles

(rousing music)

- [Narrator] In the Holy Land, a new kingdom

built by crusaders,

devout servants of the Holy State,

a life of prayer lived by a solemn rule,

the white cross, the black and the red.

New orders, of the cross, and also the sword.

- They might've been called the Hospitallers,

but these were warriors, these were warriors of God.

(horse neighing)

- [Narrator] Feared by the enemies,

guardians of the poor and the sick.

- They cared for people who needed to be cared for,

and they were there when people needed them.

- [Narrator] Dark times ahead for all the military orders.

- They'd been fighting for God and yet, they had lost.

So is that 'cause we're sinners?

- [Narrator] New frontiers for the soldiers of Christ.

- It could've been a disaster for the Hospitaller,

but they turned it into a triumph.

- [Narrator] From the Middle East

to the Aegean and beyond,

the Order of the Knights Hospitaller.

(rousing music)

The Order of the Knights Hospitaller

was renowned throughout the Middle Ages.

Their plain robes and surcoats, black and later red,

marked them out as devoutly religious,

dedicated to carrying out God's work,

with the sword if need be.

- The Order of the Hospitallers is clearly

one of the best known, most identifiable

of the military orders.

- [Narrator] They were respected by some contemporaries,

and by historians since

due to their reputation for caring and healing.

But at the same time, this led them to being overshadowed,

at least in the popular imagination.

Their rival order, the Knights Templar

are often seen as the more famous

and dashing medieval Christian warriors.

- It's always the Templars who are mentioned first,

and the Hospitallers never had such a pronounced image.

They've come down through history

as the hospital order who cared for people,

which for some reason, is never seen as being as exciting

as the people that ride out

and do the death and glory charges.

In fact, the Hospitaller did death and glory charges

as well.

- [Narrator] In fact,

the Hospitaller fought alongside the Templars

in the Holy Land of the 12th and 13th centuries.

- The Hospitallers did have a slightly more pacific image.

Although they did fight in most of the battles as well,

and with a similar number of troops,

they could be very aggressive.

But because they had a whole medical wing to them as well,

that did provide a rather different image for them

in Western Christendom.

- [Narrator] The Hospitallers were among the longest lived

of all the military orders, even the Templars.

- The Knights Hospitaller were by far

the older of the two institutions compared to the Templars.

They'd been around in Jerusalem

even before the first crusades.

- [Narrator] The Templars were the first militarized order,

formed probably in the 1120s,

following the First Crusade's capture of Jerusalem in 1099.

But the order of the Hospital of St. John in Jerusalem

had already been formed for some decades, perhaps longer,

although it wasn't yet a fighting order.

- There already was a hospital in Jerusalem

run for Christian pilgrims

by Christians from Western Europe.

- They were founded in the 1060,

or possibly the early 1070s

by a group of Amalfi merchants

who wanted somewhere to stay in Jerusalem

and wanted somewhere where poor pilgrims

and travelers could stay.

- [Narrator] They were granted a site

near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,

the most important place for Christian pilgrims,

who were often exhausted after long journeys.

The Hospital of St. John in Jerusalem became well-respected,

and the members of the order

became known as the Hospitallers.

Over the next decades,

the hospital grew in size and reputation,

opening its doors to men and women of all faiths,

not just Christian.

- The first 50-odd years plus of their existence,

they were solely medical, providing healthcare,

support, accommodation, and medical attention if necessary

for pilgrims visiting Jerusalem.

- [Narrator] The catalyst that transformed the Hospitallers

was the First Crusade.

After the capture of Jerusalem, the new crusader states

needed pilgrims and traders from the west.

The first military order, the Knights Templar,

began protecting the Holy Land's roads and frontiers,

but they were few in number.

- Some of the Hospitallers,

the members of the hospital staff

who were from the knightly class,

or at least would've had some degree of military training

because of their own family backgrounds,

decided that they could also protect pilgrims.

So that was the beginning

of what you would call their militarization.

- [Narrator] Templars and Hospitallers

patrolled the borders of the Christian Holy Land.

Like the Templars, the Hospitallers rapidly developed

into a highly respected military force,

with the emphasis on cavalry,

the most important battlefield element

being the armored knight on horseback.

Full scale battles were few.

It was frontier work, often far from the major towns.

Vitally important to both sides were outposts.

The military orders operated many castles in the Holy Land,

including some of the most important border strongholds.

- The Hospitallers were either given or built

10s of castles on the frontiers of Kingdom of Jerusalem,

Principality of Antioch and elsewhere,

and these castles performed a crucial function

because the Hospitallers could afford

to maintain them, to garrison them

and provide them with all that they needed.

- The Hospitallers' castles were wonders of the world.

They reflected the latest in castle building technology,

so that they became places that they could take

visiting pilgrims to to show them

the wonderful things that they were doing

in the Lord's name in the kingdom of Jerusalem,

and thereby they got more donations from the west

because of these magnificent fortresses.

- Several of the most famous

and impressive surviving castles and fortresses

in the Holy Land, and Lebanon and part of Syria

are or were Hospitaller castles.

- [Narrator] Historian David Nicole

is no stranger to the Middle East.

He's journeyed extensively here

during his research into the crusader period.

Of the surviving crusader-era castles,

few are as spectacular as the one he's traveling to

in northeastern Israel.

- One of the best known is of course Belvoir,

overlooking the Jordan Valley on the edge of an escarpment,

right on a frontier,

on a physical, identifiable, visible frontier,

and on the top of a cliff.

I mean, this is dramatic stuff.

- [Narrator] Belvoir, beautiful view,

is the most preserved crusader castle in Israel.

It's Arabic name meant Star of the Wind.

The castle stands on a promontory

500 meters above sea level.

- It's overlooking the Jordan Valley,

then Jordan, existing Jordan on the other side,

and Saladin's castle of Ajloun facing this,

two castles strategically opposed to each other

in visual contact with each other.

This was defensively vital.

Its location is strategic.

And as a political statement,

a statement of power and wealth by the Hospitaller's order,

it's second to none.

- [Narrator] The upper levels of the castle

will be robbed away over centuries,

but what remains is still massive,

a testament to the Hospitallers rapid growth

in a few decades after they became military.

- Belvoir is extraordinarily important to the Hospitallers,

and we can tell it's important

by the amount of effort and money that was put into it.

I mean, the thing was only here,

according to the historical record, for 21 years.

All this in 21 years,

- [Narrator] The Hospitallers began building the castle

in 1168.

- The Castle of Belvoir was built at a time

when the Kingdom of Jerusalem

was coming under increasing attack,

and people were looking increasingly

to fortifying the frontier,

where previously it hadn't been quite so necessary

because they've been on the offensive by and large.

So Belvoir was crucial.

- [Narrator] At this time in the later 12th century,

Muslim leader Salah al-Din sought to recover

the loss of Jerusalem and Palestine to the Christians.

The job of the Hospitallers and other military orders

was to delay his advance as long as possible.

- One of the major invasion routes

into the kingdom of Jerusalem

was to go south of Lake Tiberius,

and Belvoir, situated on a ridge

high above that particular crossing,

was very strategically located.

- In 1187, the inevitable came,

and Salah al-Din's forces laid siege to Belvoir,

but they found the castle extremely strong

and resilient to attack.

In the First Crusade,

the Francs had stormed Jerusalem's ancient walls

after just a few days,

but the Hospitallers stronghold here was newly built,

and its defenses were state-of-the-art.

Already atop the steep cliff,

it was surrounded on three sides by a moat

20 meters wide and 12 meters deep.

Within was a rectangular castle

with a tower at each corner and midpoint,

and a fortified gateway.

Inside the first wall was another,

and then yet another with its own defensive corner towers.

It's thought to be one of the earliest examples

of a concentric castle,

a design that became widespread

in the later 12th and 13th centuries,

both in the Holy Land and back in Western Europe.

It wasn't just the castle's strength

that made it a statement here on the frontier.

The kind of building stone the Hospitallers used

may also have been chosen for its color.

- You can read a certain amount into the use of dark gray,

effectively black volcanic basalt rock,

which is most of this,

certainly the lower parts of the castle,

and the white stone, the more finely dressed stone above.

Black and white, colors of the Hospitallers.

Now, whether this was in actual fact

a statement of identity or not is impossible to say.

It may have been just that they were using

these two available rocks,

but doesn't alter the fact that you end up with

a very striking, very visual,

very powerful black and white castle.

- [Narrator] The Muslim army couldn't take Belvoir by storm,

so all they could do was surround it and wait.

- Belvoir held Saladin up for months.

They did not fall to siege easily.

So the boasts that the Hospitallers made about them

were well justified.

- [Narrator] In the end, Belvoir held out

for an extraordinary 18 months.

But in 1187, Salah al-Din defeated

the crusader field army at Hattin,

and across the crusader kingdom,

the Muslim tide was in the end unstoppable.

- While in actual fact, this place only fell

after the battle of Hattin,

which in turn led to the fall of Jerusalem,

the fall of practically everything.

So this place, on the eastern frontier effectively,

of the kingdom was left high and dry.

It had to surrender.

There was no point in it just going onto the bitter end.

It would've ended up with just more deaths.

- [Narrator] Within months,

most of the Christian held castles fell to the Muslims.

When the Christians returned just two years later,

they needed a port.

Acre, in the Holy Land's north had fallen to Salah al-Din

along with almost everywhere else.

The Third Crusade, led by among others

Richard The Lionheart of England,

recaptured the city in 1189.

Jerusalem itself was never retaken,

so Acre became the crusaders' new capital.

Much of the city as it appears today

was rebuilt by the Ottoman Empire

in the 16th and 17th centuries.

But some parts remain from Crusader times.

For a 100 years, Acre was the crusader kingdom's

link to Western Europe.

Most of its troops and supplies,

not to mention pilgrims, entered the Holy Land here.

For the military orders too, it was an important base.

Each of the main orders had a headquarters here.

But Acre's value wasn't just as a military staging post.

Its sheltered harbor was ideal for merchant shipping.

The orders each had their own trading interest,

and they as much as the kingdom

needed the revenue from this

to keep alive their Holy War effort.

In the 1990s, a discovery was made

which offered a tantalizing insight

into the military orders in Acre.

Beneath the streets of the old crusader town,

developers found a large network of tunnels,

their purpose unknown.

They took time to explore, and even longer to unearth.

The stonework was Crusader period.

It wasn't until the layout of the tunnels was established

that a clue was revealed as to who built them.

- These are the famous Templar tunnels

running under a large part of the old city,

from the harbor to where the Templars had their headquarters

up the other end.

- [Narrator] Of all the military orders,

the Templars attract more myths and rumors than any other.

Stories emerged that the tunnels had been used

for clandestine purposes or secret rituals.

Professional historians' theories about the tunnels

might not be so sensational,

but they're no less fascinating.

- It seems much more likely to me

that they were a very convenient way

of bringing goods between the harbor

to the main Templar center,

and taking goods, indeed, people,

animals, whatever you wanted to move very conveniently.

It's a private road.

But the fact that they were able to do this

shows how wealthy and powerful they were.

- [Narrator] The tunnels extend for more than 300 meters,

and they would've been wide enough

for supplies in large wagons, personnel, or even cavalry.

In the last chaotic days of Crusader rule,

the tunnels might've offered a refuge,

or even an escape route.

- I think there's every good reason to believe the stories

that they were used at the last siege of Acre in 1291.

A few people escaped down to the harbor through here.

Because of course, above our heads in the old city,

once the Mamlukes had broken in

and the city was going to fall, it would've been mayhem.

Everybody trying to get down to the harbor

to get aboard a ship to escape as best they could.

People who had access to these tunnels

were in a very, very lucky position.

They could get down to the harbor.

They probably had ships down there

belonging to the Templars waiting for them.

So this is a mark of prestige, these tunnels

- [Narrator] When the Mamlukes besieged the city,

the Hospitallers, as well as the Templars

and other military orders were integral to its defense.

They each had towers or points of the walls to defend.

One by one, they were defeated.

The Crusader city was mostly destroyed.

The Templars castle was the last to fall,

and it was obliterated.

Most of the others too were gone, but one remained.

Near the harbor, and like the Templar tunnel,

much of it was buried under tons of earth and ruble.

The sea had flooded and silted much of it.

In the 1990s, Israeli archeologists

dug their way through this infill

to explore what lab beneath.

What they found astonished them.

Incredibly, it was the castle of the Hospitallers,

preserved almost intact.

No one suspected so much of the medieval building

still survived.

Much of the complex was buried and built over

after the Crusader period.

Archeologists were faced with the challenge

of removing the rubble and earth room by room.

It's a task that British archeologist

Tim Sutherland can appreciate.

- In recent years when this castle was reconstructed

and made safe again basically,

they emptied out all the rooms of all the rubble

that have accumulated over well, centuries.

And there was also sort of blocks and dust and dirt.

They systematically cleaned out every room

until we have what we see today.

Some of it is still in its original condition,

and it's never been cleaned.

So there are huge parts of this building

that've got huge amounts of archeological rubble inside.

It's pure archeology right in front of our eyes.

You can see all the archeological layers

as they've been deposited inside this big void.

And you see the very broad brown band there

with some big rocks in it,

but also, you can see some finer layers

tipped in completely the opposite direction.

And what's happening, people are bringing in

barrow loads of rubbish from elsewhere,

and it just builds up and builds up over the centuries

until we've got this fantastic archeological

display right in front of us.

- [Narrator] The painstaking work enables us now

to see the Hospitaller stronghold

as it may have appeared at the height of the crusades.

For a century, this was the Hospitallers'

main base in the Holy Land.

The enormous building conveys the power and wealth,

not just of the crusader state,

but the independent military order that built it.

- We're now moving into the Hospitaller quarter.

This is the part of the bustling medieval

city and port of Acre, which belongs to the Hospitallers.

There are other parts of the town

that belonged to the Italians or to the Templars.

So each had their own area.

- [Narrator] Medieval Acre must have been

a cosmopolitan place where East met West.

- And it's not just the Hospitallers here.

You've got to remember that there's markets here,

there's buying and selling,

there's men, women, children,

soldiers, merchants, animals, pack animals,

full of noise, full of life, full of smells,

some of them very nice exotic spices from the orient,

along with the silks and other valuable things

that they're bringing from the east.

- [Narrator] In all, the complex

is around 4,500 square meters.

The central open courtyard

lay under three to four meters of rubble fill.

There were many rooms and even large halls.

- This wonderful space here, this hall,

it's been identified as the refectory.

That's where the Knights Hospitaller

would've had their communal meals.

And of course, the communal life

is absolutely central to their ethos,

the building of a team, to be quite honest,

because they developed this very strong sense

of brotherhood and identity,

and the refectory and the communal meals

would've contributed to that.

You can imagine this place

would never have been entirely quiet.

There's always people coming and going, as there are today.

- [Narrator] This was the focus

for all the Hospitallers' fundraising efforts

back in Western Europe,

and the site of their new medical facility,

remembering the original hospital in Jerusalem.

Again, it was not just for Christians,

but for all the poor sick of whatever religion.

- In here, they would have their hospital,

which is quite a structure by this time.

The sounds from the city outside,

perhaps chanting and prayers from the chapel,

church bells and all the rest of it.

This is never going to be a silent place.

And in its strange religious way, very clearly military.

These were serious guys.

- [Narrator] In the medieval world,

especially in the Middle East,

one of the most feared aspects of life was disease.

With so many people living together, including the sick,

the Hospitallers understood

that hygiene had to be considered.

You don't normally consider something so everyday

when you look at a medieval castle in the Crusades.

But here in Acre, the hospital latrine

is nothing short of epic.

- It's quite a spectacular building, really.

'Cause not only are we in a huge vaulted hall,

but we're in a multiple latrine building basically.

So about 40 people could have used this at any one time.

And we're talking about a big place out there

that would've been full of hundreds of people.

So there would've been a lot of people

who needed to got the toilet.

- [Narrator] Microbiology was still centuries ahead,

but people knew enough to realize that human waste, if left

could become a problem.

The design of the huge latrine

was ingenious in dealing with this.

- So engineering wise, it's quite an interesting structure,

because the whole room slopes.

So everything slopes down towards us here,

and below the seats, on basically open pipes

down into the room below.

So everybody would be sitting here,

and the below us there's a massive vaulted room,

and all this human waste would've gone

straight down into this massive reservoir,

and in there, would've been everything

that went through these holes.

Now, not only is there human waste,

but it's everything that gets dropped down there,

just like today in the equivalent

of mobile phones or whatever,

everything would've dropped into this hole,

and you're certainly not going to go and get it back,

because it's a massive room full of human waste.

So if it went down there, you'd leave it there

until the people went to clear it all out

and put it on the field, or whatever they did with it.

- [Narrator] But beyond personal artifacts

that might have been lost, archeologists realized

that there was a unique possibility here.

The material inside the buried latrine

had not been moved for centuries.

The thought of excavating through layers of human waste

isn't for everyone,

but the results were to provide incredible insight

into the lives of the medieval people who lived here.

Pierce Mitchell is a practicing medical doctor,

but he's also a leading expert in paleo pathology.

He doesn't only study the material

that archeologists recover, the artifacts and bones,

but the evidence of microorganisms,

the bacteria preserved within them.

When Piers heard of the excavations at Acre,

he lent his expertise.

It was rare to find a medieval latrine of this size

that had been so well preserved

along with the material beneath it.

- So we studied the soil that collected in the cictern

underneath the latrines there,

and the first thing we did was to look for

the evidence of infectious diseases.

- [Narrator] Piers and his team were looking for evidence

of intestinal parasitic worms.

These lived in some of the food the crusaders ate

and digested, before coming to rest down in the latrine.

One of the reasons parasites

are so good at spreading between humans

is the survivability of their eggs.

- They have these tough walls around the eggs

that allows them to be preserved

for hundreds and often thousands of years.

So they die after a year or two in the soil

and become non-viable,

but we can look at them down the microscope

and identify the species of worms

that were present in the people using the toilets,

because most species have different shaped eggs

and different sized eggs.

- [Narrator] What Piers found opened up a fascinating

but thought provoking window

into the everyday life of the medieval people here.

- We saw many eggs from roundworm and whipworm.

These are parasitic worms that live in your intestines

that are spread by feces contaminating your food or water.

So generally, if you're not washing your hands

and if you're not cooking your food properly and so on,

you can get reinfected with roundworm and whipworm.

We also found the eggs of fish tape worm,

which is a parasite that's much more common

in northern Europe.

So it may well represent northern Europeans

who came to the Holy Land

and then used the latrines in Acre.

- [Narrator] Fish would've been a major part

of the diet of many people

here along the Holy Land's coastline.

- Fish tapeworm is contracted

by eating raw or undercooked fish.

And in Northern Europe in the medieval period,

it was common to have raw fish or smoked fish,

pickled fish, salted fish and so on,

and not necessarily cook it.

And this would lead to a very long tapeworm,

over 20 feet long.

It would spiral around the insides of your intestines,

and then they would release eggs into the feces.

And then if you went to the toilet

by a lake where there were fresh water fish,

then you can then restart the lifecycle

so that someone who then eats fish from that lake

can get infected themselves.

- [Narrator] Parasites like these, along with dysentery,

must have been a part of day-to-day life

for most people in Acre, crusaders or otherwise.

All the military orders had to be able

to care for their battle wounded.

Despite their name, the Hospitaller were probably

no more skilled at this than the Templars,

Teutonic Knights or others.

Like the Templars, the Hospitallers operated

houses or convents in countries across Western Europe,

although somehow, their presence may have been regarded

as more benign than their fellow order.

- There were Hospitallers everywhere in Western Europe

in the 13th century.

The St. Alban's monk, Matthew Paris,

who wrote about everything in Europe in the 13th century,

said that they had far more manners than the Templars did.

- [Narrator] People were not always sure

whose best interest the Templars served,

their own, it was suspected.

By the early 14th century and their dissolution,

all the Templars' vast estates and castles were forfeit.

It was decreed by the Pope that their properties and lands

across Europe and beyond

should be given to the Hospitallers.

But this wasn't always straightforward in some countries,

including England.

- The handover from the Templars to the Hospitallers

was not tidy.

The King of England, it would appear,

had wanted to keep those lands.

- [Narrator] King Edward II

resisted for as long as he could,

but even a king couldn't defy a papal decree.

- When the king had discovered

he was going to have to give the Hospitallers something,

he had instructed his keepers,

the sheriffs or their appointees,

to clear everything out from the Templars lands that moved,

and a few things that didn't.

So all the cattle went, the sheep,

all the stock, all the grain.

Everything growing in the fields, take it.

Anything that's useful, just move it.

So the Hospitallers walked into shells,

buildings that have been allowed to fall down

or that things have been removed from.

- [Narrator] Nevertheless, one former Templar property

the Hospitallers did eventually receive

was the huge estate in southern England at Crescent.

By the 1380s, the order was holding

its general chapter meetings here,

and the enormous storage barns were collecting cash crops

for the order's own economic interests,

not the King of England's.

In England today,

few other Hospitaller buildings now survive,

at least as they appeared in medieval times.

In central England,

in the small village of Barrow Upon Trent, there is one.

It may once have been known as St. Helen's or St Luke's,

but from the mid 11000, it's been St. Wilfred's.

- The church is built on a promontory in the Trent Valley,

and at the time of its building,

it would've been the most important building in the area.

It would've been seen from miles around.

You could imagine that you were back in medieval times

looking out from the church door.

And we have a gargoyle.

Very eroded, very faded.

But I always imagine he must have seen so many things

since he was put up there in the early medieval times.

It would've been so interesting to hear his story.

- [Narrator] On any historic site,

archeologists have to try and understand stratigraphy,

layers of evidence of human activity

beneath or above the surface.

- As an archeologist, people normally consider

what we do is just all under the ground.

But the nice thing about an old historic building

is that it's actually above the ground,

and it's the same sort of stratigraphy.

Obviously the later things are usually on the top,

but a building incorporates so many different aspects

in terms of the walls and the structure and the roof,

and even the floors.

- The church was built, we think, in Anglo-Saxon times,

and we know it was given to the Knights Hospitallers,

and it's been left as purely a little rural country church

since that time.

- [Narrator] St. Wilfred's has some clues

about its medieval past.

Tim has come to see some of these for himself.

- I think the first thing you think of

when you walk into a historic building like this is,

you literally, you open the door, you get the creaking noise

and then it all opens up in front of you,

and you never know quite what you're gonna get

because every single church is different.

- [Narrator] At one time,

this would've been the heart of the medieval village.

- It was originally the main building in the village.

It was built as a stronghold,

as a place for people to have markets.

It was where they would have some sanctuary

if there were any enemies around.

- [Narrator] It seems an echo of those turbulent times

may still remain.

- One of the things I noticed

as soon as I'm walking through the porch is,

and it's quite common,

there are lots of little grooves carved in the walls.

- [Narrator] They're similar to markings found

on some other churches in Britain.

No one really knows what they are,

but there's a theory that might explain them.

- When you consider that the Hospitallers

were a military order,

we would assume that there would've been

always some sort of military presence around the area,

just by who they were.

It does look like somebody's been sharpening

blades and weapons.

And sometimes you wonder whether this is

to impart religious protection

onto the implement they're about to use.

So are they about to go to war,

and they bring their knife or their blade

or their weapon, sword to the church,

and then just hone it down a little bit

just before they head off somewhere,

and psychologically,

that may be a little bit more protection for them.

- [Narrator] The Victorians added a pulpit and pews,

but some of the features and carvings

are as they would've been in Hospitaller times.

- The church itself is full of little treasures

that we found over the years.

I think the biggest one is probably our effigy,

which is an early, very early 13000, 1340s

alabaster effigy of a priest.

It may be a man called John de Belton

who came down from Craik in Durham

to help the hospitalists to develop the church.

We have lots of grave slabs

with the Knights Hospitaller grave markings on them.

- [Narrator] Ann Heathcote and the friends of St. Wilfred's

plan to return the church to its original open plan,

removing some of the Victorian features.

So it will soon, once more become

the central meeting place and heart of the village,

just as it was in Hospitaller times.

- What we want to do is to reclaim it

as our community building for the whole of the village,

and for the whole of this area,

and anyone else who wants to use it.

- [Narrator] But one intriguing feature will be preserved,

a small hand-drawn image of a medieval warrior

and the shield of the Knights Hospitaller.

Some people have suggested it's Victorian graffiti.

- The drawing which is near to the effigy

appears to show an early medieval knight in armor.

I am told it's original, but it is intriguing.

- This is one of the real gems of the church,

and it would be nice to think that this is original.

It does look like a 14th century knight.

It's got the correct helmet, it's got the right spear,

it's got the right outfit,

and also, it's got what appears to be

a Hospitaller cross on the shield.

So this is just one of the other conundrums

that's typical of this church.

There's so many questions you can ask.

And I love these things.

I think they're fantastic.

And somebody's had to go at copying them.

Obviously, these are in pencil

and they're nowhere near as good,

even though they're relatively modern.

So this is the interesting aspect of it.

Is this original,

is it showing a knight's contemporary

with this part of the church, this phase of the church,

and in which case, who was it and what's it represent?

- [Narrator] Of all the medical ailments

the Hospitallers had to deal with in communities,

one carried more dread than almost any other.

- Leprosy is certainly a disease which is feared,

and it's a disease which cannot be cured.

And to that extent,

it is one that inspires terror in many people.

- [Narrator] Leprosy was among the worst healthcare problems

in the Holy Land and Europe throughout the crusader period.

And yet, in an age rife with disease,

it was not even the deadliest.

- There were many other diseases

that were much more likely to kill you.

So it'll be much worse to have tuberculosis

than to have leprosy,

and they are very similar bacterial organisms.

Leprosy doesn't normally kill you,

whereas tuberculosis is very good at doing that.

- It was more how leprosy seemed to attack

the things that made us human, outwardly at least.

- Because leprosy affects your face

in a significant proportion of people,

and it can make you go blind,

it can cause ulcers and cause numbness

in the hands and the feet, leading to difficulty mobilizing,

all these things mean that it was a very chronic

and socially debilitating disease.

- [Narrator] The social consequences of leprosy

are still prevalent in society today.

It's now known as Hansen's disease,

and it's treated relatively simply with antibiotics.

But in medieval times, it was barely understood.

- So by the time you get to the late

13th and 14th centuries, people have a pretty good idea

of what we today would call Hansen's disease.

Whereas in the past, before that time,

it might have been very, very hard

actually to distinguish someone, say with leprosy

from a really bad case of say, psoriasis,

skin cancer, or other problems.

- [Narrator] In a society before microbiology,

people sought other explanations for the disease.

- There are different views in medieval Europe,

expressed at different times and in different places,

about leprosy.

But some religious views about leprosy

explained the punishment of the facial disfiguration

as a gift from God, as a way of atoning for your sins

while you were still alive

so that you could then go straight to heaven when you died,

instead of having to atone for your sins after death

with a concept of purgatory,

which was developing in the medieval period.

- [Narrator] The Bible told the story of the humble Lazarus

who suffered terribly in life,

but who was then rewarded instantly in heaven,

whereas his tormentor, Dives, was condemned to purgatory.

The parallel between Lazarus and Christ

was clear to the medieval church.

- Medieval society places enormous emphasis

on caring for the leper, because the leper is like Christ,

the leper is a member of the body of Christ.

And if you don't care for that individual,

as Dives failed to care for Lazarus,

then you yourself are going to be condemned

to a long period in purgatory, or even hell.

So caring for the leper has a spiritual dimension,

and people found leper hospitals

with this concept at the back of their mind.

- [Narrator] There'd been a hospital or leprosarium

outside Jerusalem since the 11th century,

and in the 12th, the Order of St. Lazarus was set up

dedicated to the care of people with leprosy.

Many of its brothers, but not all,

were often sufferers of the disease themselves.

And like the Hospitallers and Templars,

the Knights of Lazarus took their place

on the battlefields of the Holy Land.

- Because of the very nature of their condition,

they were pretty fearless people,

and in several battles, they all got wiped out.

Because they thought, what could possibly be better

than fighting a Holy War?

I don't have to think about my own life.

I can fight until they kill me.

And so, there was a time when there were very few people

in the Order of St. Lazarus left who had leprosy.

So people from Europe who didn't have leprosy

started joining the Order of St. Lazarus

as a sign of tremendous piety.

So it was regarded as even more spiritually intense.

- [Narrator] The late 13th century was a fateful time

for all the military orders.

In 1291, the Mamluk armies took Acre,

and the Holy Land fell back under Muslim control.

Never again did Christian crusaders return

to try to recapture Jerusalem,

nor did any of the military orders.

- 1291 was a disaster for the military orders

because that was their vocation and they lost it,

and also the shock that they'd been fighting for God

and yet they had lost.

So is that because we're sinners?

It's because the West didn't support us?

- [Narrator] The Hospitallers and the other military orders

were forced to consider how to adapt and decide

where next to wage their Holy War in Christ's name.

Some, like the Teutonic Knights,

took an entirely different direction northwards

to battle against the pagans of Prussia and Lithuania.

The Hospitallers though realized they needed

security and independence

from a host kingdom which Mike turned the tables on them,

just as the Templars had been undone

by the French monarchy decades before.

A large island in the Aegean Sea

was to provide that independence.

In 1310, the Hospitallers captured Rhodes.

To do this, they fought other Christians

of the Eastern Byzantine Church,

but they justified their actions as being necessary

in order to continue their fight against the Muslims.

The order was to call Rhodes home for more than 200 years.

In 1480, they successfully withstood attack

by an enormous Ottoman army of 160 ships and 70,000 men.

- Not only did they manage to defeat the attackers,

they also managed to turn it

into a fantastic propaganda victory,

back in the rest of that in Christendom.

- [Narrator] The Hospitallers circulated

their own account of the siege,

helped by new technology, printing.

The victory helped to justify their ongoing role,

and of course, keep the donations coming in.

- Western Europe must have lapped up this account

of what real knights could do,

determined soldiers of God fighting against enormous odds

and saving the city.

This is perfect chivalry.

- [Narrator] For a time at least,

the specter of the loss of the Holy Land was laid.

- It shows God's fighting force.

Because of course, in 1291,

it seemed that God wasn't fighting for them

because they'd been defeated.

Now they're saying God is fighting for us again.

We are obviously doing the right thing.

God is on our side this time.

This time we're going to win.

- [Narrator] The Order could bask in their victory

for a few decades.

But when the Ottoman armies came again in 1522,

the Order of St. John was not so blessed

and it found itself homeless once more.

Some organizations which exist today

claim to have lineage back to the orders of the Crusades.

- Some of the medical orders

that were set up during the Crusades,

such as the orders of St. John

and the Order of St. Lazarus

have still kept on their medical role.

There has been an eye hospital in Jerusalem

run by the order of St. John for many years.

The order of St. Lazarus has morphed and evolved over time,

but they're still involved with the concept

of caring for people with leprosy today.

And so, you can see how some of these orders,

for over eight centuries,

have now continued the concept of medical care

which they were originally set up to do

- [Narrator] The most well-known descendants

of the Hospitallers to this day

maintains a vital healthcare role in Britain and Europe.

- The St. John's Ambulance Brigade is rooted in,

it is a descendant of the Hospitallers,

the medieval Hospitallers.

And in fact, as the modern

St. John's Ambulance Brigade developed,

I think it was quite a conscious decision

to emphasize that the heraldry, the imagery

which harked back to the medieval origins,

it gives them one heck of a heritage.

- The Hospitallers cared for the poor sick,

they cared for people who needed to be cared for.

They were there when they were needed,

and they're still there when they're needed.

So they do continue the tradition of the medieval order.

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