The last true knight on Malta | Hacker News Reader

The last true knight on Malta

bbc.com

39 pointsMiriamWeiner33 comments

Fun fact, after the grand master of the Order of St. John surrendered to Napoleon at the french invasion of Malta, the order moved to Russia and named Paul I as its sovereign protector. The Russian tradition of the Order of St. John exists today in Hawai'i (and around the world). They have a meeting in Honolulu on the first friday of every month. Sen. Daniel Akaka and Gov. George Ariyoshi were both invested into the order. Today they do charity work, funding various humanitarian projects around the world.

The Kingdom of Hawaii actually had a very friendly relationship with Russia. King Kalakaua was a member of the Order and was even gifted a portrait of Czar Alexander II, which is still hanging in Iolani Palace to this day.

While I applaud the preservation of spirit and tradition, I don't think you can really be a knight in the modern world.

“In the past, the defence of the faith was riding horses, fighting enemies,” Fra Critien said. “Now we can defend the faith by being an example to those around us.”

That first part is quite important. Knights could have been thugs or even warlords but they weren't. Not because they would have been stopped by the state, which were fairly small and weak at the time, but because they largely chose not to.

And many crusaders went further than that. They chose a risky expedition often at a great expense of their families for no discernible earthly benefit.

Being a gentleman in the modern world is laudable but it happens under a completely different set of incentives.

Still, Malta is beautiful and definitely worth a visit. Especially for Europeans since flights and stay are very cheap.

The Knights of the Order of St. John are more about offering cutting edge medical services to the poor than conquering the world. Even today, most of the knights I know are medical doctors. The others do various kinds of humanitarian work through their own foundations, in cooperation with the Order of St. John.

>Knights could have been thugs or even warlords but they weren't. Not because they would have been stopped by the state, which were fairly small and weak at the time, but because they largely chose not to.

>And many crusaders went further than that. They chose a risky expedition often at a great expense of their families for no discernible earthly benefit.

Come on, is well established history that they often got shipped out on Crusade for being thugs. Itinerant knights were a huge problem during periods of peace, so they got told that if they pissed off to the holy land, their existing crimes would be forgiven and they could be absolved of future sin, as long as that sin was not being committed in Europe.

> stay are very cheap

Currently, not so much for those of us who did not get on the property ladder within the last year :)

> That first part is quite important. Knights could have been thugs or even warlords but they weren't. Not because they would have been stopped by the state, which were fairly small and weak at the time, but because they largely chose not to.

That’s historical revisionism. Modern ideas of chivalry mostly post date the age of knights. In their own time they were thugs and mercenaries granted land as a reward for their brutality in combat.

(But the knights of this order were medicines, not warriors, in their primary purpose. What you say is more true of these knights, but not knights generally.)

They weren’t just doctors - at their peak, these knights were fundamentally bankers: at a time were travelling with valuables on your person was extremely unwise, you could open an “account” with them in Europe, travel all the way to the Middle East, and withdraw your cash when there. It started as a simple issue of logistics, but soon the order realized all that cash could be managed, and they started loaning it out to kings and merchants, which obviously made them even richer. This is the likely cause of their eventual downfall, because kings of that age had the annoying habit of defaulting on their debts by “eliminating” their sources.

> This is the likely cause of their eventual downfall, ...

I think you may be mixing in the history of the Knights Templer there.

The Sovereign Military Order of Malta had no “eventual downfall” to any Christian King in the way the Templers did.

You’re confusing the knights of Malta with the knights templer.

>granted land as a reward for their brutality in combat.

Isn't that also revisionism? You don't exactly win wars by being chivalrous. Hacking some one to death at point blank range isn't ever going to be nice.

We attach similar ideas today, to modern soldiers. Cognitive dissonance isn't a new thing.

Yes modern ideas of chivalry are just that, modern. I have no problems believing that they, and their culture believed they lived a 'good' life.

You survive wars by being chivalrous. That’s where chivalry comes from—it does not mean protecting women and children or holding open doors or whatever nonsense. It was a medieval code of warfare where nobility were not killed but held for ransom no matter the circumstance. Landed families could participate in sanctioned warfare with relatively little personal risk. Their peasant soldiers would die, and they may lose their lands, but they themselves were likely fine.

Chivalry died with the invention of the longbow because death now rained down indiscriminately from above.

Wikipedia dates the longbow to paleolithic times, so I'm not sure chivalry died with it.

And judging by the effectiveness of the longbow you seem to be making my case for me That chivalry doesn't win wars.

That said I do agree chivalry was useful for making the battlefield survivable. It still existed in some form until the world wars with 'gentlemanly conduct', I'm not sure it was ever internally consistent.

Knights could have been thugs or even warlords but they weren't.

Having recently read A Distant Mirror, I was NOT impressed by what passed as chivalrous behavior then. Any norms of decent behavior they had was pretty much reserved for their own class.

Long time ago I learned how the traits of "chivalry" were established.

The tradition of a knight (or chivalrous person) opening a door to let other pass first was a defensive measure. Doorways were good spots for assassination and getting stabbed with a dagger was a realistic threat.

So a knight allowed - possibly even forced - others to go through the doorways first. Even the tradition of hailing with your hand comes from the need to show to others that you were not wielding a weapon.

Chivalry. A foul word.

As with many "ancient" traditions, a lot of chivalric code stuff was invented by Victorians.

> Knights could have been thugs or even warlords but they weren't. Not because they would have been stopped by the state, which were fairly small and weak at the time, but because they largely chose not to.

> And many crusaders went further than that. They chose a risky expedition often at a great expense of their families for no discernible earthly benefit.

You mean invading a foreign country because they worship the same god in a different way, and perhaps killing everyone there that oppose the invasion?

Also, I don't remember about this particular case, but it was usual to distribute some of the conquered land/money/slaves between the soldiers.

I find that this site provides a pretty good overview of the relevant history - http://www.medievalwarfare.info/crusades.htm

>"Sending young men off to fight in a holy cause temporarily stifled the internal wars that had afflicted the West since the collapse of Roman government . That a few of the early Crusading skirmishes produced victories helped Europeans regain a sense of self-confidence, after centuries of losing on nearly every front, they temporarily turned the tables on their military and cultural superiors to the east."

>"The Church regarded crusaders as military pilgrims. They took vows and were rewarded with privileges of protection for their property at home. Any legal proceedings against them were suspended. Another major inducement was the offer of indulgences for the remission of sin. Knights were especially attracted by what were effectively Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free cards allowing them to commit any sins throughout the rest of their lives without incurring liability in this or the next world."

You need to read more history if you believe knights were not thugs and warlords. And the crusaders were the top thugs in no small part due to church giving them licence to slaughter non Christians. and specifically set them selves as warlords at the expense of the states that existed in that region.

Also knights were the state.

Everything you said and implied is the polar opposite of historical fact. I'm dumbfounded. Its like meeting a flat earther.

If you're interested in the Knights of Malta have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_del_Priorato_di_Malta which is a bit of extra-territorial Italy in Rome given to the Order.

There's a cool optical illusion looking through its "Aventine Keyhole" towards St Peters.

I've read that these charitable Christian orders retain passport issuing rights which were "grand fathered in" to the modern state passport system. Thing is, you have to prove you're travelling on order-related business. Since all the knights and grand Chancellors are citizens of other states, that means no fancy tax avoiding magic passports alas.

Only SMOM, AFAIK. It has a funny quasi-country status, despite having no territory.

Doesn’t it have like a single fort on the island or something?

It’s not just about tax: a “magic” passport can be pretty good for spying and smuggling activities. Malta has always been a “listening station” even before the term was coined, what with being in the middle of an extremely busy sea that borders the biggest empires of the age. During the Cold War a number of dubious characters were shuttling around with those passports, and being ordered a knight of Malta in Italy had a strong correlation with being a right-wing personality with Vatican and NATO ties.

It's not like there's some master list of "authorities allowed to issue passports". Each state decides on its own which passports it will recognise, and they don't all agree.

After hearing about people successfully traveling on Principality of Sealand passports, I did wonder how far you could get round the world possessing documentation from a completely fictional country.

>This is not the first time that passports from Sealand have found their way into the news. One was found on the killer of Gianni Versace, Andrew Cunanan, and he was said to have a car with Sealand diplomatic plates. In 1997 forged Sealand passports were used to launder drug money in Slovenia, and there were reports that 4,000 forged passports were sold at £1,000 a head before China's takeover of Hong Kong. People involved in an illegal pyramid-selling scheme in eastern Europe had Sealand papers; one had border stamps from Libya, Iraq and Iran.

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2000/mar/28/features...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camouflage_passport

There are a variety of companies that issue fake passports in the styles of fictional or historical countries.

I'd be very surprised if it wasn't a core set of recognized nation states, and a set of transition economies from the former USSR making the vast bulk of semi- and not- recognized states. Political process dominates Taiwan, Kashmir and Palestine. Nobody recognizes Pitcairn Islanders or residents of Kurguelen. (British overseas and French outre mer respectively and I was joking they don't pretend to be passport issuing nations)

> But a year later when he was arrested for his participation in what many assume to be a brawl, the knights imprisoned the artist at Fort St Angelo and expelled him from the Order.

For the only things I know Malata now are gambling, as a tax haven, and for the assassination of a journalist (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/17/malta-protecti...).

Not so much to do with the idealized world of knights and gentlemen.

I'm pretty sure the order that this article is about does not run the government. Based on my limited knowledge of history, orders like this were generally citizens (super loose terminology) of a host country, rather than rulers. Malta was an exception, until the 19th century.

Maltese here. Breaks my heart that that is all we might be known for right now. Even makes me feel alien in my own country sometimes.

I learnt the other day that "caballeros" is Spanish for gentlemen. Which is a nice echo of the knight/gentleman identity mentioned here.

Interesting contrast with the meaning of ‘cavalier’.

Yeah, for some reason the French word (from which the English one derives) degenerated in a Don Quixote-like caricature. This has not happened in Italian nor in Spanish, afaik.

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