Description of the Project

In 1999, the "Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta" and its Protestant "branches" celebrated their 900^th anniversary. Many public reactions, but also "official" versions of the Order's history and even some of the publications within the scientific community demonstrate that many phases of the Order's history still await intensive research. This is strongly connected with the lack of printed sources.

While for the period up to 1310, there is the monumental Cartulaire général de l’Ordre des Hospitaliers de S. Jean de Jérusalem (1100-1310), ed. Joseph Delaville Le Roulx, 4 vols. (Paris 1894-1905), for the later periods a lot of material is still unpublished. Early collections such as Sebastiano Paoli, Codice diplomatico dell’Ordine Gerosolimitano, vol. 2, Lucca 1737, offer only relatively few documents of those which have survived. Many documents have also been published in articles and collections which may not generally have been noticed.

Therefore, this collection contains editions and transcriptions as well as summaries of documents as in calendars, as it seems appropriate, convenient and possible – though only for the period up to the 1530s. In most cases, it will not present the documents in any final form, but it rather offers a kind of preliminary guide to the sources. It will probably remain for a long time "work in progress".>

The Hospitaller Sources present the documents in three levels:
– the starting page offers a list of years for which documents are already online and some links;
– the list of calendars allow to survey the documents already online;
– the single file contains the calendar, the information on archies and libraries, and - were already available - transcripts or editions of the record. >

Lit. (old concept) J. Sarnowsky: Hospitaller Sources – a Project for a Source Book in the Internet, in: Bulletin of International Medieval Research, 8 (2002), pp. 13-20.