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Emanuel Buttigieg and Simon Phillips (Eds.) (2013). Islands and military orders, c. 1291c. 1798. Farnham: Ashgate. Hbk, 302pp. ISBN: 978-1-4724-0990-4. US$134.95.
Christianity's first military orders emerged in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, by-products of Roman Catholic Europe's concerted efforts to wrest the Holy Lands from Muslim control. With the fall of Acre in 1291, however, even the most powerful military orders - the Knights Hospitaller, the Knights Templar, and Teutonic Order among them - were ousted from the Levantine mainland and forced to relocate elsewhere. While the Teutonic Order ultimately moved its headquarters to Prussia, the Knights Hospitaller and Knights Templar (and others) set about establishing bases on several Mediterranean islands: Cyprus, Rhodes, Malta, and others. What influence did island life have on the military orders? And what effects did military orders have on the islands that they made their homes?
In Islands and military orders, 21 scholars - mostly historians, but also sociologists, archaeologists, and students of architecture and literature - take up these and related questions. The contributors draw upon extensive archival research, original archaeological discoveries, and the secondary academic literature of multiple disciplines and languages. The end product is a sweeping yet scrupulously detailed account of how several military orders dealt with the challenges and opportunities presented by their military defeats to Muslim forces and their subsequent relocation to island bases. Although the bulk of the book's contributions deal with the Hospitallers (perhaps the archetypical island-dwelling military order), significant attention is paid to the Templars and Teutonics. Comparatively minor attention is given to several lesser known orders,...