Talk: Templars and Hospitallers: Competition, Cooperation, and Myth
Wed 08 Oct
|Museum of the Order of St John
Dr Rory MacLellan will discuss the intertwined stories of these two orders and the pseudohistories that still tie them together today.
Time & Location
08 Oct 2025, 19:00 – 20:00
Museum of the Order of St John, 26 St John's Ln, London EC1M 4BU, UK
About the Event
The 2025 Jonathan Riley-Smith Memorial Lecture, an in-person evening talk in partnership with the St John Historical Society.
The Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller played a key role in the crusades and the politics of the Crusade States, one that often saw them on opposite sides in each conflict and civil war dividing the Latin East. The two competed for land and donations and even came to blows on rare occasions. Yet, when war came, they could put aside these differences in the joint defence of the East.
This link became stronger after the suppression of the Templars in 1312, which saw the Hospitallers inherit most of their lands. The Templar conspiracy theories which have proliferated since the late twentieth century have drawn upon this link, twisting the historical evidence to claim that the Templars survived as a shadow organisation within the Hospitallers. In this talk, Dr Rory MacLellan will…