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Nyehah! I have returned in the shadow of the black sun! Run and cower and check your trash bins. I beat AC Mirage so now I'm home free from any spoilers. I had a blast, it was a spectacular and nostalgic experience. My only complaint is that I wish there was more to play. It has thoroughly disinterested me in anything that Jade has to offer. Now that that's done I can get back to art and complaining that I cracked my phone screen (please someone tell me if there's a DIY way to fix it, I'm broke af and can't afford fancy rich girl things like repairing a pane of glass the size of a goddamn index card). So aight let's give my to-do list a quick skim here… ah yes, the Knights Hospitaller, otherwise known as the Order of Saint John or the Knights of Rhodes or the Knights of Malta, for reasons which shall become obvious shortly. These guys are probably the second most famous knightly organization to come out of the Crusades after the Templars… probably because they were the ones that didn't get persecuted and got to take all the Templars' shit afterwards. Whoever said to the victor goes the spoils?

As you can probably guess from the name, the early history of the Knights Hospitaller centers around a hospital. Specifically, it was the hospital in Jerusalem founded by Pope Gregory I in 603, and rebuilt under the care of the Monastery of Saint John the Baptist in 1023. Originally, this corner of the Holy City was simply a rest stop for sick and weary Christian pilgrims, but then the Crusaders rolled up to sack the place in 1099. The head of the hospital, Gerard, had refused to evacuate with the rest of Jerusalem's Christian population, dedicated instead to remaining with his patients. When the Crusaders claimed the city, they decided they liked the cut of Gerard's jib, and started throwing fat stacks of cash at him. Soon, it became so popular to give special privileges to the hospital that Pope Paschal II issued a Papal Bull in February 1113, establishing the hospital as an independent organization with Gerard as its first Grand Master. Maybe if we funded our hospitals better today, they'd also get the opportunity to double as knights, but oh no, we have to live in the miserable and boring timeline where we charge poor people a grand just to replace a tooth.

But okay, I'm getting a little ahead of myself. When do we start adding, you know, knights to the hospitaller? Taking up the sword seems a little counteractive to the whole "do no harm" thing after all. This development can largely be attributed to Raymond du Puy, who succeeded Gerard as Grand Master in 1120. While his early life has long since been obscured by myth and legend, it seems that Raymond took it upon himself to induct the Crusader knights charged with guarding the hospital's wealth into the Order proper. These men became such powerful warriors in their own right that in 1136, King Fulk of Jerusalem assigned the Knights a post defending Bethgibelin, an important fortress on the road between Hebron and Ascalon. While Raymond had already well gotten to work on violating the Hippocratic Oath by this point, even participating in the disastrous Siege of Damascus in 1148, he and his Order first won martial acclaim after taking Ascalon from the Fatimids in 1153, earning them a seat at the big boy table with other knightly orders such as the Knights Templar.

Apparently, dinner at this table was a bit awkward, though. While the Hospitallers and Templars had worked together to secure a phenomenal victory against an up-and-coming Saladin at the Battle of Montgisard in November 1177, the two organizations apparently had some sort of beef. I couldn't find any specific story attached to this rivalry outside of it being a generic turf war, but evidently it was so bad that Pope Alexander III had to force them to make a truce in 1179. I find it funny that at the same time the Pope also had to issue a reminder that hey, you guys are still a hospital, don't forget to use all this money we're giving you to heal the sick more than… you know… killing people. But hey, since when should we listen to that nerd the Pope? In the end, it didn't really matter who got the best seat at that table, because the table was thoroughly flipped over when Saladin reclaimed Jerusalem in 1187. The Knights Hospitaller thus had to pack up and move shop to Acre, where they'd sit and stew until Richard the Lionheart could show up to beat up that meanie Saladin for them. Come 1191, the Knights Hospitaller under Grand Master Garnier de Nablus would be instrumental in securing Richard's most famous victory at the Battle of Arsuf.

The Knights Hospitaller proceeded to participate in most of the other Crusades that everyone forgets about, until Acre was finally reclaimed by the Muslim powers in 1291. The Crusader Kingdoms finally abolished, all the knightly orders all gave a collective "ahhhh shit…", and the Knights Hospitaller specifically packed up and moved their headquarters to Cyprus. The island's king, Henry II, really didn't like having this extremely wealthy and powerful organization sitting hungrily outside his throne room, though, so he just sort of pointed them in the direction of the island of Rhodes and said "please just go conquer that instead". The Knight accepted his plea, and landed on Rhodes in 1306. The island was in Byzantine hands at this point in time, but hey, everyone else was picking away at this dying husk of an empire anyway, so might as well hop on the bandwagon while the picking's good. Presumably funding their invasion with all the fat stacks that they got when the Templars had all their shit confiscated and redistributed in 1307, the Knights successfully annexed the island by 1310. Now we can finally start calling them the Knights or Rhodes, because let's be honest, it's been a long ass time since the Knights Hospitaller did anything… hospitable.

They effectively turned Rhodes into their own little independent kingdom from which they could rent out their services to any would-be Crusaders (like the ones who took Smyrna in 1344) and be an absolute menace to Muslim trade routes in the Eastern Mediterranean. Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire, after taking Justinian's coveted seat as his own in 1453, sought to wipe this little rock off the map, and again in 1480, but both times the Knights stubbornly clung to it like an annoying mold. It fell to Mehmed's great-grandson, the Magnificent Suleiman, to finally dislodge the pest. As much as I love making fun of medieval Europeans, Suleiman's siege of Rhodes in 1522 honestly was a clash of elite warriors. Both sides bravely faced great losses, with the Knights (only 7000 men compared to the 100,000 Janissaries) even able to hold out for six months of Ottoman cannon fire. If you've ever seen Ottoman cannons, you know that's a damn impressive feat. Still, the day was ultimately won by the Caesar of Rome, who respected Grand Master L'Isle-Adam as a valiant warrior, and negotiated generous terms.

The Knights afterward wandered around kinda homeless until Pope Clement VII came to an arrangement with Charles V of Spain that would allow the Knights to establish a new headquarters on the island of Malta in 1530. In other words, they could continue doing what they'd always been doing (harassing the Ottomans with acts of piracy), just this time in the Western Mediterranean instead. This seriously irked a now aging Suleiman, who got up from death's door just to teach these bastards a lesson. He tried and failed once in 1551, but the real final showdown was the Great Siege of 1565. This was a brutal David and Goliath story in which a third of the island's population was killed, but nonetheless saw the Knights emerge victorious. Malta, the Knights, and their Grand Master, Jean Parisot de Valette, became revered as bastions of Christendom throughout Europe, and Malta's current capital city, Valletta, was named in his honor. Don't ask me where the extra L came from, some mysteries are simply beyond our puny mortal understanding. Malta put all their reward money to work converting a significant portion of the island's limestone into one giant fortress only breachable by German air raids, but if we go into that then we'll be straying away from the history of the Knights to the history of Malta. I'll save that story for another day for now, as this reference sheet is really meant to be more for the medieval incarnation of the Knights Hospitaller, and I've crossed over that line far enough already.

Design notes, there seemed to be two problematic routes I fell down when looking for reference images. One trend just paints the Knights Hospitaller as a black and white re-skin of the Knights Templar, which (and I feel like you can start a drinking game based on how often I say this) isn't inaccurate per se, but y'all know that's an angle I try to avoid where possible. The other problem I ran into was sorting out their medieval uniforms from the armor of later periods. Even the colors proved a pain in the ass to suss out. From what I can gather, during the Crusades, most of the members of the organization wore standard black tunics. The red tunics, more famous from later years, were initially reserved for the most elite knights of the order, as per a Papal decree in 1259. Naturally, singling out the (often wealthier) elite with special privileges rubbed the rest of the organization the wrong way, so the decree was rescinded in 1278, and henceforth most of the Knights wore the red tunic as standard. Of course, as I've stressed before, pre-modern armies weren't usually that obsessed with colors and standardization, so of course there's always some wiggle room if your average soldier just needed something to keep them from getting stabbed by the Ayyubids. As a compromise, I tried to throw in a little bit of black and a little bit of red, and I think it actually came out looking quite lovely. I'm not entirely satisfied with the line art itself, but for now I'll chalk that up to dealing with the mental consequences of drawing a faction sheet after a hiatus as if that's not a disastrous recipe for burnout-

Description
Nyehah! I have returned in the shadow of the black sun! Run and cower and check your trash bins. I beat AC Mirage so now I'm home free from any spoilers. I had a blast, it was a spectacular and nostalgic experience. My only complaint is that I wish there was more to play. It has thoroughly disinterested me in anything that Jade has to offer. Now that that's done I can get back to art and complaining that I cracked my phone screen (please someone tell me if there's a DIY way to fix it, I'm broke af and can't afford fancy rich girl things like repairing a pane of glass the size of a goddamn index card). So aight let's give my to-do list a quick skim here… ah yes, the Knights Hospitaller, otherwise known as the Order of Saint John or the Knights of Rhodes or the Knights of Malta, for reasons which shall become obvious shortly. These guys are probably the second most famous knightly organization to come out of the Crusades after the Templars… probably because they were the ones that didn't get persecuted and got to take all the Templars' shit afterwards. Whoever said to the victor goes the spoils?

As you can probably guess from the name, the early history of the Knights Hospitaller centers around a hospital. Specifically, it was the hospital in Jerusalem founded by Pope Gregory I in 603, and rebuilt under the care of the Monastery of Saint John the Baptist in 1023. Originally, this corner of the Holy City was simply a rest stop for sick and weary Christian pilgrims, but then the Crusaders rolled up to sack the place in 1099. The head of the hospital, Gerard, had refused to evacuate with the rest of Jerusalem's Christian population, dedicated instead to remaining with his patients. When the Crusaders claimed the city, they decided they liked the cut of Gerard's jib, and started throwing fat stacks of cash at him. Soon, it became so popular to give special privileges to the hospital that Pope Paschal II issued a Papal Bull in February 1113, establishing the hospital as an independent organization with Gerard as its first Grand Master. Maybe if we funded our hospitals better today, they'd also get the opportunity to double as knights, but oh no, we have to live in the miserable and boring timeline where we charge poor people a grand just to replace a tooth.

But okay, I'm getting a little ahead of myself. When do we start adding, you know, knights to the hospitaller? Taking up the sword seems a little counteractive to the whole "do no harm" thing after all. This development can largely be attributed to Raymond du Puy, who succeeded Gerard as Grand Master in 1120. While his early life has long since been obscured by myth and legend, it seems that Raymond took it upon himself to induct the Crusader knights charged with guarding the hospital's wealth into the Order proper. These men became such powerful warriors in their own right that in 1136, King Fulk of Jerusalem assigned the Knights a post defending Bethgibelin, an important fortress on the road between Hebron and Ascalon. While Raymond had already well gotten to work on violating the Hippocratic Oath by this point, even participating in the disastrous Siege of Damascus in 1148, he and his Order first won martial acclaim after taking Ascalon from the Fatimids in 1153, earning them a seat at the big boy table with other knightly orders such as the Knights Templar.

Apparently, dinner at this table was a bit awkward, though. While the Hospitallers and Templars had worked together to secure a phenomenal victory against an up-and-coming Saladin at the Battle of Montgisard in November 1177, the two organizations apparently had some sort of beef. I couldn't find any specific story attached to this rivalry outside of it being a generic turf war, but evidently it was so bad that Pope Alexander III had to force them to make a truce in 1179. I find it funny that at the same time the Pope also had to issue a reminder that hey, you guys are still a hospital, don't forget to use all this money we're giving you to heal the sick more than… you know… killing people. But hey, since when should we listen to that nerd the Pope? In the end, it didn't really matter who got the best seat at that table, because the table was thoroughly flipped over when Saladin reclaimed Jerusalem in 1187. The Knights Hospitaller thus had to pack up and move shop to Acre, where they'd sit and stew until Richard the Lionheart could show up to beat up that meanie Saladin for them. Come 1191, the Knights Hospitaller under Grand Master Garnier de Nablus would be instrumental in securing Richard's most famous victory at the Battle of Arsuf.

The Knights Hospitaller proceeded to participate in most of the other Crusades that everyone forgets about, until Acre was finally reclaimed by the Muslim powers in 1291. The Crusader Kingdoms finally abolished, all the knightly orders all gave a collective "ahhhh shit…", and the Knights Hospitaller specifically packed up and moved their headquarters to Cyprus. The island's king, Henry II, really didn't like having this extremely wealthy and powerful organization sitting hungrily outside his throne room, though, so he just sort of pointed them in the direction of the island of Rhodes and said "please just go conquer that instead". The Knight accepted his plea, and landed on Rhodes in 1306. The island was in Byzantine hands at this point in time, but hey, everyone else was picking away at this dying husk of an empire anyway, so might as well hop on the bandwagon while the picking's good. Presumably funding their invasion with all the fat stacks that they got when the Templars had all their shit confiscated and redistributed in 1307, the Knights successfully annexed the island by 1310. Now we can finally start calling them the Knights or Rhodes, because let's be honest, it's been a long ass time since the Knights Hospitaller did anything… hospitable.

They effectively turned Rhodes into their own little independent kingdom from which they could rent out their services to any would-be Crusaders (like the ones who took Smyrna in 1344) and be an absolute menace to Muslim trade routes in the Eastern Mediterranean. Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire, after taking Justinian's coveted seat as his own in 1453, sought to wipe this little rock off the map, and again in 1480, but both times the Knights stubbornly clung to it like an annoying mold. It fell to Mehmed's great-grandson, the Magnificent Suleiman, to finally dislodge the pest. As much as I love making fun of medieval Europeans, Suleiman's siege of Rhodes in 1522 honestly was a clash of elite warriors. Both sides bravely faced great losses, with the Knights (only 7000 men compared to the 100,000 Janissaries) even able to hold out for six months of Ottoman cannon fire. If you've ever seen Ottoman cannons, you know that's a damn impressive feat. Still, the day was ultimately won by the Caesar of Rome, who respected Grand Master L'Isle-Adam as a valiant warrior, and negotiated generous terms.

The Knights afterward wandered around kinda homeless until Pope Clement VII came to an arrangement with Charles V of Spain that would allow the Knights to establish a new headquarters on the island of Malta in 1530. In other words, they could continue doing what they'd always been doing (harassing the Ottomans with acts of piracy), just this time in the Western Mediterranean instead. This seriously irked a now aging Suleiman, who got up from death's door just to teach these bastards a lesson. He tried and failed once in 1551, but the real final showdown was the Great Siege of 1565. This was a brutal David and Goliath story in which a third of the island's population was killed, but nonetheless saw the Knights emerge victorious. Malta, the Knights, and their Grand Master, Jean Parisot de Valette, became revered as bastions of Christendom throughout Europe, and Malta's current capital city, Valletta, was named in his honor. Don't ask me where the extra L came from, some mysteries are simply beyond our puny mortal understanding. Malta put all their reward money to work converting a significant portion of the island's limestone into one giant fortress only breachable by German air raids, but if we go into that then we'll be straying away from the history of the Knights to the history of Malta. I'll save that story for another day for now, as this reference sheet is really meant to be more for the medieval incarnation of the Knights Hospitaller, and I've crossed over that line far enough already.

Design notes, there seemed to be two problematic routes I fell down when looking for reference images. One trend just paints the Knights Hospitaller as a black and white re-skin of the Knights Templar, which (and I feel like you can start a drinking game based on how often I say this) isn't inaccurate per se, but y'all know that's an angle I try to avoid where possible. The other problem I ran into was sorting out their medieval uniforms from the armor of later periods. Even the colors proved a pain in the ass to suss out. From what I can gather, during the Crusades, most of the members of the organization wore standard black tunics. The red tunics, more famous from later years, were initially reserved for the most elite knights of the order, as per a Papal decree in 1259. Naturally, singling out the (often wealthier) elite with special privileges rubbed the rest of the organization the wrong way, so the decree was rescinded in 1278, and henceforth most of the Knights wore the red tunic as standard. Of course, as I've stressed before, pre-modern armies weren't usually that obsessed with colors and standardization, so of course there's always some wiggle room if your average soldier just needed something to keep them from getting stabbed by the Ayyubids. As a compromise, I tried to throw in a little bit of black and a little bit of red, and I think it actually came out looking quite lovely. I'm not entirely satisfied with the line art itself, but for now I'll chalk that up to dealing with the mental consequences of drawing a faction sheet after a hiatus as if that's not a disastrous recipe for burnout-