Order of Saint Lazarus

Also known as Lepers of Saint Lazarus

A small hospital and military order originally caring for lepers, including knights of the other orders who had contracted the disease; uniquely associated with the leper-king Baldwin IV.

The Order of Saint Lazarus grew out of a leprosarium in the kingdom's earliest years, just outside the walls of Jerusalem near the postern still called the Lazar Gate. Its rule required that members of the Templar and Hospitaller orders who contracted leprosy be transferred to its care, and from this its membership came to include lepers who were also professed knights — the so-called fratres leprosi.

The order took on a small military role in the 12th and early 13th centuries: a contingent of leper-knights served at Hattin in 1187, where almost all of them died, and at La Forbie in 1244, where the order was effectively annihilated as a fighting force. Modern fascination with the order owes a great deal to its imagined link with King Baldwin IV the Leper (r. 1174–85), though the surviving sources do not in fact say that Baldwin himself ever joined the order.

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