Castles and estates of the Knights Hospitaller in the Holy Land

The Order of Saint John of Jerusalem — the Hospitallers — was founded in the early twelfth century as a hospice for sick pilgrims at the Holy Sepulchre, and developed across the next two centuries into one of the great military-religious orders of the Crusader Latin East. By the late twelfth century the Hospitallers owned a network of castles, fortified manor estates, and urban quarters that rivalled the Templars in scale and exceeded them in revenue.

This page catalogues every site in the atlas with a documented Hospitaller affiliation — from the order's two largest fortresses (Belvoir in the Galilee and Krak des Chevaliers in the County of Tripoli) through their estate-castles around Jerusalem (Belmont, Aqua Bella) and Acre (Atlit was Templar, but the Hospitaller quarter of Acre survives almost intact). After 1291 the order regrouped on Cyprus, then took Rhodes in 1310, and eventually Malta — but their architectural legacy in the Holy Land is preserved in some of the best-conserved Crusader buildings anywhere.