HISTORY

The name of Hotel Croce di Malta takes his origin from the nearby headquarters of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM).

The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta  (known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, Order of Malta or Knights of Malta for short, traces its origins  back  from the ancient order of the Knights Hospitaller or Knights of St. John (in Latin: "Ordo Sancti Johannis Hospitalis Ierosolimitani"), an organization founded in the Holy Land in the eleventh century (1048 1050) with the construction on behalf of merchants from Amalfi of an  hospital in order to provide care for poor and sick pilgrims. The hospital was donated, afterwards ,  to a monastic community wich was recognized as a religious order of chivalry (hence the name of hospitaller), in 1113 by a papal bull of Paschal II (Piae postulatio voluntatis), under the name Order of St. John of Jerusalem.
It became a  military order  when it had to defend its own hospitals in the Holy Land from the assaults of the Saracens: thus, in addition to a formal recognition it  acquired a territory and an armed force also, taking shape as a real state. Over the centuries, however, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta lost a part of its territory and for this it needed to acquire someone more (Rhodes, Malta) in order to maintain its own territoriality that it lost for only a short period of exile, lasted few months, between the loss of the same territory in the Holy Land  and its moving to Rhodes. In 1798, however, Napoleon and his soldiers occupied the island of Malta, on which the Order  had ruled since 1530 by virtue of feudal rights granted to it by the Kingdom of Two Sicily and where, according to its own law, it could not to be opposed by force of arms against other Christians. For this reason the French had an easy task in taking control of the island. This episode is identified generally with the epilogue of the military function of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.