Hospital of Saint John (Jerusalem)

The Hospital of Saint John was a hospice established by merchants from the Italian city of Amalfi in the second half of the 11th century for male Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem.

From the 8th century, the use of penitentials—handbooks about the acts of penance that sinners were expected to perform—reinforced the western Christians' enthusiasm for pilgrimages, for these manuals regarded penitential journeys as an effective form of self-mortification.

Dozens of prominent western clerics and aristocrats (men and women alike) travelled to the Holy Land, and they were often accompanied by commoners who joined their entourage in the hope of their protection.

These cities' agricultural hinterland was small, thus their burghers eagerly invested in the lucrative trade in slaves and competitive manufactured goods (such as linen) with northern Africa and the Levant.

[13] Writing between 1170 and 1184, the historian William of Tyre says that merchants from Amalfi approached the Fatimid caliph asking a plot of land in Jerusalem's Christian Quarter because they had no house in the Holy City.

[9][14] Riley-Smith assumes that William wrongly attributes the establishment of two of the three institutions to the Amalfitans, since Benedictine monks had administered a Saint Mary Church near the Holy Sepulchre possibly as early as Charlemagne's time, and the hospice for Latin pilgrims still existed towards the end of the 9th century.

The Vetus Chronicon Amalphitanum narrates that during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem c. 1080, John, Archbishop of Amalfi, met with merchants from his hometown who had established two hospices, one for male and another for female pilgrims, there.