The Sword and the Green Cross

It is taken for granted in most of the present day civilized world that a visit to the pharmacy, chemist’s or apothecary is a must to procure the prescribed medicine and thus aid and assist the cure of normal ailments. What is not taken for granted is that, to this day, most of the Western world’s symbol of a pharmacy or a chemist’s is indeed a green cross. Why is the cross green? Not red or black or blue. Green.

This green cross owes its controversial birth pangs to the tumultuous happenings of the first crusade and its immediate aftermath. The green cross came to project one of Christendom’s monastic orders of knights, commonly known as the Order of Saint Lazarus. The latter owed its creation to the Latin Catholic church which today is supposed to symbolise the epitome of peace, humility and an abhorrence of war and murder, even when such blood is spilt in the name of a supposedly merciful God.

Although the Old Testament frequently portrays the Almighty as a God of wrath and vengeance, modern – day Christian apologists try hard to neglect whole centuries of Christian history where the words of Exodus were indeed the order of the day:

‘The Lord is a man of war.’ (Exodus 15:3)

The purpose of this book is to inform the reader of the past and present Order of Saint Lazarus, putting such a religious and military organisation in its proper historical perspective and to, slowly but surely, cast off a huge amount of interpolations and inaccuracies regarding this subject matter.

This is a difficult task, primarily because the collective mental image of a knight normally takes the shape of the widely popular Knights Templar or the Knights of Saint John. Indeed, these two Orders of Knighthood emanating from the harsh crusading centuries totally eclipse all other Orders of Knighthoods in terms of popularity and myth.

Needless to say, one will find numerous web pages throughout the internet, together with promotional and propaganda material from several organisations, all projecting themselves to be the authentic Order of Saint Lazarus. They all have their own version of events, most of which start depicting the Order of Saint Lazarus from the crusading period. Fact is frequently juxtaposed with fiction and fantasy. Fallacies and wholesale neglect of the historical evidence have been purposely and strategically intermingled with contemporaneous accounts in order to validate this, or that, version of spurious history. On the other hand, one will also find a number of very serious publications and web pages dedicated to the works of prestigious historians who maintain that there is no real present – day chivalric Order of Saint Lazarus and that such above-mentioned web pages are operated by bogus ‘Orders’, accredited and acknowledged by no one other than themselves. The conservative and non-sensationalist Catholic Encyclopaedia has stated that

‘…the historians of the Order have done much to obscure the question by entangling it with gratuitous pretensions and suspicious documents.’

Although this may indeed seem a harsh statement to be splattered across the introductory pages of a book analysing the history of the Order throughout the ages, one must ensure that such a work is projected, from the outset, in a factual manner in order to exclude the possibility of misinterpretation of the subject matter.

The Order of Saint Lazarus has to be examined with constant reference to the prevailing backdrops of the day. One cannot fully understand a monastic order of warriors unless one scrutinizes the period of the crusades. The crusades also need to be analysed as a political and religious by-product of the papacy and its then constant and self-attained prerogative of integrating its spiritual authority with its temporal authority.

The history of the Order of Saint Lazarus touches on the lives, norms, practices and customs of societies spread across the globe and, consequently, spreads across decades and centuries. It will touch on long forgotten mores and norms, extinct empires and kingdoms, and - unfortunately - wars, intrigues, treachery and over-zealousness. There are both heroes and scoundrels in this history. There are pious men who gave much to the Order of Saint Lazarus and there are crooks and con men that gave the Order a very bad name.

This book will try to give a fresh, albeit factual, outline of the Order of Saint Lazarus and also examine the numerous organisations bearing the name of Saint Lazarus in the modern world.

But first, before we embark on our journey across time and continents to savour the mark of the Order throughout the centuries, let us answer a very simple question.

What is chivalry?

Without a clear perception of the term ‘chivalry’, one cannot even start to address the history of the Order of Saint Lazarus.

Although the military orders are also referred to as chivalric orders, chivalry - as a system per se of ethical ideals - arose from feudalism and reached its highest development in the 12th and 13th centuries. Chivalric ethics originated chiefly in France and Spain and spread rapidly to the rest of mainland Europe and to England. They represented a fusion of Christian and military concepts of morality and still form the basis of gentlemanly conduct. Noble youths became pages in the castles of other nobles at the age of seven; at fourteen they trained as squires in the service of knights, learning horsemanship and military techniques, and were themselves knighted, usually when they reached the age of twenty one.

The chief chivalric virtues were piety, honor, valor, courtesy, chastity, and loyalty. The knight's loyalty was due to the spiritual master, God; to the temporal master, the suzerain; and to the mistress of the heart, his sworn love. Love, in the chivalrous sense, was supposedly largely platonic; as a rule, only a virgin or another man's wife could be the chosen object of chivalrous love. With the Roman church’s cult of the Virgin Mary, the romanticized elevation of noblewomen on a pedestal reached its highest expression. At least on paper.