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Within less than a century, the Knights of St John had established a vast network of hospitals and fortifications along the pilgrim routes leading from Europe to Jerusalem. Over the next two hundred years, they developed into a formidable army of aristocratic Christian warriors, building and defending a long chain of castles to safeguard the land frontiers of the Holy Land, from Asia Minor to Egypt. The Knights of St John were the crack troops of Christendom, but they also bore the brunt of wave after wave of attacks from the armies of Islam. By the end of the thirteenth century they had been made to relinquish almost all of their hard-won possessions. When the Christians were finally forced out of the Holy Land altogether, the knights were the last to leave, finally defeated at the Siege of Acre in 1291.

The history of the order over the next three centuries would be no less bloody and no less embattled. The knights found a new home on the Greek island of Rhodes, a strategically vital maritime base at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa. Having captured the island, they fortified it and set about creating a fleet of fighting ships. From that time on, they were no longer an army of Christian footsoldiers but a naval force. From their base on Rhodes they mounted raids on Turkish shipping and vulnerable coastal settlements, taking slaves and capturing hostages for ransom.

In the Islamic world they were regarded as brutal and pitiless marauders. In their monastic uniform of black robes, proudly emblazoned at the chest with a white eight-pointed cross, the Knights of St John represented a militantly aggressive form of Christianity. Their activities inevitably attracted reprisals. In 1480 a Turkish fleet laid siege to Rhodes, only to be repelled with crippling losses. Forty years later, in 1522, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent once more sent a flotilla of ships to conquer Rhodes. After six months of attack and counter-attack, the knights were finally defeated and expelled from the island.

In 1530 the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V gave them another new home, on Malta, part of his Two Kingdoms of Sicily. His motives were part religious, part strategic. Charles V wanted to protect the southern flank of Europe and ultimately Rome itself against the might of Islam. His reasoning was that if anyone could hold Malta, the Knights of St John could. He ceded it to them in exchange for an annual tribute of a single falcon.

Thirty-five years later, in 1565, the Turks once more laid siege to an island garrisoned by their most hated adversaries. The Siege of Malta lasted for months and would forever be remembered, both for the ferocity of the fighting and for the atrocities committed on both sides. The official historian of the Order of St John, Giacomo Bosio, included a harrowing account of it in his three-volume Dell’Istoria della sacra religione, the last part of which was published in 1602, five years before Caravaggio arrived on Malta. At the height of the siege, Bosio recounted, having captured Fort St Elmo, the Turks proceeded to massacre their Christian captives. The day allotted for the killing was 24 June, the feast day of St John and therefore one of the two most holy days of the year for members of the order (the other being 29 August, the day that marked the saint’s decapitation at the whim of Salome). Making grim play of the significance of the date, the Turks turned the killing itself into an obscene parody of a Christian religious festival: ‘All the cadavers which by their clothing could be recognized as knights or men of importance were gathered up; and it was ordered that they be stripped nude, decapitated, and that their hands be severed. Then, out of disresepect for the Holy Cross and to make sport of the knights’ military overgarments, on each corpse four huge incisions were made with scimitars, making the sign of the Cross on both the fronts and the backs.’43

On a later occasion, in a similar spirit of vengeful parody, the Turks crucified