Flintlock and Rapier:
An Alternate History of the Americas
By Errnge
The Knights Hospitaller
An Alternate History of the Americas
By Errnge
The Knights Hospitaller
After the Fall of Rhodes in 1522, the Knights Hospitaller, also known as the Knights of St. John, were left without a home. They wandered for years, landing first in Crete, and then Messina, Viterbo, and then Nice. Complaints followed wherever they went. Even in the Vatican, people were uneasy with such a powerful order of seven hundred men dedicated to fighting and crusading in the name of Jesus Christ so close by. After all, nothing ruined a good day of papal corruption like having an army of zealots hanging around.
So it came that newly crowned Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Spain, Austria, King of Italy, and apparently King of everything else in the entire western hemisphere not already claimed by Portugal (see the Treaty of Alcacovas and the Treaty of Tordesillas) was left to deal with the problem. You can imagine, even now, the Emperor stroking his magnificent black beard trying to figure out what exactly to do. You see, these were the issues: the Knights Hospitaller was a militant Christian Order, it was a sworn enemy of the Ottomans who were just looking for another reason to invade Europe, and the Knights Hospitaller were so well respected for their gallantry and valor that he couldn’t just get rid of them… or could he?
At first the idea to set them up in Malta was proposed. We have every reason to believe that Charles V planned to go through with this plan, but as fate would have it, the Emperor inexplicably changed his mind, and came up with another plan.
The year was 1530 when Emperor Charles V met with Philippe de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Grand Master of the Knights of St. John. The proposition was simple: Charles V would give the Knights as many ships as they needed to sail west across the Atlantic, and he would give them Jamaica. In return, all he expected was an annual tribute of one sword sent to him every All Souls Day, which would be received by the Spanish Governor of Cuba in Havana. With pressure from the Pope, and the opportunity to convert unknown multitudes of heathens to the Catholic Church, Grand Master Philippe de Villiers agreed.
The trip to Jamaica was, to put it frankly, a bitch. Between the death, the dying and the death, the Grand Master’s journal reports sixty-nine lost knights on the way to Jamaica. It took months to get there, but finally, from the sandy beaches of Jamaica, white sails appeared over the horizon.
On August 11th, 1531, six-hundred and thirty-one Knights Hospitaller landed in New Seville, Jamaica, establishing the first European sovereign nation in the Americas. Emperor Charles V thought he was eliminating a problem, but as history can tell he was only replacing one for another.
One of the first actions the Knights made as the new rulers of Jamaica was renaming everything. It was all just too Spanish for them, apparently. New Seville, the current capital of the island, was renamed New Jerusalem, and the island, a bastardization of the native Taino name, they re-labeled as la Isla de Providencia Divina, the Island of Divine Providence, known now simply as Providence.
This was very optimistic of the Knights, especially when you consider that half of them were dead by the years end due to malaria and other tropical diseases. Grand Master Philippe de Villiers himself died in the spring of 1532 from an unknown disease. He was succeeded by a Spaniard named Juan de Homedes y Coscon, who certainly knew at this point what an awful predicament his order was in. Jamaica, or Divine Providence as it was now known, was anything but a paradise.
You see, the Spanish initially colonized Jamaica for two reasons: it was located between Cuba and the mainland, and they didn’t want anyone else to have it. When the Hospitallers arrived, there was almost nothing in Jamaica. Not counting the newly arrived Knights, the island was home to just under a thousand Spanish colonists spread along the northern shore. The main source of profit on the island before that was the exportation of natives taken as slaves, most of whom were sent to Cuba to work in the gold mines. But by 1519, almost all of the native Taino were eradicated, only a few hundred left deep in the jungle. A few colonists as recently as 1526 had taken to harvesting sugar cane, giving some small profit to the island, but this did little to improve the island.
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This is what the Hospitallers inherited. At least it was pretty. But the new Grand Master Juan de Homedes y Coscon had grand intentions to turn his realm around. One of the first things he decreed was the outlawing of the slave trade on his island. Livid that someone could be so… so… so humanitarian! The Governor of Cuba threatened an invasion, to which the Grand Master replied:
“After withstanding the vast Turkish hordes at Rhodes, do you really think a few hundred Spaniards can stop His Lord’s chosen warriors?”
-- Juan de Homedes y Coscon, Grand Master of the Knights of St. John, Order Hospitaller, Knights of Divine Providence, March 24th, 1533
Thinking better of it, the Governor of Cuba recanted his threat, apparently deciding that the few hundred natives left on Providence weren’t worth the trouble of invading. The abolition of the slave trade did lend the Hospitallers the support of the Dominican missionaries on the island, particularly Bartolome de las Casas, who had previously criticized the former governors for all of their shenanigans, like genocide and ethnic cleansing. But there were still more reforms to be made.
Realizing that much of the disease that crippled the colonists in New Jerusalem was due to the swampy location in the north of Providence, de Homedes took the advice of the former Governor of Jamaica Santino de Raza, and moved the capital to the south of the island. The only colony on the south of the island was a town called Santiago, founded by the former governor and conquistador Francisco de Garay. Grand Master de Homedes moved the capital there, and renamed it New Rhodes, partially as a joke. You know, because the Hospitallers moved from Jerusalem to Rhodes? It’s funny, I swear. Anyway, the move may very well have saved the Hospitaller realm, which was feeling the increasing pressure of buccaneers and pirates lurking the surrounding waters…
