The Order of Saint Lazarus grew from a leper hospital outside the walls of Jerusalem into the strangest of the military orders: a brotherhood that cared for lepers and received leprous knights from the Templars and Hospitallers into its own ranks. Small and often overlooked, it fought and bled in the Crusader states, then survived in the West as a hospitaller order long after the Holy Land was lost.
Of all the military orders, the Order of St Lazarus was the most unusual. It began as a hospital for lepers outside the walls of Jerusalem and never abandoned that founding purpose, even as it took up arms. Knights of the Templars and Hospitallers who contracted leprosy — a constant danger in the East — were sent to St Lazarus, and for a long time the order was itself led by a leprous master.
It was never large or wealthy, and its records are fragmentary, but it shared in the wars and disasters of the Crusader states before retreating to the West, where its hospitals and commanderies outlived the Kingdom of Jerusalem by centuries.
A hospital dedicated to St Lazarus — the beggar “full of sores” from the Gospel parable, taken as the patron of lepers — stood outside the northern wall of Jerusalem by the first half of the 12th century. It cared for the many lepers of the Latin East, a group both pitied and feared.
Leprosy touched even the throne: Baldwin IV, the “leper king”, ruled Jerusalem while the disease slowly killed him. In such a world a specialised leper order filled a real need, and the house of St Lazarus grew under royal and noble patronage.
By the mid-12th century the order had added a military role. Its most striking feature was that leprous brothers — including knights invalided out of the Templars and Hospitallers, whose own rules required them to transfer to St Lazarus — fought in its ranks. For much of the 13th century custom, and then rule, held that the master of the order should himself be a leper.
Only in 1253 did a papal dispensation allow a healthy man to hold the mastership, an acknowledgement that leadership by the dying was no longer workable as the order took on more fighting.
The Lazarites fought in the great crises of the Latin East. At the catastrophe of La Forbie in 1244 the order’s contingent — leprous and healthy knights alike — was almost wiped out, and it suffered again during Louis IX’s crusade at the fighting around Mansurah in 1250.
These losses were heavy for so small a body, and each one thinned an order that could never easily replace its knights. When Acre fell in 1291, St Lazarus, like the greater orders, lost its reason for being in the East.
The order’s centre of gravity had long lain in Europe, where kings and lords had endowed it with leper-houses and estates. Its chief seat became Boigny, near Orléans, under French royal protection; its principal English house was Burton Lazars in Leicestershire, and it held commanderies in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and beyond.
In the West the order returned to its first work — running hospitals and leprosaria — while keeping the forms and dignities of a knightly order. Its master at Boigny, Thomas de Sainville, reorganised it around this western base as the East slipped away.
As leprosy receded in late-medieval Europe, the order’s hospitals lost their purpose and its wealth drew predators. In 1490 Pope Innocent VIII tried to suppress it and hand its property to the Hospitallers; the French branch resisted and survived under the crown’s protection.
The order then splintered along national lines. In Savoy it was united with the Order of St Maurice in 1572 to form the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus; in France it was joined to Our Lady of Mount Carmel in 1608. From these threads descend the several bodies that claim the name today — a contested and much-disputed succession.