The Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller, already catalogued in this atlas, spent much of the crusading period as parallel institutions, both military-religious orders drawing recruits, land grants and royal patronage across the same Christian kingdoms, both fielding forces in the same campaigns, and both, at points, competing for the same limited resources and royal favour in ways that occasionally strained relations between them. Their fates after the crusader states' collapse could hardly have diverged more sharply. The Templars were suppressed outright in the early fourteenth century under pressure from the French crown, their leadership tried, their order formally dissolved, their assets largely absorbed by the Hospitallers themselves under papal decree, an ending so abrupt it has fuelled centuries of legend about the order's supposed secret survival.
The Hospitallers faced no comparable suppression. Their retreat from the Holy Land to Rhodes, and later from Rhodes to Malta after a lengthy siege, was a series of relocations rather than a dissolution, each move preserving the order's institutional continuity even as its territorial base shrank. Historians generally attribute the difference partly to the Hospitallers' broader institutional base, the hospital and charitable functions that gave the order value even without crusading territory to defend, and partly to the absence of the specific political vulnerability, heavy debt to the French crown, that made the Templars a convenient target. The result is that one of the two great military orders of the Crusades ended in dramatic suppression and the other continues, in altered form, to the present day.