"Order of St John of Jerusalem Hospitallers Females. It is possible that in the twelfth century female members served in the hospital, although they were not mentioned in the Hospitaller rule. At the end of the twelfth century, cloistered female convents dependent on the order emerged. Of these, the most important was the convent of Sigena, founded in Aragon in 1187. The cloistered female Hospitallers neither fought nor served in the hospitals, although they contributed responsions to the main convent. There were also associate members (called donates): men and women who took vows of obedience and promised to join the order in the future. Confraters and consors gave an annual donation to the order and were promised care in their old age and a Christian burial in return.
After the fall of Acre, there was some discussion in western Europe about combining or dissolving the Hospitallers and the Templars. The two biggest military religious orders had been criticized for their sometimes rancorous participation in the politics of Outremer and their apparent hesitancy to pursue the immediate recovery of the Holy Land. The Hospitallers' establishment of their central convent and infirmary on Rhodes coincided with the dissolution of the Order of the Temple and the confiscation of its properties. Although there is no evidence that the Hospitallers planned for this eventuality, they avoided a fate similar to that of the Templars by removing their convent from any possible interference from European rulers.
From 1306 to 1310 the Hospitallers conquered the island of Rhodes (located off the southwestern coast of Anatolia) from the Byzantines. They subsequently acquired other islands and territories in the Dodecanese, notably Kos, Simi, Kastellorizo, and Bodrum. On Rhodes, although still subject to the authority of the pope, the order became a sovereign state and naval power involved in the politics of the eastern Mediterranean. The order entered into treaties with and collected tribute from Muslim potentates.
Individual popes, such as Innocent VI, pressured the order to move to the Anatolian mainland and fight against the Turks, under the threat of losing its lands to a new military religious order. These plans did not come to fruition, however, and Rhodes served as the base for several crusading expeditions in the fourteenth century. The Hospitallers participated in Pope Clement VI's crusade to capture Smyrna (mod. Uzmir, Turkey) in 1343-1349, and then contributed 3,000 florins a year to its defense until it was lost in 1402. In 1365 Rhodes was the staging place for the crusade of King Peter I of Cyprus against Alexandria in Egypt. The sack of Alexandria in October 1365 alarmed the master of the Hospital, Raymond Berengar, who feared that the Mamlük sultan would retaliate by blockading Rhodes and Cyprus; this concern demonstrates the extent of Hospitaller reliance upon the mainland of the Near East for food and other supplies…"
link
Full article here.
weaponsandwarfare.com/?p=30112
Hope you enjoy!.
Amicalement
Armand
tackles a 
