Knights of fiction

Since I’m obviously very much into crusader history and the history of the Order of Malta, I have to quickly mention a couple of my favorite fictional Knights, too.

I met both of these fictional Knights of Malta (or Hospitallers) last year. First of them was David Thewlis’s character, simply known as the Hospitaller, from one of my last year’s favorite movies, Kingdom of Heaven. Not a big role, but he was still my favorite character of the movie, right after Balian. He was a philosopher and a warrior monk, who I (knowing the history behind the movie) wished wouldn’t have participated in the battle of Hattin as he finally did. I posted quite a lot about the movie in my own blog, so if you are interested, you can see why I thought the movie was good in here and in here.

The second fictional Knight of the Order I met last year was one named Sir Graham Reid Mallett (or Gabriel), from Dorothy Dunnett’s brilliant Lymond Chronicles. He’s a Knight of the Grand Cross, angelic and powerful. Or so it seems. In the novel Disorderly Knights Dunnett lets her hero, Francis Crawford of Lymond, get involved in the history of the Order quite heavily and he meets Gabriel in Malta. In order to avoid spoiling the possible reading experience, I won’t tell you more. I’ll just say that all six Lymond novels are historical fiction at its most enjoyable form, and I warmly recommend them to anyone, who’s into European 16^th century history and well-written fiction.