Commanderate of St. John

The Commanderij of Sint-Jan is a former Johannite Commandery of the Order of St. John located at Hofstraat 3-5 in Montfoort. The building is a national monument and is currently used as a banquet hall for weddings and parties.

The commandery was founded in 1544 by bailiff Bernard van Duven and originally consisted of a chapel, cloister, and a commander's residence. He appointed Gerrit Zas as the first commander. The buildings were constructed in late Gothic style with decorations in Renaissance style. The architects cannot be definitively identified. Willem Noort and Cornelis Frederiksz are mentioned. The commandery was in use for only a short time and was secularized in 1630.

The origins of the contemporary Johannite and Maltese Order trace back to the mid-11th century and lie in a pilgrimage hospital established by merchants from Amalfi in Jerusalem. This Benedictine monastery-hospital came directly under the protection of Pope Paschal II by bull on February 15, 1113, granting the brotherhood the right to appoint its own grandmaster. Thus, around that time, the Order of Hospital Knights emerged from a monastic order, later also known as Johannite knights, named after the hospital's patron saint, John the Baptist. According to the social hierarchy (nobility, clergy, and bourgeoisie), the order consisted of three groups: knights, whose calling was to fight against the infidels, protect pilgrims, and care for the sick and wounded; priests, who led worship services; and serving brothers, who cared for the sick and strangers. Their attire consisted of a black mantle with a white cross. Initially, only the priests wore this black mantle. In 1259, Pope Alexander IV authorized the knights who went to battle to wear red mantle cloaks adorned with a white cross and to replace these with the long black mantle in peacetime, which is still worn by the knights and ladies of the Johannite Order in the Netherlands.

The oldest Johannite monastery in the Netherlands is the Catharinaklooster in Utrecht, now known as the Catharijneconvent. The exact date of the monastery's founding is unknown. There are indications that Johannites, also referred to as Jansheren, were present at the site as early as 1122. Among the oldest Johannite monasteries in the Netherlands are the commandery St. Jansberg near Sneek, established in 1207, and the Jansheren establishment in Arnhem, which already existed in 1214. The commanderies in Buren, Ermelo, Haarlem, Harmelen, Ingen, Kerkwerve, Mechelen, Middelburg, Nijmegen, Oosterwierum, Oudewater, Waarder, Warffum, and Wijtwerd date back to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The commandery in Montfoort dates from the sixteenth century.

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