The book for the first time comprehensively examines the history of one of the oldest spiritual and chivalric orders of the Catholic Church - the Order of Hospitallers, or Johannites. Now he is widely known under the name of the Order of Malta. His fate intertwined not only with the history of Palestine, the Byzantine Empire, many states of Western Europe, but at the end of the 18th century and with the fate of the Russian Empire, when the Russian emperor Paul I became the 72nd Grand Master of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem.