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Answer: The Knights Hospitalers of St. John of Jerusalem. |
The Hospitalers were one of the military orders created in the 12th century to assist Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land in the wake of the Western military successes of the First Crusade (1099).
When the Crusader principalities were conquered by the Turks in 1291, the Hospitalers relocated to the island of Rhodes and subsequently, in 1530, to the Maltese archipelago, fighting all the way.
As a token of fealty to the Holy Roman Emperor (who had ceded Malta to them), the Hospitalers presented the Emperor the annual tribute of a live falcon. The fabulous treasure bird may be "the stuff dreams are made of", but the dream was hatched in Hammet's fertile imagination.
