The Sovereign Military Order of Malta – also known as the Knights of Malta – isn’t just a religious Catholic order with nearly 1,000 years of history. Nor is it just a multi-million-dollar-budget humanitarian aid organization, with operations including refugee camps and disaster relief programs in some 120 countries around the world.
It’s also a sovereign nation, with United Nations observer status and its own constitution, but, unusually, without any land. It issues car license plates – without having any roads to drive them on – and its own stamps, currency and passports.
The Knights originated as a chivalric order in Jerusalem around 1099 and were gifted the Maltese archipelago in 1530 by the King of Spain. Napoleon Bonaparte forced the Knights out of Malta in the French invasion of 1798, and these days the Order is headquartered in Rome. Daniel de Petri Testaferrata, the Malta-based President of the Order, tells CNN that only about 100 of the 13,500 knights, dames and chaplains now dispersed around the globe live in the Maltese archipelago.
