The Order of St John is our last direct link with the Crusades. For over nine centuries the Order has cared for the sick - from the earliest times of the pilgrims to our own day, when that ideal is still carried on by the members of the St John Ambulance. John Julius Norwich tells the extraordinary story of the Knights of St John, filmed on the island of Rhodes and in Malta where the great confrontation with the Turks was to reach its climax when the Order held off the huge armies of Suleiman the Magnificent in the siege of 1565, and saved Western Europe for Christianity. Re-aired 9 December 1979