For nearly 1,000 years it has cared for the poor and sick, first among the parched pilgrims heading to the Holy Land during the Crusades and more recently in refugee camps, war zones and hospices around the world.

But the Sovereign Order of Malta, a chivalric order based in Rome that regards itself as a an independent sovereign state, has been riven by a distinctly undignified fight between its British princely head and his deputy, a German aristocrat.

Matthew Festing, the Catholic order’s Grand Master and a former officer in the Grenadier Guards, dismissed Albrecht von Boeselager after a bitter row over condoms.