Chapel of St Anne
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Transcript
Below the church, the Chapel of St Anne became the burial place of Grand Masters. That is interesting precisely because the office was elective rather than dynastic. Kings normally used tombs to advertise family continuity. Here a corporate institution created its own sequence of rulers.
Burial inside the headquarters gave the Order a physical genealogy even without hereditary succession. Each tomb linked the current leadership to predecessors and to the sacred core of the complex. In effect, the institution manufactured continuity in stone. It is a quieter form of political theatre than a throne room, but no less deliberate.