Battle of Rhodes (1522 AD)

The Order of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John (also known as the Knights Hospitalers) were organized during the First Crusade and operated a hospital in Jerusalem. These were Christian knights dedicated to spreading and protecting their faith. When the forces of Islam recaptured the city, the Knights withdrew to the port city of Acre. When Muslim forces captured that city after a six-week siege in 1291, a handful of Hospitalers escaped and returned to Italy to rebuild their forces. When, in 1307, the French King Philip IV arrested all members of another military order, the Knights Templar, in an attempt to weaken the military power of the Catholic Church, the Knights Hospitalers fled to avoid the same fate.

The Knights of St. John chose the island of Rhodes as their headquarters. Since their expulsion from the Holy Land they had concentrated on enhancing their naval as well as military power and owning an island so near their hated Muslim enemy would allow them to harass Muslim shipping and trade in the eastern Mediterranean. The Knights captured the island, and Pope Clement V confirmed their possession of it in 1309. For the next two centuries the Knights were a continuous thorn in the side of Muslim merchant and naval fleets.

After Sultan Mehmet reestablished the power of the Ottoman Empire and captured Constantinople in 1453, he set about conquering territory from southeast Europe to the frontiers of Persia. He was unstoppable. Finally deciding to rid himself of the Knights, he mounted an invasion of Rhodes in 1480. The main assaults, under the command of Mesic Pasha, against the fortifications of the city of Rhodes came from the seaward side, but the stout walls the Knights had constructed proved too difficult for the Turks to overcome. When a landward assault also ended in failure, the invaders went home. A concurrent assault against the Italian peninsula was ended prematurely in the wake of the Ottoman defeat at Rhodes, and the Knights' victory probably saved western Europe from Muslim incursion and possibly control.

In Rhodes, the grand master of the Knights of St. John, Fabrizio del Carreto, oversaw the strengthening of the city's defenses over the next few decades. By the time of his death in 1521, Rhodes possessed the strongest fortifications of any Christian bastion in the world. Their naval attacks on Muslim merchants continued to nettle successive Ottoman sultans, and in 1522 the recently enthroned Sultan Suleiman ("the Magnificent") tried again to dislodge the Knights and protect his trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean

Suleiman led the invasion, which one of his chroniclers claims consisted of 700 ships and 200,000 men, although the army probably numbered no more than half that. Unlike Mesic's strategy in 1480, Suleiman decided to concentrate on an attack from the landward side, a decision that allowed the Knights to receive reinforcements throughout the siege. The Knights had built well under del Carreto's direction. Attackers now had to cross two ditches before the walls instead of the normal single ditch, and the walls themselves had been thickened some 200 percent and heightened since the previous invasion. Each section of the walls was assigned to a different langue of the Knights, who were divided into national units.

Seeing the difficulty of a direct assault, Suleiman employed the thousands of miners he had brought to undermine the walls. Luckily for the Knights, just before the siege the Venetian engineer Gabriele Tadini da Martinengo slipped into the city. He developed an instrument made of tightly stretched parchment that vibrated at the slightest motion. Warned by this device where the Turkish tunnels were, he was able to have his men undermine the mines. In spite of his best effort, the Turks' numerical superiority allowed them to dig more mines than the Knights could counter. On 4 and 24 September, and again on 30 November, the Turks were able to collapse some of the walls and rush the resulting breaches. Fighting was intense at each of the three battles, but the defenders prevailed at heavy cost to all of them.

In October Chancellor André do Amaral, the chief rival to L'Isle Adam for the position of grand master, was accused of treason. One of his servants was discovered carrying a message urging the Turks to continue the siege. He was a haughty and unpopular man; many readily believed that he was capable of such an act. But the witnesses at his trial were of dubious trustworthiness and Amaral himself refused to say anything, even under torture. No contemporary Turkish sources mention contact with him, but it is possible he was working against the defenders. In 1856 a huge explosion under the Church of St. John in Rhodes destroyed the church and the nearby grand master's palace. Such a blast indicated the possibility that the long-sealed church vault contained a large amount of gunpowder, when the defenders of 1522 were in short supply. Still, no such charge was leveled against Amaral at his trial. He was convicted and executed.

By December the Knights were in dire straits, although there had supposedly been ammunition and food supplies stocked away for a year's siege. Islands the Knights held in the region had all surrendered to other Turkish attacks, as had their last mainland stronghold at Halicarnassus (Bodrum, Turkey). Unlike the 1480 siege that had ended with the approach of winter, Suleiman was violating normal strategy and maintaining pressure despite the season. After losing as many as 15,000 casualties, Suleiman offered the Knights honorable terms if they would surrender, and the citizens of Rhodes supported the idea. When L'Isle Adam's council also agreed, the grand master contacted the sultan. On 20 December the fighting stopped, on the condition that there would be no retribution against any of Rhodes' citizens and that they should be allowed to continue the free practice of Christianity. The Knights were allowed free passage away from the island, along with all the wealth they could carry.

On 1 January 1523 the Knights marched down to the docks and embarked on their galleys. L'Isle Adam's ship hoisted a flag to half staff, the banner bearing a picture of the Virgin Mary crying over her crucified Son over the motto Afflictus to spes unica rebus ("In all which afflicts us thou art our only hope"). Suleiman supposedly commented, "It saddens me to have to oblige this brave old man to leave his home" (Sire, The Knights of Malta, p. 59).

Suleiman lived to regret that moment of compassion, for seven years later the Knights relocated to Malta and continued to challenge the power of Turkish navies in the Mediterranean. The final campaign of the sultan's long reign was against Malta, and it proved a failure. Still, the capture of Rhodes was significant in allowing free trade for Islam throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Had L'Isle Adam not accepted terms but continued on in defense of his city, he almost certainly would have been defeated and the Order of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John would have been exterminated. Support from European powers for a stronghold in the lion's mouth had long been waning, but the order gained a new lease on life in Malta. Their continued existence provided the bulwark of Christianity on that island and in the Mediterranean.