But it is in Cyprus that we first hear of the Order owning fighting ships—galleys and galleasses. These were probably intended to be used in a Crusade that never took place—a Crusade for which Pope Clement had been campaigning for some years but which failed through lack of funds as well as through the general decline in the crusading spirit in Europe. It was during this period in Cyprus that an astute Grand Master, William de Villaret, drastically reorganised the Order, tightened up its discipline, secured it further properties and privileges in Europe, and ensured its continued existence.

Nevertheless, although the Knights of St John had their possessions in Cyprus and had gradually recovered from the moral and material losses resulting from their expulsion from Outremer, their position was not satisfactory. The Latin King of Cyprus, Henry, a descendant of the former kings of Jerusalem, was determined that they should not acquire any more holdings in the island. He knew how much power both the Hospitallers and the Templars had exercised in Palestine, contributing to the decline of the kingdom both through their influence and their mutual hostility. He was determined that they were not going to act in a similar fashion in his own country, and made it quite clear to the Orders that they were only present on sufferance. Both the king and his barons viewed the knights with considerable suspicion. Writing of this period in the Order’s history Riley-Smith sums up its achievement and character throughout the preceding centuries:

 

If historians have exaggerated the Order’s strength, they have under-emphasised its real historical importance. Not only was it one of the most important institutions in the Latin East, but its officers were great men in many western states. It was one of the first internationally organised exempt Orders of the Church. Its ideal of the care of the sick poor set a standard that was followed by many in the later Middle Ages. It proclaimed, perhaps most characteristically, the crusading ideal: that mixture of charity and pugnacity that had so profound an effect on all western thought in the High Middle Ages. It was an instrument of the popes in the centuries of their preeminence, while in its internal history it reflected the changing social and economic structure of Europe: the rise of the knightly class, but also the emergence of a capitalist monetary economy.

 

The opportunity for securing for themselves a territory which they could truly call their own presented itself in 1306. A Genoese pirate and adventurer, Vignolo dei Vignoli, had obtained a lease of the islands of Cos and Leros in the Dodecanese group in the Aegean. He now came and proposed to Grand Master Fulk de Villaret (who had succeeded his uncle William) that he and the Order should join forces. With their combined ships and men they would capture all the islands in the area—in return for which he would retain a third of the income from them. The fact that the islands were part of the Byzantine empire does not seem to have troubled him. (The Latin kingdom of Constantinople had collapsed in 1261 and a Greek emperor was once again upon the throne.) Grand Master de Villaret listened and approved the scheme, but felt that, in his case at least, he should have papal approval before committing his knights and men against what was, in theory at any rate, the territory of another Christian monarch. That permission was not too difficult to obtain, for the fact was that the Byzantine governor of Rhodes had cast off his allegiance to the emperor in Constantinople and was running his island as a miniature independent state. It was nevertheless a Christian country, the Rhodian Greeks belonging to the Orthodox Greek Church, and only extreme casuistry could have justified an attack upon it. Fulk de Villaret was lucky. Pope Clement V, who was later to join with Philip of France in destroying the Templars, was a cynical casuist, Philip’s creature, and a man of easy conscience.

 

 

 

Chapter 8

AN ISLAND HOME

 

Rhodes is one of the most beautiful islands in the Aegean Sea. It is also the most easterly, lying only ten miles south of Cape Alypo in Asia Minor. The channel between Rhodes and the Turkish dominated mainland carried a large part of the merchant shipping passing between the ports and harbours of the north and those of the Levant, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt The luxuries of the East—spices, silks and sugar—passed their doorstep, as did the grain and timber of the Black Sea. Rhodes was thus admirably suited for the purpose to which the Knights were now to dedicate themselves—the continual harassment of the Moslem world and the disruption of its trade. If they could no longer fight the enemy on land then they would turn to the sea.

The island which was to become the Order’s home for two centuries had a long history of military and naval distinction. Rhodian seamen had been famous for their skill and ability in classical times. A Rhodian, Timosthenes, had been one of the foremost scholar-navigators in the days of the Ptolemies, and had been chosen Chief Pilot of the great Egyptian fleet. This tradition of nautical excellence persisted into the days of the Roman Empire and the Rhodians had formed the backbone of the imperial navy in the East. The islanders, native to the sea and its ways from childhood, had subsequently gone on to prove their worth in the navies of the Byzantine Empire, showing themselves master mariners and superb navigators over and over again.