Coming, up with the blockading force they soon proved their immense superiority over the Egyptians, capturing twelve of their vessels along with all their crews. This in itself was profitable enough, but they went on to put a party of Knights and soldiers ashore, engaging the Mamelukes who had landed from the Egyptian ships. In the ensuing battle 700 Mamelukes were killed while the rest, unable to escape by the sea since their fleet was destroyed, were all captured. If the Pope’s call to arms had fallen on deaf ears the Order had shown that it was still as active as ever in its war against Islam.

Four years later, in 1444, the Egyptians once more tried their hand against the Knights, landing on Rhodes itself and laying siege to the city. Their efforts were frustrated by their own inefficiency in siege warfare and by the strength of the city’s fortifications. Defeated yet again at sea, the Egyptians withdrew after a siege lasting forty days and returned to Alexandria. They were never again to trouble the Order of St John. Within a few years they themselves were to find the Turks at their gates, and their country was ultimately destined to become part of the Ottoman empire. Over the centuries since they had first established their hospital in Jerusalem and had evolved the military branch of their Order the Knights had been in conflict with almost every Moslem power in the East, as well as pagans like the Tartars. Their hardest task now lay ahead, for the Turks and Turcomans who embraced Islam were to combine the religious fanaticism of the Saracens with the hardiness and violence of the Asiatic steppe peoples.

The activities of the Knights during the years since they had firmly established themselves in Rhodes, right up to the moment when the first major attack was launched against them (while ill-acknowledged in Europe) had been largely responsible for the fact that the Turks had never made much of a showing as a naval power. Like the Arabs long before them they feared and distrusted the sea. They might have echoed the remark of ’Amr, the great Arab conqueror of Alexandria: ‘If a ship lies still it rends the heart; if it moves it terrifies the imagination. Upon it a man’s power ever diminishes and calamity increases. Those within it are like worms in a log, and if it rolls over they are drowned.’ But the Turks, again like the Arabs, were to prove that within a comparatively short time they too could learn to be seamen. In this, and in their shipbuilding techniques, they were to be aided by Greek subjects from Asia Minor and by the knowledge and expertise of the shipbuilders of Constantinople. For, in 1453, the great city that had been founded by Constantine the Great, that had been captured by the Latins in the Fourth Crusade, and later retaken by the Byzantines, fell for the last time to the victorious Sultan Mehmet II.

Mehmet, son of the Sultan Murad, was one of the most distinguished men in Turkish history and he was to make himself the terror of Europe. Although he was to advance Turkish arms into Europe itself, and to be revered ever after by his people as the conqueror of Constantinople and the founder of Turkey-in-Europe, he was far from being of pure Turkish descent. He himself liked to claim that his mother was a Frank, and he certainly had Greek and Armenian blood in his veins. His appearance was more European than Turkish, as is borne out by the famous painting of him by Gentile Bellini. A good-looking man, with piercing eyes under curved eyebrows, he had a thin Semitic nose above full red lips. An Intellectual, he had an extensive knowledge of Greek literature as well as Islamic, and he was well read in science and philosophy. A brilliant linguist, he spoke Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Persian. It was said of him that his greatest desire was to emulate Alexander the Great. Unlike Alexander, however, he was a man of monstrous cruelty, with all the implacability of the Oriental despot. When, on the death of his father, the latter’s widow came to condole with Mehmet and congratulate him on his succession her young son was at that very moment being drowned in his bath on Mehmet’s orders. Yet, like many a tyrant, he enjoyed the company of artists and scholars. His first words as he rode through conquered Constantinople were the lines from the Persian poet Sa’di:

 

Now the spider weaves the curtains in the palace

Of the Caesars,

Now the owl calls the night watches in the

Towers of Afrasiab.

 

Contrary to the code of Islam he was a notorious wine-bibber, happiest perhaps when in his cups. He was also, in common with many Turks, a paederast, and among his many acquisitions after the fall of Constantinople were a number of handsome Greek youths. A strange compendium of virtues and vices, this was the man who was to look south from his new capital and plan the destruction of Rhodes and the end of the Knights Hospitaller.

The man who was to meet this challenge as Grand Master of the Order was a Frenchman of the Langue of Auvergne, Pierre d’Aubusson. Born in 1423, he was fifty-seven at the time that Mehmet launched his attack on the island.