And at the palisades themselves stood the long line of armoured men—a curtain-wall of steel—swinging above their heads those great two-handed swords that could split a man from head to crotch in a single blow. Many were drowned, others killed on the spot, and the attack was foredoomed from the start. The survivors turned, splashed back through the shoals, and made for the safety of their ships. But even here no safety existed, for the fort’s guns and small arms once again came into play. One vessel blew up, and most of the others sustained such damage that it took the carpenters and shipwrights days to put them into service again.

But by mid-June so weighty and sustained was the general bombardment (nearly a thousand cannon balls a day, d’Aubusson calculated) that certain parts of the city walls were on the point of collapse. The worst area was to the south of the commercial port, the curtain-wall surrounding the Jews’ Quarter of the city which was held by the Langues of Auvergne and Italy. All the time the Turks were snaking forward their trenches, advancing them night after night towards the counterscarp of the great ditch that surrounded the city. On the night of June 18th a second major assault was launched against St Nicholas, this time by the cream of the Sultan’s troops, the fearsome Janissaries. The Turks had constructed a large floating pontoon on to which the Janissaries were marched, the pontoon then being towed under cover of darkness up to the threatened tower. Brave though the attempt was, and this time better thought out than the previous daylight operation, the Turks were not to find the defenders asleep at their posts. Every gun that could be brought to bear swept the crowded pontoon and the galleys and other escorts that had moved up for the kill. The night was dark no longer. Flares, bursting grenades, and liquid fire illuminated a scene reminiscent of hell. In the waters the bodies of hundreds of Janissaries testified to the firepower of the garrison and of the city. By daylight next morning all was over. Once again the fort, that all-important defence work, had held out against the arms of Islam.

As in any city under siege there were always some who felt that it would be better to save their skins than to die in the crumbling, smoking ruins. Two such plots against the Order were exposed and the men concerned were put to death. One of the schemes involved poisoning the Grand Master himself. The renegade, a Dalmatian or Italian, who had conceived it, was torn to pieces by the townspeople on his way to the place of execution. But, despite these and other attempts to suborn the Rhodians or betray the city, d’Aubusson kept his eye all the time on the mysterious German, Master George. Like so many spies Master George finally betrayed his purpose by the fact that the information he gave the Grand Master about the Turkish dispositions or the siting of the city’s guns was always shown to be either inaccurate or ineffectual. At length d’Aubusson had had enough. The German was put to torture, admitting at last that he had been true to his Turkish masters from the very beginning. There seems little doubt, despite the inevitable mistrust which must always hang around answers elicited under torture, that Master George was guilty. He was publicly hanged and a message to the effect that their master-spy and master-gunner was dead was shot into the Turkish lines.

By the third week of July it was quite clear to the defenders that the first great mass assault must soon fall upon the city. The wall surrounding the Jews’ Quarter was a crumbling ruin and, despite the fact that the defenders had built another wall and ditch behind it, there was little that could be done about the point just seaward of the tower of Italy where only a narrow and largely destroyed curtain-wall protected the city between it and the commercial port. On July 27th following upon not days and nights but week after week of constant bombardment (during which time the whole city of Rhodes seemed like a ship sailing over a sea of smoke and fire) the great attack was launched. In the first wave came the Bashi-Bazouks, irregulars, many of them of Christian birth. Violent, predatory, the scum of the eastern earth, they fought under the Turkish banner only for plunder. Brave though many of them undoubtedly were, they were an undisciplined crew, and their Turkish masters made sure that their enthusiasm did not wane too rapidly in the teeth of resistance.