Behind them they sent a line of Turks armed with whips and maces—working on the principle that if they feared their officers more than the enemy then all would be well. The Bashi-Bazouks were expendable. Their bodies would fill the ditch and provide the stepping stone for those who came after them. And these were the Janissaries.

Yeni-Cheri, ‘New Soldiers’, was the Turkish word for them and it was accurate enough since they were a completely novel concept. They were all Christians by birth, who had been selected on account of their physique during a five yearly inspection throughout the Turkish empire for healthy young males aged seven. Destined for the army, they were taken away from their parents, trained as strict Moslems, and instructed in the arts of war. As W. H. Prescott wrote of them: ‘Those giving the greatest promise of strength and endurance were sent to places prepared for them in Asia Minor. Here they were subjected to a severe training, to abstinence, to privations of every kind, and to the strictest discipline… Their whole life may be said to have been passed in war or in the preparation for it. Forbidden to marry, they had no families to engage their affections, which, as with the monks and the friars of Christian countries, were concentrated in their own order.’ They were the Moslem equivalent of the Knights of St John. It was often said by both sides over the centuries that if the Knights were only Moslems, or the Janissaries were only Christians, either would be happy to fight alongside the other. Their mutual respect was founded on an equal bravery, an equal fanaticism, and an equal belief in the righteousness of their respective causes.

Misac Pasha, the commander-in-chief, had ordered a devastating fire to be opened upon the whole area around the tower of Italy just before the main advance was made. This was not so much to destroy the walls any further—they were already in ruins—but to drive the defenders off the walkaways and send them under cover. The minute the fire ceased, the Bashi-Bazouks rolled forward like a wave and thundered over the storm-beaten rocks of the city walls. Behind them came the Janissaries. It was not long before the Grand Master saw that terrible omen of defeat, the standard of Islam, flying above the shattered tower of Italy. It burned there in the blue summer air as it had done above so many other cities from Constantinople to Baghdad.

Although lame from an earlier arrow wound in the thigh, d’Aubusson was the first to lead the defenders into the breach. Followed by about a dozen Knights and three standard bearers he mounted one of the ladders leading to the top of the wall. It was now that the armoured man came into his own. Standing on the narrow walkaway, almost invulnerable in his armour to anything but an arquebusier’s lead bullet, the plate-armour of the fifteenth century gave a single man an advantage over dozens of opponents. Even so it was inevitable at close quarters that some thrusts should pierce through ‘the chinks in the armour’. D’Aubusson received three or four wounds before finally a Janissary ‘of gigantic structure’ hurled a spear clean through his breastplate and punctured his lung. This moment, when he was being dragged back out of the affray, might well have seemed to signal the end of Rhodes. The enemy were in the breach, the tower of Italy was in their hands, and the attackers swarmed onwards thicker and thicker, like bees driven by some strange urge in their nature to found a new colony in this remote and stony outpost. It was the very density of the onrushing enemy that proved their downfall. Once the first men were closely engaged ‘breast to breast’, those behind ‘cried forward, and those in front cried back’.

One is inevitably reminded of Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’, for the style of warfare had changed little over the centuries. Warfare was still entirely personal, and in such close engagements individual morale counted for more than anything else. The Bashi-Bazouks, driven forward by the fear of their officers behind them, and yet again by fear of the Janissaries behind them, did not relish the punishment that even a small group of dedicated armoured men could inflict upon them. For them, as indeed in a different way for the Christians, it was an age of superstition.