The fertile island looked as if clouds of locusts had passed over it, while ruined farms and houses, slaughtered animals and scorched grapevines, showed that the Turk in his passing was as great a destroyer as the Tartar or the Mongol. It would take years before the evidence of the siege of 1480 was effaced from the landscape, and many months before the ruined walls and towers could be restored. Had Mehmet himself returned with a fresh army the following year there can be no doubt what the result would have been. Rhodes at that moment could not have endured another siege. In the spring of 1481 the great conqueror himself led out his army to achieve what Misac Pasha had failed to do the expulsion of the Knights and the destruction of ‘their damnable Religion’. On his way south through Asia Minor he fell ill of dysentery, or a fever, and died. The Order was spared by the will of God.

 

 

 

Chapter 14

PEACE AND POWER

 

The main result of the siege of 1480 was to restore the Knights to a prominence in Europe which had largely escaped them ever since the loss of Outremer. Their raiding parties into Asia Minor, their successful galley actions against Egyptians and Turks, all these had seemed very peripheral activities to the powers of Europe, concerned with their own internal affairs and their external rivalries. But ever since the fall of Constantinople and the steady encroachment of the Turks upon European territory the eyes of Popes, rulers and princes had been increasingly turned towards the eastern frontiers of the continent. Out there, far away in the Aegean, so close to Asia Minor as almost to be part of Turkey itself, the island of Rhodes was Europe’s last hope in the East. The news that Mehmet II, the unconquerable Sultan, had sustained a major reverse at Rhodes, and that his army and fleet had been decimated and forced to turn tail, brought a new surge of hope. Perhaps Turkish fortunes were not irreversible? Perhaps this strange crusading Order, which for a long time had seemed an anachronism, was the potential instrument that might breach the main gate of the Turkish empire? Rhodes and the Knights who defended it were now seen as standing in the front rank holding back the hostile tide—unconquerable swords laying waste the infidel.

The outcome of 1480 was that gifts of money and munitions poured into the island from all over Europe. As one of the last secure ports of trade with the East, Rhodes attracted merchants and tradesmen, artisans and ship captains, as well as plain freebooters eager to operate under licence against the rich shipping routes of the Moslem world. D’Aubusson was not slow to catch on to the advantages to be gained for his island-state by this new and favourable light in which it was now held. He needed in any case as much money as he could get to repair the ravages of the Turkish occupation and siege. The towers and walls must rise again, but twice as powerful as before, and constructed to the designs of the best military architects of the period. Among those who were sent on diplomatic missions was the Rhodian Vice-Chancellor, Caoursin, the author of the eyewitness account of the siege. As ambassador to the papal court he would make sure that the Pope and his cardinals, and everyone of importance who came within the papal circle, heard from his own lips of the gallantry of the Knights, of the terrible reverses of the Turks—and of the necessity to aid Rhodes in every possible way.

For forty years the Order of St John enjoyed an unprecedented period of prosperity, their reputation higher than ever before. Quite apart from the successful outcome of the siege there were other reasons for this. One was that there was a new feeling of optimism in the air since the opening up of the Atlantic trade routes to the New World gave western Europe the access to immense wealth which could not be denied them by the Turk. True, the old trade routes to the Far East were barred by the Ottoman Empire lying like a scimitar across all Asia Minor and the Near East, but the Knights had now inspired the hope that these two could in time be restored and Turkish power broken. (Perhaps, indeed, it could have been if the European powers had been prepared to support the Knights with men, as well as money and materials.) The other heady influence during this period emanated from Italy and spread like wildfire throughout Europe—the Renaissance. The fuse for this had been fit as long ago as 1204 when the Latin conquest of Constantinople had unleashed innumerable works of art, as well as artists and craftsmen, into the victorious city of Venice. Among the loot from Constantinople were the bronze horses that now adorn St Mark’s in Venice, the Byzantine enamels that decorate the famous Pala d’Oro in which rests the body of St Mark, and the finest Byzantine ivory casket in the world, the Veroli casket. Ever since then the influence of the ancient world had been gradually permeating Europe, and by the fifteenth century there came the flowering summer of speculation in science and philosophy, of technical and artistic achievement, and in the whole concept of man as the measure of the universe. In Rhodes these things will have had comparatively little impact, for the Knights were bound to a system of ideas and a way of life that was at complete variance with the new thought. Nevertheless even here the influence of the Renaissance was to be felt, particularly in the scientific study of military architecture; in the great advances that had been made in cannon-foundry and weapon design; and in the elaboration of the galley into a work of art as well as a more efficient weapon of war.

But what above all gave the Order of St John during these years the opportunity to turn their small state into an almost model kingdom of efficiency and prosperity was the dispute over the Ottoman succession that followed upon the death of Mehmet II. The Sultan had had three sons, the eldest of whom had been strangled on his father’s orders for seducing a wife of his chief Vizir. (Fornication, adultery and sodomy were common enough in Turkey, but even a son must be sacrificed if it meant retaining the good will and loyal service of a senior administrative official.) The two sons who disputed the imperial throne were Bajazet, the second son, and Djem, the youngest. At first glance it might seem that Djem had no claim to the throne, but his and his supporters’ contention was that he had been born when his father was already Sultan, whereas Bajazet had been born before he had ascended the throne. This conception of being ‘born in the purple’ was a Byzantine inheritance, and might casuistically just be held to refer to the throne of Constantinople.