This hilly island, forty-five miles long, twenty-two miles wide and divided by mountains, was famed for an idyllic climate and fertile crops, though there was no town other than Rhodes itself, which the brethren had made the safest trading base in the Levant, its landlocked harbour fortified by chains, booms and moles. Egypt and the Anatolian emirates would have to suffer endless raids; not without reason did they name the Hospitaller lair 'stronghold of the hounds of Hell'. Crusading states are usually limited to six, but Rhodes has some claim to be the seventh.
Sweeping reforms dealt with new maritime duties; from 1299 the admiral ranked as a conventual bailiff while the Turcopolier, now responsible for coastal defences, was similarly promoted. Their survival was no less spectacular than their rivals' fall. Then the threat of Philip IV acted as a catalyst for a structural revolution; even in the thirteenth century there had been an embryonic division into langues, those speaking the same tongue. The Order was now divided into seven of these langues, each comprising several priories under a Grand Priory and with its own auberge (hall of residence): at Rhodes, Provence, Auvergne, France, Italy, Spain, England (with Ireland) and Germany (including Scandinavia and Bohemia–Poland). Because of the large number of Gallic brethren, France was given three langues, while in the fifteenth century Spain would be divided into Aragon (with Catalonia and Navarre) and Castile (with Crato, i.e. Portugal). Though he ranked lower than his nation's Grand Prior, at Rhodes a brother commanding a langue was one of the conventual bailiffs, and styled a pilier: Provence was under the Grand Commander, the Master's lieutenant administering the brotherhood's properties; Auvergne had the Marshal, senior military officer; France the Hospitaller; Italy the Admiral; Spain the Drapier; England the Turcopolier; Germany the Grand Bailiff.
The Chapter General included all brethren from the Master to the humblest serving brother, but as its meetings were stormy and often riotous, it met less and less. Day-to-day government was administered by the Venerable Council, a quorum of senior officers, though the most important constitutional body was the Sacred Council, an assembly of bailiffs – conventual, Syrian (nominal except for Armenia) and European. Italy possessed seven priors, the Iberian peninsula five (the castellan of Amposta ranking as prior of Aragon). England had four members: the Turcopolier, the priors of England and Ireland, and the commander – styled bailiff – of Egle. All langues shared the Syrian posts and the seven Cypriot commanderies. To become a bailiff it was necessary to spend fifteen years at Rhodes. As great officers they were distinguished by a larger cross and called 'bailiffs grand cross', receiving especially rich commanderies – the English prior, for example, occupied four besides Clerkenwell.
The fourteenth century was to prove a difficult one for the Order of St John, for the concept of the crusade was dying, while Italian merchants were strangling the Latin East with their capitalist tentacles, averse to alienating Moslem business interests. Despite the Templar properties there was a steady decline in revenues, and the Order was hard hit by the Black Death. It had already suffered great financial losses when the Florentine banks had failed in the 1340s. There were also severe internal dissensions, even at Rhodes. Fra' Foulques, able but overbearing, became increasingly dictatorial and then went to pieces, womanizing and drinking. In 1317 angry brethren, led by an elderly, embittered commander, Fra' Maurice de Pagnac, tried to murder him, but he escaped to the castle on the acropolis of Lindos.2 In 1319 John XXII confirmed Fra' Foulques's deposition and he retired to a commandery in Languedoc.3 Pagnac had died, and so the brothers elected Fra' Elyon de Villeneuve as their superior.
Yet life on Rhodes remained monastic. Brethren ate and slept in their langue, saying Office in its chapel. Altogether the auberges constituted one convent, and all brothers attended chapters in the magistral palace, keeping important feasts in the Order's church where novices made their solemn profession to the Master. Several hundred knights lived on Rhodes – two hundred in 1330, twenty-eight of them English – so a single house was impracticable. Rhodian coins show the Master kneeling before a crucifix, proclaiming both his religious status and his role as 'Guardian of the Poor'. All brethren worked in the great hospital, with its 1,000 beds where the sick slept between linen sheets and ate off silver plates, drinking wine from silver cups. Patients included casualties in battle, merchants, pilgrims and the island's poor. Every evening at sunset in the 'Palais des Malades', chaplain brethren recited the great prayer for 'Our Lords the sick': 'Seigneurs Malades, pries pour pais que Dieu la mande de ciel en terre. Seigneurs Malades, pries pour le fruit de la terre que Dieu le multiplie en telle manière que saincte église en soit servie et le peuple soutenu. Seigneurs Malades, pries pour l'apostell de Rome et pour les cardennaus et pour les patriarchs et pour les arcevesques et pour les evesques et les prelate . . .' They prayed too for all Christian kings, pilgrims, captives and benefactors.4
10. A fight at sea in the fifteenth century between Knights of Rhodes and Turks
However, the Hospitallers' chief business was at sea, protecting Christian merchantmen or waylaying Moslem traders. They themselves ran a fleet of cargo vessels and pilgrim transports. Their battle flotilla seldom contained more than a dozen galleys, yet these were the hardest-hitting warships of their day, small but extremely fast, usually carrying twenty-five men-at-arms with rather more crossbowmen. Their torpedo was the iron ram which stove in timbers, and mangonels were the artillery – a heavy boulder could crash through a ship's bottom while fireballs, naphtha or incendiary arrows set her alight. Such techniques crippled rather than sank and the enemy ships were immobilized – holed below the water-line, their oars smashed, transfixed by a metal beak or tethered with grappling hooks – so that the knights could board, their arbalestiers shooting down on the crew. Rhodes was often lashed by sudden storms and the brethren made themselves excellent sailors, the best fighting seamen of their age; in Edward Gibbon's majestic prose: '. . . under the discipline of the Order that island emerged into fame and opulence; the noble and warlike monks were renowned by land and sea; and the bulwark of Christendom provoked and repelled the arms of the Turks and Saracens'.
Mameluke Egypt remained strong and threatening, while Asia Minor was now a mass of small Turkish emirates ruled by ghazis (warriors for the faith). The largest groupings were the Karamans, ruled by the Grand Karaman at Konya, and the Germaniyans, but a succession of superb leaders had transformed the small Osmanli clan into the dominating tribe, under whose horsetail standard all ambitious ghazis hastened to enrol. In 1326 Orhan – 'Sultan, son of the Sultan of the Ghazis, Ghazi son of the Ghazi, Marzuban of the Horizons, Hero of the World' – captured Brusa, and, in 1329, Nicaea. It was only a matter of time before Osmanli spahis conquered the Balkans.
Of Christian neighbours Greece – 'Romania' – was a mosaic of small, violently inimical states. The Palaeologan revival waned until the Byzantine Empire entered its final decline with the civil wars of the mid-fourteenth century. Every hilltop and island was ruled by an independent lord – Greek, French, Spanish or Italian – while Genoese and Venetians possessed a multitude of trading posts. The Hospitallers had several commanderies, the Teutonic Knights a few isolated ones. Cyprus was Rhodes's chief neighbour. Hugh IV (1324–58) and his descendants were each crowned King of Cyprus at Nicosia, King of Jerusalem at Famagusta nearest the mainland, and their sons styled Prince of Antioch or Tyre. Despite nostalgia for la douce Syrie – Frankish ladies always wore black in mourning for the lost kingdom – Cypriot nobles with names evocative of Outremer – Ibelins, Gibelets, Scandelions – led a sybaritic existence in delightful villas amid rose gardens and vineyards. To Hospitallers the Cypriot monarch was the most important sovereign in Christendom but, as Jacques de Molay had written to Pope Clement, his army was too small. Then there was Armenia, hard pressed by Mamelukes. When the last Hethoumid died in 1342, the Cilicians chose Hugh IV's nephew, Guy de Lusignan, as their king. But these ferocious mountaineers were unreliable; not only did they quarrel – Guy was murdered in 1344 –
but they reacted violently at tactless attempts to Romanize the Gregorian Church with its hooded prelates, crowned vartapets (archpriests) and dramatic liturgy. Even when their country was reduced to its capital, Sis, with a string of coastal fortresses and a few mountain strongholds inland, the proud, warlike barons held out among their wild glens and clifftops. Yet for all their courage 'Erminie' was doomed.
The sea-knights won victory after victory. Those of their victims who escaped limped home with horrific tales of these fiendish dogs from Gehenna. In 1319 the Grand Commander Albrecht von Schwarzburg was escorting the Genoese governor of Chios to his island when he was attacked by a Turkish fleet, which he routed. Only six enemy vessels escaped, by night, while most of the Faithful were drowned. The ghazis wanted revenge, and in June 1320 Rhodes was blockaded by eighty warships. But the pugnacious Albrecht sailed out to meet them with the Order's battle-squadron of four galleys and twelve other vessels. Most of the enemy's ships were boarded or sent to the bottom, while their entire assault force, which had landed on a nearby island, was captured.5 In 1334 a fleet of Hospitaller, papal, Cypriot, French and Venetian crusaders ambushed Yakshi, emir of Marmora, off the island of Episkopia on the Negropont coast, and, during a running battle which lasted nine days, outsailed and outfought the Turks, who lost over 100 vessels.6
In 1344 Clement VI, learning that Umur of Aydin was building an armada of landing craft, formed the Latin League, comprising Cyprus, Venice and Rhodes. Their combined fleet of twenty-four galleys, commanded by the Prior of Lombardy, Fra' Gian de Biandra, stormed Umur's stronghold of Smyrna in October, burning his entire navy of 300 ships at anchor. All Christendom rejoiced, and a crusading army of 15,000, mainly French, arrived in 1346. Another victory was won, off Imbros, in 1347 by the Catalan prior, Pere-Arnal de Peres Tortes, in which the Turks lost 100 galleys, while the following year Umur himself was killed during a gallant attempt to retake his beloved Izmir. Now the brethren held it for the pope.7 This crusading resurgence, however, was checked by bubonic plague. In Cyprus only the fortress of St Hilarion – where the royal family took refuge – was immune, and the mortality was so terrible that for years afterwards visitors were deterred by the island's reputation for disease and poisoned air.
After the Templar dissolution the Hospitallers were weakened by brethren hurrying back to Europe in hope of some rich commandery. The General Chapter of 1330 ordained that before promotion all brothers must serve five years 'in the convent', including three caravans, each constituting a year's active service. In 1342 the pope had complained to Fra' Elyon about his Order's laxity, threatening to create a new brotherhood with its surplus revenues. By the end of the fourteenth century few European commanderies contained more than one brother, the commander himself. In England conventual life ceased, save at Clerkenwell, postulants entering the novitiate at Rhodes. The St Lazarus and St Thomas brotherhoods were moribund. After the Black Death there was a remarkable decline in leprosy. Formerly houses like Burton Lazars with separate cells for each leper, and medicinal baths, took in only those suffering skin disease; now ordinary sick were admitted, though the 'Governor, Warden and Master of Burton Lazars' conducted visitations until well into the fifteenth century, sometimes acting as Lieutenant in Scotland for the Master at Boigny.8 The last-known Knight of St Thomas, Fra' Richard de Tickhill, was professed and given the habit by the preceptor of Cyprus, Fra' Hugh de Curteys, in 1357 at the Church of St Nicholas of the English in Nicosia.9
Rhodes possessed two ports, the outer or 'Harbour of the Galleys' formed by a long, curving neck of land, the inner a landlocked bay whose narrow entrance was guarded by moles on which stood the towers of St Jean and St Michel. The city was built in a semi-circle round this inner port, protected by a double wall with thirteen towers and five projecting bastions – one of which was allotted to the English brethren – and also by a rampart along the harbour front. Though the great cathedral of St Jean, begun in 1310, had been built in a hybrid, Catalan–Italian style, other churches such as St Catherine's were flamboyant with ogee arches and wild tracery, while the rich merchants' houses next to the collachium were both imposing and luxurious and, like the brothers', swamped in a sea of flowers – roses, oleanders, bougainvillaea, Turkish tulips, mimosa and jasmine. Inland, as far as the eye could see, was a rich green vista of gardens, orchards, vineyards, farms, with an abundance of fig, nectarine and peach trees. Everything in the city, even its ramparts, was built of honey-coloured stone. The markets sold every luxury known – silks, spices, scent, sandalwood, damascene metalwork, precious stones, jet, furs, amber and slaves – for this embattled port commanded the Levant trade-routes. In its narrow, cobbled streets, through the Gothic gateways, swarmed not only Greeks and westerners but Christian Copts from Egypt, Armenian refugees, Syrians of poulain or Jacobite origin and even Georgians, besides Jews from the ghetto. Yet Rhodes was their home and they were loyal to their lords, the sons of country gentlemen in Yorkshire, the Limousin or Westphalia, the Campagna, Castile, or any other land in Western Europe.
The collachium was the compound which cloistered the 'convent' proper, including the Magistral palace, the Order's church, the Sacred Infirmary and the auberges in the 'rue des Chevaliers'. By now every langue owned one, though in the previous century the Catalan prior, Pere-Arnal de Peres Tortes, recorded that when he arrived he 'had to beg his lodging in the streets', after which he erected a fine Aragonese auberge. Naturally some langues were better represented than others, particularly the French, while Poles and Scandinavians must have felt lonely in the German house. The total strength of knights in the convent was raised from 200 to 350 in 1466, to 400 in 1501 and finally in 1514 to 550,10 but the number of English brethren never rose to more than a dozen. Despite this disparity, the system worked well enough, apart from occasional squabbles over precedence. Many were stationed outside the convent. On the island itself there were fortresses inland protecting little country towns, and a castle on the bay of Trianda, a few miles west of Rhodes, as well as the acropolis of Lindos, a fortified table-mountain whose garrison included twelve brothers under a commander. The Order ruled the entire Dodecanese archipelago, Kos – or Lango – being the most important island, with a flourishing town often described as a miniature Rhodes. Symi and Leros were defended by strong towers, while a hundred miles to the east, just off the Anatolian mainland, was Kastelorizon or 'Châteauroulx'. All had harbours in which the brethren's galleys could shelter and revictual. No doubt knights posted to these isolated outposts pined for the convent, where not only did they eat off silver but their diet included nutmeg, cinnamon and pepper in quantities unknown in Europe save at the greatest tables, while sugar was a commonplace. Persimmons, dates and pomegranates were served in that age when oranges and lemons were an exotic luxury to the West, as well as those sweet wines beloved by the medieval palate. Brethren returning from the stench of bilge and galley slaves knew the pleasure of hot baths. For relaxation there was hawking and buck hunting, and no doubt sailing and fishing. Visitors were always welcome and occasionally there was the excitement of royal guests, Byzantine or Cypriot, besides Turkish and Egyptian embassies. Yet the collachium made Rhodes a real monastery, spiritual duties being enforced with a heavy hand; sometimes wilder spirits, who found it too severe, fled to the fleshpots of Cyprus.
Hugh IV of Cyprus abdicated in 1358 to make way for his son, Pierre I, a visionary who was determined to win back Jerusalem. His reign began with a series of spectacular victories. As Armenia had appealed to Rome for help, in 1361 Pierre garrisoned the hard-pressed Haiot port of Gorighos, after which, assisted by the crew of four Hospitaller galleys, he stormed the pirate city of Adalya.11 Soon the Turks learnt to dread this fierce king, who dragged captured ghazis 'at the horse's tail'; but Pierre left for Europe to plead for a crusade, travelling to Venice, Avignon, France, England, Germany, Bohemia and Poland. By 1364 it was time he returned; Cyprus had been laid waste by Turkish raiders, and hitherto friendly emirs were growing menacing. In June 1365 the
king sailed with his crusaders from Venice to Rhodes, where the Cypriot fleet joined him in August.
Together with the Hospitaller flotilla of sixteen galleys carrying 100 brothers and their mercenaries under the Order's admiral, Fra' Ferlino d'Airasca, this armada – 165 vessels in all – set out for Alexandria.12 It included flat-bottomed landing craft from which horsemen could ride out on to the beach. The destination was kept secret and the Mamelukes were taken by surprise. Pierre de Thomas, the papal legate, harangued his flock: 'Soldiers of Christ take comfort in the Lord and his Holy Cross and fight His War bravely – have no fear of the enemy and pray to God for victory. The gates of Paradise are open.'13 The Egyptians defended their walls vigorously with cannon, vats of boiling oil and molten lead, flame-throwers – wooden tubes discharging jets of naphtha – and even gas bombs, inflammable discs which emitted dense fumes of sulphur and ammonia to drive blinded attackers reeling back, vomiting and choking. At first the Christians were beaten off, their scaling ladders thrown down, then some sailors crawled through a drain to open a gate, and the besiegers swept into the great city. Many brethren fell during the assault and Fra' Robert Hales, Bailiff of Egle, performed prodigies of valour.
The Monks of War Page 21