The 1522 Siege of Rhodes

Causes, Course and Consequences

Simon Phillips, Simon David Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000593549
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In 1522, the Ottomans attacked the island of Rhodes and, after a six-month siege, the Hospitallers surrendered on terms. The Knights Hospitaller had ruled Rhodes since 1309, and the Ottomans had attempted to capture the island 40 years before in 1480, but were defeated by the Knights. The Ottoman victory in 1522 resulted in the Knights being expelled from the island and eventually settling in Malta, Gozo, and Tripoli and the Ottomans obtaining domination over the Eastern Mediterranean and its trade.

This collection of essays, published on the 500th anniversary of the siege, explores such question as why Suleiman the Magnificent attacked Rhodes, what made the 1522 siege successful, and how the Rhodian population, the Knights Hospitaller, the Eastern and Western Mediterranean, and Europe in general were affected by the loss of Rhodes. The answers to these questions are explored in new research by expert historians and archaeologists in their field.

This book will appeal to all those interested in the Knights Hospitaller, Ottoman History, Crusader Studies, and Early Modern European History.

Part I Causes

1 Hospitallers and Ottomans Between the Two Great Sieges of Rhodes (1480–1522/1523) ¹

Alexios Savvides and Photeine Perra

DOI: 10.4324/9781003154563-3

In the later phase of the Hospitaller Order’s history, both Ottoman sieges of Rhodes in 1480 and 1522, recently retold in Robert Douglas Smith’s and Kelly DeVries’s monograph as well as in Nicolas Vatin’s contribution in a collective volume on late medieval Crusading, are inextricably associated with the two greatest Ottoman sultans in history: Mehmed II ‘Fatih’ (the Conqueror: 1444–1446 and 1451–1481) and Suleiman ‘Kanuni’ (the Lawgiver: 1520–1566), known to the West as the Magnificent.² The political and diplomatic relations of the Knights Hospitaller with the Muslim Aegean and Mediterranean powers in the later Middle Ages cover a period of two centuries that can be divided into three main phases: the first part of the fourteenth century with the Turcoman Emirates of the western Anatolian littoral (mainly those of Menteshe and Aydin); the first part of the fifteenth century with the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria; and the period from the late 1430s with the Ottoman Sultanate, which was eventually to capture Rhodes and the rest of the Hospitallers’ Dodecanese possessions in 1522.³

The Knights’ presence in most of the Dodecanese, as well as on an adjacent section of the Anatolian coast from the early fourteenth century onwards, was of great concern to the Muslims, especially after the expulsion of the crusaders from the Holy Land in 1291. Both the Hospitallers’ domains, as well as Lusignan Cyprus, were viewed as crusader territories adjacent to the recaptured Palestinian and Syrian lands. Indeed, ‘The state of the Knights of Saint John presented itself as the bastion of Roman Catholicism in the Aegean’ according to the late Turcolo-gist Elizabeth A. Zachariadou.⁴ In Muslim historiographical and other sources of the period, the Hospitallers appear as ‘Isbitariyya’, a term deriving from the Arabic version of the Latin word ‘hospitalis’, which basically signified lodgings for wayfarers and pilgrims and thus partly also the hospital in the strict sense. The strategic importance of Rhodes as a port on the trade route, which had ‘increased during the period of the Crusades when it was one of the chief points of call for ships going between Italy and Syria’ (Rosser), was fully realised by the expanding Ottoman Sultanate. From their advent there and well into the 1400s, the Knights utilised the turcoples (i.e., Christianised Turcophone mercenaries) in patrolling Rhodes’ coast against external threats.⁵

The Hospitallers were on the whole realists and did not hesitate to sign mutually beneficial treaties with the surrounding Muslim powers from the early years of their establishment on Rhodes and the Dodecanese in 1309. As Zacharias Tsirpanlis commented, ‘the temporary common interests between the two inveterate enemies often led to the drawing up of pacts of amicable relations’.⁶ Tsirpanlis’ planned sequel volumes to his initial volume in 1995, covering the years 1454–1481 and 1481–1522, remain a desideratum, as they would definitively shed much light on the latter part of Hospitaller rule, particularly so on Hospitaller–Ottoman contacts.⁷ Indeed, the various studies of Anthony Luttrell up until the second half of the fifteenth century await their counterpart synthetic work for the last decades from the 1460s onwards.⁸ Such a work would complement the orientalist Ettore Rossi’s (1894–1955) solid and valuable survey for A.D. 1421–1523 and the detailed monograph by Jürgen Sarnowsky on the various intricacies of Hospitaller rule and administration.⁹ Tsirpanlis’s other pertinent publications since the 1970s have done much to promote bibliography on the presence of the Hospitallers on Rhodes and in the Dodecanese, together with those by Anthony Luttrell, and scholarship will always be in their debt.¹⁰

I. The Preparatory Period (1438/1439–1479)

The earliest systematic effort towards diplomatic contacts between the Hospitallers and the Ottomans is dated to 1438/1439, i.e., shortly before the first Mamluk attack on Rhodes (1440). The embassy sent by the Knights to the Ottoman sultan Murad II (1421–1444 and 1446–1451) in Adrianople/Edirne (the Ottoman capital since 1368/1369) was not successful at first, though a few years later, in 1445, diplomatic contacts were established. They were renewed in 1450 and further formulated (albeit temporarily) in 1451 by Mehmed II, Murad II’s son, successor, and eventual conqueror of Constantinople in 1453. The surviving Greek text of the treaty of 25 December 1451 (also translated into old Italian) stresses the trade concessions to both Hospitaller and Ottoman merchants in their respective territories and has been meticulously analysed by Tsirpanlis.¹¹ The chief Hospitaller possession on the Anatolian coast was the stronghold of St. Peter’s Castle, near ancient Carian Halicarnassus, opposite Kos. It was constructed by Grand Master Philibert de Naillac (1396–1421) between 1407 and 1409 (c. 1407 according to A. Luttrell), following the departure of the Hospitallers from Smyrna after the latter’s conquest by the Mongol khan Timur Lenk (Tamerlane), after a two-week siege in December 1402.¹² The building of its fortress had secured the connivance of the Ottoman prince (and later sultan), Mehmed I Chelebi (1413–1421), who was entangled at the time in a pernicious Ottoman fratricidal strife with his brothers and was searching for allies.¹³

The real Ottoman threat to the Latin Aegean was to manifest itself after 1453; thus, among other Westerners, Grand Master Jean Bonpart de Lastic (1437–1454) sent letters to various Latin rulers urging them to avenge the Christian bloodshed during the fall of the Queen of Cities. For half a century and until the aftermath of the Second Ottoman–Venetian war, the alarming progress (for the West) of the Ottomans created successive efforts in the West to urgently rekindle the crusading cause against their Muslim opponents, as shown by Norman Housley. In fact, it was a series of Ottoman raids in the Dodecanese between 1454 and 1461¹⁴ which spurred Pope Callixtus III (1455–1458) to mount a new crusade. A papal fleet assisted by Hospitaller vessels mobilised by Grand Master Jacques de Milly (1454–1461) counter-attacked in northern and eastern Aegean areas between 1456 and 1458, during a bout of pestilence in the Kos-Rhodes-Crete region.¹⁵

Meanwhile, the Ottomans, in response to the Hospitaller raids on their shipping and on Anatolian coasts, intensified their own operations against Dodecanesian targets and shores. However, they stopped short of launching a direct attack on well-fortified Rhodes town itself. Instead, they stormed the Rhodian stronghold of Archangelos, on the island’s north-eastern section, succeeding in partly destroying the settlement, as shown by the late Alexandra Stephanidou (1968–2006).¹⁶ They also campaigned against Kos, which was pillaged by the fleet of Hamza Bey in June 1457,¹⁷ as well as against Symi in 1460. The Knights tried, without success, to renew their 1451 pact with Mehmed II, in 1455 and 1461/1462, a year before the outbreak of the First Ottoman–Venetian war of 1463–1479.¹⁸ Grand Master Giovanni Batista degli Orsini (1467–1476) assisted Venetian Negroponte/Euboea in 1470 by sending two galleys, yet the Ottomans seized it, while Ottoman corsair activities in the Aegean continued even during the first Ottoman siege of Rhodes (1480) and beyond that, forcing the Knights to renew their fortifications.¹⁹

Until 1489, the year of the Venetian takeover of Latin Cyprus from the Lusignans, the Serenissima had been, despite occasional fallouts, a relatively reliable ally of the Hospitallers, a situation, however, which would become problematic after 1489, as was recently observed by Simon Phillips.²⁰ There was an attested collaboration between the Order and the Republic of Saint Mark during the Second Ottoman–Venetian war of 1499–1502/1503, although it has been observed that a few decades before, there was a lurking unwillingness between the Order and the Serenissima to join forces against their common Ottoman enemy.²¹ On the other hand, the Knights under the aforementioned Grand Master Orsini as well as the Lusignans of Cyprus under James II (1464–1473) had been approached in 1472 (in 1471–1473 according to Halil İnalcık) by the Venetians in order to join forces in a coalition against Mehmed II with the emir of the ‘White Sheep’ Turcomans (‘Akkoyunlu’), Uzun Hasan (1457–1478), the Ottomans’ most threatening eastern adversary since Tamerlane. Even an operation at recapturing Trebizond (which the Grand Comneni had surrendered to Mehmed II in 1461) was attempted. However, Venice’s orchestration of such a Western anti-Ottoman alliance was not eventually to materialise.²²

Of particular concern for the Ottomans was the threat of the ‘corsair knights’, whose Rhodian harbour operated as a sort of an espionage base as well as a centre for other Christian piratical forces. This situation, observes Svat Soucek, was further aggravated on account of the fact that the Ottomans were unable for a long period to deal with the problem decisively. However, it seems that the Hospitallers contributed involuntarily, and this is historical irony, to the creation of an Ottoman naval supremacy in Northern Africa, as well as to the creation of the greatest epic in Muslim Mediterranean history: the seizure of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Causes
• Part II Course
• Part III Consequences
• Index