As often pointed out in this space, we are in the midst of a very old war. Seneca III takes us back almost five hundred years, to the Siege of Rhodes in 1522, one of a long series of hard-won victories against European Christendom by the Ottoman Turks.

This is the first of three parts.

The Cross and the Crescent: Rhodes, 1522
by Seneca III

Part I: Stronghold of the Hounds of Hell

“Allah’s Deputy on Earth, Lord of the Lords of this World, Possessor of Men’s Necks, King of Believers and Unbelievers, King of Kings, Emperor of East and West, Emperor of the Chakrans of Great Authority, Prince and Lord of the Most Happy Constellation, Majestic Caesar, Seal of Victory, Refuge of all the People in the Whole World, The Shadow of the Almighty Dispensing Quiet in the Earth” had been Sultan and head of the House of Osman for less than two years, yet this only son of Selim the Terrible, Suleiman bin Selim Khan, he whom history would record as ‘The Magnificent’, had already demonstrated the ruthless efficiency that would make him the paramount conqueror of his time.

Following the swift suppression of a rebellion by the Governor of Damascus immediately after his father’s death he had plunged his armies deep into squabbling Christian Europe, taking Belgrade in 1521 only seven months after acceding to the throne. At twenty-seven years of age his star was rising fast; he was feared in Europe, revered in Constantinople and obeyed with alacrity throughout his dominions. And yet to Suleiman, poet, historian and scholar as well as soldier, the brightness of his success was dimmed by the so far unfettered depredations of one small group of men whom he rightly saw as tarnishing the glory of all of his other achievements.

To find these Infidel offenders Suleiman had only to look south from his palace above the Golden Horn. In the Aegean, deep within the underbelly of the Ottoman Empire, only fifteen miles from mainland Turkey, sitting astride the sea lanes of Islam and holding them in an iron grip, lay Rhodes, southerly anchor of a beautiful, broken necklace of bright green islands called the Dodecanese. It was the last bastion of the Crusaders, a state within its own right, home of the fearsome, aristocratic fighting monks of the ‘Sovereign Military and Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem’.^[1]

In the two centuries since their expulsion from Outremer^[2] the Brothers of the Holy Religion had used their time well. Reacting to the constraints of their new island home they had broadened their vocation to include naval warfare as well as their skills as armoured cavalry and fortress engineers. They built, manned and deployed their swift galleys so effectively that they soon became the finest fighting units afloat. Crewed by expert Rhodian seamen, and with their fighting platforms thick with the heavily armoured Knights and Sergeants of the Order, each vessel was more than a match for several times its number. These Monks of War, austere, pious, brutally professional and effective out of all proportion to their small numbers, had turned the eastern Mediterranean into their private fief, where they took or sank Suleiman’s ships at will. This wholesale predation upon the maritime commerce of his Empire was an insult that Suleiman was about to avenge in the eminently practical manner of the day… by fire and sword.

So it came to pass that on the 26th July, 1522, the fifty eight year old Grand Master of the Order, Fra.^[3] Phillipe Villiers De L’Isle Adam, came onto the balcony of his palace to watch Suleiman’s advance force of thirty galleys sail past Rhodes. At their posts around the perimeter of the massive fortifications, sweating within their armour and heavy, quilted undergarments beneath the sun of high summer, the 500 Knights and Sergeants at Arms and the 1500 trained Mercenary and Rhodian troops who constituted his small force watched with him. And within this girdle of steel men and stone ramparts — a badly drained roughly oval area no more than 500 by 650 metres in size — were crammed the people of Rhodes, their children, their valued possessions and their animals, from which assemblage was already rising a pungent effluvium. Without, the fertile fields and orchards of the island lay stripped bare, blackened by fire and fed now by wells and springs poisoned with the rotting carcasses of slaughtered livestock.

At dawn the next day all eyes turned northwards. With the coming of first light, to the dull reverberation of stroke drums, the crack of overseers’ whips and the creak of oars, over 600 war galleys and transports commanded by the corsair Cortoglu brought Suleiman and his army of 200,000 men to their time of battle. Even taking into account the fact that chroniclers of that time tended towards numerical superlatives when reporting such strengths, it was without doubt a vast fleet and an enormous army, because no one, least of all the brilliant Suleiman, underestimated the difficulties involved in breaching the walls of the most fortified city in the known world, and then engaging in close-quarter combat with those fanatical armoured warriors wielding two handed broadswords that could cleave a man from skull to waist in a single blow.

But that demanding moment was yet to come. Throughout the next few days Suleiman’s colourful horde disembarked at Kalithea Bay. Together with the regiments of Janissaries^[4], Sipahis^[5], Bashibazookis^[6] and gyrating, drug crazed Iayalars^[7]came the artillery — mortars, culverin and huge basilisks^[8] — cannon of every shape and size with which to bombard the ramparts of Rhodes, ramparts that over recent months had been even further strengthened in preparation for the battering this array of firepower would soon deliver. More ominously for the defenders there came thousands of trained miners, but their intentions had long been anticipated by the experienced De L’Isle Adam, and for them also he was well prepared.

For attacker and defender alike it was a display of bravura and splendour; the shining armour, the raucous cacophony of drum, tambour and horn, the flutter of proud banners, the still, stone faced demeanour of the Knights counterpointing the ostentatious, stylised display of bejewelled wealth paraded by the Pashas and the ritual trading of insults between the common soldiery, unchanged in its exquisite anatomical detail since time immemorial. It was all there, the full charade of panoplies, as ephemeral as the coming battle would be enduring. For all knew that come the morrow, and down all the days that followed, there would be naught but the acrid fumes of burnt powder, the stink of putrefaction from rotting corpses entombed in steaming rubble rendering the air so thick it could be tasted, the agonised shrieks of the mutilated punctuating the thunder of cannon, the sinister crack of the extremely accurate long-barrelled matchlock muskets of Fez, the ring of steel on steel, the hunger and thirst, the whole ghastly Hell’s kitchen of medieval siege warfare — and tomorrow would come soon enough.

To be continued…

Notes:

Caveat: A long and detailed draft for this article, hand written whilst serving in Malta over 40 years ago, has recently surfaced amongst the piles of debris that constitute the contents of a couple of old filing cabinets recovered from the back of my loft during a recent house move. I did not therein cite any sources, or find any associated paperwork so doing (as was and is my practice) and the only sources I can remember offhand are The Monks of War, by Desmond Seward and The Great Siege, by Ernle Bradford, (a tattered copy of the latter has just turned up in the piles). There were others, of course, many others, now long lost in various transits or still on the shelves of Maltese (and later Rhodian) libraries and in the dusty corners of their archives, and I do apologise for any extended quotations, above and following, that, I suspect, being uncited, could border on overt plagiarism.

— Seneca III

For links to previous essays by Seneca III, see the Seneca III Archives.