Dressed in black mourning, the Grand Master of the Hospitallers appeared in front of the tent of the Ottoman Süleyman on Rhodes. A kiss on his hand was to seal the capitulation of the knights to the sultan around the turn of the year 1522/23. However, he is said not to have presented himself as a superior triumphant, but to have had a conversation with the loser about the vicissitudes of fate and regretted having to drive him from his homeland. This ended the Order’s rule over the island, 213 years after its conquest.
The Johanniter and Malteser, as their Catholic branch is called, are still present in everyday life. Its eight-pointed cross on a red background is emblazoned on ambulances, hospitals and nursing homes. The call button to “Johanniter Unfall-Hilfe” or “Malteser Hilfsdienst” enables numerous seniors to live in their own homes. Both institutions are thus continuing a tradition that was founded almost 1000 years ago in the Holy Land, where the “Order of the Hospital of St. John in Jerusalem” was dedicated to nursing. To protect them, the order of knights came into being, which went on a long journey after the fall of the crusader empires. A station became Rhodes from 1310.
Similar to the Teutonic Order, the Johanniter is also often described as a combination of “NATO and the Red Cross”. Both arose from hospital communities in Palestine, while the third order of chivalry of the time, the Templars, had devoted themselves to military duties from the start. But in contrast to the Teutonic Order, which wrote history as a hegemonic power in the Baltic States from 1230, and the Templars, whose spectacular dissolution in 1312 still provides material for conspiracy theories today, the odyssey of the Knights of St. John played more in the background.
After the fall of Acre in 1291, their grand master was able to escape to Cyprus. In Limassol, a new religious convent was established, whose inhabitants suffered from a lack of resources and a crisis of meaning. In order not to create a powerful “state within a state”, only 70 knights and ten sergeants (not noble “serving” knights) were granted exile on the island. Even tentative cruises to Asia Minor could not satisfy her search for a new field of activity.
Pope Clemens V knew a way out. He advised the knights to build a fleet. Because only with her would a reconquest of Jerusalem be possible. In addition, ships could improve the precarious supply situation of the knights on Cyprus, who were dependent on supplies from the many possessions of the order from Spain to Bohemia. The Pope provided start-up funding by supporting the French King Philip IV in crushing the Templars. After this was dissolved in 1312, its goods were transferred to the Hospitallers.
In search of a new home, the knights soon found a lucrative target. A Genoese trader, Vignolo de Vignoli, offered the Grand Master the Dodecanese islands of Rhodes, Kos and Leros, citing a dubious deal with the ailing Byzantine Emperor Andronicus II. In return, he was to be granted trading posts and income. Immediately, 35 knight brothers and a few hundred mercenaries set out to conquer.
Although the venture was billed as a crusade to liberate the island from the “yoke of incredulity of the schismatic Greeks,” taking possession proved difficult, with Venetians, Aragonese, and Turks also making claims. This showed how pioneering the investment in a fleet had been. After a few victories at sea, Rhodes and its neighboring islands were firmly in the hands of the Hospitallers in 1320. Once again, Christians had fallen victim to a “crusade.”
Since the call of Pope Urban II in 1095, Christian knights have been going to the Holy Land. For more than 200 years, their rulers in the Orient led a precarious existence. The last fortress falls in 1291.
What: N24
However, Rhodes was anything but a flourishing landscape. The wars and looting had left only about 10,000 mostly Greek residents alive. Since Genoese and other merchants from the West brought only small reinforcements to the island, the order tried to recruit military settlers and sailors, who were offered quite lucrative conditions. But even the promise of fertile soil and the geographical proximity to the Holy Land was only able to convince a few interested parties.
So mercenaries remained the military backbone of the Johanniter. Since the number of brothers who were trained in weapons and who submitted to the strict order regulations of poverty, chastity and obedience remained small, technology was supposed to take care of the defence. Italian engineers equipped the fortresses on Rhodes and Kos with the most modern bastions.
This put a strain on the coffers, all the more so as the support payments from property in Western Europe declined due to the plague and the beginning of the Little Ice Age. “Expenditures of 97,977 ducats were compared to income of around 47,000 ducats,” said the Hamburg historian Jürgen Sarnowsky, summing up the order’s budget in 1521. And citing the conclusion of a contemporary witness: “The rest they have to fetch from their enemies at sea, so that they can get along.”
However, “enemies” was a broad term and could include Turks, Muslims, Greeks, or Italian merchants. As in ancient times, the crusader state on Rhodes became a center of piracy, where spices, fabrics, foodstuffs were transshipped, and of course slaves, who often enough met the fate of having to drive the galleys.
This business model did not go unchallenged, however, when after the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 the Hospitallers became the last Christian bastion in the Levant. Sultan Mehmed II saw it that way too. In 1480 he landed on Rhodes with 70,000 soldiers. But the Hospitallers held out. After three months, Turkish losses totaled 24,000 men. Confused, the Ottoman had to withdraw again.
Mehmed’s great-grandson Süleyman I., who was to earn the nickname “the Magnificent”, recognized the failure of his ancestor as an opportunity to make a name for himself. His father Selim I had expanded the Ottoman Empire into a world power that stretched from the Danube to Egypt, from Syria to Iran. Having come to the throne in 1520, the son wanted to show what he was made of.
After a first successful campaign to Hungary, the Johanniter Grand Master Philippe de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam received an unequivocal letter: “I command you to voluntarily surrender the island and the city of Rhodes … If you are clever, you will become my friend prefer cruel war.” Although the sultan offered freedom of movement, the 30-year-old master of the order relied on life experience: “But consider that of all human undertakings, those that depend on the luck of the gun are the most uncertain. Farewell.”
However, L’Isle-Adam put his luck to a considerable test. When in June 1522 the Ottoman fleet, which had up to 400 ships and 150,000 men under Mustafa Pasha, appeared off Rhodes, the Grand Master was only able to defend the fortress with 600 knights, 500 Genoese sailors, 400 mercenaries from Crete and a few thousand urban militiamen. Since the leading politicians of the West, Emperors Charles V and Francis I of France, were at war with one another, there was little hope of help from there.
Süleyman relied on the modern artillery that his father had used to conquer his empire. The Berlin historian Karin Schneider-Ferber quotes from records of the Zurich bell founder Peter Füessli, who as a pilgrim met the defenders of Rhodes in 1523. Then the more than 150,000 soldiers of the sultan brought into position hundreds of light and heavy field guns, mortars as well as half and main snakes, which could fire bullets made of iron and lead as well as stone. Up to 60 bullets “as big as a man’s head” fell on the ramparts per day, “likewise so many at night”.
The battle also raged underground. The Turks attempted to drive tunnels under the walls in which powder charges could be detonated. But the defenders were on guard and defused many of these “mines”. After Mustafa Pasha’s assault in September left 15,000 dead, Suleyman sentenced his brother-in-law to death (he was later pardoned) and took command of Rhodes himself. But even that didn’t get him any closer to his goal.
Finally, news from the city that described the supply situation in the darkest of colors dissuaded the sultan from the idea of breaking off the siege. The chancellor of the order, Andrea d’Armaral, was identified as the informant. He had lost out in the election of the grandmaster against L’Isle-Adam. On November 5, “his head was cut off in front of a crowd,” wrote Füessli, “and (he) was then divided into quarters and the parts stuck on the walls”.
But that didn’t help against the misery that was beginning to rage within the walls. When Süleyman made him a generous offer on December 10, L’Isle-Adam was realistic enough not to heroically refuse, but to agree to a three-day truce. Four days before Christmas he finally accepted the terms. These were downright generous: until the beginning of January 1523, all knights with weapons, belongings and goods were allowed to leave without being molested. All residents were free to move away within the next three years, while those who stayed behind were granted freedom of worship, freedom from recruitment into the Janissary corps, and exemption from taxes for five years.
180 knights and up to 5000 townspeople set out from Rhodes on a new odyssey. After stations in Crete, in Messina and Nice, it ended in 1530 on the island of Malta, which Charles V granted the order as a new refuge. There the Hospitallers became the Maltese. In order to secure their new homeland, the knights equipped Malta with huge fortifications. In 1565 Süleyman I’s attempt to expel the knights from there failed.
In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte put an end to the rule of the Maltese, as the order had long been known. The possessions were also confiscated in Germany, France, Spain and Italy. In 1822 the Order of Malta was recognized as a sovereign non-state subject of international law, and later its property was partially restituted. The seat of the Grand Master was Rome. In 1859 it was re-established in Germany.
With the Reformation in 1538, the Protestant branch of the order, which continued to call itself Johanniter, emerged from the autonomous order Ballei (province) of Brandenburg. Under pressure from Napoleon, it was dissolved in 1811 and transferred to a Prussian Order of Merit. Refounded in 1852 as an “association of old law”, the Johanniter today have their headquarters in Potsdam and the administrative headquarters in Berlin. Johanniter and Malteser are committed to “a common history and a common mission”.
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