FOR ALL ITS appearance of a late development, no tradition of the Hospitallers is more ancient than their link with the sea. The Blessed Gerard established a network of sea travel to the Holy Land, and it may be that the extensive carrying fleet which the Order had at the service of pilgrims by the thirteenth century was already a feature of the earliest years. The first documentary mention we have of a ship of the knights is that of a dromond - a predecessor of the galley - which in 1165 transported Alexander III and his cardinals from Montpellier to Italy. This type of vessel was perhaps used to protect the convoys of ‘round ships’ which plied the route to Jerusalem.
The activity thus developed enabled the Hospitallers and Templars in 1187 to make a swift adaptation to sea warfare, when their galleys drove off the Saracen ships in the siege of Tyre. Though this is an isolated example of naval action by the military orders it demonstrates that they had both the means and the experience to turn to sea fighting when the need arose.
For the thirteenth century we have fuller details. At Acre the Hospitallers had their own dockyard, where they built small ships for coastal traffic. The importance of the Provencals in the Hospital’s naval concerns seems to have been already established, and a treaty with Marseilles in 1233 mentions Guillaume de Valence as the Order’s commendator naviumr Thirteen years later, when Louis IX prepared a fleet for the Seventh Crusade, he chose the Hospitallers’ vessel Comtesse as a prototype for twenty of his new ships; the Order also commissioned its own fleet for this crusade and took part with it in the capture of Damietta. In 1264 the Prior of Saint-Gilles, Feraud de Barras, was commander of the French navy.
It was the loss of the Holy Land that obliged the Knights of St John to exchange the horse for the ship. From Cyprus they made naval expeditions in alliance with the Templars, and in 1299 the office of Admiral appears; the conquest of Rhodes and the brilliant naval exploits of the next decade were demonstrations of the mastery that the knights swiftly acquired in their new element.15 Their strong naval role both permitted and was defined by the conquest of the chain of islands along the Turkish coast; and by 1374, when they were entrusted with the defence of Smyrna, they were established as the guardians of that coast over a stretch of more than three hundred miles. Venice, Genoa and other European powers had larger navies, but the concentrated brilliance of the Knights of Rhodes was a unique attribute. Then and for five centuries to come, the function of the Order’s navy was that of a corps d’elite which could be used in any joint enterprise of the Christian powers; with an average of only four galleys at any time, it was too small to make any independent impact of its own, and once the Order had acquired its island empire its role in Rhodes was essentially defensive.
An upheaval in the situation in the East was caused by Tamburlaine’s victories, especially his conquest of Smyrna in 1402. Instead of protecting Christian trade with Turkey, the Knights of Rhodes found a new occupation in attacking the shipping of a country now wholly in enemy
The harbour of Rhodes, showing the galley port (right side of the main port) next to the wall of the Arsenal. The Mandraccio harbour can be seen to the right of the picture.
Two thirds of crews became invariable, while buonavoglie (volunteers, often enlisted because of debt) supplied the rest. The predatory exploits of the Order aroused the hostility of Venice, whose empire in the East was now at its zenith, and whose interests demanded unruffled relations with the Moslem world. To the citizens of the Serenissima Rhodes was ‘a thorn in their eyes and a lance in their sides’.
Such was the ascendancy of the knights over the sea as to threaten even distant Egypt, so that in 1440 the Egyptians tried to seize Castel-rosso; but the attempt demonstrated the crushing superiority of the Rhodians. After capturing the enemy fleet, the knights disembarked and in a swift battle destroyed the Mameluke army. Four years later the Egyptians essayed a much more ambitious descent on Rhodes, and put ashore an army that besieged the city for forty days. Baffled by the strong walls and defeated again at sea, they had to acknowledge failure, and the attempt ended the brief resurgence of Egyptian power.*
Hands. The coastline they faced, with its numerous promontories and straits which ships had perforce to negotiate, offered the perfect setting for ambushes — so perfect that it remained a favourite haunt of the Order’s corsairs even after the withdrawal to Malta. The knights developed the tactics of hunting in packs of two galleys, one to hide behind some headland while the other drove the merchantman on to the chosen point. With these activities they were turning the tables on the Turkish corsairs, who until the Christian capture of Smyrna in 1344 had posed a formidable threat in Aegean waters.
By 1462 the supply of Turkish captives, who were impressed as rowers, was sufficiently constant to permit the abolition of the servitude marina, a form of compulsory sea service for the Greeks which the knights seem to have inherited from the Byzantine administration of Rhodes; henceforth the use of galley slaves to form
* This siege is thought to have been the model for the siege of Rhodes in the fifteenth-century Catalan chivalric novel by Joanot Martorell, Tirant lo Blanc (Chapters 98-108). Though the narrative tells us little about the real siege it gives us a glimpse of the position that the ‘Knights of the White Cross’ held in contemporary romantic literature.
A graver danger emerged with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. In 1473 the Roman Grand Master Orsini commanded the galleys in person in the alliance of Venice, Naples and Rhodes against Turkey, but it was not until the Ottoman defeat before Rhodes itself and the death of Mahomet II that the tide of conquest was halted. The succeeding forty years constitute the high point of the Order’s naval effectiveness in the East, with a chain of brilliant successes matching those of the early fourteenth century.
World History
