When Villeneuve died in 1346 and his brethren gathered to elect his successor, it is said that the Grand Commander, Dieudonne de Gozon, rose in the assembly and declared that on deep consideration he found no-one among his companions so fit to occupy that office as himself; awed by this sublime self-confidence the Hospitallers unanimously elected him to the magistral throne. It is also said that as a young knight Gozon had rid the island of a dragon that had been devouring young maidens in the neighbourhood of Rhodes. After several knights had lost their lives trying to kill it, the Master had strictly forbidden any more to make the attempt. But Gozon trained two large hounds especially for this fearsome hunt (with the aid of a model built from eyewitness accounts). His plan was put into effect; the wicked Worm was slain. So inexorable, however, was the discipline of the Hospital against disobedience that Hdion de Villeneuve upheld the threatened sentence and stripped Gozon of his habit. He later relented on the plea that the act had been for the public good, a grace but for which the Order would have been deprived of one of its most notable Masters.
We may be led astray by this tale if it prompts us to speculation as to the kind of animal that harassed Rhodes in the early part of the fourteenth century; what we can learn from it with certainty is that the Knights had taken the afflicted land of Rhodes and made of it a chivalric Isle of Gramarye. For the first time, as they had not been able to in Jerusalem or even in the lordly fastnesses of Belvoir or Crac, they had created their own knightly realm, moated by the sea, where the Master of the Hospital ruled amid a court of the noblest blood of Christendom: men of whose exploits legends were made.
Foulques de Villaret had chosen for the dwelling of the knights an island famous for its beauty since ancient times; claram Rhodon, which Horace had appealed to as a byword of loveliness when he wished to praise his own Tiburnian groves. The roses that grew there in abundance gave the island its name. There were fertile valleys whose produce sustained the knights, and the pine-clad hills gave timber for their fleet. More than a kingdom, Rhodes gave the knights
A garden, and after the parched wars of Palestine they rested for a while in ease and splendour. We are told that Villeneuve, because of the economies to which he was constrained in his first years, later wished to throw off the imputation of meanness with a royal magnificence. In 1343 Pope Clement VI complained to him: ‘The administrators of the Order ride great fine horses, feast on exquisite viands, wear magnificent apparel, drink from cups of gold and silver, and keep birds and hounds for the chase. ’ The Pope might rebuke the decline of religious poverty, but Rhodes reaped the fruit of secular amenity; in the forests roamed the herds of deer that the knights introduced in their love of the chase, and the ancient capital rose again in strength and beauty. An English visitor of 1345 thus described it: ‘Within the castle walls are an archbishop and his metropolitan church, and the dwellings of the many citizens are like those of distinguished men. There are moneyers, armourers and all the artificers necessary to a city or a royal castle. Below the castle is the house of the hospital, a mother, nurse, doctor, protector and handmaiden to all the infirm.’
World History
