Empires of the Sea - the Final Battle for the Mediterranean 1521-1580 Read Free Page A

of Christendom.
    European opinion of the knights was mixed. For the Papacy, Rhodes carried a huge symbolic weight as the outer line of defense against the infidel, manning a maritime frontier in continual contraction as the Byzantine inheritance crumbled before the Islamic advance and one by one the bright ring of islands fell to the Ottomans. Pope Pius II lamented that “if all the other Christian princes…had shown themselves as tireless in their hostility to the Turks as the single island of Rhodes had done, that impious people would not have grown so strong.” Even after the fall of Constantinople, Rhodes continued to nourish the Holy See’s most cherished project—the possibility of an eventual return to the Holy Land. Others were less charitable: to Christian maritime traders, the Hospitallers were a dangerous anachronism. The Order’s acts of piracy and blockades of Western trade with Muslims threatened to destabilize the delicate peace on which commerce depended. The Venetians thought the knights indistinguishable from corsairs and regarded them as a menace second only to Ottoman imperial ambitions.
    The knights’ impact certainly outstripped their resources. There were never more than five hundred on Rhodes, drawn from the aristocracy of Europe, supported more or less willingly by the local Greek population and mercenaries. They comprised a small well-organized military elite with a powerful sense of mission whose nuisance value was out of proportion to their number. Their galleys lurked in the aquamarine lagoons and rocky inlets of the Asian shore, quick to snatch passing traffic—boatloads of pilgrims from Istanbul bound for Mecca; timber for Egypt from the Black Sea; cargoes of spices from Arabia; honey, dried fish, wine, and silk. Their reputation was fearsome among friend and foe alike. To tackle a Hospitaller galley was to take on a scorpion. “These corsairs are noted for their energy and daring,” wrote the Ottoman chroniclers. “They disrupt life, causing all sorts of losses to merchants, and capturing travelers.” To Muslims, they were, and always had been, the archenemy, the “evil sect of Franks, the worst sons of Error, the most corrupted of the Devil’s spawn” the Muslim general Saladin had slaughtered his Hospitaller captives without compunction during the Crusades. Their allegiance to the pope made them doubly loathsome in Ottoman eyes. Worse still, they ran a market on the island for the sale of Muslim slaves. “How many sons of the Prophet are captured by these children of lies?” mourned the Muslim chroniclers. “How many thousand of the faithful are forced to turn infidel? How many wives and children? Their wickedness knows no end.”
    Successive sultans perceived Rhodes as a menace, an affront to sovereignty—and unfinished business. Mehmet had sent a large invasion force to take it and been humiliated. When Selim, Suleiman’s father, captured Egypt in 1517, the position of Rhodes astride the sea route to Istanbul increased the island’s strategic threat. The early decades of the sixteenth century were a time of hunger in the Eastern Mediterranean, and food supplies for the capital were critical. “The said Rhodians are inflicting great losses on the sultan’s subjects,” noted the Venetian diarist Sanudo in 1512, the year the knights captured eighteen grain transports bound for Istanbul and forced up the prices there by 50 percent. Complaints to the sultan grew audible: “They don’t let the ships of merchants or pilgrims bound for Egypt pass without sinking them with their cannon and capturing the Muslims.” To Suleiman this was not just a strategic threat; his position as “head of Muhammad’s community” was at stake. The taking of Muslim slaves on the very doorstep of his realm was intolerable. He now decided to crush “the vipers’ nest of Franks.”
             
     
    NINE DAYS AFTER SULEIMAN had written his victory letter in Belgrade, the man to whom