The Last Crusader Order on Rhodes Held Out For Six Months Against an Ottoman Army Twenty Times Its Size

The Knights Hospitaller had governed Rhodes as a sovereign Catholic-military state since 1309 — substantially the substantial last surviving Crusader-period military order with substantial sovereign territorial holdings. By the 1520s the Order had substantively absorbed the Templar lands of the early-14th-century Templar suppression and substantively was the Catholic Mediterranean’s substantively most influential single substantively military religious institution.

The Hospitallers had substantively survived a first Ottoman siege of Rhodes in 1480 under Sultan Mehmed II — the same Mehmed who had substantively taken Constantinople in 1453. The 1480 siege had substantively been substantively pushed back by the Hospitallers after approximately three months; the Ottoman army had substantively withdrawn substantively without breakthrough.

The second Ottoman attempt came forty-two years later.

The 1522 siege

Suleiman the Magnificent had succeeded his father Selim I in 1520 and consolidated the Ottoman position over the following two years. Rhodes was the next strategic target. Hospitaller commercial-naval raiding from Rhodes had been a long-standing Ottoman grievance; the Hospitaller presence on the Asia Minor coast blocked the standard Ottoman shipping lanes between Istanbul and Alexandria.

Suleiman arrived at Rhodes on 26 July 1522 with an army of approximately 100,000 — the largest Ottoman expeditionary force assembled to that point in the 16th century. The Hospitaller defenders under Grand Master Philippe Villiers de l’Isle-Adam numbered approximately 7,500: about 600 professed Hospitaller knights plus the local Rhodian-Greek militia and a small contingent of European mercenaries.

The siege ran six months. The Ottoman bombardment was relentless. The Hospitaller defence was tenacious. Ottoman casualties through the autumn ran to approximately 40,000–50,000 dead — extraordinarily heavy by 16th-century siege standards.

The surrender

By mid-December the defenders had been reduced to approximately 1,500 effectives and were running out of powder, food, and replacement fortification material. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam opened negotiations with Suleiman in late December. The terms were favourable: the surviving Hospitallers received safe passage with their personal arms, archives, religious relics, and movable property; the local Rhodian Christian population received three years to leave without molestation; the city’s churches were not desecrated.

The Hospitallers departed Rhodes on 1 January 1523 — a fleet of fifty ships carrying the surviving knights, their dependants, and their movable institutional property. They sailed to Crete (then Venetian), then to Sicily, and eventually accepted a 1530 grant of Malta from the Emperor Charles V. They held Malta until Napoleon expelled them in 1798. The Order survives today as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

The Bodrum Castle that Hospitaller Rhodes had built out of the Mausoleum stones in the 15th century — the site that connects to the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus story — fell to the Ottomans in the same campaign.