The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II - Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire (28 page)

On 13 June the Turkish artillery began a furious bombardment of the mole and the tower that continued for four days and nights. On the fourth night a party of Turks in rowing boats began building a wooden pontoon bridge from the foreshore out to the mole, using a hawser to attach it to a grapnel they dropped into the sea by the base of the tower. An English sailor named Robert Jervis heard the sound of their oars, and after they rowed away, paying out the hawser as they went, he dived in and cut through the rope, carrying back the grapnel to present to d’Aubusson, who rewarded him with a bag of gold coins.

Mesih Pasha made another attempt to land on the mole on the night of 18-19 June, but this was also repelled. Some 2,500 Ottoman troops were killed, according to Caoursin, who writes that ‘for three whole days their corpses kept being washed up by the sea, glittering with gold and silver and rich raiment. Others could be seen on the bottom of the harbour, swaying with the currents as if put there by nature… Not a few of our men collected the spoils, to their great profit.’ Fra de Curti told his brother that ‘the heads of many Janissaries were displayed on our towers and the sea was red with their blood’.

Meanwhile Mesih Pasha had also been bombarding the southern part of the walled city, the densely populated Jewish quarter, badly damaging the Italian Tower and the south-eastern section of the defence walls. Seeing that the outer fortifications were being reduced to rubble by the bombardment, d’Aubusson set everyone to work on building an inner fortification, demolishing the houses in the Jewish quarter and using their stones to erect a new defence work. Caoursin writes of the dedication with which the populace went about their work, undeterred by the constant bombardment.

Neither did the Grand Master, the Bailiffs, Priors, citizens, merchants, matrons, brides, maidens, spare themselves; but all carried on their backs stones, earth and lime, having no thought of personal gain but each thinking only of the safety of all… The great projectiles from the mortars terrified the people who saw them flying through the air… We ourselves were not a little anxious, particularly at night…which was spent in cellars, near the more robust doors, or under the arches of Churches…snatching some restless sleep…

D’Aubusson himself led the defenders in the Jewish quarter, sleeping on the walls at night so that he would be ready if there was an attack. During the night of 18-19 June, when Mesih Pasha attempted to land on the mole, d’Aubusson rushed there to help, killing a janissary with his own hands, while he himself was almost killed when a piece of shrapnel shattered his helmet. Fabrizio Del Carretto, who was in charge of the defenders on the mole, implored him to take shelter, and d’Aubusson replied, ‘My place is the place of danger, if I should be killed, you will be able to worry about your own future and not mine.’

A rumour spread among the Italian knights that Sultan Mehmet himself was headed towards Rhodes with an army of 100,000 fresh troops. The Italians prevailed upon Gian Maria Filefio, the Grand Master’s secretary, to suggest to him that the knights abandon Rhodes before it was too late. D’Aubusson called in the Italian knights and told them if they wanted to leave Rhodes they were free to do so, and he would cover their departure, but if they remained there was to be no talk of surrender, under pain of death, to which they had no recourse but to agree and beg the Grand Master’s forgiveness.

Mesih Pasha had a herald call out to the defenders that he was requesting a safe conduct for his envoy to offer the knights terms of surrender. D’Aubusson said that the envoy could not enter the city, but would have to deliver his message from the counterscarp in front of the defence walls. According to Caoursin, the envoy, Süleyman Bey, said that Mesih Pasha offered to allow the knights to continue living in Rhodes as vassals of the sultan if they surrendered. But if they did not give in, he said, ‘The city will be devastated, the men slaughtered, the women ravished and consigned to ignominy.’

Caoursin then quotes the response given by d’Aubusson’s spokesman, Fra Antoine Gualtier, castellan of the city of Rhodes, who concluded by saying: ‘Take your armies home and send us ambassadors. Then we will talk of peace as equals; but as long as you stand armed before our city, do your duty as a soldier, and, with the help of God, we will give you our answer. You do not have to do with effeminate Asiatics, but with Knights of proven valour.’

After the refusal of his proposal Mesih Pasha resumed his bombardment of the city, pleased by the arrival of two shiploads of fresh janissaries. At this point Master George of Saxony, the German bombardier who had defected from the Ottoman forces, fell under suspicion and was summoned before the Council of Knights. When the question was put to him under torture, he admitted that he had been secretly communicating with Mesih Pasha, whereupon he was condemned and hanged.

On 24 June the knights celebrated the feast day of St John the Baptist, their patron saint, with the usual Solemn Mass in their conventual church. A few days later a Christian ship made its way into port with reinforcements, a company of troops under Benedetto della Scala of Verona, greatly improving the morale of the defenders.

D’Aubusson sent envoys to Rome, who arrived there at the beginning of July, bringing with them an appeal to the Pope for aid against the Turks. Pope Sixtus agreed to send two large ships to Rhodes with troops, ammunition and supplies, and King Ferrante of Naples promised to send two more vessels. On 3 July Sixtus convened a meeting of the ambassadors resident in Rome, and it was agreed that the expenses for this relief expedition were to be met by imposing a so-called Rhodian defence tax (
tassa per defesa de Rodi
). The assessments they agreed upon were: the Pope 10,000 ducats, the King of Naples 20,000, the Duke of Milan 15,000, the Signoria of Florence 8,000, the Duke of Ferrara 4,000, the Signoria of Siena 4,000, the Marquis of Mantua 1,000, the Marquis of Montferrat 1,000, the Signoria of Lucca 1,000, and the Duke of Savoy 3,000 - a total of 67,000 ducats. Venice was not included in the assessment, because of the republic’s peace treaty with the Ottomans. But Sixtus hoped that when the Venetians saw the other Christian powers preparing for a crusade they would scrap their treaty and join in the struggle against the Turks.

Meanwhile, the siege on Rhodes continued unabated, the Turks bombarding the Jewish quarter day and night, eventually destroying the Tower of Italy and opening a breach in the defence walls. At dawn on 27 July, after a night of particularly heavy bombardment, Mesih Pasha ordered his entire army to attack the breach in the walls of the Jewish quarter. He first sent in his shock troops, the
başıbozuks
, who charged over the mound of rubble and up onto the ruins of the Tower of Italy, where they planted the Turkish standard. They were followed by the janissaries and
sipahis
, some of whom made their way into the town and began slaughtering the townspeople. By then d’Aubusson had led the knights up onto the tower, where a janissary severely wounded him with a spear so that he had to be carried away. But the knights outfought the attackers and forced them to withdraw, cutting them down in droves as they fled in disorder and slaughtering those who were cut off inside the town. The knights pursued their enemies as far as the Ottoman camp on Mount St Stephen, where they captured the sultan’s gold and silver standard, triumphantly returning to town with the severed heads of Turks on their pikes and lances.

According to Caoursin, 3,500 Turks were killed in the attack on the Jewish quarter, including 300 janissaries. He writes: ‘There were corpses all over the city, on the walls, in the ditch, in the enemy stockades and in the sea…they had to be burned to avoid an infectious disease.’

At first it was thought that d’Aubusson would die from his wound, for the spear had punctured his lung, but he made a remarkably rapid recovery. He reported that ‘many of our Knights and Bailiffs fell, fighting to the last wherever the combat was thickest. We and others of our comrades sustained many wounds.’ Fra de Curti noted that in the battle in the Jewish quarter ten knights of the Order lost their lives, ‘including the Bailiff of Germany’. According to other sources, seven of the ten knights who died were English: Thomas Benn, John Wakelyn, Henry Hales, Thomas Plumpton, Adam Tedbond, Henry Battesby and Henry Anlaby. Marmaduke Lumley, who later became Grand Prior of the Order in Ireland, was gravely wounded but subsequently recovered. Other English knights who fought in the battle and survived were Leonard Tybert, Walter Westborough, John Boswell, who was a Scot, and John Roche, an Irishman.

The failure of his assault on the Jewish quarter convinced Mesih Pasha that he was unable to take Rhodes, and on the following day he ordered his troops to lift the siege and begin preparations for withdrawing from the island. It took ten days for them to strike their camp, and the last of the troops were taken aboard the Ottoman fleet late in the afternoon of 7 August.

Just as the Ottoman fleet departed, headed for Physkos, observers on Rhodes saw two ships approaching, a carrack and a brigantine, one flying the flag of the Pope and the other that of the King of Naples. Mesih Pasha sent a squadron of twenty galleys to attack the Christian ships, a shot from one of their guns carrying away the mainmast of the brigantine. But the heavily armed carrack, the
Santa Maria
, captained by a Spaniard named Juan Poo, covered the brigantine until it was able to make its way into the harbour of Rhodes before nightfall. The
Santa Maria
was unable to enter the harbour because of heavy seas, and the next day it was attacked by the Ottoman galleys, which it fought off in a three-hour battle in which the Turkish squadron commander was killed. The
Santa Maria
then entered the harbour under full sail, unloading fresh troops and supplies, including 800 barrels of wine, as well as letters from Pope Sixtus and King Ferrante for Pierre d’Aubusson, whose life still hung in the balance.

The siege had left the city of Rhodes in ruins, with the Grand Master’s palace and many of the churches destroyed along with the Tower of St Nicholas and much of the defence walls. About a half of the knights were killed during the siege, including seven of the fourteen English, Scottish and Irish knights, along with a similar proportion of the other Christian defenders, not to mention the civilians who were slain when the Turks broke into the Jewish quarter.

The Ottoman casualties, according to Christian sources, probably amounted to 9,000 killed and 15,000 wounded, about a quarter of Mesih Pasha’s force. Mesih Pasha kept his fleet in Physkos for eleven days before sailing homeward, after unsuccessfully trying to take the fortress that the Knights of St John had built at Halicarnassus. When the fleet arrived at Gelibolu, Mesih Pasha was relieved of his command on the orders of Sultan Mehmet, who is reported to have said that if he himself had led the expedition Rhodes would have been taken. When the defeated fleet reached Istanbul, according to Angiolello, its crews and troops arrived in silence, ‘not sounding instruments of joy, as they were accustomed to do on such occasions when the fleet came home’.

Meanwhile, the Christian victory was celebrated joyously all over Europe, particularly in the city of Rhodes itself. When the celebration was over Guillaume Caoursin, vice chancellor of the Order, sat down to write his famous account of the siege ‘for praise of God, exaltation of the Christian religion, and the glory of the knights of Rhodes’. Entitled
Obsidionia Rhodiae Urbis Descriptio
, Caoursin’s account was first published at Venice in 1480. It was then translated into English by John Kay, laureate to King Edward IV, and published by Caxton in 1496 as
The Derlectable newess & Tithyngs of the Gloryoos Victorye of the Rhodyns Agaynst the Turke
.

13

The Capture of Otranto

Although Pierre d’Aubusson had been seriously wounded during the siege, immediately after it was over he set out to rebuild the ruined city of Rhodes and its defence walls and towers. Three days after the Ottoman withdrawal the Grand Master and the council met and decided to send an envoy to Italy to inform Pope Sixtus and King Ferrante of their victory over the Turks, and also to request further aid, ‘for it is of course assumed that the enemy proposes to come back’. By the beginning of October 1480 d’Aubusson decided that the Ottoman fleet had finally left the region and was not likely to return in the immediate future. The council therefore decided to allow the departure of the galleys and mercenaries that had been sent by King Ferrante. But they decided to retain the 100 men of arms who had come to Rhodes with the prior of Rome, because the knights had suffered such heavy casualties during the siege that their garrison needed reinforcements.

Mehmet’s expedition against the Ionian Islands in 1479 had given him possession of Santa Maura, Ithaka, Cephalonia and Zante, the former possessions of Leonardo III Tocco, who had taken refuge with King Ferrante of Naples. Corfu, the northernmost of the Ionian Islands, remained in the possession of Venice, which because of its peace treaty with the Ottomans remained neutral when Gedik Ahmet Pasha conquered the other islands in the archipelago.

On 2 July 1480 the Senate wrote to Vettore Soranzo, the Captain-General of the Sea, who at the time was on Corfu, informing him that the Ottoman fleet had left the Dardanelles and had divided into two parts, the larger one headed for Rhodes (where the siege had already begun on 23 May) and the other bound for the Adriatic.

As soon as Soranzo received the letter he left Corfu with twenty-eight galleys for Methoni, in the south-west Peloponessos, which together with nearby Methoni were called the ‘Eyes of the Republic’, for they surveyed all maritime traffic between the eastern Mediterranean and the Adriatic. Soranzo’s instructions were to avoid any conflict with the Ottoman forces, but if they attacked any Venetian possessions he was to oppose them. At Methoni, Soranzo met with an Ottoman envoy, who requested safe passage for a Turkish flotilla headed into the Adriatic, along with provisions. Soranzo agreed to the envoy’s requests, and he followed with his squadron as the Turkish ships headed towards the Adriatic to join Gedik Pasha’s fleet at Valona in Albania.