Within the walled town the most interesting building is the knights' old hospital, centred on a courtyard bounded by two storeys of arcaded galleries, with simple vaulting below and a flat wooden roof above. Along the east side runs a magnificent Gothic hall with central columns and little chambers let into the walls. This was the main ward of the hospital and the chambers were for isolating infectious cases.
Rhodes was attacked by the Ottomans in 1440, 1444, 1469 and 1480. It required a six-month siege by 400 ships and around 200,000 soldiers under Suleiman the Magnificent to force its inevitable surrender on Christmas Eve, 1522.
The evacuation of Bodrum and Kos followed soon after and the knights became peripatetic till the Emperor Charles V gave them Malta in 1530. That would prove their final line of defence against Ottoman Muslim forces. Malta was tested to the utmost — and not found wanting — in the Great Siege of 1565.
Post your comment
- The US Can Still Help Save Syria — and Iraq
- Russian Resurgence has Blindsided Nato
- On Europe, Nothing Less than Treaty Change will do
- Putin has his Useful Idiots on the Left and the Right
- Sarajevo: Where the Century of Terror Began
- Allen Lane’s Pelicans Take Wing Once More
- How Not to Remember the First World War
- Opera is Not Just Our Most Expensive Noise
- Jonathan Miller: One Man, Two Cultures
- Without a Big Idea, Cameron Will Lose
- A Christian Country? No, a Conservative One
- How to Get School Competition Right
- The War on the Firmest Bulwark of our Liberty
- How Modern Liberals Created Nigel Farage
- Caught in the Trap of His Own Metaphysics
- In Search of My Father, Agent of the Comintern
- Geoffrey Hill and the poetry of ideas
- Master of the Glories of the English Country Garden
- Independence Will Do Nothing for Scots
- Bullying and Bluff on the Road to Referendum
