The Knights of St. John

by Augusta Theodosia Drane

And yet at the very time of these achievements, whilst the treasury of the order was being exhausted by its disinterested exertions, and its blood was flowing freely on every coast of the Archipelago, the old murmurs were being repeated, and representations were constantly made at the papal court that the knights were idling away their time in their luxurious palaces, employed in the amassing of vast treasures, and the enjoyment of a life of ease. Nor was this all: not a post or embassy from Europe but brought them a fresh budget of advice. Rhodes was unfit for the residence of the order; they ought to be somewhere on the mainland; they should be in the Morea, which the Turks were threatening to overrun; and above all, why did they not return to the Holy Land? This last suggestion was seriously propounded in an embassy despatched from Rome, at whose head appeared one of their own brethren, Heredia, grand prior of Castile,—a man of consummate abilities, but who, for the gratification of his boundless ambition, had separated himself from the interests of the order, and had succeeded in gaining extraordinary influence in the councils of the Pontiff, Innocent VI. This continual interference from authorities in Europe, to whom the real state of affairs was wholly unknown, caused the grand masters much embarrassment, which was increased by the internal dissensions which rose out of the new division of the order into languages. This division had gradually been adopted for the convenience it afforded in several ways, but was only formally acknowledged in the grand chapter held under Helion de Villeneuve in 1322. Each language then had its inn, as it was called, where the knights met for meals in common, and to debate in their own tongue. But the evil effects of this arrangement were soon felt in the growth of national jealousies, and the unity of the order was severely injured by it. To it may be attributed the failure and disappointment of many a noble plan: as when the heroic Raymund Beranger, grand master of the order in 1365, after a bold and successful enterprise against Alexandria, which he took by surprise, entirely destroying the piratical fleet of the Saracens, addressed letters to all the powers of Christendom to implore their assistance against the threatened invasion of his island by the sultan of Babylon, and appealed at the same time to the order in every country of Europe to pay up the arrears owing from the different commanderies and priories, and unite together to avert so imminent a danger. Not only were the letters disregarded, but the jealousies between the languages of Provence and Italy reached such a height that Beranger, worn out with sorrow and disappointment, was only prevented from resigning in disgust by the authority of Gregory XI., who finally took the adjustment of the whole question into his own hands.

On the death of Beranger, in 1374, Robert de Juillac, grand prior of France, was chosen as his successor. He was at his priory at the time of his election, and setting out for Rhodes, he presented himself at Avignon on his road, to offer homage to the Pope. The devotion of the grand masters to the Holy See through all their difficulties is very striking; and on no occasion did they offer a more noble example of religious obedience than on the present. Smyrna was still in the hands of the Christians; its Venetian governor was half-merchant, half-soldier; and complaints were addressed to the papal court on the part of the archbishop and inhabitants, that, in consequence of his devotion to his commercial engagements and frequent voyages to Italy, the place was left without defence, and almost without a garrison. Gregory decided on committing the care of the city to the Hospitallers; and when Juillac appeared at Avignon, the first intelligence that reached his ears was that, in addition to every other difficulty and embarrassment, the defence of Smyrna was to be given into his hands. In vain he represented that Smyrna was a forlorn hope, isolated in the midst of the Turkish dominions, and too far from Italy to receive any succours from thence in case of siege. “The situation of the city,” replied the Pontiff, “in the heart of the infidel’s own country, is the very cause of my intrusting it to your order; for the Turks will not advance farther so long as they have so considerable an enemy at home; and I therefore charge you under pain of excommunication, to despatch the necessary garrison immediately on your return to Rhodes.” When this injunction was communicated to the council of the order assembled in the island on the arrival of the grand master, there was but one feeling as to the nature of the commission intrusted to them. “All were very well aware,” says Vertot, “that it was to send the knights to certain death; nevertheless they took the part of obedience, and many of them even generously offered themselves for a service whose dangers and glory were equally certain. For it was not to be supposed that the Turks, whose power daily increased, would long leave the knights in peaceable possession of a place which was in the very centre of their dominions.” For twenty-seven years, therefore, did the Hospitallers succeed in holding Smyrna triumphantly against the Turks; and its noble defence is said to have delayed the fall of Constantinople, and possibly to have saved the rest of Christendom by drawing away the attack of the infidels from other quarters. The event, therefore, amply vindicated the sagacity of Pope Gregory, yet not the less does it elevate the obedience of the knights to the dignity of a sacrifice.

CHAPTER III.

Progress of the Turks—Bajazet and Timour the Tartar—Siege and conquest of Smyrna—St. Peter’s of the Freed—Greatness of the order under Naillac—Mahomet II.—Fall of Constantinople—Threatened invasion of Rhodes—Death of Scanderbeg—Conquest of Lesbos and Negropont—Election of Peter d’Aubusson.

From the period of the first settlement of the order at Rhodes the war with the Turks, though desultory, had been continual. The Turkish empire, which, under its first sultan Othman, already included many of the provinces of Asia Minor, extended itself into Europe in the reign of his son Orchan. Disputes at Constantinople between the rival emperors, John Palæologus and Cantacuzenus, led to the unhappy policy adopted by the latter of calling in the Turks to his aid. Orchan (to whom Cantacuzenus had given his daughter in marriage) did not fail to seize so favourable an opportunity of enlarging his conquests; his son Solyman crossed the Hellespont; and speedily making himself master of the northern provinces of the Greek empire, even endeavoured to gain a footing in the Morea. Orchan’s son Amurath,—for Solyman had died in the midst of his career,—followed up his father’s victories with still greater success; and Palæologus, who in vain strove to resist the advances of the Turks, was compelled gradually to yield all his possessions to their arms, with the exception of Constantinople, Thessalonica, the Morea, and a few islands. Adrianople (at no great distance from the walls of Constantinople itself) became the metropolis of the Ottoman dominion in Europe (A.D. 1361), and the danger of the latter city became daily more and more imminent; for whilst, on the one side, Asia was in the hands of the infidels, they were, on the other, masters of all the Macedonian cities and provinces, and from their position at Adrianople were able to attack and overran the Bulgarian and Servian principalities; and thus the capital of the Greek emperors was gradually surrounded on all sides by the victorious Moslem. Two defences alone of any strength remained to the Christian arms on the shores of the Archipelago: they were the island of Rhodes and the devoted garrison of Smyrna.

The divisions and dissensions of that unhappy time no doubt contributed in a great degree to the rapid extension of the Turkish conquests. First and foremost, and that which lay at the root of all the rest, was the disastrous schism which ensued on the death of Gregory XI., when a pope and an anti-pope claimed the obedience of the nations. Christendom, thus divided against itself, had no time to give to the danger that threatened it from without; the western powers, engaged in contesting the pretensions of two rival claimants of the papal chair, were unable to unite against the common foe. The Christian world was, in fact, bereft of its directing head: the popes had ever been the life and soul of the crusades against the infidel; and when their voice was dumb, or gave, or at least seemed to give, an uncertain sound, who could prepare himself for the battle? As regarded the order of the Knights Hospitallers, the evil was unmitigated. Our purpose in the present sketch being less to offer a continuous history of the order of St. John than to recount their struggles with the Moslems, we must pass rapidly over the period during which Heredia, the prior of Castile, was grand master, and redeemed his previous disloyal conduct by a government of remarkable disinterestedness and devotion. Brave he was even to daring. At the siege of Patras he mounted the breach, sword in hand, careless whether his knights followed him or no, and flinging himself with all the ardour of a young soldier into the midst of the Turks, encountered the governor in single combat and laid him dead at the foot of the wall he had been defending. At Corinth, which was the next point of attack, he fell into an ambush and was taken prisoner. The order offered the restitution of Patras, together with a large sum of money, for his ransom, and three of the grand priors even engaged to remain as hostages in his place until the conditions were fulfilled: but though the Turks consented, Heredia magnanimously rejected the proposal. “Leave me, my dear brothers,” he said, “leave me, worn out as I am with years and toil, to die in my chains, and reserve yourselves who are young and active for the service of God and His Church.” As for the money, he would not hear of its being paid out of the treasury of the order; it should come from his own family, whom his ambition had enriched. One would have thought that the infidels would have been moved to generosity by so much nobility of soul; but all the effect it had upon them was, that they condemned him to a severer confinement, in which he was detained for more than three years. On his release, he made ample reparation for his previous avarice by devoting the wealth he had accumulated to the foundation of new commanderies and other means of defence against the untiring enemy of the Christian name; but all his efforts and self-sacrifices were paralysed and rendered of little avail by the divisions that prevailed. The contest for the papacy caused a schism among the knights; and as there were two competitors for the chair of St. Peter, so there were two grand masters, both arrogating to themselves the supreme command of the order.

It was then that Bajazet, the son of Amurath, began his extraordinary career. One province after another was overrun and ravaged by his armies; from Europe he passed to Asia, and thence back again to Europe, attacking Christian and infidel alike in the very wantonness of success. Even the frontiers of Hungary were laid waste; and having taken some prisoners of that nation, he sent them back to king Sigismund, with the following insulting message: “Tell your master that I will pay him a visit next spring; and after driving him from the land, I will pass over into Italy, and plant my standards on the Capitol of Rome.” Indeed it was his common boast that his horse should eat his oats on the high altar of St. Peter’s. In 1395 the fatal battle of Nicopolis was fought, which seemed well-nigh to promise the fulfilment of this insolent threat. Sigismund of Hungary there found himself at the head of a hundred thousand men,—the army of a new crusade which had at length been raised through the exertions of Pope Boniface IX.,[5] who proclaimed a plenary indulgence for all who should repair to the rescue of Hungary and the neighbouring kingdoms. It was composed of the forces of France, Venice, Greece, Hungary, and the Knights of St. John. Sixty thousand horse (according to some writers), “all of tried courage and enterprise,” says the old chronicler, “the very flower of Christian chivalry, were there, led on by the Count de Nevers, a prince of the French blood-royal.” But the battle was lost with immense slaughter;[6] Sigismund escaping with the grand master, Philibert de Naillac, in a single galley, to Rhodes, and leaving (it is said) twenty thousand of his followers dead upon the field. Ten thousand Christian prisoners, among whom were three hundred of gentle birth, were led out on the morning after the conflict, with their hands bound behind them and halters round their necks, and butchered in cold blood before the eyes of Bajazet himself, who sat at the entrance of his tent from daybreak till four in the afternoon to enjoy the horrid spectacle, and forced his unhappy captive, the Count de Nevers, to stand by and witness the death-pangs of his comrades. They were offered the Koran or the sword; and as one by one they made profession of the Christian faith, they paid the penalty of their fidelity with their lives. “It was a cruel case for them,” says Froissart, “thus to suffer for the love of our Saviour Jesus Christ; and may He receive their souls!” This victory brought Bajazet to the walls of Constantinople. His generals overran Styria and the south of Hungary; the sultan himself lead his victorious armies into the north of Greece, while his lieutenants, crossing the isthmus of Corinth, subdued the whole of the Morea. Athens was taken in 1397, and the Crescent, the symbol of barbarism, shone over the ancient seat of learning and the arts. The metropolis of the East, for which the emperor gained a temporary but ignominious respite by turning one of the churches of the city into a mosque, and consenting to pay an annual tribute of 10,000 ducats, would doubtless have speedily fallen into the power of Bajazet but for the appearance at that moment of a rival on the scene. Manuel Palæologus had in vain sought the assistance of the European princes; the wars in which they were engaged prevented their heeding his appeal. In his extremity he had recourse to Timour the Terrible,[7] the khan of Tartary, whose jealousy of Bajazet’s successes induced him readily to listen to the embassies of the Greek emperor. The result is well known: on the plains of Angora (A.D. 1402),—the same where Pompey overthrew the power of Mithridates,—the Turks and Tartars met, and after a bloody contest the triumphs of Bajazet were terminated for ever, and he himself, falling into the hands of his savage conqueror, was subjected to a captivity the ignominy of which has gained for him a compassion and sympathy to which his crimes and infamous vices were far from entitling him.

It followed as a matter of course, that the dominions of Bajazet were simply transferred into the hands of Timour; and with the single exception of the knights of Rhodes, all the princes of the East submitted to his yoke, or acceded to his alliance. Their stubborn independence brought on them a declaration of war from the Tartar despot. It seemed insufferable that one small island should presume to withhold its allegiance to a monarch whose dominions exceeded those of Alexander and of every conqueror the world had ever seen, and whose power was acknowledged by the Christian sovereigns of Anatolia, as well as in all the provinces of the East; yet Rhodes, small as it was, presented so formidable an aspect, with its masses of fortifications, that he determined on first of all reducing the city of Smyrna, whose position in the very heart of the Asiatic provinces seemed to bid defiance to his arms. Timour’s object was, however, scarcely so much the actual subjection of the place as the gratification of a proud ambition; and well knowing that a city which had so long resisted the power of the Turks would prove no easy conquest, he declared to William de Mina, the governor appointed by the grand master, that he would be contented if his banner were suffered to float from the citadel, without proceeding to a siege, or depriving the knights of their actual possession. But the demand was scornfully rejected: not that the Hospitallers for one moment entertained a hope of withstanding the attack of the Tartars, unsupported as they were by any succours from Europe, and isolated in the midst of the enemy’s dominions; but Smyrna was the post of honour which, intrusted to them as it had been by the Pope himself, it would have been eternal disgrace to the order either to abandon or surrender: and though the season was winter, Timour, exasperated by the haughty reply of the garrison, at once commenced the siege.