In fifteen days he had thrown a mole across the harbour, which deprived the Christians of all succour from without, and brought the Mongol troops close to the seaward parts of the town; the resistance he encountered, however, was worthy of the fame of a city, of which a Persian historian declares, that it had sustained a seven-years’ siege under Bajazet, had never paid tribute to any one, or ever been in the power of any Mussulman prince from the period of its conquest by Biandra. Attacks and sallies were daily interchanged; and whilst both parties displayed prodigies of valour, victory could be claimed by neither. The mines formed by the Tartars were of no effect; for the besieged crushed all who entered them by the enormous stones, or rather rocks, which they dashed from the summits of the walls. At length Timour, impatient of delay, ordered a general storm; an enormous number of wooden towers were erected, in which the besiegers succeeded in approaching the fortifications; and from these they threw themselves on the ramparts, covering their manœuvre by a shower of arrows, the density of which darkened the very air. In vain did the brave defenders struggle to force back the torrent of their enemies; they poured in from every quarter in countless numbers: nevertheless the same Persian writer, Cheresiddin Ali, assures us that the assault lasted from morning to sunset, and that the obstinacy of the defence equalled the ferocity of the attack. “No one,” he says, “had a moment’s repose; the intrepid besieged ceased not to send forth a shower of arrows, Greek fire, and stones, without giving breathing-space for a minute; and all the while there fell an extraordinary storm of rain, as though the universe were about to be swallowed up in a second deluge; yet still, in spite of the horrors of the tempest, Timour continued to give his orders to his generals, and to stimulate the courage of his soldiers.” As soon as the miners had effected a breach, the apertures were filled with naphtha and other combustibles, and these being fired at once, the walls fell all together with a hideous crash; and the Tartars, forcing back the defenders, entered the city, and commenced an indiscriminate slaughter of every living being it contained, sparing neither sex nor age.[8] A very few escaped by throwing themselves into the sea, and swimming to the vessels without the port; but a vast number were drowned. Several vessels had been despatched from Rhodes with succours, but were unable to land their troops: among them, according to Cheresiddin, was the karrack, or great galley of the order: “it was full of armed men,” he says; “but when they approached the city, they saw no longer any vestiges of it,—neither town nor castle remained, for all had been razed to the ground; and the stones, furniture, and every thing therein had been cast into the sea. Therefore, when they saw this, they put back their galleys; but Timour ordered that a number of Christian heads should be thrown from engines on board their vessels; and this was done so skilfully that some rolled upon their decks. Then those on board, recognising the ghastly tokens, gave up all hopes, and returned to their own country.”
Such is the description of the siege left by the Mussulman historian, who, while he does honour to the courage of the defenders, is, of course, little able to appreciate the generous devotion of their death. The defence of Smyrna, first undertaken under religious obedience, had been persisted in from the same honourable motive. They had been avowedly stationed in that remotest outpost of Christendom to offer themselves, if need were, as victims for the safety of Europe; and the destiny, far from appalling them, had only seemed glorious in the eyes of men whose vow and vocation it was to die for the Cross they bore upon their breasts. So when the black flag of Timour was hung out on the last day of the siege,—his accustomed signal of “universal destruction,”—they knew very well that the hour of sacrifice was come, and welcomed it, as the martyrs did their torments. The dawn saw them at the altar; Mass, and a last communion, and an offering of their life to God, made solemnly, yet withal with a certain joy and exultation, preceded the last struggle at the ruined ramparts. “They captivated their will to obedience unto death,” says a modern historian of the order, “and fell for their own honour and the protection of Christendom.”
Nor was the devotion of the order content with this heroic defence; it did not deem its obligation to obedience satisfied, even when Smyrna was a heap of ruins, and all its defenders destroyed. Philibert de Naillac, considering that to his order had been confided the defence of whatever was left in Asia capable of being defended, proceeded, on the departure of Timour for Persia, whither he was called by an invasion from India, to reconnoitre the coasts of Caria, with the purpose of establishing a fresh garrison in some fortress of that province. About twelve miles from the isle of Lango, in the Gulf of Ceramis, there rose an old castle on the ruins of the ancient Halicarnassus;—a body of troops had been left in it by Timour; but Naillac, leading thither a small fleet in person, surprised and cut to pieces the Tartar garrison, and erected on the site of the old fortress another of extraordinary strength and solidity, which he dedicated to St. Peter, and which became the asylum of refuge on the coast of Asia for such Christian slaves as found means to effect their escape from Turkish or Tartarian bondage. There is something in the description left us of this fortress that combines the character of romance with the noblest spirit of chivalry. Naillac surrounded it with the strongest fortifications that art could devise; there were walls of enormous height and thickness pierced for cannon, to keep off the approach of hostile vessels by sea; whilst on the side of the land the defences were yet stronger; ramparts and bastions stood one against another, and to gain entrance to the fortress it was necessary to pass through seven lines of these ramparts and their seven gates. Over the last gate, however, appeared a motto which breathed the true spirit of a knight of the Cross, whose trust was less in his own sword or valour than in the favour of the God of armies: Nisi Dominus custodierit civitatem, frustra vigilat qui custodit eam.[9]
Standing thus proudly on the rocky peninsula of the Carian Gulf, St. Peter’s of the Freed, as it was called, became in one sense another hospital of the order. A strong garrison was put into it, and a number of vessels were constantly at anchor in the harbour, ready at the first note of alarm to issue forth, and either alone or in conjunction with the galleys of Rhodes and Lango, to sweep the seas of the hordes of pirates and corsairs that infested the coasts. Many too were the Christian slaves who, escaping from the chains of the infidels, found refuge within its walls; and the inmates were never weary of inventing and practising new devices for the relief of the refugees. Among others, the knights kept a race of large and sagacious dogs, whom they trained to go out and seek for those who might have sunk exhausted on the mountains unable to reach the castle walls. The instinct of these dogs was extraordinary: we read of one Christian who, escaping from the hands of his masters, threw himself into a well when closely pursued, rather than fall again into their hands. Here he was tracked by one of these watch-dogs, who, unable to get him out, at least succeeded in saving his life. The well was dry, and the man had received no injury from his fall, but would infallibly have died of hunger but for the fidelity of the Hospitallers’ dogs. For many days did the noble animal bring him in his mouth all the share of food given him for his own daily support, dropping it down into the well below. At length it was observed that the dog was growing thinner every day; and his continual excursions after breakfast in the same direction exciting curiosity, some of the servants of the garrison set out to watch what he was about; the truth being thus discovered, the man was saved, and the dog given his place in the history of the order, of which he had proved himself so worthy a member.
Naillac was amongst the most able of the grand masters of that period, and was recognised as the protector of all the Christian states of the East. He saved Cyprus from the horrors of civil war by a disinterested and judicious interference; and in his day, says Vertot, “there was no corsair vessel that dared approach the Lycian coast. Every where he was acknowledged as the most powerful Christian prince of the East; he had more than a thousand knights under his command in the convent at Rhodes; and the greater number of the isles of the Sporades were subject to him. The sea was covered with his fleets; and the Rhodian vessels, under the escort of his galleys, carried their commerce into every port.” Most of these ships and galleys were prizes taken from the Saracens, who were even constrained at length to sue for peace, and despatched an embassy to Rhodes to arrange the terms. The conditions of pacification were all in favour of the Christians; and amongst them Jerusalem was not forgotten. It was stipulated that the Holy Sepulchre should be surrounded with walls, and that six knights of the order should be allowed a residence close by, free from all tribute, and with power to receive pilgrims into their house as of yore.
If we must add to these statements the fact, that Naillac, in common with those of his knights settled at Rhodes, was on the side of the anti-popes during the great schism to which we have already adverted, our readers must not be hasty in condemning him. Those were days when the right side was hard to be distinguished amid the confusion in which, from various causes, the whole matter was involved; and if Naillac was in error, he at least bore no inconsiderable part in the efforts made by the councils of Pisa and Constance to extinguish the schism: nor were they without success; and before he died, he had the satisfaction of seeing that unity which had been restored to Christian Europe, shared also by the order of which he was the head. No greater proof can be offered that the knights of Rhodes were animated by no schismatical spirit than the fact, that in their island the union between the Greek and Latin churches, established by the Council of Florence, was ever inviolably observed. Rhodes was probably the only state in which the two rites were kept in use among a people who were yet closely bound in one communion, and who never felt the jealousies of other Eastern countries, where Greek and Latin were the watchwords of party strife.
During the fifty years that elapsed from the siege of Smyrna to the fall of Constantinople, the war with the Turks continued with unabated vigour. Their empire revived after the death of Timour; and for many years Rhodes maintained a twofold struggle with Turks and Saracens; from the latter of whom they suffered two invasions and a siege of forty days, when so gallant a repulse was given to the infidels, that, as Vertot tells us, the young nobility of Europe, and especially those of France and Spain, were filled with an enthusiasm for the glorious body that, unaided and alone, kept off the dreaded foe whose arms were every where else invincible; and the best blood of Christendom flowed into the order, which indeed stood in no small need of such reinforcements. Very few details of any interest, however, have been left of these achievements, and we are left to gather what the position of Rhodes was at this period from the continual circulars and briefs addressed by the Popes to the monarchs of Christendom, calling on them, but always in vain, to unite in one vigorous effort against that common enemy now only kept at bay by the Knights of St. John. It is indeed impossible to over-estimate the zeal manifested by the Roman Pontiffs for the preservation of Christendom: even from writers hostile to their interests we gather an idea of their extraordinary vigilance in this matter; and doubtless but for their ceaseless exertions the progress of the infidels would have extended far beyond the boundaries of the Grecian empire. Had those exertions been seconded, as in the days of the crusades, the result might have been very different; but the princes of Europe never heartily entered into the cause; and though year after year the danger became more threatening, the appeals and entreaties of the Popes were received but with apathy and indifference.
It is satisfactory during this period of the history of the order, when doubtless, though surrounded by peril, its greatness and glory were at their height, to find a distinct notice of the austere and religious spirit still preserved alive and vigorous in Rhodes. With their ports filled with a flourishing commerce, and their treasury enriched by continual captures from the infidels, the knights themselves elevated to the position of temporal princes, and courted by all the nations of Europe as the defenders of Christendom, we find them derogating in nothing from the severe simplicity of their institute. Those of the brethren who were settled in the commanderies of Europe had indeed greatly fallen off from regular discipline; but at Rhodes, which was the real heart of the order, we read that “every one lived in the exact practice of the rule and of the statutes. In the midst of their continual hostilities the knights were never dispensed from their austere fasts during Lent and Advent, or from their abstinence on Wednesdays; and in the refectory and other parts of the house no one ever dared to break the silence which was observed as regularly as in a community of monks.”[10]
In 1451 the Ottoman throne became vacant by the death of Amurath II., who was succeeded by a prince destined to be the deadliest enemy whom Christendom had yet beheld. This was Mahomet II., surnamed the Great, who even then, though scarcely twenty-one years of age, had acquired a fame for talent, valour, and ferocity, which made him the terror of Europe and of the world. His vast capacity was united to so detestable a character that he has been called the Mahometan Nero; in truth he was of no religion; and if, as is said, his mother had been a Christian, and he had himself been originally brought up in the true faith, and instructed in its mysteries by the Greek patriarch, it is probable that his fury against the Cross was accompanied with all that bitter and unquenchable hatred which ever marks the apostate. On his accession to the throne his court was filled with ambassadors from all the eastern states, including that of Rhodes, to propose treaties and alliances of peace. Mahomet received them all with the utmost courtesy, and swore to establish a universal pacification; meanwhile his emissaries were actively employed in every direction preparing for the conquest of Constantinople; and scarcely had a year elapsed from his elevation to the sovereignty, when he marched upon the Greek capital, proclaiming his intentions in the war-cry which was his manifesto, “Constantinople—and then Rhodes.”
There is not certainly an episode in history of more melancholy or more absorbing interest than that which relates to the final extinction of the Christian empire in the East. The Greek emperors are for the most part so entirely unworthy of our sympathy, that we are scarcely prepared for that momentary flicker of a great and noble spirit which illuminates the fall of the last successor of Constantine. He bore his name as well as his dignity, and it is not too much to say that he bore both worthily and well. Long and zealously had he laboured to heal the calamitous schism which for ages had separated his people from the communion of the Holy See, and thus from Europe and the whole Latin world; but unhappily with but little success. And now, when the ferocious enemy of the Christian name was before the gates and almost within the walls of the city, division in all its worst forms of bigotry and fanaticism distracted and paralysed the efforts of the brave defenders. The infatuated Greeks, at the head of whom was the Grand Duke Notaras, refused to co-operate with the Latin auxiliaries who had been despatched to aid the remnant of what was once the Greek empire in its last struggle for existence. There was the Cardinal Isidore, whom the Pope had sent in the hour of need with a small body of veteran soldiers; and there were bands from Spain and Venice, as skilled in all the arts of war as they were bold in fight; and above all, there was the celebrated Genoese, John Giustiniani, a host in himself, with his seven noble compatriots in arms, and three hundred chosen followers. But union and concert there were none: it was as if two hostile armies were arrayed against each other, while the common enemy was battering at the fortifications and about to precipitate himself upon the devoted city. Notaras, indeed, openly vowed he would rather see the sultan’s turban in Constantinople than the cardinal’s hat; and though some confessed that, if compelled to make the choice, they should prefer the yoke of those who at any rate believed in Christ and honoured His Virgin Mother to that of the dreaded and detested Turk, yet even at the last, when the enemy were pouring through the streets, and the church of St. Sophia was filled with crouching multitudes pressing round the altars in all the agony of terror and despair, Ducas declares that had an angel from heaven appeared to them and said, “Only accept the union, and I will disperse your enemies,” they would have remained deaf to his voice, and chosen rather to be slaves in subjection to the Moslem than freemen in communion with the See of Rome. The wretched monks who seemed to be possessed body and soul by the author of strife and division, kept the minds of the populace inflamed at the highest pitch; a very frenzy, as Von Hammer expresses it, seemed to have seized upon the convents, and the religious,—if the term can be applied to men who had neither faith nor the fear of God,—protested they would sooner acknowledge Mahomet than accept the creed of the Catholic Church.