23 May – 17 August 1480
Rhodes, 1480
Mehmed gives the war against the Knights of Rhodes to Mesih Pasha, a member of the Palaiologos family who was taken in 1453 and raised at the sultan’s court, and who commands the fleet as bey of Gallipoli. On 23 May 1480 a fleet of 160 ships appears before Rhodes and lands the army in the bay of Trianda: 70,000 men by the Knights’ accounts, 10,000 to 20,000 by modern estimates. The Grand Master Pierre d’Aubusson, who has long been in charge of the walls, defends the town with 3,000 to 4,000 men, among them about 500 knights.
Rhodes in the Nuremberg Chronicle, a woodcut by Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, 1493Wikimedia Commons, Michael Wolgemut, Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, Public domain (Rhodos1493.png)
The Ottomans set up their camp on Mount St Stephen west of the town and first try to take the tower of St Nicholas, which guards the entrance to the two harbours. Their guns fire on it without a break, and the attacks of their infantry from 9 June are thrown back, with d’Aubusson leading the defence himself. The guns then batter the weak eastern wall by the Jewish quarter, held by the knights of Italy, and the knights and the townspeople dig a new ditch and build a second wall behind it.
The tower of St Nicholas at the mouth of the harbour of RhodesWikimedia Commons, Davidh820, CC BY-SA 4.0 (View on the Fort of St. Nicholas from the Tower of St. Paul.jpg)
At dawn on 27 July about 2,500 janissaries take the tower of Italy and break into the town. After three hours of fighting they are driven back, d’Aubusson is wounded five times, and the knights pursue them as far as Mesih Pasha’s tent and take his standard. Between 3,000 and 4,000 Ottomans are killed that day, and on 17 August the fleet gives up the siege and leaves.
Sources
- Guillaume Caoursin, Obsidionis Rhodiae urbis descriptio (1480).
- Pierre d’Aubusson, report on the siege to Emperor Frederick III (1480).
- Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (1978).
- Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), vol. 2 (1978).
- Nicolas Vatin, L’Ordre de Saint-Jean-de-Jérusalem, l’Empire ottoman et la Méditerranée orientale entre les deux sièges de Rhodes, 1480–1522 (1994).
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