Despite these divisions, --perhaps even because of them, the Order was a solid fabric. The Order could be petty and bureaucratic; it had whole slaughterhouses of parchment scrolls dedicated to knight’s’ genealogies and land holdings and registered rents and leases, but the Order provided inns, hospital care, and in some cases, transportation for pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land from all of Europe. From your front door in London or Aix-la-Chappelle or Nijmegen or Nuremberg or Prague or Verona or Barcelona or Nájera or Paris or Bordeaux you could travel all the way to Jerusalem guarded, supported, and cared for by the Order.
The decision to guard the pilgrim routes and to provide care for the sick, whether pilgrims or not, had been one of the earliest, defining moment in the Order’s history. Unlike the rival Templars, the Hospitallers had not defined themselves solely as warriors. With the fall of the Holy Land, about a hundred years before my time there, the Templars had lost their purpose, but the Order continued to provide caravans to Jerusalem.
I mention this because on arriving at Rhodes, the capital and fortress of my Order, I saw for the first time how few the Knights of the Order were. In truth, in times of peace, the Order maintained only about three hundred brother-knights at Rhodes, and another few hundred serving brothers. Some serving brothers were professed soldiers: that is, professional soldiers who had taken all the vows of the Order, but were of insufficient birth to rank as knights. They were called brother-sergeants. There were very few in the commanderies in Europe – just two in Avignon, a few retired old men in England helping to raise warhorses – but there were hundreds at Rhodes, where they provided the expert leadership and technical skills in siege work and ship handling to the knights. But most of the serving brothers were doctors, apothecaries, nurses and herbalists, carpenters and blacksmiths and other skilled men. They were not warriors except in the direst emergency.
All this is by way of explaining that Rhodes was a military base, a great fortress in the very face of the Turkish enemy, but also a small state, like Vicenza in Italy or Strasbourg. It had a small but expert army, a set of skilled craftsmen, a subject populace of free peasants most of whom were Greek schismatics, and a handful of feudal lords – mostly Latin, but a few Greek. It had a government and ambassadors and the Grand Master was as powerful as many princes. Rhodes had an excellent fleet of six galia sottil and one galia grossa and two dozen lesser craft, small galleys with fewer than a hundred oarsmen, fast and shallow in draft, that could cover shipping, transport pilgrims, or raid the enemy coast. The navy drove most of the Order’s military preparations. Rhodes was a naval power. She contributed two full-time galleys to the defence of Smyrna, a city on the coast of Turkey that the last crusade had seized in Crecy year.
Yet this small fleet, and the garrisons of the dozen castles the Hospitallers manned in Outremer and the Ionian islands, and the armed caravans that took pilgrims to the Holy Land – these small operations required almost all of the Order’s manpower. Rhodes always had to be prepared for siege, still does. At any moment an enemy fleet might descend like the Assyrian wolves to try to snap up the port or lay siege to the city. And every mark of the revenue of the islands, the tolls paid by pilgrims, the revenues of all the Order’s estates in Europe and Cyprus – all that money was already spent and on the same castles, ships and caravans I’ve mentioned.
We always imagined the Order as a great Roman legion of knights, ready to march at a moment’s notice against the Saracen foe. But the truth was that for a Passagium Generale the Order had to summon in all the knights and brother-sergeants and donats and other volunteers from all over Europe, which cost money and took ships. And then they had to feed and house all those men, see to their equipment, put them in the field, feed and maintain them and their horses. All that, while continuing to serve pilgrims, heal the sick, and defend their own fortresses. So, they were a legion, but most of the legion was tied down in routine duties.
We arrived – that is, the legate arrived – with fifty brother-knights from the commanderies, men like Fra Peter Mortimer. And there were a hundred more come with the Genoese or making their way in private ships. Rhodes was packed to the gunwales with knights.