The Bastion of the Palace of the Grand Master

“…since this bastion was entirely compact, filled with earth up to the battlements, with a field or recreation garden arranged on top, the stone missiles of the artillery, albeit enormous and fired with force, did not inflict the smallest amount of damage to the wall, while many ended up stuck inside” — leading the Ottoman commander to move his cannons and attack the town wall elsewhere.

“…the bastion of Auvergne, which protected this side of the Palace, as the most important fort that obstructed the unification of the left wing of the Ottoman army with their central wing during the siege in 1480…” On leaving the garden within it, the visitor records being “impressed by the beauty of two ancient torsos, which were once used for the decoration of a fountain.”

“The comprehensive preliminary research of the Bastion produced important new evidence and has enriched our knowledge on several periods in Rhodes’ history… The careful archaeological research and documentation efforts have effectively recovered much that had been lost of this prominent cultural heritage site, the focal point of the Medieval Town of Rhodes.”

I am older than almost anything else you will meet in this story, and for a very long time, I was not a bastion at all. I was simply a tower — a thick, round, stubborn Byzantine watchtower, standing on the highest corner of an ancient fortress by the sea, thirteen hundred years ago and more. Centuries later, new people arrived on Rhodes: the Knights of Saint John, warrior-monks building themselves a walled town. They did not tear me down. Instead, they built around me, the way a tree grows new rings around its old core. First came a gateway beside me, cut through the old moat — the Gate of the Master Builder, people called it. Then Grand Master Antoni Fluvian, before the year 1444, wrapped a spur-shaped wall around that gate to protect it better, the earliest true fortification I ever wore.

Then, in 1444, an army from Egypt attacked the town. The attack failed, but it frightened the Knights badly enough that two more Grand Masters, Orsini and then Pierre d’Aubusson, decided I needed to become something much bigger. They dug a proper moat around me. They raised thick new earthen walls. And d’Aubusson, planning for the cannons he knew were coming one day, built a long, roofed, vaulted chamber along my east side, with square openings for his own big guns to fire through — what everyone came to call simply the Battery. By then the Knights had a name for me: Boulevard Beauregard. “Bastion of the Great View.” I looked out over the whole of Mandraki harbour and the mountains of Asia Minor across the water, and everyone who built onto me made sure I kept that view.

In 1480, the test came. A huge Ottoman army surrounded Rhodes, and their cannons — enormous ones, built to smash castles to rubble — were turned on me along with everything else. A soldier who was there, a man named Merri Dupui, wrote down exactly what happened, and it is my favourite sentence in this whole story: the stone balls came in “enormous and fired with force,” he wrote, and yet they “did not inflict the smallest amount of damage to the wall, while many ended up stuck inside.”

Here is my secret, the one the enemy gunners did not understand until it was too late. I was not built like a thin, hard eggshell that a strong enough punch could crack. I was built fat and soft all the way through — packed solid with earth, right up to the very top, with a garden growing on top of me as though I were nothing more than a big, friendly hill. A cannonball does not shatter a hill. It just sinks in and stops, the way your fist sinks into a cushion instead of breaking it. One by one, the enemy’s cannonballs buried themselves inside me and went nowhere at all — until the frustrated Ottoman commander finally gave up on me completely and marched his cannons off to try his luck somewhere else. Being soft had made me unbreakable.

After that victory, d’Aubusson did something I did not expect from the builder of a fortress: he gave me a garden. He built a spiral staircase, carved with his own coat of arms, running straight down from his private rooms in the Palace to the top of me, so that the Grand Master of the whole Order could step out of his bedroom and walk directly into his own private garden — without ever leaving the safety of his walls. A drawing from the year 1520 still survives showing what grew up there: fountains, orange trees, climbing vines on arched metal frames, and, tucked into one corner, a vaulted aviary full of peacocks, ostriches, and rabbits. I was, by then, both a weapon and a palace garden at exactly the same time, and I am still proud of that combination.