The Mint of the Knights Hospitallers

“A silver coin is spent at Rhodes that is struck at Rhodes, called gigliati” — struck, the same account specifies, to an alloy of eleven ounces three sterlings fine silver to the pound, of which “the mint of Rhodes renders only 55½ [coins] by count per mark” against a nominal count of fifty-seven.

“…quia Civitas habundat hominibus et non reperitur pecunia minuta … quod … cudere faciat quatrinos vel parvos denarios” — because the city was full of people and small change could not be found, it was resolved that the Grand Master should have quattrini and small deniers struck.

Some 4,000 coins of the early fifteenth century, found within or near this building — apparently during structural interventions carried out under the Italian administration. No source consulted for this document states where these coins are now held, how they were catalogued, or what denominations they comprised; it is this find alone, rather than any inscription or title deed, that identifies the standing building as the Order’s mint.

Let me tell you what it feels like to hold the heart of a city in your hand. It weighs a little under three and a half grams, it is made of gold, and it is called a ducat.

My name is Eberhard von Lothringen. I come from Lorraine, a long way north, and I am the mint master of the Knights of Saint John on the island of Rhodes. I make money. I do not mean the way a merchant makes money, by buying cheap and selling dear. I make it the old way, with fire, hammer and a pair of iron dies, and I am proud of every single coin.

My workshop stands inside the walled Collachium, east of the Grand Master’s Palace, in a long, plain building pressed against the northern fortifications. Downstairs are vaulted rooms where the furnace glows. Upstairs is a tall hall with a row of columns down the middle, where the work is checked. It is not a beautiful building. Gold does not need a beautiful room. It needs a safe one.

Here is something that surprises visitors: I am not allowed to strike a coin whenever I feel like it. Not even I. The rules are strict, and older than me.

When a merchant brings me gold or silver, I must turn it into coin, however much he brings. But first the amount must be announced to the Castellania, the court that watches over the town. Then someone carries the proof up to the Palace, and only then are the dies, the engraved iron stamps that give a coin its picture, handed over by the Grand Master or his deputy. A trusted man of the Palace carries them to my workshop and stays there, watching every blow of the hammer. When the coins are done, Castellania weighs them before one is released. If a coin is too light, I take it back, melt it down, and make it again. I have melted whole batches for being too light, and I have never complained. A light coin tells a lie, and a lie in gold travels very far.

The Grand Master whose name is on my coins is Fabrizio del Carretto. His ducats follow the Order’s old custom, showing a Grand Master kneeling in front of Saint John, because the Order’s rulers always preferred to be pictured humble before they were pictured great. Around the edge run the Latin words of the Order, and I could recite them in my sleep.

Now I will tell you what I love most about Rhodes. It is not the walls, though they are splendid. It is the noise. On a single morning in the market I can hear Greek, Italian, Catalan, Provençal, German and Arabic, sometimes all in one street. Greek families whose grandfathers were born here live beside Latins from half of Europe. The Venetians have had their own church, trading house and law court on this island since 1224, long before the Knights arrived. The merchants of Narbonne and Montpellier have their own trading hall, granted in 1356. Catalan merchants, like Gabriele Taragona, who collects the tax on soap, pots and fire, and Marco Patao, who has a house, a shop and fields of his own, send money across the sea as easily as other men send letters.

And the bankers! The old ledgers say that by the year 1320 the Knights owed the great Florentine banks of Bardi and Peruzzi five hundred thousand florins. Five hundred thousand! The Order conquered this island partly on borrowed money. When those banks collapsed in the 1340s, the Order lost about three hundred and sixty thousand florins, and still Rhodes went on. Later the Medici bank collected the Order’s money from all over Europe for a fee of about seven in a hundred. Genoese merchants lent to us. Bills of exchange come and go through our harbour. Sometimes it seems to me that every bank in Europe has a piece of paper with the word Rhodes written on it.

In 1516 the Grand Master even signed a trade treaty with the Sultan of Egypt, so that Rhodian ships and Egyptian ships would leave one another’s merchants in peace. A mint master loves treaties, because treaties mean traders, and traders mean gold coming through my door.

But where there is gold there are cheats, and I will tell you about the afternoon I caught one. A Genoese captain came storming up from the harbour, with a money-changer hurrying behind him. The captain had put down a pile of gold, and the money-changer’s scale said it weighed less than the captain’s own reckoning. Voices rose in three languages. Everyone on the street stopped to listen.

Now, you must know that every money-changer in Rhodes must have his weights and scales checked and sealed by the mint master. That is me. It is one of my duties, and it is just as important as striking ducats. I sent for my own standard weights, the ones kept locked in the upper hall, and set them on the money-changer’s scale beside his. His weights were wrong. Somebody had filed a little off the bottom of one, so that gold would always seem lighter than it truly was, and the difference would slide quietly into his purse.

The money-changer turned the colour of old cheese. The market inspector, who checks the weights of shops and taverns every three months, arrived just in time to hear the end of it. The goldsmiths’ guild heads, two of them, one Latin and one Greek, elected every year to hunt for fraud, such as lead painted to look like gold, nodded gravely. The false weight was destroyed, a proper one was made, and I pressed the mint’s seal into it myself.

The captain shook my hand. “In Genoa,” he said, “they told me Rhodes can be trusted with money.” I walked home taller than the Palace tower. A seal from my mint on a scale is like my Grand Master’s name on a coin: it means that you may stop worrying and start trading.

Let me show you how a Rhodian counts. One florin is twenty aspers. One asper is sixteen denari, the tiny coppery ones. These are the units in which prices are written down, and every child in the market knows them.

And here is the number I am proudest of. In the days of our old Grand Master d’Aubusson, a Venetian ducat was worth about seventy-five Rhodian aspers. The Order’s own gold ducat was worth ninety. Ninety! That is the good name of Rhodes written in numbers. Merchants preferred our gold, because they knew what they were getting.

Funny thing: when the Order struck its first gold ducat, long ago under Grand Master Gozon, it copied the Venetian zecchino so closely that you had to read the writing around the edge to tell them apart. That was no shame. Merchants trust what they recognize. Our writing said: SIT TIBI CHRISTE DATVS QVEM TV REGIS ISTE DVCATVS, which means, roughly, “Christ, may this duchy which you rule be given to you.” The coin looked familiar in Venice and in Genoa. And that is how a coin learns to speak every language.

A ducat does not sit in a purse for long. If you follow one, you will find out what really holds Rhodes together.

Some of it goes to the tax collectors. Grain ground in the mills and wine sold in the town are taxed, and the tax-farmers who collect it pay a fixed sum to the Order in advance. In the summer of 1521 one account added it all up: eighteen thousand five hundred florins from the main taxes, and three thousand five hundred more from a small surcharge on wine, twenty-two thousand florins in a single year. Some goes to the customs house, where every cargo pays its duty and Muslim traders pay a slightly different one. Some goes on the walls, the galleys, the guns. Some goes to the Great Hospital, which takes roughly seven coins out of every hundred the Order spends, and pays its two university-trained doctors two hundred and fifty florins a year each.

And a great deal of gold arrives from far away. Every commandery of the Order in Christendom owes a fixed payment to Rhodes every year. The Grand Commandery of Cyprus, for example, sends two thousand Venetian ducats, due every June on the feast day of Saint John the Baptist. Ships bring prize goods too, captured from enemy vessels at sea, and I will admit that not everything sold on our quays is something to be proud of. Among the people sold in the markets of the Mediterranean were captives, and the Order’s own laws tried to keep that trade in check by demanding that every one of them be registered within three days and that no Christian be enslaved by another.

The truth, which a mint master knows better than most, is that the Order has never had quite enough money. It borrows, it taxes, it bargains, and it counts. We hold this island with galleys and walls, yes. But we also hold it with ledgers, tax contracts, bank credit and the good name of a coin.

There is only one thing that worries me. In April 1488, before I ever came to Rhodes, the council wrote down a strange sentence: “the city is full of people, and small change cannot be found.” So the council resolved that the Grand Master should have little coins struck, quattrini and small deniers. Today, in my years under the present Grand Master, my furnace makes mostly gold, and I sometimes see a woman at the baker’s with a golden ducat in her hand, and nobody able to change it. A fine ducat is wonderful for a ship’s captain. It is not much use for buying bread. I have a feeling that the council will need to write that sentence again one day.

In 1521 Grand Master del Carretto died, and the Order chose a new one: Philippe Villiers de L’Isle-Adam. New Grand Master, new dies. A trusted man of the Palace brought them to my workshop, and I set them on the anvil and looked at them for a long time. The cross on them looks different from any I have struck before: more arms, more points, more splendid. Something is changing, I thought, and I did not know what.

That autumn, the tax collectors signed their contracts for a full seven years. Everyone believed in Rhodes. Everyone believed in the next seven years. And yet, down in the harbour, I heard the sailors talking about a great Ottoman fleet, the new Sultan, and a hunger for this island. Perhaps I was only imagining it. But I struck the new ducats as carefully as ever, one after another, each as heavy as the law says and not a hair lighter.

Because this is what I believe, after all my years at the furnace. A wall can be knocked down. A harbour can be blockaded. A ship can be sunk. But a good coin is a promise, and a promise travels farther than any army. Someday, perhaps, a ducat from my workshop will lie in a museum glass case in a city I will never see, and a child will press her nose against the glass and wonder who made it, and whether he was proud. Tell her yes. Tell her he was very proud indeed.