The Inn of Spain

Grand Master Juan Fernández de Heredia's instruction of January 1393, directing his procurator to pay one hundred florins to fr. Pedro de Villafranca for the building and repair of the hospice of the Langue of Spain — the earliest documented act in the Inn's history.

The preamble of the chapter general of 1493, confirming under Grand Master Pierre d'Aubusson a tithe to fund repairs, records that the palaces and dwellings of the venerable Langues of the sacred convent of Rhodes need to be brought back to a proper and sound condition, naming the Langues of Aragon, Catalonia, Navarre, Castile and Portugal explicitly.

The 1504 contract by which the two Langues of Spain formally accepted from Villaragut and Almeida a joint gift of six hundred florins, on condition that their arms be set upon the building beside those of the king of Spain — the campaign that united the two wings and created the great assembly chamber where the numerous knights of the two Langues met.

Grand Master Philippe de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam personally took over the defence of the bastion of Spain for thirty-four days after the military engineer Gabriele Martinengo was blinded directing its countermines, officiating sometimes in the quality of a soldier, and sometimes in that of pioneer, but always in that of general.

One hundred florins change hands in Domenico d'Alemania's office: payment to fr. Pedro de Villafranca, drapier of the convent, for the building and repair of a hospice for the Langue of Spain. No one present could have guessed that this modest instruction would be the first line of a documentary record still being read six hundred years later.

The Mamluk fleet has barely cleared the horizon when Grand Master Jean de Lastic turns to rebuilding. He writes to the prior of Castile and León: help meet the cost of repairing the Spanish auberge. Within the year a mason sets the quartered arms of Lastic, combined with the cross of the Religion, above a new Catalan-style portal wide enough for a laden mule to pass beneath.

Two veterans of the 1480 siege, Villaragut and Almeida, stand before the Order's vice-chancellor and pledge six hundred florins between them — enough, at last, to finish the work the 1493 tithe could not. Their one condition: their arms beside the king of Spain's, on the wall that will soon bridge the lane between the two wings. Twelve days later, Grand Master Emery d'Amboise puts his own seal to the agreement.

Gabriele Martinengo is carried from the countermines, blinded in one eye, and still the mining goes on beneath the bastion of Spain. Grand Master l'Isle-Adam takes the post himself — soldier by day, pioneer after dark, general always — for thirty-four days. On 17 December, days before the city falls, the knights of this Inn are still fighting at the Spanish barbican.

No single incident of the siege casts as long a shadow as the case of Andréa d'Amaral, and no account of the Great Siege organized by place can fully contain it, because its true site was not a tower but the Order's own command structure.

Amaral, a Portuguese knight, had been the Order's Chancellor for years before 1522 and had stood as a candidate for Grand Master himself in the election of January 1521 that Philippe Villiers de l'Isle-Adam won. He received, by the chapter's account, not a single vote in that election — a humiliation for a man of real standing and ambition within the Order, and one that later generations of historians have pointed to as the likeliest root of whatever followed. Despite the defeat, Amaral remained one of the Order's most senior and trusted officers: when l'Isle-Adam was absent from Rhodes or incapacitated, it was Amaral who was authorized to act for the Grand Master in his stead, a mark of exactly how much institutional power and access he still held even after being passed over for the Order's highest office.

Through the opening months of the siege Amaral held senior field command: he is recorded directing resistance at the Bastion of Auvergne and, by extension, the adjoining sectors, and his name appears repeatedly among the commanders of the Order's most contested stretches of wall — precisely the sectors, Auvergne and Aragon, where the defence was later said to have deteriorated most sharply and dangerously as the siege wore on through October. Whether that deterioration was simple exhaustion and manpower shortage, or something closer to deliberate neglect, is exactly the question his accusers would soon be asking.

The affair broke into the open at the end of October 1522, when a servant was caught in the act of signalling to the Ottoman camp from the wall near the Tower of Saint Nicolas, on the Auvergne-facing side of the fortifications — the same sector under Amaral's effective authority. Put to torture, the servant confessed, and his confession implicated his master. Amaral himself was taken into custody and, in turn, subjected to torture; he denied every charge to the end, admitting nothing. It made no difference. He was tried by a jury drawn from his own peers — fellow knights of the Order, sitting in judgement on its own second-highest surviving officer in the middle of the siege that was deciding the Order's survival — and found guilty of treason. His servant, named in the record as Blas Diez, was executed with him.

The sentence carried out on Amaral was as public and as brutal as the Order could make it. He was decapitated, and his head was set up on the Tower of Saint George — the very bastion his own sector adjoined, and a stretch of wall that had very nearly fallen to Ahmed Pasha's mines only days earlier. What remained of his body was quartered, and the pieces displayed along the walls of the Auvergne, Aragon, England, and Italian posts: a warning staked out, quite deliberately, across almost the entire landward circuit of the city he was accused of trying to betray.