The Villaragut House

The building’s own testimony to its reconstruction survives in its masonry rather than in an archive: a triple coat of arms — the Order’s, Pierre d’Aubusson’s, and Diomède de Villaragut’s — carved above the motto “Firma fe” and the date 1489, publicly naming both patron and year in a period of severe external threat and reconstruction.

Diomède de Villaragut appears in the Order’s own records across more than three decades: as “purveyor” of the Grand Master in 1471, as commander of Aliaga during the siege of 1480, as Drapier of the Tongue of Castile by 1489, and as Castellan of Amposta — the senior title of the Tongue of Aragon — in 1497 and 1504.

The surviving coat of arms identifies the building, beyond doubt, as an official building of the Order — but, on the explicit, candid assessment of its own principal modern scholars, not its precise use. The almonry identification remains the best-supported explanation advanced since 1992, strengthened by the 2002 excavation, rather than a documented certainty.

The sirens had stopped, and that was the worst part. I stood in the courtyard of the house that bears my name, more than four hundred years after the last record of my name, and I felt the ground tremble. Then came a roar, and a bomb struck the north side of the house. The great wall that faces the Street of the Knights — a wall that had stood through earthquakes and empires — came crashing down into the street. The old Gothic window, carefully restored in the twentieth century, shattered with it. Dust rolled through the courtyard. In the long silence that followed, I thought something I had not thought in four centuries: Is this how it ends? Everything I had built, everything the house had survived, a pile of rubble in the dark?

I will be honest with you: I am no longer quite sure who I am. A ghost, perhaps. Or perhaps only a name, carved so deeply into a wall that it has been remembered stubbornly enough to start talking. Whatever I am, I was there on the night in 1944 when the bombs fell on Rhodes. I was not a famous Knight. You will not find me in stories about great battles. I was something quieter and, I like to think, just as useful: a trusted officer, the sort of man the Grand Master relies on to make sure things get done. In 1471 I was responsible for the supplies where they were needed. For 30 years I hold this post. But I will tell you more later.

In the summer of 1480, a vast Ottoman army arrived by sea and surrounded Rhodes. For months, cannon fire thundered against the walls. I was given command of a company called Aliaga, and we fought to hold the city. Rhodes held. The people celebrated. But they had barely caught their breath when, in 1481, an earthquake shook the island and brought down more buildings than the cannons ever had. Grand Master Pierre d’Aubusson looked at his ruined town and made a decision: Rhodes would be rebuilt, every street of it. And I, by then an officer with real responsibilities, decided to help rebuild a building of my own.

I did not build on empty ground, though I did not know it then. Far below my feet, long before any Knight set foot on Rhodes, a grand colonnaded street had run past a great Roman monument with four gateways. Its paving stones and its drain lay buried under the soil. Nobody in my day knew they were there. Archaeologists would find them centuries after I was gone, under the west wing. There had been a house on the plot before mine, too. The records call its owner only Perina, and tell us almost nothing else: two floors, a garden. When the Order began building its enormous new Hospital next door, Perina’s house stood in the way and was in danger of falling down. In June 1439, the Order gave it to its notary, a man called Elisseo Delamana, to live in with his family, partly just to keep the roof up. Scholars today think Perina’s house may have been the first version of the building I would later rebuild. If they are right, then even before my time, that plot had a way of refusing to fall.

By 1489 the work was done. The walls stood taller and stronger than before. And on the wall above Lachitos Street, the masons carved three coats of arms side by side. On the left, the shield of the Knights of Saint John. On the right, the shield of Grand Master d’Aubusson. And in the middle, my own shield, with the year, 1489, and two Latin words — FIRMA FE. They mean: my faith is steadfast. It was a promise, carved where everyone could read it. I will not waver, whatever comes. I did not know, as I watched the masons work, how many things that promise would be tested against.

I was Drapier of my Tongue, the officer in charge of supplying cloth and clothing to the Order and its Hospital. And the Order’s own rules described an almonry, a poorhouse, that gave bread, wine and food every day to some thirty poor people, and clothes to thirteen poor people every Saturday in Lent. My house had a courtyard and two-storey arcades just like the great Hospital next door. A narrow passage even led from its rooms toward the Hospital. Most scholars believe the house was part of the Order’s almonry, working alongside the Hospital: the Hospital healed the sick, and the house helped feed and clothe the poor. I would be proud of that, if it is true.

And here is the clue that made archaeologists sit up in the year 2002. At the south-east corner of the east wing, they uncovered a long, narrow room built over a deep stone pit: a medieval latrine. But this one had five seats in a row, so that several people could use it at the same time. A single family does not need that. A busy institution full of people does. Funny as it is, the most important clue about my existence turned out to be a toilet!