The Mole of the Mills

Luchino dal Campo, in 1413, records “many beautiful windmills”; a Bürger von Paris, in 1480, gives a precise, much-quoted count of “13 windmills” on the mole together with “the tower of Gallias” at its seaward tip; Santo Brasca, also in 1480, calls the sight “marvelous”; and Pietro Casola, in 1494, “a beautiful sight to see them in operation.” Bernhard von Breydenbach’s published 1483 illustration further shows the mills’ secondary, defensive use, dropping small barrels on the besieging Turks in 1480 — among the best-documented building histories, by consistent traveller testimony alone, of any monument in this project.

A widely repeated story that Genoese captives built the mole’s thirteen windmills in exchange for their lives is recorded only by two travellers writing more than two centuries after the events it describes — Conrad von Grünemberg (1486) and Jean Thenaud (1512). This document’s dedicated windmill source treats it as an already-circulating legend rather than a documented building history, and this Statement reports it accordingly, while noting that it is nonetheless telling evidence of how central the windmills had already become, by the late fifteenth century, to the popular image of Hospitaller Rhodes.

Bosio’s chronicle credits a Grand Master, under the year 1454, with having “made great expenditure to fortify the harbour for the safety of sailors and travellers, with tower and chains.” An earlier revision of this very document (v05) attributed that achievement to Jacques de Milly; direct consultation of Manousou-Ntella’s 2009 study establishes that it in fact belongs to his predecessor, Jean de Lastic, under whose mastership the expenditure was recorded. This Statement follows the corrected attribution throughout and notes the earlier error transparently rather than silently dropping it.

This document draws principally on Kosma and Manousou-Ntella’s 2012 excavation study, supplemented by Manousou-Ntella’s own 2009 and 2010 studies of the wider Rhodes harbour fortifications. The architect’s name appears across these publications in three romanisations — Manousou-Ntella, Manoussou-Ntella and Manousou-Della — which this document treats as one author without attempting to resolve the inconsistency. Separately, this document’s dedicated source on the windmills themselves, previously listed only as “Ntellas 2003, not independently consulted,” has since been identified, consulted in full, and merged into this revision as Dellas (2002); the year and transliteration discrepancy between the two listings is likewise reported rather than resolved.

I am the Mole of the Mills. Some people call me the Mole of the Windmills instead. Travellers who sailed into this harbour could not stop talking about us. One, in 1413, wrote home about “many beautiful windmills.” Another, in 1480, counted us precisely: thirteen windmills, he said, standing beside the tall tower at my tip. A third, arriving in 1494, called the sight of us turning together “a beautiful sight to see.” We were, without anyone planning it quite this way, one of the most famous postcards of the whole medieval world.

But we were not just pretty. Inside each one of us, six sails turned a huge wooden gear wheel, which spun a smaller toothed wheel six times faster, which spun a tall upright shaft, which turned a heavy millstone high up on our third floor. Grain poured in from a hopper at the top; flour poured out into a trough at the bottom. The Knights’ own word for how we worked was simple and proud: «νυχθημερόν». Day and night. We almost never stopped.

Rhodes itself could not grow anywhere near enough wheat to feed everyone who lived here. Ships brought grain from Cyprus, and from across the water in Asia Minor, and later, more and more, from the rich wheat fields of Sicily — carried here by merchants from Catalonia and Aragon who made this trade their speciality. All of that imported grain had to be ground into flour somewhere before anyone could bake a single loaf of bread. That “somewhere” was us. Every ship that sailed in loaded with wheat was, in a very real sense, sailing toward our sails. Merchants from Florence and Venice and southern France all did business in the harbour at once: Rhodes did not need to grow its own food if it could buy it, carry it, and grind it faster and more reliably than anywhere else nearby. Thirteen mills working day and night were not a luxury. They were the machine that let a whole city eat.

Because we mattered so much, the Knights taxed us — carefully, and on purpose. Alongside the customs duties charged on every ship’s cargo and a special tax on wine, the Order’s treasury collected its own flour-weighing tax, charged on every sack of flour we produced. Nobody was allowed to cheat around us, either: a set of city laws called the Capitula Rodi fixed exactly what a miller could charge to grind someone’s grain — no more than eight small coins, called denars — and warned that any mill-house caught holding back grain, or spoiling it, would have to pay the owner back in full. We were watched as closely as the bread-sellers and the fish market, because bread was that important.

Then, in the year 1462, something changed that tells you exactly how valuable we had become. For a long time, ordinary citizens of Rhodes had owed the Order an old, unpopular duty called the servitudo marina — rowing and serving aboard the Order’s war galleys whenever they were called on. That year, Grand Master Pedro Ramón Zacosta cancelled it completely. In its place, he put a tax on grinding grain in the city’s mills. Think about that for a moment: an entire ancient military duty, the kind that had once sent men to row warships, was replaced by a tax on flour — because by then, enough wheat passed through mills like us to pay for what galley-service used to provide. We had become, quite literally, more valuable to the treasury than warships rowed by hand.

One single man controlled most of the windmills on this mole, and his name was Domenico d’Allemagna. He was no miller. He was a prior of the Knights’ Italian Tongue and an admiral of the Order’s whole fleet — but his real fortune came from us, not from the sea. He collected the rent we earned, mill by mill, and he used it to pay for two entire religious buildings almost by himself.

With the rent from our second and sixth mills, counting from the north end of the row, he built the Panagia chapel inside the Knights’ own great church of Saint John, in the year 1389. With the rent from our ninth, tenth, and fourteenth mills, he built an entire hospice for the sick and for travellers in need, dedicated to Saint Catherine, in 1392. Five windmills — just five, out of the row — were enough rental income to build a chapel and found a hospital. That is how much flour, and how much money, passed through us every single year.