The Commercial Harbour of the Knights Hospitallers

In 1342, the Byzantine historian Nikephoros Gregoras recorded that his friend Manuel Angelos found at Rhodes “a good harbour and Tarsana that receive merchants from all parts” — a rare outside eyewitness confirmation that the harbour and its shipyard were already working as a commercial port within a generation of the Hospitaller conquest.

Approaching Rhodes on the morning of 10 June 1458, the pilgrim galley of the Milanese condottiere Roberto da Sanseverino was chased for some six hours by an armed Genoese ship in the roadstead, whose plague-stricken crew had mistaken it for a hostile vessel; the matter ended when the galley displayed the banner of the Patriarch of Aquileia, then papal legate at Rhodes. The party lodged at the House of St Catherine, then at the Italian Langue’s auberge, and was received by a Grand Master “sick in bed with the gout,” consistent with Jacques de Milly. His diary does not say which harbour received the galley; because Mandraki was the closed war-galley base, this project treats this harbour as the far more probable point of arrival for a civilian pilgrim vessel.

Carved in marble on the Sea Gate, the Latin inscription of 1487 names Pierre d’Aubusson “de Turcis inclitus victor,” the renowned victor over the Turks, and the portal’s reliefs show the Virgin and Child, St John the Baptist and St Peter, flanked by the shields of the Order and of d’Aubusson. Manoussou-Della reads the gate as conceived “to become the most significant point of reference, the symbol of a naval city.”

Earlier drafts of this document flagged the Commercial Harbour’s chain as resting on web sources alone; that flag is now reversed for the chain itself. Manoussou-Della’s dedicated chapter independently corroborates it: fixed end at the terminus of the Mole of the Windmills, control mechanism at the base of the Tower of Naillac, attributed “with great certainty” to Naillac himself. What remains uncorroborated is only the chain’s opposite, landward anchor point, which the chapter does not attribute to any “Tower of France” or “Tower of St Angelo.”

The Wikipedia and viagallica.com pages describe a second tower on the harbour’s landward side, but no academic architectural or restoration source consulted names it. The user also supplied a paper titled “Maritime Caravans and the Knights of St John”; read directly for this project, it proved to be Simon Mercieca’s chapter on the Order’s 16th–18th-century Malta-period caravan cruises, in which “St Angelo” denotes the unrelated Fort St Angelo at Birgu, and it mentions no Rhodian tower or harbour chain. A further supplied source, the Warfare History Network’s “The Sieges of Rhodes,” returned a 403 error and could not be retrieved.

Michael of Rhodes, who names himself “Michalli da Ruodo,” was Rhodian-born; according to Alan Stahl, he enrolled in the Venetian merchant marine at Manfredonia in 1401 at about sixteen, and compiled between 1434 and 1445 a manuscript of mathematics, navigation and shipbuilding. This project adopts, as its own working assumption rather than as fact, that he left Rhodes by this harbour, estranged from his mother. The Michael of Rhodes Project states plainly that nothing is known of his background or reasons for leaving, and no source examined mentions his mother.

This project adopts the account given in the companion Mandraki Statement: the Tower of Naillac was seriously damaged by the earthquake and explosion of 1856 and entirely demolished by 1863, and survives only in images, descriptions and an unexcavated footprint near the modern lighthouse mole. The Illustrated London News sketch of 16 December 1856 is cited there and was not examined for this page. Manoussou-Della’s Commercial Port chapter, as summarised in the source Statement for this harbour, instead reports damage in an 1851 earthquake and a repair “to its present form” photographed in May 1852; that account has not been carried forward on this page and should be checked against the chapter itself.

My name is Niko, the Greek. I am the runner for the clerk of the customs house, which means I am allowed to be everywhere in the Great Harbour, all day long, and nobody tells me to go home. Everyday I walk along the long Mole of the Windmills, beside the Tower of Naillac. From here I can see everything. Behind me, the sea. In front of me, the whole harbour: a wide basin ringed by the town wall, with its gates, its towers and its sea-front busy as an anthill. At the foot of this tower, in a room I am not allowed to enter, there is a winch that can pull a huge iron chain across the harbor mouth if enemies ever come. The Knights of Saint John do not forget that Rhodes is a fortress.

Everyday busy ships enter the harbor! A Venetian galley with her tall flag. A round Genoese merchantman, fat as a pumpkin. A little Greek boat from the islands, low in the water under her sacks. Next to them, a sleek ship from Egypt. And, and the vessels of the great Turks. The Knights are the boldest sailors of the Christian world, and the Great Harbour is their front door. Over the door, on the grand marble Sea Gate that Grand Master d’Aubusson built, the Virgin and Child look down on every ship that arrives. It is the symbol of our naval city.

Now follow me down to the quay, and I will show you what a ship can carry. Pepper, so fragrant that it makes you sneeze three feet away. Caviar in little barrels, from the far northern seas. Perfumes in tiny glass bottles, worth more than their weight in silver. Fabrics in every colour, silk from the East, wool from the West. Carpets rolled up like sleeping giants. Jars of olive oil, barrels of wine, loaves of sugar wrapped in blue paper, blocks of soap. Spices of every kind: ginger, cinnamon, cloves.

And people. I must tell you about that too, because a harbour tells the whole truth. In these years, among the merchandise that comes through the port are slaves, men and women who have been captured and are bought and sold like sacks of pepper. It is the worst thing I see here, and I try not to look too long. The Order has rules about it, at least. Every slave brought into Rhodes must be registered at the customs house within three days. The clerk checks where the person came from, and he must be sure that the enslaving was lawful under the Order’s own statutes. No Christian may keep another Christian as a slave. These rules are written down, and I carry the papers. But when I think about the faces of the people in the line, I do not feel that rules are enough.

Master Bartolomeo, the clerk, sits at his tall desk in the customs house, which the Knights call the Commerchium. It stands at the corner of the great public square, so close to the harbour that you can smell the tar through the window. Every ship that comes to Rhodes passes through his hands. The goods are counted. The dues are written down. The gold is weighed. My job is to run, with a message, a measure, a stamp, a basket of wax. Why do merchants pay? Master Bartolomeo explains it patiently, as if I were his own grandson. Every cargo that comes through the port pays a small duty to the Order, and in return the Order keeps the sea road safe. The duty on wine, for instance, was once given to the highest bidder, on the condition that he also paid to keep a guard-galley at sea. So the wine drinker, the wine merchant and the galley are all part of one big machine.

When my grandfather was young, the people of Rhodes met in this very house and agreed to add a small extra tax to the harbour dues, one part in a hundred, to pay for the walls. Think of it! A tiny coin for every barrel, and the walls rose stone by stone. Add up all the harbour and market duties, says Master Bartolomeo, and in a good year they come to well over twenty thousand florins. “A harbour is a purse,” he likes to say, “that fills itself, if you keep it safe.” There is a separate duty for merchants who are not Christians, Muslim or Jewish traders, and I confess I do not understand why they pay more. Master Bartolomeo only shrugs. “It is the rule,” he says. “But they pay it, and they come back. That is what matters to Rhodes.”

The Knights of Saint John and the Turks are deadly enemies. Every child in Rhodes knows the story of the Great Siege of 1480, when the Sultan’s army tried to take our island and failed. Over the Sea Gate, in marble, the Grand Master is called the famous victor over the Turks. And yet, if you look at the quay this very morning, you will see a Turkish merchant named Mehmed counting his bales of cloth beside a Rhodian trader named Giorgios, the two of them arguing about the price of dried figs as cheerfully as two old neighbours. Master Bartolomeo explains it to me one slow afternoon. “Niko,” he says, “an enemy at war is a different thing from a customer at the counter. When our grandfathers made peace with the old Sultan Bayezid, the treaty promised our merchants freedom of trade in his lands, paying only the usual tolls. Grand Master d’Aubusson wrote to the Pope that Rhodes gained great advantages from it. Sometimes we give a safe-conduct to an Ottoman merchant, so that he can pass through to the West. The Order may fight the Sultan’s army, but the Order also likes the Sultan’s customers.” I think about that a lot. Two men can be enemies at the walls and partners at the quay, and the strange thing is that neither of them is lying. Each wants to be safe, and each wants to be rich, and the harbour is the place where the two wishes meet. This year there is even better news. The Grand Master has signed a twelve-point treaty with the Sultan of Egypt. The merchants of both sides may trade in peace, and the ships of neither may attack the ships of the other. The whole quay was buzzing about it for a week.

In the evening, when the great lamps are lit on the quay, I like to walk past the Arsenal, which we call the Tarsanas. The gate there is very wide, wide enough for a cart to carry a mast. Behind it the Order’s shipwrights build and mend galleys with a clatter and a smell of pitch that I love. Much of the gold that comes through the Commerchium ends up right here, in oak planks, ropes and sails. The Order’s ships are not only for guarding the harbour, though. Sometimes the galleys of the Knights capture merchant ships of the Order’s enemies at sea, and their cargo is brought home as prize. Just a few years ago, they say, a great ship was taken that was carrying spices, cloth and carpets from Alexandria. Some of the pepper was set aside to ransom the merchants who had been aboard. I find that thought a strange one: the same pepper that I smell on the quay might once have bought a man his freedom. The Knights do not make money only by fighting, of course. They make it by weighing, counting, taxing and trading, and by being a place where everybody is welcome as long as they follow the rules and pay their dues. That is the real power of Rhodes. Our walls are strong, but our welcome is stronger.

Night falls over the Great Harbour. The ships rock gently. The last carpet has been rolled, the last barrel stamped, the last coin counted, and Master Bartolomeo puts the keys into his belt with a sigh. I walk back out onto the mole and look up at the Tower of Naillac. The chain is silent in its stone, as it has been for years, and I hope it will stay silent for years more. A chain is a good thing to have, but it is a better thing not to need. Because this is what I have learned in my little life. A fortress shuts the world out. A harbour lets it in. Rhodes is a small island, but in this harbour it is as large as the sea, because every ship that comes here brings a piece of somewhere else: a scent, a colour, a language, a story. The Knights built walls to keep Rhodes safe, but they kept the great door open to the water, making Rhodes very rich rich.