ABSTRACT

The fifteenth-century Hospitallers of Rhodes walked a fine line between the rhetoric of the Order’s mission and the realities of existence in the eastern Mediterranean. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Order solicited money from western Europeans by promoting itself as an outpost of Christendom that maintained an uncompromising stance against Islam. The Order’s propaganda was so effective that it has continued to shape modern perceptions of its history. Franz Babinger interpreted the Treaty of Constantinople between Venice and the Ottomans in 1479 as the first time pragmatism triumphed over religious enthusiasm in eastern diplomacy. 1 Nicholas Vatin cited Babinger and noted that the Order’s chief propagandist, Guillaume Caoursin, was also the Order’s diplomatic representative when Sultan Djem sought sanctuary with the Order on Rhodes. 2 Caoursin was the lay vice-chancellor of the Order and the personal secretary to Pierre d’Aubusson, Master of the Order between 1476 and 1503. Caoursin created the public image of the Order when he published Obsidionio Rhodiae urbis descriptio, the official account of the Ottoman siege of Rhodes that took place in 1480. 3 It became a best seller, and between 1480 and 1482 it was printed in Venice, Parma, Bruges, Louvain, Passau, Zaragoza, Rome, and Odense. 4 It was reissued in 1496 in an illustrated volume entitled Rhodiorum historia (1480–1489) that was a collection of Caoursin’s historical writings. 5 Caoursin’s description of the siege reached a wider audience when Bernhard von Breydenbach included it as an uncredited appendix to his popular guidebook, Peregrinationes in Terram Sanctam. 6 First printed in 1486, Breydenbach’s text and appendixes were reprinted in 1490 and translated into Czech, Dutch, French, German, and Spanish. Breydenbach’s guidebook, with its textual apparatus and its accurate engravings of cities along the pilgrimage route, molded the perceptions of a generation of European pilgrims. Pilgrims who visited Rhodes after the siege reported back to Europe Caoursin’s depiction of a robust Order that refused to bow down before the might of the Turk. 7