ABSTRACT
Literate pilgrims who stopped at Rhodes en route for Jerusalem in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sometimes described the island and the city’s main features in their accounts of the journey. Historians attempting to recreate the topography of the medieval city of Rhodes have found these descriptions inadequate for identifying buildings and fortifications. Michel Balard theorized that these visitors were so distracted by the presence of the Master and Convent of the Order of the Hospital that they overlooked the inanimate sites of Rhodes. 1 Rhodes, however, was not a destination for these travellers, just one more stop on the pilgrimage route. Pilgrims found the island’s attractions scant in comparison with the glories of the Holy land. Their interest in Rhodes evolved after the Order successfully defended the island against the Ottoman Turks in 1480. Afterwards, Guillaume Caoursin, the Hospitaller vice-chancellor, published the Order’s official history of the siege, entitled Descriptio Obsidionis Rhodie Urbis. The Latin edition was printed in eight European cities between 1480 and 1483, and Hospitaller priories throughout Europe commissioned translations into the vernacular. At the same time, the familiar medieval manuscript genre of the pilgrim’s journey to Jerusalem evolved into a complex work that catalogued attractions and novelties, similar to the modern guidebook. 2 One of the best examples of this new comprehensive pilgrimage account, Bernhard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinationes in Terram Sanctam (1486), not only included an original engraving of the port of Rhodes but also reprinted Caoursin’s Descriptio, providing visitors a comprehensive history of Rhodes along with a complete catalogue of its points of interest. A unique late fifteenth-century French manuscript account of the Siege of Rhodes (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Dupuy 255) shows the influence of this new pilgrimage genre. The unknown author integrated the history of the siege of Rhodes with a description of the city to provide a guide to the sights of the battlefield.
