ABSTRACT
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Hospitaller Rhodes attracted settlers from various regions, including Cyprus, Latin Syria and Egypt. The Hospitallers themselves actively encouraged such settlement, given that Rhodes at the time of the Hospitaller conquest of circa 1310 had been depopulated on account of Turkish and even Latin raids. 1 The Syrians settling on Rhodes for whom evidence survives fall mostly into two categories: sergeants serving in the Hospitaller forces and merchants, although they also include one doctor and one servant of the Latin Church of Rhodes. The Cypriots are socially more diverse, including a sergeant, Cypriots performing the servitudo marina, which was a form of galley service, a merchant and serfs, although the latter are recorded in a document of the early sixteenth century. Except in the case of Cypriots with recognizably Greek names, it is probable that the ‘Cypriots’ mentioned in Hospitaller documents were Syrians who had moved to Cyprus after or even shortly before the fall of Acre and Tyre in 1291, when the Hospitallers established their headquarters at Limassol, and had then migrated to Rhodes following the Order’s conquest of this island in 1309–10.
