ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to study the settlement, population and defences of the island of Rhodes during the period of Hospitaller rule after 1306. During the period of Ottoman rule from 1523 to 1912, a number of Europeans travelled in the Rhodian countryside, publishing descriptions, engravings and other illustrations. In the absence of any monastic archive or of any surviving notarial register kept on Rhodes, the Hospitaller documents provide a valuable and, given their character, a unique picture of an agrarian society there. Limited use is made of fragments taken from the Hospital’s legislation, its statutes, some of which were passed or confirmed on Rhodes and which were certainly available there. Hospitaller Rhodes had no land frontier to protect and it is often difficult to distinguish between villages, refuge castles, defensive towers and watchtowers, or to see how far agricultural centres were walled or fortified or settlement was dispersed.
