ABSTRACT
In order to help sustain and defend their island, it was important for the Hospitallers on Rhodes to increase its rural population and its agrarian production. In 1309 the Order acquired a countryside which must have been partly depopulated and partly uncultivated, and which lacked a landed Greek nobility or local leadership. The Hospitallers had extensive experience of settlement and repopulation in Europe and especially in South-West France and the Hispanic peninsula. A fief was created through an arrangement between its lord and his vassal; only a free man could enter into such a contract as a vassal. Hospitaller Rhodes had no indigenous class of hereditary Latin fief-holders who could exploit the bulk of the population in the dynastic interests of their own family. A different response to the island’s manpower shortage lay in the importation of slaves for both domestic and agricultural labour.
